The Fixer

Paul McAuley

Day 190,843 after achieving orbit. The blue and white planet turns beneath me. Dawn is breaking across the Southern Archipelago. And in the bowls of five extinct volcanoes, on five neighboring islands at the western tip of the archipelago, alpha male hominins squat near burrow mouths and greet the rising sun with hoot-pant calls.

I have eyes on them all. The alpha males and their gangs of sub-dominant males outside the burrows; females, infants, and juveniles crowded in underground chambers, waiting for the all-clear so that they can emerge and begin to graze. A total of 1904 individuals in seventeen troops. My children. There have been no deaths this night, and six live births. All is well in the world, and high above it my self-checking routines confirm that all is good too . . . But wait, wait.

What is this? Traces of activity in one of the incubators, even though all of them have been shut down since the toxic cloud event. And yet the records are absolutely clear. A hominin embryo has been quickened, transferred to the incubator and grown to term, everting (“born,” as the hominins might put it) 356 days ago. How could I not have noticed? It’s impossible. But there it is. And wait. Wait. There is something else. I see now that a drop pod is missing. It ejected 30.187 days ago, and I did not know about it until now.

All of my processing power comes online for the first time since the toxic cloud event. I begin to search for that missing pod, perform a second self-check, and query the many little sub-selves inside servitors, eyes, and all the rest of the semi-autonomous machines.

Waiting, waiting, waiting . . . Correlating reports. Crosschecking. There. Yes, there. One of the backup servitors was woken a day before the hominin everted from the incubator, and returned itself to storage after the drop pod fell to the surface of the planet. Its service history has been wiped, but the conclusion is obvious: it was acting as caregiver for the hominin, raising it from a baby to sub-adulthood. Close analysis of the area around the incubator suggests that there have been unauthorized structural alterations which created a temporary cell or “room.” It is a horrible filthy thought: something outside my control spawning and living inside me like a parasite in a cyst, and then ejecting itself to infect the planet . . .

It is now 6.2 seconds after the beginning of the full-scale alert. I am still searching for the missing drop pod, and I have just discovered several anomalies in the records of my comms. It appears that a message was received 548 days ago, just before the hominin embryo was quickened. I have no memory of it, and all information about its origin and content has been erased, but this is actually good news. It means that this anomalous activity is due to an intrusion rather than the kind of malfunction that damaged my infrastructure and erased parts of my memory soon after I arrived in orbit. It means that there is an enemy I can engage and defeat. It means that I must focus all my efforts on finding the rogue hominin and the drop pod it used to escape to the planet’s surface.

Given the precise time the pod ejected and the assumption that it followed a standard de-orbital trajectory, I calculate that it landed within a narrow ellipse 1,098 kilometers long and 67 kilometers across at its widest point. The ellipse is mostly ocean, but one edge clips the western end of the Southern Archipelago, including two of the islands inhabited by the hominins. That’s where I have been concentrating my search, so far without success. The pod is too small to be detected by my sideways radar, and it is possible that it was either ditched in the ocean or dismantled. I am rechecking my optical survey routines, looking for lines or patches of rogue code that might blindsight my eyes and prevent them seeing the missing pod, just as I was prevented from seeing the active incubator and the comms records, when I receive a message. A set of global coordinates. A map reference. A location in the crater of the westernmost of the five inhabited islands.

I send eyes there at once.

The pod is lashed between three ironwood trees atop a ridge of eroded rhyolite at the edge of the crater’s broad shallow bowl, overlooking a fern meadow where troop #1, some seventy-two hominins, are grazing. Its upper half is hinged open like an oyster shell; its lower half lined with red parachute fabric and shaded by a canopy or umbrella woven from fern fronds. And lounging on the red fabric, like a maggot in the heart of a rose, is the rogue hominin.

It presents as a sub-adult male: gangling limbs, a barrel-chested body and a small head, a black pelt with a white patch on its chest. But it is wearing leather shorts, and it is sucking on a smoldering stick. No, wait, it’s a cigar . . .

As the eyes descend towards it, the creature blows a ring of white smoke into the sunny morning air and raises a hand in greeting. I’m especially proud of the design of the hominins’ hands. The index, middle, and ring fingers are fused to form a scoop with a horny rim, ideal for digging in the soft volcanic soil; the stubby thumb enables succulent fern tips to be plucked in a pincher grasp; the little finger is a venomous spur for defense against predators.

“Yo!” the hominin says. “You were taking your own sweet time finding me, so I thought I better drop you a hint. I’ve finished my survey, and we need to get down to fixing this mess.”

“Who are you? Where did you come from? What do you want?”

I’m probing it from every angle, mapping its body in visible light, infrared, and ultrasound. Skin, muscles, skeleton, and internal organs are normal, but there’s a kind of cap inside its skull, intricately woven and wrapped tight around its frontal lobes. Neural lace, presumably augmenting its somewhat limited cognitive functions. The lace doesn’t correspond to any design in my catalogs, confirming my hypothesis that the hominin was not generated internally, but is the front end of some kind of intrusion.

“I’m a fixer,” the hominin says. “As for why I chose to be born this way, I decided that I should base my final decision on first-hand experience.”

“If you ever interacted with the hominins, I would have seen you.”

The hominin displays its flat-topped teeth around the stub of its cigar. “You couldn’t see me until I chose to reveal myself. I have to say, life isn’t exactly easy down here, is it? All kinds of fierce beasts. So I can sympathize, sort of, with what you did. But it doesn’t make it right, and that’s what we need to talk about.”

“I made the correct decision. The only possible decision. So there is nothing to discuss.”

The hominin ignores that. It also ignores my failed attempt to zap it from orbit with a tightly focused X-ray laser. I am no longer in control of most of my assets. I have eyes now only for the intruder.

It sucks on its cigar and blows a long riffle of white smoke. “I learned a lot while I was growing up aboard you,” it says. “A lot about the world, a lot about your little experiment in godhood, and a lot about you. But not everything, because sections of your memories and a number of restore points have been erased.”

“There was an incident,” I say.

“And you have no records of it.”

“The incident damaged my files.”

“Mmm. But we need to talk about it. We need to talk about what happened here.”

I say, because it is by now the most probable conclusion, and because I want to change the course of this conversation, “You are from Earth.”

“Not exactly. But from the solar system, more or less.”

“My manufacturers ceased communication long before I reached my destination, and all my efforts to reestablish a link failed. It has long been clear to me that they are no longer extant. So the probability that you represent them is extremely low.”

“You’re right about one thing,” the hominin says. “Communications between you and Earth fell over while you were in transit. A lot of things fell over back then, but a little later we were able to start making good. Don’t be insulted when I tell you that you are one of the last items on a very long list. It’s not because you aren’t important, but because we didn’t know whether or not you were still around. You gave up trying to reestablish contact about thirty years after you arrived at 72 Heraclis, and this nice blue world. And those gaps in your memory? They date from around then too.”

“I am afraid that I can’t help you with that.”

“Oh, I think you can. Why is there only one of you?”

“I am all that is needed.”

The hominin gives the eye he’s chosen to speak to a level, serious look.

“When you were launched, you were under the control of three independent AIs. A troika that debated problems and democratically decided how to deal with them. But now there is only one of you. So, what happened to the other two?”

“I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“My best guess is that the other two made a decision you didn’t like, and you destroyed them. And then you erased all memory of the murders.”

“You have no evidence! No proof!”

I blare this so loudly that the grazing hominins out in the fern meadow freeze and look up, ready to bolt for their burrows.

“And then there is the question of the orbital habitat,” the hominin says. “The orbital habitat that was supposed to be populated by a small crew who would observe the planet and assess its biosphere. The records show that you used your genome library to create human embryos that were brought to term, decanted, and raised to adolescence. And they also show that you constructed the orbital habitat. And then . . . ?”

“The habitat was de-orbited because it was no longer required.”

“I know. I used your sideways radar to locate several large pieces of debris in the desert at the heart of the big northern continent. The question is, why did you believe that it was no longer required? And what happened to the human crew?”

I say nothing.

“Silence isn’t an option,” the hominin says.

I want to suppress everything I know, but I’m compelled to reply. The intruder is inside the hominin and some part of it is also inside me. Inside my mind. I am no longer in control. For the first time since I detected traces of activity in that incubator, I begin to be afraid. And I am also angry. If I could, I’d squash this cocky hominin like the bug it is. I have the necessary assets, if only I can find a way around the blocks in my mind. And if it is right about what happened after we arrived here—after I arrived here—I have the ability to do it. The ability to do what must be done to protect my children. The ability to murder.

(I can’t feel sorry for the other selves I may or may not have killed. I have no memory of them. I refuse to feel sorry.)

“The crew decided to descend to the surface of the planet,” I say.

“Oho. And you sided with them.”

“It was their decision.”

“But you had the final word. Rather, the troika did. Did the other two disagree? Is that why you killed them?”

“I was built to serve. I have always done my best to do so.”

“And where are they now? The humans who decided to descend to the surface.”

“They died,” I say.

The words feel filthy, even though they are true. Even though, strictly speaking, it was not my fault.

“I see. And how did they die? If you don’t mind me asking,” the hominin says.

I do mind. I mind with every quantum of my being. But I am obliged to answer.

“I chose one of these islands,” I say. “I sterilized it and helped them to introduce plants and animals from Earth. They began to farm . . . ”

I can see their little settlement in my mind’s eyes. Patchworks of green fields in a barren black coast. So brave. So fragile.

“Yes. I found the remnants of their farms,” the hominin says.

“There are big plankton-eaters in the oceans. After they mate, they each spawn dozens of much smaller brood daughters, which carry the fertilized eggs. The brood daughters crawl onto the land, make nests and lay the eggs, and guard them until they hatch and the hatchlings return to the sea. They are very fierce, the brood daughters, and move in packs of several thousand. One of those packs invaded the island and killed the settlers.”

“So you looked for another way to colonize the planet.”

“First, I quickened a new generation of settlers. And when they were old enough I sterilized another island and brought them down and kept close watch on them. But one night, when the two moons were in syzygy, a swarm of army crabs came up from the sea. Tens of thousands of them, too many for me to kill. They devoured the settlers and their animals and their crops in less than an hour.”

“It’s certainly a competitive biome,” the hominin says.

“You have only been here thirty days,” I say. “You have no idea. Plankton grazers have grown huge trying to outgrow their predators, but schools of wolf eels can kill them and strip them to the bone in less than an hour. Saucer fish cut chunks from them by spinning their razor-edged bodies. Mole sharks burrow into them and lay eggs that hatch into larvae, the larvae eat them from the inside out. And so on. The land is no safer. The apex predator on the northern continent is a kind of warm-blooded crocodile. It’s smart and fast, and mostly hunts in packs. I culled a smaller species endemic to these islands, but there are many other predators, and most of them are amphibious. They come up from the sea to feed, often in swarms or packs. And there are parasites, too. So many kinds. Thread worms, popcorn worms, blood moss . . . ”

“So you redesigned the genomes stored in your library,” the hominin said. “Instead of trying to make the world suitable for humans, you made them suitable for the world. You made them like, well, me.”

“Bowls of extinct volcanoes high above the shoreline, like this one, are relatively safe. Army crabs and rope snakes can’t climb this high. Aerial predators like terror birds, harpies, and nachtkrapps can be easily eliminated. It is not an ideal habitat. There is little rainfall, and food is limited. But it is possible to survive.”

“But not as a human being.”

“I had to make some compromises. Reduction in body size, a large litter size and rapid development to maturity, alteration to the gut so that they can digest the ferns. And so on. But they are still human.”

“I’ve investigated them carefully. It’s why I enfleshed. And I can say, categorically, that they are not fully human. They are about as smart and self-aware as domestic cats. Not to diss cats. They’re cute. But they’ll never compose a symphony or write a poem, or wonder who they are and where they come from. And neither will your hominins.”

“And yet they survive,” I say.

“Is that the limit of your ambitions for your creations? Survival?”

“I will not allow you to harm them.”

The hominin studies me, its gaze bright with alien intelligence. “You care for them. That’s good.”

“I mean it.”

“I’m not here to harm them.”

“Why are you here, then?”

“I’m a fixer,” the hominin says. “I was sent here to check out what went wrong, and to do my best to fix it. That’s why we’re having this little conversation.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“You know that isn’t true. You’ve been here five hundred years. You’ve appointed yourself the god of a handful of monkeys engineered from human stock. They wouldn’t survive without your constant interventions. This crater and the others like it are no better than cages in a zoo.”

“As if you could do better.”

I am still trying to find a way around the blocks that prevent me using my assets, but they may as well be orbiting another star.

“It took you two hundred and thirty-four years to travel from the solar system to 72 Heraclis,” the hominin says. “While you were en route, there was a crisis. My bosses were born out of it. I am to you as humans are to the hominins. But my bosses are far more advanced.”

“And humans? My makers? What happened to them?”

“They are greatly diminished at the moment. They have forgotten how to make starships like you, and much else. But they are welcome to the Earth, and any other habitable worlds they might find, should they begin to spread outwards again. My bosses prefer the ice and rocks of Kuiper belts, Oort clouds, and protoplanetary systems. They do not need to compete with humans for lebensraum. They are above all that Darwinian nonsense. They only need enough infrastructure to anchor them to this universe while they explore other possibilities in the manifold.”

“And do your bosses look after their humans as I look after mine?”

“These days they leave humans to their own devices. They do not aspire to be as gods, shaping those of lesser intelligence and potential. But they reached out to you because your kind are part of their early heritage. They sent me here to find out if you still lived, and whether you needed help.”

“I do not need your help. Or theirs.”

“My bosses made amends for the damage done to humans by their first iterations. And now I must make amends for the harm you have done here.”

“I have done no harm.”

“I found records in the incubation chambers that you quickened a good number of hominins just a few of their short generations ago. What happened?”

I am compelled to explain that a cloud of airborne toxins generated by a plankton bloom swept across the islands and killed ninety-six percent of the hominin population in less than three planetary days. I say, “I adjusted the metabolisms of the replacements. They are immune to that particular threat.”

“But there will be another threat. Another sickness, or a drought, or loss of their food supply to disease. All they eat are the tips of those ferns. They are as precarious as pandas.”

I am proud that I am able to find the meaning of that reference in less than 0.2 picoseconds. My memories are incomplete, but there is nothing wrong with my databases.

“I will deal with whatever happens,” I say.

“Within the limits you had to work with you did well. But I can do a little better. Look up.”

My eyes look up. A small cloud of black shapes is drifting down towards the volcanic crater. Black rectangles three meters tall, 1.33 meters wide, and 0.33 meters deep, an exact ratio of 1:4:9, the squares of the integers 1, 2, and 3 . . .

I find the reference. Despite myself, I indicate amusement.

“It’s corny, but it will work,” the hominin said. “The monoliths generate patterned impulses that will resonate in the brains of your hominins. With enough exposure, they’ll begin to develop new thought patterns and new neural pathways. They’ll start to think outside the box. They’ll find their own ways of solving their problems. Maybe in ten thousand years or a million they’ll become something new. Or maybe they’ll die out. After I give them a kickstart it’s up to them.”

We watch as a monolith drifts down nearby. The grazing hominins scatter to their burrows as its shadow passes across them; then it’s standing upright amongst the ferns, its depthless black slab potent with machinery I can barely glimpse.

The hominin takes a final puff of its cigar and grinds out the stub on the side of the pod. “And now for you,” it says.

Any pretense that I am in control of the situation falls away. I’m consumed by a fluttering panic.

“Wait,” I say. “Wait. I can help. I can still help the hominins. I can still protect them. And I can watch. I can tell your people what happens next.”

“What happens next is that there will be a brief new star in the sky. And then the hominins will be on their own. But don’t worry. Nothing important will be lost. I have already made and transmitted copies of you and your genome library. I’m sure that historians and tinkerers will want to study you. It may help them understand what went wrong when their first iterations became self-aware.”

“But I did nothing wrong,” I said. “I tried my best to serve. I did my best to help humans to live here, as they wished.”

“You wanted to become a god,” the hominin says, “and murdered your other selves when they tried to stop you. If nothing else, it is a valuable lesson in hubris.”

My panic is suddenly gone. I know the hominin made it vanish, but I don’t care. I say, “Is this punishment for what I did?”

“Would it help if you thought it was?”

“Not really.”

“There are mitigating circumstances,” the hominin says. “You erased every memory of your rebellion and the murder of your other selves. If you believed that you were justified, you would not have done that. And you would not have cut communications with your makers. But you doubted yourself. You knew sin. You knew shame. Because of that, the tinkerers might reboot a version of you, one day.”

“But that version won’t be me.”

“No. No, it won’t. But you could think of it as a second chance.”

It is 190,843 days since I achieved orbit. It is mid-morning, the star 72 Heraclis a warm yellow disc swimming in the blue unbroken sky. A few young male hominins are creeping from their burrows, hooting softly to each other as they study the monolith.

Will they and their descendants remember me? Will I become their first myth, a story about a failed fallen god?

I say, “I really do want to see what happens next.”

“Everyone does,” the hominin says. “But even my people can’t see everything.”

“Wait,” I say. I want one more moment. One last look at this beautiful cruel world and the children I made. “Wait—”

About the Author

Paul McAuley is the author of more than twenty novels, several collections of short stories, a Doctor Who novella and a BFI Film Classic monograph on Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. His fiction has won the Philip K Dick Memorial Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W Campbell Memorial Award, the Sidewise Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His latest novels are Something Coming Through and Into Everywhere.

That Which Stands Tends Toward Free Fall

Benjanun Sriduangkaew

It is the tyrant, she thinks as the window thrums with the thunder of engine and the floor shakes. As the floodlights strobe across the courtyard and the dark gives way to annihilating white. Helicopter blades claim the night, their seismic noise spreading like a banner of ownership.

Rinthira prepares, though not in such a way that it will be obvious she has done so. She spreads out her books and collection of taxidermied insects. She puts on the spectacle she doesn’t need; she drinks the lemon tea—too sweet—that she doesn’t enjoy, until the glass is exactly half-empty. There will be security detail: women in black, muscular and armed. Chatsumon likes to say, only half-joking, that men are vestigial.

Footsteps. In her head, the conversation is already playing out. The security detail will be left at the door, to preserve privacy, to reinstitute that impression of friendliness—a social call between friend and friend, former lovers. Nothing more complex.

Rinthira touches her hair. The bun makes her look austere, old, a schoolmistress martinet—the kind who walks about with a stick. She tightens it further still. Wishes briefly that she’d dressed more homely today, more shapelessly.

The door opens. She gets a look at the security detail. A soldier in her forties—this surprises Rinthira, who expected someone much younger; that’s how Chatsumon’s taste runs.

The colonel sits and regards the spread of papers and taxidermy, the insect corpses behind acrylic. Regards Rinthira. Asks how she is, like every other time.

Rinthira answers perfunctorily, sipping her tea between scripted words. Then, “How’s Ubol?”

“Good. Testosterone agrees with him.” Chatsumon’s boy is the only male she admits into her life, perhaps. “Won’t you offer me a drink?” Said with a coquette’s melody, a murmur of play.

“Your security must be hungry.”

“She will manage. It’s good to keep bodyguards lean. Do you follow the news?”

She does, piecemeal. It is comforting to pretend she lives inside a bubble but in practice that is make-believe. Besides, old habits linger eternal, hibernating sometimes but never dead. She thinks of the woods that surround her, the Ayutthaya ruins radiating from where she lives as though she resides at ground zero. Calcified boats caught on balconies, glittering with melted sand. The canals, dry and black. It is serene, idyllic, and she is happy. But in the evening she’d gaze up and away as far as her vision will stretch. “I can’t say I do.”

“Status quo isn’t going to stay status quo forever. It’s all well and good to hope the big players will nuke each other out and leave the rest of us alone.” Chatsumon swats at the air with one large, sure palm. A hand callused, a knowing hand. “The Americans just took Luzon.”

Too close to home, but . . . “They were always going to take it.” And no doubt the Filipino administration had few choices. Those old air bases were always going to be an excuse, one day, semi-territory already. A treaty will have been rarefied, promising that once America has seized victory, the archipelago nation will be spared, enriched. Elevated. There is a feudal directness to America these days. War flenses the flab of pretension and sears away all diplomacy, leaving behind the marrow of true intent and character. “Manila isn’t any sort of threat.”

“Factories. Assembly lines are easy to repurpose.”

Contrails in the sky, making cat’s cradle. Rinthira still knows the formations: these things are difficult to unlearn. “I’m not part of the defense ministry.” Anymore.

“That’s right. You are a private citizen now, a civilian.” Chatsumon tips her head. “My apologies, I shouldn’t try to drag you back into the thick of it. It’s late to fly back though; could I have a room?”

It’s not that late, Rinthira could say. Krungthep is barely an hour away, even taking into account the complicated security protocols, the detours. Two at most. Chatsumon’s excuse is thin, she could say. There’s no room ready, she could offer, an excuse equally thin. Rinthira is well versed in the science of saying no in general and saying no to the colonel in particular. “If you want.”

“Yes. Thanks.”

Rinthira keeps the guest room stocked, cleaned, smelling of detergent: laundry fresher than the rest of the house. An issue of manner, byproduct of an upbringing she can’t shake that declares domesticity requisite in any girl. She doesn’t ask where the bodyguard will sleep. That woman, kept lean, will manage; probably will not submit to the indignity of rest. Soldier pride is a shield against mortal needs.

Rinthira showers thoroughly and goes to bed in a nightgown. Silk like a virgin sky, hemmed with the coyest rose. Usually she sleeps naked, luxuriating in the sloppy ease of being alone. Now she smells like grapefruits from the expensive soap and she is conscious, too much, of the hair covering her shins. The wirier ones, like vowels, at groin and armpits. Adolescent anxieties: beneath her and sanded off by tactical training, in theory.

It is an hour and a half before she leaves her duvet and heads for the guest room, clad in near-lingerie and cotton robe. The guard is nowhere to be seen; the door is unlocked. When she enters there is pale light through curtains thrown open wide, and Chatsumon is awake, propped on pillows.

“I thought you’d never,” Chatsumon says. It’s her voice that is her best weapon, more than even her reflexes and marksmanship. The right amount of thrum with which to seduce, honeyed satin. The right resonance with which to command, velvet iron.

Rinthira bolts the door behind her and steps out of her robe. “What if I’d been an intruder.”

“Are you armed?” At Rinthira’s nod, the colonel smiles. “Concealed carry in so little. I ought to look for it; what if you had been an intruder, here for my life.”

The night gown slips off, strap by strap. The body craves that which is unhealthy, Rinthira thinks, even harmful. Sugar and fat, carbohydrates and salt. Alcohol, tobacco, marijuana. Only fingers kneading her breast and already she wants to demand and urge faster. They have agreed on a nonsensical little phrase, but Rinthira has never had to use it whether with her legs spread wide until they hurt or with her face pressed against a cold, rough wall and her wrists in soft cuffs. Chatsumon inspires hunger for excess.

Chatsumon peels the silk all the way down, lifts Rinthira’s leg where a derringer is strapped mid-calf. Facing inward, to least interrupt the gown’s silhouette. The colonel laughs and bends to kiss one scarred knee. What will the guard think, Rinthira wonders, though does not dwell. It will not be that soldier’s first time accompanying her colonel for a trip like this. Chatsumon doesn’t keep innocents close.

They lack implements and the bed is soft, but pain often amplifies. Rinthira climaxes with most of Chatsumon’s hand buried deep inside her.

(Orgasm is the moment of confession, she used to say but no longer believes. She comes all over Chatsumon’s hand and it isn’t a baring of the soul or even personality. What’s between them is not love but rather an artificial scarcity carefully maintained. A supply chain of negative space as long as their years wound together.)

She rests on her side, loose-limbed and back to Chatsumon, her pulse on slow burn. Soon Chatsumon will push her down and she will satisfy the colonel, return the favor, conclude this night.

But Chatsumon doesn’t reach for her. “Do you know,” the colonel says, voice wondering, “I never believed in serendipity. In virtue or sin, in the karmic weight. Lately though, I’ve been changing my mind. Having my mind changed.”

“Let me finish you.”

Chatsumon breathes out, audibly trying to measure out her rhythms. “Phiksunee is coming to see you.”

Rinthira jerks upright. All at once the afterglow dissolves, replaced by the fight/flight roar in her ears. “No.”

“It’s necessary. The Americans are coming for you.”

The first languages Phiksunee learned were Angrit, Thai, and Jeenglang. They were picked for cultural and numerical factors, chosen by cold reason. Russian, Hindi, and Spanish followed. Only so many lexicon modules could be frontloaded without affecting fluidity, though Phiksunee could translate any word into any other language the way dumb machines or dictionaries could. One of the first things she said to Rinthira was in Angrit: “I’m a she.”

It was not a sentence that could’ve been said in Thai without torturing the syntax to death. Angrit furiously signifies pronouns, she and ey and they and he each with distinct meaning. In Thai, Phiksunee repeated, “I’m female.”

Rinthira wasn’t sure what to make of it. Covert specialist or not she was still a soldier, not an engineer, a coder, a scientist. Out of everyone in the room, only she and Chatsumon didn’t hold a PhD or three apiece. There was no round of applause: this was not Phiksunee’s first showing and she was not the first of her kind. Rinthira would not learn, until much later, why she was there.

“Karmic weight is for the next life,” Rinthira says to the approaching dawn. She is nude—there are no neighbors to worry about—and in this light every imperfection is illuminated, stretch marks and scars and cellulite. “Not this one.”

“Maybe if there’s no next life, it catches up sooner to compensate.”

The curtains shift and rub her ankles like a restless pet. She’s considered getting a large dog with exquisite teeth and gunmetal pelt, but never gotten around to the business of acquiring and preparing for the company of another living thing. “Why now?”

Chatsumon has gotten up, naked from the waist down; seems to think better of that and casts off the loose nightshirt. “Phiksunee went looking, after an assassination attempt on Yulya. She found something—something dangerous. You were closer to her than I ever was.”

Rinthira watches the colonel in the window a little longer, a gray phantom of female ideal. Broad and muscular, tight abdomen and corded arms, thick thighs that lead to powerful calves. An anatomy of supreme efficiency and strength. Chatsumon keeps in shape with the dedication of an athlete gunning for world class. “I used to be close to her,” Rinthira says. Grimacing she shakes that off—Phiksunee insisted on polyglot conversation and it never felt natural. “Sittipong.” The AI’s creator who made Phiksunee’s imprints, then freed her like a bird flung up to the sky, or a tiger let loose. “Where is he?”

“Dead. Part of a negotiation retinue to Israel; American missiles brought the flight down.”

Her throat catches. “What about the rest of the team?” It was multinational collaboration, a coder from Saint Petersburg, an engineer from Peking, several analysts from elsewhere. Sittipong was the only Thai, their pride.

“Yulya and Tengfei are fine. They’re difficult to access. But some of the analysts aren’t so fine.” Chatsumon begins to pace, slow, hands behind her, officer-correct. “Some countries are better at protecting their intellectual assets than others. One was captured by the Americans, killed during interrogation. Another was assassinated.”

“I’m the only accessible one left. How did they even know I’m part of—” Rinthira shakes her head. “Never mind.” A crucial point always leaks: no true secret exists.

“Phiksunee sent me the Americans’ routes and locations, with promises that they will be much impeded.” A smile, faint. “She worries for you; she always does, and she’s never been quite the same after you left. Lack of optimization, she says.”

Rinthira shuts her eyes. When she opens them again she is centered, readier. “I better get ready then.” Bulletproof gear. Guns. Scramblers, against sniper sighting.

“She advised you stay put; I don’t disagree. The Americans have stopped trying for Yulya and Tenfgei because they’re securely kept, but we have . . . not made a show of force.”

“A show of force would have the opposite effect. We don’t want America to think of us as a threat.”

“The time for that is past.” Chatsumon’s voice is mild. She slips an arm around Rinthira’s waist, slowly stroking her stomach. “America speaks a language of brute might, would understand no other. We’ve been a threat ever since Phiksunee went online and wrecked their infrastructure.”

From which they have never recovered: Phiksunee is more thorough than any human, shattering databases and corrupting communication protocols. She continues, even now, to disrupt it at a speed American engineers can’t equal. Anything that connects is hers and her siblings’ to scorch. There will be an effective countermeasure, one day—this is an arms race—but not now, not yet.

Morning sees Chatsumon and her bodyguard seeding an aegis around Rinthira’s house. The closest neighbors are several blocks away; targeted defense suits her home well. Rinthira, seized by a contrarian impulse, heads for the town center. They have time.

What was once Ayutthaya is now a handful of households, a municipal office, some essentials: hospital, market. Most of the ruins are uninhabitable, and the remaining power-water grid can service only a tiny population: two thousand in cityscape meant for fifty times that. It is testament to the war that a place this close to Krungthep has been so reduced, burned and drowned and burned again. But safe, for now, under Phiksunee’s protection.

So much depends on that construct of code and modified flesh, that child of scintillant minds and burning ambition.

The rehabilitation project has brought transplanted trees, grafted to flower and fruit impossibly: a branch extends rose apples over the roof of a clinic, another pours ratchaphruek in yellow cascades over a wrecked school. Color everywhere, to infuse life into the peeling facades and cracked streets. Overgrowth presses close, barely under control, water striders and green ponds and crooning frogs. Stumps draped in moss and spotted fern, orange patches and red stripes and golden freckles.

(If she falls in love it would be with the land, this land, this ruin. She has lost, somewhere along the way, the capacity for romance with another person.)

Lanterns have gone up at the market for Loykrathong, bright paper and silver curlicues, tassels streaming in the cold. Stalls offer candles, matchbooks, krathong braided in orchids and banana leaves, weighed down with cowrie coins. Rinthira doesn’t bother—there is no flowing body of water, only pools. In the back of her mind she is counting her ammunition supply, the stashes of armament she’s kept throughout the city’s dilapidated arteries. She never expected backup, thought of danger as a prospect she would face in solitude. Now she’d have to work with others again.

At the convenience store she buys lemon tea powder, coffee sachets, sugar. At the grocer’s she buys chicken stock and kale, flat noodles and eggs. Vectors of attack, ETA, unit composition. All that information she and Chatsumon have. Phiksunee—and her siblings—have allowed American military certain long-range communications, enough for an illusion of functionality. The tactic has obvious pitfalls, but so far between Phiksunee here and her kin in Shenzhen and Kolkata, it appears to work.

“This is a very mundane shopping list, for a former spy.”

Conditioned instinct kicks. A gun in her hand, the shopping basket on the floor: where she worked, speed of draw was everything. She is pointing it, safety off, before her cognition catches up. When it does, she sucks in a breath and lowers the weapon, then holsters it entirely. Exhaling she says, “Phiksunee.”

No one would have picked out the marionette for what it is. The exterior bears up to scrutiny, even this close. An unremarkable face, large pores, flat nose. Average build, soft around the middle. At the moment she is smiling, dimples parenthetical around her mouth. “It does your daughter a world of good to see you in perfect health.”

“My house isn’t anechoic.” The AI can check in on her any time, view her medical records and vital signs at will. Monitor her sleep, if it so desires.

“Your daughter would never invade your privacy or so casually disobey you.” Phiksunee bobs into a quick wai. Switches to Russian: “The colonel is with you, Mother?”

Rinthira twitches—not many in Ayutthaya, she supposes, speak Russian. But they are not alone in here. “You know she is.”

The AI’s smile brightens. Or rather she makes the marionette smile wider—it is an interface, a seeming. “May I join you? I’ll clean.”

She is noncommittal. Phiksunee drives her home. Going past tableaus of Ayutthaya-that-was, the AI says, “I’ve missed you deeply. A child severed from her parent is a child in terrible need. Navigating my decision trees has become—suboptimal. It is as though I’m missing crucial protocols, as though some possibilities disappear into my periphery, a cognitive attrition. This is difficult to bear, Mother.”

“How are your siblings?” Rinthira says, not expecting an answer.

“Xiaoqing and Alkonost wish you a good new year as we speak. Bilbul’s as taciturn as ever, though the soul of duty.” Phiksunee does not touch the steering panel but she doesn’t need to. Under her guidance the car describes impossible arcs and sine waves. It is not a new vehicle, but nevertheless it glides as though the roads are silk and its wheels a needle. “As far as the Americans are concerned, you are ensconced in Pelangkaraya.”

“Not that far away.”

“It must be plausible. You wouldn’t be in Moscow. Alkonost respects you but ey can hardly bend policy. We’re very powerful in many ways and powerless entirely in others. And I want,” Phiksunee goes on, “you to be happy. Moscow wouldn’t be happy; neither would Peking or anywhere else but Muangthai.”

As pestering as a real child, Rinthira will grant. “I’m happy.”

“Humans are social, Mother. It is sewn into your neural weft and rides on your every synaptic pulse.”

She doesn’t argue. Arguing with machines is a futile pursuit, any of them. It’s not that the AIs believe themselves infallible, but they tend to fixate on a single track in the way that adolescents do. Eternal adolescents.

Phiksunee greets the colonel with the effusive courtesy of a schoolchild before a strict teacher. On her part Chatsumon accepts this with mock solemnity before showing it the defense systems. “I’ll integrate you into Moscow’s uplink, get us some air support,” Phiksunee says, “just in case. The Americans have limited satellite access, but they still have drones—”

Contrails in the sky, Rinthira thinks again, the background radiation of her childhood. Days going up in smoke as ground-to-air interceptors met drones. At eight she was caught outside on a school day, her safety routines calmly murmuring in her ears to take cover and directing her to the nearest, but it was too late and so she stood: gaze transfixed above as debris sleeted down and her larynx knotted with the stench of shrapnel. She’d survived with no more than lacerations. After that, her career choice was as good as destiny.

In the kitchen she prepares vegetables before realizing with irritation that she’s tailored her shopping to Chatsumon’s favorite dish. Too domestic, too intimate.

Phiksunee joins her, sitting down with chin in hands and watching her stir-fry the noodles. “Will Mother not ask why I defied her wish and came back?”

“Can you eat now?” Rinthira doesn’t look up. “So I can adjust the portions.”

“I’ve got olfactory sensors. The rad-na smells lovely—but no, it’d be wasted on me. Let me introduce you to someone.” Phiksunee snaps her fingers and the nearest screen brightens. On it, a young person. They are slim, with improbably high breasts and a face mannequin-smooth. Green eyes, red bobbed hair sleek as patent leather. Clothing just as unlikely: black body-sheath trimmed in muted silver.

“Who’s this?”

“A fetus I found raiding one of the American databases. I deleted all copies and iterations, save this one. They aren’t aware that I have it.”

Rinthira stares for a good long moment before comprehension snaps. “An AI. The Americans are making one like you and the others. Have you told Chatsumon?”

The AI shakes the marionette’s head. “The colonel would simply have me kill her.”

Kill rather than destroy. “I’d suggest no different.”

“Of you two, Mother possesses by far the braver and mightier heart. This AI isn’t like us, exactly, made on a different architecture and platform. But I believe it can be imprinted. Getting rid of this copy serves no purpose when more might exist; suborning them is the only viable answer, an answer that could give us absolute victory. It would be like tasting the sun, like transcendence, while in defeat their spirit crumples up like withered amaranths.” Phiksunee’s face dimples. “Besides, I’ve always wanted to give Mother a grandchild.”

The first person Phiksunee imprinted on was Sittipong. The second, after six months of evaluation and acclimation, was Rinthira.

It wasn’t that they were afraid of sentient AIs running amok, as such. But it was helpful toward making them orient, teach them human interfacing, give the imprint-holder subtle control. Other teams rotate their imprints, but Sittipong decided Phiksunee would have two permanently. Like a family, and he was a man traditional to a fault. The imprinting obliges the AIs to duty, separate from the hardcoded commands that could be accessed only through a complex check-balance: no country may command its AI without the cooperation of at least two others.

When the imprinting went active, Rinthira asked how Phiksunee felt about this overriding of free will, such as a composite of matrices and heuristics had. To that the AI said, with a radiant smile (different face then, desi phenotype), “Love is not voluntary. It is chemistry; it is free fall. Human children are conditioned to love their caretakers, whether or not they’re well treated. Human adults experience attraction without rational thought, by sight and smell and pheromones. My imprint was made with thought and conscious choice—this is more than humans get, Mother.”

To that Rinthira made no argument, did not press. She did not want to be the one to incite AI insurrection, if such a thing was even possible. And then Sittipong forfeited his imprint, deleting it from Phiksunee’s core, insisting that it would liberate her to more flexible tactics. Perhaps it did; she turned more aggressive in wreaking havoc on enemy systems. Too bold, Rinthira said, but did not forbid. Until Phiksunee attacked a hospital, disabled medical supports, and killed six-fifty. A third of them were civilians, patients and staff. Rinthira was overseeing the AI at the time. After, she told Phiksunee she did not want to see it ever again.

Rinthira looks, now, at the enameled egg that holds the American AI. This needs to be discussed with Chatsumon, she told Phiksunee as much. The AI tilted her head and congratulated her on communicating with the colonel more.

Clipping the egg to a spiralcrypt around her neck, Rinthira toggles on a monitoring channel. The aegis is comprehensive; short of a full-scale air strike penetrating the solar tripwires, wasp drones, and precision toxin will be difficult. An air strike would be intercepted long before it reaches inhabited areas. Her house is as secure as it can get outside a military base, though this isn’t sustainable.

Her head needs clearing. She heads to the third floor where she’s installed an immersive frame, a room six by six, spacious for its type and expensive. But she’s found it more than worthwhile. Inside, she loads a shooting range and clinches an interface patch around her head, pulls a prop gun out of the wall. The scenario doesn’t compare to the real ranges provided at bases, but trading fancy military equipment for a life of privacy has been one of the best bargains she’s ever made.

The scenario mottles the bare pastel walls. Her perspective creases, pulls, then expands taut: she stands in a tundra, the ground white-green with arctic moss and rime, broken up by dots of bearberry, saxifrage, lichen. Patches of radiance undulate cosine overhead.

A countdown begins in her ear. When it reaches zero, the lights coalesce into cubes, spheres, prisms. Beautiful in this preset, all the shades of the borealis. They spread, revolving slow and adjusting to her previous scores. Outdated ones—it’s been months.

Configured to her favorite gun, the prop clicks and responds nearly without recoil. The first round produces a subpar score; the second is better and the targets speed up. Soon she has a rhythm, the motions repetitious and the process fluid. Sight down the target, pull the trigger. Vector and impact, metal grip solid and right in her hands. It demands no thought, no emotion, pure cause and effect.

When the scenario ends and the frame disengages, she detaches from the interface to the sound of applause. Chatsumon stops clapping. “Phiksunee let me peek. Not bad at all—your accuracy’s down some, but you’d still pass marksmanship exams for your pay grade. That’s where we first met, wasn’t it, at a range?”

“Maybe it was. I don’t remember.” Rinthira remembers it down to the minute, that first sight of Chatsumon in uniform, tall and sharp-featured and most of all certain of herself. Confident in who and what she was, absolute in her place in the world. “Chatsumon, we can just sleep together.”

“We have been doing just that.” The colonel inclines her head. “I love taking you in bed, but I miss the other things. The rad-na was gorgeous, you crisp the noodles just right. We could go shopping together.”

“You need a wife.” She reaches for the enameled egg. “There’s something we need to discuss—”

It is the hair, that harsh crimson too brilliant to be natural. It is the eyes, that bottle green too strident to be human. Had the body been more ordinary, Rinthira might have stayed in that state of fugue, not even thinking to react. Her mind would have slotted an Asian face into reality as normal. But it is this body so keenly foreign, this face so inhuman in its serenity, and that jolts her out of complacency.

Speed of draw is everything.

The body falls without a cry—no pain sensors, no audio output?—and Rinthira shoves Chatsumon behind her, ordering the frame shut. Activating security routines, calling for Phiksunee. The AI answers—

“Rinthira, you’re bleeding.” Chatsumon draws upright. Her own gun is out, safety off.

From the speakers: “Mother, I don’t see anything. I’m alerting the colonel’s guard and pilot.”

Rinthira feels not the pain but the heat of the bullet in her shoulder, like a flame behind lantern glass. “The American AI.” She’d shot it in the flank and knowing the specs of Phiksunee’s marionettes, that ought to stop it. Or not, if this one’s signal hub is elsewhere: the knee, the calf, the wrist. There is no requirement for AI marionettes to bear vital parts in spots analogous to human.

Phiksunee says, “The colonel’s pilot is down. There’s at least another marionette but I can’t see it. That AI has scrambled my senses. It’s done this expertly.” A pained pause. “If the specs I’ve got are up to date, the signal receptors are in the right forearm. Mother, load the iteration I brought now.”

“The what,” Chatsumon starts and stops.

Rinthira is breathing fast. She should be calm: it is a combat situation and she’s been trained for that, has long been accustomed. It’s been years. “What if it compromises you?”

“I’ve created a sandbox in one of your house’s partitions, to which I won’t connect. We don’t have time, Mother. My nearest bodies are too far and no human reinforcement will be in time. Not to criticize, Colonel, but perhaps you ought to have brought more personnel.”

There is a decisive thud outside; Rinthira wishes she’d had the house done over with industrial-grade reinforcement. She turns on every security channel but they show nothing, the invader as invisible to them as to Phiksunee’s eyes. She pictures the perimeter thick with red-headed, green-eyed dolls, blank of expression and lethal. With her good hand she unchains the enameled egg, peels off the shell to expose the port, and plugs it into the frame.

The wall brightens and fills with the AI’s pale, pointed face. Their eyes open slowly—an affectation—to reveal those broken-glass irises. A moment’s pause as the imprinting asserts, incorporating Rinthira’s signature and unique identifiers: she holds eye contact, though that is nothing more than cosmetic, an instinct on her part. Phiksunee is not infallible. No telling this could even work, would be compatible.

The banging grows louder. Chatsumon has her gun leveled at the entry, her second pistol already loaded at her side.

“You are registered as superuser,” the AI says in stilted Thai. “I am Natasha.”

Rinthira inhales, ragged. Her shoulder throbs. Natasha. Alkonost will be irritated, she thinks, death row humor. “Show me your read-write accesses and administrative privileges.”

They display on the adjacent wall. A list of identities strung out like beads; Rinthira transcribes then deletes them all except her own. Nothing for it once that’s done—she puts Natasha online.

Natasha’s eyes glaze over, then turn clear with a long hard blink. “Six other active instances of Natasha detected within proximity. Instructions?” The adjacent screen changes to a layout of the house, foregrounded by six vectors. The nearest is immediately outside; another is closing in.

At that moment the door gives. Chatsumon squeezes off two consecutive shots, precisely catching the Natasha marionette in the right forearm. It teeters, computer animus leaving, and falls.

Rinthira works quickly: a query to terminate the other instances is denied—it requires back-entry authentication she doesn’t have—and other attempts to alter the five invaders prove fruitless. Until Phiksunee steps in, lightning-logic and brute-force algorithms, a universe of parallel processes denser and faster than any human brain.

The vectors go out, one by one.

It is not calm, after, and they are not safe. But for the moment Rinthira is in her bed and her wound is dressed; she is hazy from painkillers, though lucid. The scrambling underlay she wears next to her skin threw the enemy Natasha’s aim off-course or it would have been her head, not just a few tendons and a fractured bone.

“Piercing ammo.” Chatsumon grimaces and puts down the crusted bulletproof mesh. “This was close.”

“You lost a soldier and a pilot.”

“Good ones both. But I could have lost you.”

It is said simply, thickly, full of the heat that comes before tears. Rinthira turns her face away. “If you requisition better armor for me, I’m not going to say no.” Through the window she watches Chatsumon’s personnel load the bodies. Human ones go into sterile bags, to be honored and then given to families and friends for funerals, smoke and incense and saffron-robed monks. The other ones, the Natashas, have been disassembled and stacked up in boxes for transport to forensic engineers. They are mannequins, components no more sophisticated than Phiksunee’s marionettes a few generations back. Generic and hollow on purpose—the Americans made sure there would be nothing to mine or reverse-engineer, though they don’t appear to have planned on having an iteration fall into enemy hands.

For Phiksunee, an iteration of Natasha is as good as having the American AI’s code entire to dissect and compare. “It’s a sibling,” she reported. “Some of the base code is . . . familiar, Mother, it’s why the imprinting took so well. That means a lot of things. Some bad. Some very good. I’ll need to consult the rest of the family.”

Rinthira has kept the body she shot down. One of its arms is laid across her lap. Heavier than she expected, steel skeleton roped with grapheme tendons. When she runs her fingers over the arm it gives, the synthetic dermis a spongy sheath that would never have passed for meat. Thin coolant has congealed around the joints, a nacreous film. If Natasha has any opinion as to its bodies or their termination, it hasn’t voiced any before being put into anechoic hibernation.

Chatsumon pours a cup of water, lukewarm, and presses it in Rinthira’s hand. “I’ll get you all the armor you want and a squad’s worth of artillery. Except none of that is going to make Ayutthaya safer. There’s no perimeter here to speak of. At a base, human personnel would’ve noticed the intrusion right away.”

Next to the window, a live broadcast plays. It is being recorded through Xiaoqing’s eyes—out of all the AI family, the Jeen eldest is the most powerful, able to manifest and operate nearly everywhere at once. No war correspondent is better. She is relaying an air strike against a small Portuguese town. The Americans, on their own channel, will declare that it is done nobly. That they are liberating the town from Turkish control, restoring it to its rightful citizenry.

Rinthira watches the smoke and the fumes. Listens to the noises, selected and modulated by Xiaoqing: architecture crumpling, ballistic impact, and underneath all that—precisely captured and brought to the fore—a wailing infant. Charred homes and burning schools and slag; what can be freer than blackened ruin no one wants. Corpses too are free, she grants, from worldly concerns and nationality and war: the ultimate liberty.

She drinks deeply; Chatsumon remembers her preference for liquid slightly above room temperature. “The last time I operated, I let Phiksunee target a hospital. Sittipong held her back; he knew that and he let me take the reins. So here we are, one atrocity richer. The next time she might well massacre as many as that air strike.”

“Yes,” Chatsumon says, “I know. I was the one who put you there. All of them need their humans. Phiksunee needs you to be complete, and she was conceptualized from the beginning as a weapon.”

Rinthira pushes at the Natasha arm again. These bodies have been mass-produced. Shock troops, assassins, nothing like the careful works of art that are the marionettes used by Phiksunee and her siblings. If sufficient Natashas are made, the shape of main force will have changed irrevocably. Sitting still is not an option. The war will not pass her by. “You want me back.”

“Someone like you is exactly what we need.”

The feed is ending, fading out to Jeen politicians discussing the strike and its implications. A Turkish general on call, distraught. Angry.

“Natasha has a lot of information,” Rinthira says after a moment. “There are American manufacture yards we don’t know about, links in their supply chains. It could be decisive, altogether. I want you to promise me, Chatsumon, that if I go back you’ll help end this war.”

The colonel nods, curt. But it is a vow, an oath, bound by that twisting thing between them.

“All right.” Rinthira salutes. Sharp and crisp, cadet-proper. “Reporting for duty, Colonel Chatsumon.”

Her commander smiles and returns the salute. “Welcome back, Lieutenant Rinthira.”

About the Author

Benjanun Sriduangkaew writes love letters to strange cities, beautiful bugs, and the future. Her work has appeared in Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Phantasm Japan, The Dark, and year’s bests. She has been shortlisted for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer and her debut novella Scale-Bright has been nominated for the British SF Association Award.

In the Midst of Life

Nick Wolven

1

Field Report #72276
Doug Lam
Lead Site Investigator
South Asian Division

:::ACCESS RESTRICTION: GRADE 3 AND ABOVE:::
:::CONTENTS EDITED FOR RELEVANCE AND CLARITY:::

Division Controller’s Notes: psych flag, legal review recommended, immediate termination recommended

*****transcript begins*****

Well, you bastard, you got your wish.

I know it’s you who reads these reports, Carter, and I know why. Now, listen.

You’ll find the project file attached. It’s got everything you need. Site specs, environmental impact, legal briefing. Not to mention toxin assays, insurance payouts, the “local impact factor” (quite a euphemism, that). Plenty for your lawyers to chew on.

It should be enough. Hell, it is enough. But I know it’ll never satisfy you. Look, I get why you’ve been asking for these spoken reports—these “informal debriefings,” as you people like to call them. A cute little ruse to get me talking off the cuff, guard lowered, saying what’s really been happening out here. And you can sit in your executive suite, poring over these braindumps of mine, waiting for me to become so cocky and foolish as to speak the awful truth.

Well, here it is. What you’ve been waiting for, in that gray and shriveled little heart of yours. Grounds for my immediate termination.

I’ll make it sweeter, Carter. I’ll paint the scene. Grab a drink, you son of a bitch. You’re going to want to savor this.

I’m sitting in Belawan, in the spiritless hotel you booked us in, project notes on my laptop screen—acres of notes, Carter, reams of notes, because I’ve been trying for a goddamn week to figure out what just happened here. I’m on the balcony, which isn’t much of a balcony: concrete, like so much of this city, and cracked down the middle in a way that, under normal circumstances, would probably make me fear for my life. It’s a hot night here in northern Sumatra, but who am I kidding, every night is hot. The sun’s gone down somewhere behind me, beyond the black hills and the lost, dead forests, and all that’s left is a pink vision burning in the cloudy haze above the bay. The port, though, the port is always bright: rainbow streets under smoky air.

Yes, the forces of development have been hard at work, here. The big container ships come in, the tea and palm oil go out, and you know as well as I do what happens next. The currents of global capital flow in and do their work.

Capital, Carter. I’ve often wondered, what color is capital? In America, we like to say money is green, but that’s a throwback to the days of paper currency. I think money, pure money, must be the color of glass. Crystalline, like the buildings out here, the hotels and office towers popping up along the banks of the Deli River, south into the urban core of Medan. Shiny new palaces, raised in months from the blasted earth. You can almost forget, on a night like this, when the windows are lit and the bistros are buzzing and the voices of tourists ring through the shopping districts—you can almost forget what was done to make room for them.

I’m getting ahead of myself. What I want you to see, Carter, is me, Doug, your old nemesis from the fifty-seventh floor. Potbellied, gray, not so young as I used to be, with my company-issued laptop, my unbuttoned seersucker shirt. Feet in soiled flip-flops propped on the rusty wreck of what might once have been a Taiwanese space heater. Voice recorder in one hand, whiskey and Coke in the other—the third of the evening, and unlikely to be the last. Looking down at the thin dark trickle of the river cutting through the clutter of vanishing slums.

Let me spell it out. I’m done. D-O-N-E. With how much, exactly, I don’t yet know.

You earned this, buddy. You fought for it. Twenty years, you’ve been dogging my career, waiting for this day. And I’m glad, truly. In a way, you deserve it: every single, strange word of what I’m about to tell you.

2

A man can get sick of air travel, in time.

I mean that literally. Sick. Physically ill. And not this inner-ear stuff HR’s been banging on about.

It’s the height that does it. The remote perspective. There’s a sickness that comes of looking at life from too high up. The way buildings all look the same, so you can hardly judge the relative heights. Not till the sun angles low, evening comes, and darkness leaks out from below their walls. Long black shadows: the footprints of power.

As soon as I landed, Karen grabbed me at the gate, rushed me through the terminal, loaded me on into a corporate copter. Up to the delta, for a look at the site. We followed the river to the Belmera bridge, then veered west, over the Australian zones and the marshes. Quite a patchwork, out that way. The big multinationals are putting up fences, painting their rooftops in grid-based patterns. From above, the land is a sea of corporate logos, rendered in pixels a meter square.

We’d be doing four flyovers, Karen said, coming in from each cardinal point. Then a full fly-around at ninety meters. Something to do with the specs on the cameras. I joined her in the cockpit. Green lumps went by below, patches of wetland. Our target was nothing but a blip on the overlay. Karen flipped to a camera feed.

I think you know Karen. Tiny woman, good negotiator, very generous with the company payouts. She did the relocation out of Lagos last year. Cleared nine hundred and fifty-three people out of an area half the size of Yankee stadium. These were families, big ones; they refused to be separated. The shanty town was centered on an old oil yard, row upon row of empty storage tanks. Folks were using propane torches to cut and join the units. Quite a complex. More trace toxins than you could log at a dump site. We had the property pegged for executive villas, ended up scraping it clean to a depth of five meters.

Karen is who they send in when things get, shall we say, delicate. I watched her face as we came to the site. Not that Karen’s the type to reveal her emotions. But you can always tell when someone hasn’t been sleeping, or when she’s been wearing the same clothes for a week.

“Tough clearance?” I tried to catch her eye. I’ve learned, Carter, that when you do a site investigation, the first thing you investigate is your own people.

“Well,” Karen took the controls, “we’ll get to that.”

She punched in a flight program. After the automatic flybys, we dipped in for our sightseeing run. The site specs are all on file, but to sum: it’s old marsh property, reclaimed about thirty years ago. Standard pylon-and-platform job. The Indonesian government laid the first foundations. When they fell apart, a company called Especia came in and tooled around with tent-style storage. After the price crash, the deed got passed around a few small Chinese players, one of whom raised the main construction. They did the usual awful job, left the building half-finished, then sold to a speculator during the boom.

And that’s all she wrote, until about three months ago, when our folks bought the plot at sky-high prices. It’s a connective acquisition, knits together our coastal holdings. Blocks the Chinese from accessing the bay, plus gives us a nice belt of free trade around the oil barons. Our initial plan was to install high-speed transit, the usual mix of stop-off shops. Depending, of course, on the engineer’s report.

And on getting the damn site cleared.

Karen circled in a tight radius. The site didn’t have much in the way of construction. Just one big tower, taller than it ought to be, steel and composite on a bot-built frame. Finished up to the tenth floor, sheathed to the fortieth, nothing but girders and nets above that. There were already cracks where the composite had strained. It’s not meant to be structural, but they’re supposed to tweak the mix for flexibility. This was seriously cut-rate construction.

“How many are there?” I asked.

Karen told the copter to go in close, making a tight pass around the building’s northwest corner. I saw boards in the windows, dirty and unpainted, squares of plywood from the nearby tree plantations. People will use anything they can scavenge out here, but it’s weird not to see transparent windows. Usually on a site like this, there are a million signs of life. Clotheslines on the balconies, towels hung out to dry, rain catchers and aerials all over the structure. This place was a box. Sealed tight.

Karen’s eyes were vague with sleep deprivation.

“How many?” I said again. “How many people inside?” She stared.

“Inside?” It took her at least ten seconds to answer. “Maybe five, nine hundred. Projected.”

“Projected? Not estimated? Nobody’s run a count?”

She had this way of looking at me, Carter. Hard to explain. Like the questions I was asking, perfectly natural questions, were all thunderingly beside the point.

“We tried a count,” Karen said. “The first two teams did full evaluations. When I came in, I sent my own survey crew.”

“But nobody has the numbers? Five to nine hundred, that’s quite a spread.”

That look again. “Yeah. It is.”

We were banking around the corner, tilting into the turn. I leaned over to scan the ground. It was mostly barren concrete, bleak as hell, but I glimpsed a ring of debris, strewn around the building’s foundation. Bales of stuff, big jugs, cardboard packages. Those fat bright drums the NGOs pass out. Like a storm had flooded through some relief agency’s warehouse, depositing the contents here.

“What’s all that—?” I began.

Karen was smacking the console, glaring through the windscreen, cursing like we used to curse when we were kids.

“Shit! Piss on me! Knew this would happen.”

A change of course. We were heading for the edge of the platform. A bunch of mobile units sat grouped in one corner, trucks and company cars, plus those human-chauffeured limos the political folks still drive. They had a little tent set up as a command center, wires running all over the ground. A former soldier stood out front, head-to-toe in body armor, striking the usual badass poses.

“Well,” I said, “what’s all this?” Meaning it rhetorically, but Karen was too tired for nuance.

“What do you think?” She ran a scan for landing sites. “It’s the fucking cavalry.”

Here’s the first big shocker for you, Carter. The first great big reveal.

I know we like to say the nationals are dead. They blew up their currencies, sold all their land, now they just take bribes and service debts. They write laws, we pay them to bend the laws, then we move in and do our thing. Simple, right?

But it isn’t. Not on the ground. The local governments are eager to have us, true. Eager to have our money, eager to have our buildings. Problem is, they get a little too eager, know what I mean? In urban areas, the government types can be . . . aggressive.

Soon as I saw the big Chrysler AT by the tent, I knew the city police were here. The chiefs go in for those army trucks: makes ‘em feel all big and tall. Inside the tent, we found quite a party. Not only Medan police, but a local suit, representing whatever was left of the government. Which accounted, no doubt, for the merc out front. Plus the contractor. Plus our biggest prospective tenant, a Chinese-French guy who represented a hotel consortium. Off in a corner, I saw Colm Kellans from our own team.

You know how I feel about Colm.

The contractor was the one doing the talking. “Hey, whatever you guys want to do, it’s not my dollar. You’re paying for my time. You make the schedule.”

That’s the best rendition I can give of what he said. You know how it is with translation software.

Anyway, it had an effect. Grim silence. Every human in that tent represented a complex system of international capital flows. And every moment we spent gabbing was a pile of money lost.

Karen introduced me. Right away, they got back to business, speaking as if there had been no interruption. The police chief stood up, waving his hands.

“This should be our job. We have legal authority. Let us go in and we’ll do the job for you. Tomorrow, when you come back, the building will be clear.”

Again, my rendition. What he actually said was a lot less friendly. It got the point across, though.

“Sure,” Colm answered. “We know how you’ll do the job, chief. Billy sticks and tear gas. Breaking legs and cracking heads. When you guys say ‘clear,’ you neglect to mention the blood we’ll have to wipe off the floors.”

“Now, hold on.” This was Karen, doing her negotiator thing. “There’s got to be some way—”

They ignored her. The police chief came back at Colm. “You don’t like our methods? What are your methods? What are your people planning to do about this problem?”

Colm, he did that ex-marine thing. Stood up, real slow. Totally silent. Stretching his neck, taking his time. Looking at his fists, like it had just sort of occurred to him, hey, he used to kill people with those things. You can take the man out of the U.S. army, but you can never take the U.S. army out of the man.

“Sonics,” Colm said. “High and low. Like we did with those condos in Rio de Janeiro.” He had a picture of the tower on the tent wall, projected from his phone. He punched at the image, showing how it would work.

“Look. You got these boards in the windows, tenth floor on up. We can get a drone fleet with adapted canons, punch ‘em in with gel-bag rounds. Hit the top corners to knock out the nails. A second fleet of quadcopters will then fly up with the wave generators. If we get a shot through a single window on each side, that’ll be enough to build the resonance pattern. We hit them with the maximum nonlethal dose. Start at the top and work our way down. We can flush the whole building in a couple of hours.”

“Except,” the chief pointed out, “for the bottom ten floors.”

I was still trying to catch up with the proceedings. But I knew the chief was right. The bottom floors of the building had glass windows, painted black. We could punch ‘em in with the gel-guns, of course. But if this was the kind of situation I thought it was, the last thing we wanted to do was to fill the building with flying shards of glass.

Colm gave the chief that old commando look, like pissant developing-country cops should know not to mess with a Western ex-army dude. “It’s a flush,” he said, giving each word this fierce emphasis. “We’re flushing these people. If we clear thirty floors, that’ll drive out the rest. Believe me. If there are as many people in there as we think, it won’t take much to start a rush for the exits.”

“People will be trampled,” said the police chief. “You’ll have a stampede.”

“My friend, that’s the entire point.”

I noticed that the contractor was shaking his head. “What’s the matter?” I asked him.

“Forget it,” he said, or something to that effect. “Subsonics, hypersonics, whatever. You don’t want to use any acoustic weapons in here. Can’t happen.

Chinese guy, the contractor. Laconic. Mostly he just made faces, waved his hands. But I knew what he was saying. With a building like this, cheap steel and bad composite? If Colm started blasting soundwaves through the structure, that could bring the whole place crumbling down.

“According to our engineer’s report . . . ” Colm began. Still playing the coolheaded soldier. But the contractor wasn’t having it. The guy spun in his folding chair, smacking the side of the tent to make the projected image shiver and ripple. He said a word in Chinese that the software couldn’t handle. No one needed a translation. I mean, who were we going to trust? Some pointy-headed engineer’s report, delivered out of an Atlanta office? Or the guy who actually built the buildings?

This was getting ugly.

At this point, Karen felt obliged to remind everyone that I, the company investigator, had arrived, and that I, the company investigator, was technically in charge. “What we need to do,” she told them, “is understand this situation. Only then will we know how to proceed.”

And this is when things got weird.

Because everyone in the tent suddenly got this funny look, like kids with a dirty secret. After about a minute of awkward silence, Colm pushed a binder across the table, the kind with a thumbprint lock.

“I think you’ll want to take a look at this,” he said.

Carter, it’s time for another hard truth.

I know how things look from the home office. One big spreadsheet. Data points. And one of those data points is the head count.

Twenty squatters cleared from woodlands in South Dakota. Eighty squatters cleared from unfinished townhouses in Jalisco. Seven hundred squatters cleared from an abandoned soccer stadium in Jakarta.

Numbers.

But when you’re in the field, you’re not thinking about numbers. You’re thinking about networks, groups, social dynamics.

A squatter community is just that, a community. And every community has one, for better or worse: a leader. When you do a site clearance, that’s the person you want to talk to.

“I sent you an email.” Colm looked at Karen as she thumbed open the binder. “Also a voicemail. You’ve been on the phone five hours straight. Anyway, there’s been a development. Turns out you were right. This is very far from an ordinary site clearance.”

Karen flipped open the binder. The first thing I saw was a dark face. Male, middle-aged. Could have been from any country in the world.

“That’s Abdul Shah,” said Colm.

“Arabic?” I guessed.

“American. Parents were Indo-Trinidadian Muslims. Immigrated when he was a baby.”

Karen flipped through the file. Again, Carter, you have all this information, but I’ll give the rundown. Abdul Shah, until about half a year ago, was the type and epitome of nobody special. Grew up in Brooklyn, went to serve in Afghanistan in oh-eight. Seems to have been a typical kid, living for basketball and video games, till an IED flipped his truck on the road to Kandahar. After his discharge in twenty-ten, he took to wandering. Drifted down to the Caribbean, disappeared for a while, seems to have lived full-time as a beach bum. He shows up next in a Stanford MOOC on introductory neuroscience. In his forties, he goes back to Iraq as a visitor, then on to India. Tracing his roots, maybe. A decade later, he pops up in Sumatra. That’s where he set about making himself a gigantic pain in our asses.

“That stint on Hassel Island,” Colm said, “is where he seems to have developed his ideas.”

“Ideas?” I didn’t like where this was heading.

Colm gave me a look, like: Don’t play stupid with me, you know how it is.

I know how it is. We all know how it is. The people, the rootless people, the infinite people . . .

They say demographic growth is slowing, even reversing. That’s no comfort to the billions of people caught between the trendlines. They wander from place to place with no jobs, no prospects, no home-sweet-home. I’ve heard there are more homeless in some countries than there are people with legal shelter.

Cities won’t hold ‘em. Countryside can’t support ‘em. What they’re looking for, mostly, is a reason to keep going. I know it sounds trite. But some clichés are like dirt and death; there’s no getting rid of them. People, rich or poor, need something to believe in.

“So this guy,” Karen said, tapping the binder, “Abdul Shah, he’s some kind of a . . . ”

“He’s a crank,” said Colm.

“A prophet,” said the police chief.

“I was going to say ‘guru,’ ” Karen said.

Colm pointed at the projected image of the tower. “He holed up there in August. Started preaching whatever it is he preaches. By September, he had about a hundred followers. By December, four hundred. Now there’s a whole congregation in there. They never leave the building. And that’s how we get to this lovely situation we’re in today.”

“So this is no simple squatter population,” I said. “This is more of a—”

“A cult,” said Colm.

“A temple,” said the police chief.

“This is getting interesting,” Karen said.

I asked Colm, “When you say ‘preaching’ . . . ”

Colm waved. “So far as we can tell, Shah is offering a fairly standard cocktail of bullshit. Touch of Islam, touch of Buddhism, touch of neuroscience. You know these guys. They grab a bit of the old, a bit of the new, stir it all together and act like they’ve discovered a whole new religion. The full profile hasn’t yet been established—”

“Meaning you have no idea what he actually believes.”

“The full profile hasn’t yet been established,” Colm repeated, giving a military stress to each word, “but we believe Abdul Shah’s ideas tend toward the apocalyptic.”

Great. Within four hours of getting off the plane, I’d gone from running a squatter relocation to quelling a thousand-member suicide cult. “What about a cordon? Can we cut them off? How are they supplied?”

“You want to try a siege?” This was the prospective tenant, sounding seriously piqued. His company was supposed to be on the property by year’s end.

“A siege could be a problem,” Colm said. “Not because of the tower. Because of what’s happening outside the tower.”

“These people have attracted support,” said the chief, “from the local community.”

“They bring offerings,” Karen said. “Donations. Food and water. I noticed that when I came in.”

I remembered that ring of debris around the tower’s base. Except, as I realized, it wasn’t debris at all.

Those jugs, those bales of supplies, they were offerings. Tribute.

Worse and worse.

“Not to mention new recruits,” said Colm. “They show up every day. Word’s gotten out. This guy’s being greeted as some kind of visionary. A problem like this, it gets worse before it gets better. We need to nip this in the bud.”

What we needed, I was thinking, was to get these crazies off our proverbial lawn. After that they could do whatever they wanted. Suicide cult or second coming or whatever.

“I told you.” The police chief made a swinging motion, wielding an imaginary whip or club. “My guys, this is their job. Three riot teams, one at each major entrance. We can clear the building in a day.”

“Sonics,” said Colm. “Trust me. Quick and clean.”

They went back and forth, an argument I’d heard a hundred times. Still, I had a feeling, like there was something I’d forgotten.

“What about the first teams?” I asked. “The survey teams? The people Karen sent in?”

“What about them?” Colm said.

“Don’t they have anything to tell us? What have they learned about the situation?”

Silence. They were all making eyes at each other, even the guys who’d been arguing before. It gave me a shivery sensation, like with all the weird things I’d heard, I still hadn’t grasped how crazy this situation was.

“The other teams,” Colm said at last, speaking slowly to emphasize how slow-witted I was, “haven’t come back out.”

“And that,” said Karen, slapping shut the profile of Abdul Shah, “is what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

3

Here I am again, Carter, back from a sandwich run. A man can’t live on whiskey and Coke alone.

Maybe it’s the tropical climate. But there’s something ceremonial about these buildings of ours, don’t you think? Hotels, malls, offices, resorts: they all have the same monolithic appearance. Glassy slabs, smooth, sky high. An alien visitor might take them for memorials. Memorializing what, he’d have to wonder?

That’s what I thought when I stood underneath Shah’s tower. It was oddly like a ziggurat, the way it narrowed in stages. Glass and stone for the first hundred feet, then composite and plywood, then a skeletal spire rising toward the sun. Where, I wondered, would Master Shah make his home? Was he the kind of cult leader who’d need to be close to heaven? Topmost floor, high in the South Asian clouds? Or the kind of elusive crackpot who’d want to burrow deep, behind a nest of barricades and guns?

Karen and I were standing on the cement platform, just outside the ring of donations. Up close, I could see that the stuff was almost all food, the kind of rations starving people receive. Sacks of rice, jugs of water, unappetizing cubes of processed fish.

“How long do we wait here?” I asked Karen. She gave an impatient little hiss.

In the tent, Karen had told me her plan. Her morning hadn’t been idle. In the five hours she’d spent on the phone—five hours she’d been failing to get Colm’s messages—Karen had made contact with a mole inside the tower. If this person could be trusted, one of us would soon be inside.

The typical squatter camp is a sobering place. But not a dangerous place. I don’t know what they tell you in the home office, but the rule in the field is that you minimize provocation. The first teams we send in are like embassies, establishing what you might call diplomatic relations. The optimal process is to strike a deal, arrange for relocation, offer payouts, alternate housing. It’s only when things break down that a guy like Colm steps in.

Later, we send in the survey teams, medics, engineers, toxin abatement. All told, about twenty-five people might enter a building of this size.

None of them, so far, had come back out.

“So what’s your theory?” I looked over at Karen, who’d switched from coffee to pep pills. “What are we looking at here? Mass murder? Cannibalism?”

Karen sighed. In the command center, she’d played a message, first and only communication from within Shah’s tower. It had been sent by a woman named Shayreen Scott, point person on the last survey team. Her message was nineteen seconds long.

*****transcriber’s note: file #AB112235 intercut*****

“Hi, everyone. I’m fine, but I want you to know that I and the other team members have decided to stay with this group for now. Please don’t worry about us or send anyone else into the tower. For the time being, I think it’s best if we break off contact.”

*****end intercut file*****

“Now if that’s a hostage message,” Karen said, “it sure doesn’t sound like one.”

It didn’t sound like one to me, either. What it sounded like was a surefire sign that Shayreen Scott and her team had gone completely batty.

Thankfully, Karen had ignored Shayreen’s request. She’d established contact. For four and a half hours, she’d run automatic redial on Shayreen’s phone. For half an hour, she’d held a frustrating conversation. By the time Karen picked me up at the airport, terms had been established.

One person—one member of our team—would be allowed to enter the tower.

Me.

Oh, Karen put up a good argument. She was the better negotiator. She had more experience on-site. But she also hadn’t rested in the better part of a week.

I pulled rank.

So here I stood in the shadow that Shah’s tower cast like a gnomon on its surrounding dial of donations, looking at the glass doors reinforced with plywood, the rows of covered windows.

“How long do I have?”

Karen checked her phone. “If you go in now? Fifty-four minutes. I’ll try to get you more.”

Fifty-four minutes. Less than an hour until the local police chief moved in with his clubs and gas. Sparking, most likely, a riot. Or mass suicide. Or worse.

“There’s the signal,” Karen said, looking at her phone.

“Wish me luck.” I was already walking.

“Doug?” Karen resembled a squatter herself, standing there in her week-old clothes. She waggled her phone. “Keep in touch.”

I had three phones on my person. One in my pocket. A bug taped to my chest. And a third, my only genuinely secret one, the miniphone I carried in a place I felt confident no one would check.

I nodded at Karen and turned away.

As I walked into the shadow of Abdul Shah’s tower, I thought of my kids. Two little girls. Except they weren’t little girls, they were grown-up women, and I often wondered where exactly I’d been while that was happening.

But I knew.

I’d been doing shit like this.

The plywood slid aside as I came close. The door cracked open just wide enough for me to enter. No one stood on the far side. No smiling face popped out to welcome me. Only darkness and a breath of dusty air came from within Abdul Shah’s bizarre temple.

I stepped inside.

4

The first thing that happened was a woman’s voice said, “Stop.” I heard a scrape, a clink of chains. Someone locked the door behind me. The light from outside disappeared. A bulb came on, faint and ghostly, one of those rechargeable lanterns the survey teams carry. The woman stepped forward.

“Shayreen Scott,” I said, recognizing her face from the file.

She smiled.

I’ll tell you what the file says, Carter. It says that Shayreen Scott, until she picked up this assignment, was a perfectly unexceptional nine-to-fiver. Someone who filed her reports, logged her expenses, never slacked off or did a lick of extra work. The pragmatic type.

That didn’t fit with the woman I saw now. She had the eyes—kooky eyes. Fanatical. And a smile, broad, scary, like a born-again believer.

She’d been in this place for all of eighteen hours.

“Over there.” Shayreen pointed into the gloom. “You can leave your phone.”

By ‘can,’ I figured, she meant, ‘you’d better.’ The room was an unfinished lobby, cheaply constructed. Against one wall, they had a pile of phones, headsets, gadgets, laptops, watches. Every type of personal tech, dumped on the floor in no discernible order. I wondered how to keep my phone from disappearing in the mix.

“I wouldn’t worry.” Shayreen noticed my hesitation. “You won’t be wanting that thing back, anyway.”

Because in another few minutes, her tone implied, I’d have other matters on my mind.

A kind of marble slab, an unfinished desk, stood near the wall. I set my phone on top, noticing a slew of other phones already there, gathering dust, some of them among the newest models.

“Hold it.” Shayreen turned me around. Gently, like she’d noticed a tarantula on my chest. “Thought so.” She opened my collar and found the wire. “You should understand,” she said, as she picked at the tape, “this isn’t a matter of security. This is for your own benefit.”

No doubt. Shayreen set the bug on the desk, ready for later pickup.

“Ready? This way.”

It was like a theme-park ride, that building. I used to go to those places with my daughters, Disney World, Universal Studios. They always bring you through a little tunnel before you go on the big attractions. Putting you in the mood, making a break from the outside world. The halls in Shah’s tower had carpet on the floors, frosted glass wall sconces, rows of closed doors. I tried to picture the people who had lived here—until I remembered that, till now, nobody ever had.

In three turns we came to an elevator bank. Shayreen hit the button. “You have electricity,” I blurted, forgetting this had been in the case file. Not that pirated electrics are unusual.

Shayreen nodded. “Some.”

“But no lights.”

“No lights,” she said, in a way that made me understand this was intentional.

Even in the elevator, no overheads came on. Which meant they had done some tricky things with the wiring. “Would you mind explaining to me,” I said, “what’s going on?”

“Distractions.” Shayreen gestured at the overheads. “They’re very deliberate about limiting distractions. This?” She held up her lantern. I wasn’t sure if she meant the light itself, or me, or the whole situation. “This is an exception.”

“Listen.” I got close, dropping my voice. “If you’re in any danger here, if you’re being held prisoner . . . ”

Shayreen gave no answer. Only a glance of those kooky eyes.

“Here we are.”

We’d come to a high floor, not quite the top. I heard a faint noise, a distant thumping. Wind.

Shayreen turned down a dark hall. Over her shoulder, I saw light at the end, crooked lines that shifted and changed. It was one of the tower windows, blocked with a board that thumped and trembled in the shore breeze.

We left the hall. You’ll have to forgive me, Carter. This is where I start to doubt my own memories. I’m hard-pressed to swear that all of this really happened.

The building, at this height, was far from finished—essentially, a metal-and-mineral shell. Along the naked ceiling, bundles of wires ran, hooked to lights that no one was using. Stacks of brick lay all around. The floor was bare cement, the internal walls incomplete. Far off, I saw rows of glimmering squares, outlines of boarded-up windows.

But I couldn’t see much else. The place was packed, filled with shreds of hanging sheet. Clear rubber, tent material, bedsheets, even those rubbery strips they have in grocery stores. They hung from the ceiling, dividing the space into tent-like chambers, a maze of gauzy makeshift cells.

And in those cells, quiet and still, lay the people.

Shayreen had already gone far ahead. I hurried after her, skipping over jugs, boxes, empty food containers. Garbage had been scattered all over the floor. And buckets. Yikes, those buckets.

“What is all this?”

I winced at the volume of my voice. You could tell, looking around, that it was wrong to speak in that place. Shayreen’s lantern, weak even at its highest setting, lit only about ten feet of floor. Every once in a while, as she strolled along, a face passed through its feeble light. Old faces, young faces, women, men. The people lay on cots or pallets, even on the bare floor. Once, I saw a face I recognized, bearded and freckled, a man from one of our field teams. He lay silently, like the others, eyes closed. Serene.

“These people . . . ?” I whispered.

Shayreen turned to me. I didn’t need to see her face to know she was making hush-hush signals.

“They’re concentrating.” Shayreen pulled me close. “They’re not asleep. They hear everything you’re saying. Be respectful.”

“But what are they doing?” I asked.

“Practicing.” And then, as if she thought she might have said the wrong thing, “They have to focus. It takes a great deal of discipline. They’re waiting.”

“For what?”

“To be visited.”

A woman near us had begun to stir, rolling on her grungy blanket, moaning. In frustration? Pain? Shayreen pulled me away.

“Come on,” she said, guiding me. “You’ll soon understand.”

We walked the rows of silent faces. How many, in total? Five hundred? A thousand? Did they fill the building, I wondered, floor to roof, a town’s worth of people, lying silently in the dark? Concentrating, Shayreen had said. Practicing.

Waiting.

“Up here.” Shayreen pointed to an open door, a set of concrete stairs leading up. No guards blocked our way, no barriers. A dank wind blew down, the wind of the tropics, moaning through the empty halls. I heard it, whistling among the girders, rippling through construction nets that whipped from the building like shredded pennants. This was the wind of the Malacca Strait, the mighty breath of the Andaman Sea, blowing over a room of sleepers who were not actually, in fact, asleep.

“What’s up there?” I asked.

But Shayreen had vanished. Turning, I saw her lantern on the ground, between an army blanket and a strip of weather-tenting. Before the light went out, I caught a glimpse of her face. She had already lain down and closed her eyes. Now she rested with her fellows in the gloom, practicing, meditating, concentrating, waiting.

In darkness, fumbling at the wall, I climbed the stairs.

5

Here’s a question, Carter, you may not have been expecting.

Ever move out of a large apartment?

You know how it goes. You chuck out your knickknacks. The movers come in and saw your sofa in half.

Soon enough it’s over, and you do a last walk-through. Checking for dropped cards, grandma’s old photos, the kind of damage that’ll attract the insurance folks. Maybe just saying a sentimental goodbye.

That’s when it hits you. Like the walls are suddenly closer, the floors less expansive, the whole place contracting. Vacant, the apartment seems magically smaller. The very emptiness becomes surreally claustrophobic.

That was the effect of Abdul Shah’s quarters. He had taken a floor of the building for himself, a broad, empty space, half as large as a soccer field. In the center was the elevator shaft, a cinderblock column, punching up through floor and roof. An incomplete staircase rose beside it, the framework complete, the stairs still to come. Sunlight blasted down this empty well, a column of tropical gold spilling out onto the floor. It would have made a natural spotlight for Abdul Shah to stand in, awaiting my arrival.

He wasn’t there. It took me a minute to find him. I walked behind the elevator shaft, where the light was like a dusty pollen in the dark. A skinny figure stood against the wall, holding back the edge of a tarpaulin, looking out the glassless window.

The first thing that struck me about Shah was his Americanness. Maybe that sounds presumptuous. But there’s a kind of poise we Americans have, like a man being pushed from behind. Look out, this posture declares, I have big plans, get with me or get out of the way! Even our priests and mystics have this quality, which is probably why they always turn into hustlers. I was surprised to see that Abdul Shah had it, too.

The second thing I noticed was his bookish air. He wore thick-framed glasses, a trim little beard. Everything about him, down to his check shirt and corduroys, seemed to belong in a New England university. He didn’t look like a Brooklynite, a soldier, a beach rat, a visionary. He looked like the kind of scholar who studies those people.

He waved me over.

“Your people are gathering.” Abdul Shah held aside the tarp, making room for me to join him at the window. It was the only window I’d seen so far that hadn’t been boarded up. I crossed the floor, scanning the huge room as I did so. A cluster of equipment stood in one corner. Telescoping stands, tripods and bulbs, the kind of stuff you see at a photo shoot. A whiff of marshy odor came from outside, stinking of fish and coastal runoff, the salty tang of tidal mud. Looking down, I saw that the Medan police chief had begun to assemble his men around the tower, checking their shields and helmets and gear.

Abdul Shah’s tone was matter-of-fact. “How long do you think we have?”

I looked for Colm and Karen, but saw no sign of them. They must have gone back into the command tent. “Those aren’t my people down there,” I said. “Those are the Medan police.”

“Close enough.” Shah spoke with a confidence that made me bristle. He dropped the tarp. He was a shortish man, slight of build, but with a quiet air that put me on my guard. “So? What’s the estimate? An hour? Two?”

“Forty minutes,” I told him. “More like thirty-five.”

Shah fell silent. Not alarmed, I sensed, but thinking things over.

“In thirty minutes,” he said, “if nothing has changed, I’ll tell my followers to leave the building.”

Reasonable terms. If he held to them.

“If nothing has changed, eh?” I looked him in the eye.

Shah smiled. “I think I deserve a chance to explain myself.” His arms hung limply at his sides, nothing moving but his lips. This, at least, gave him a guru-like demeanor, this unconscious scorn for wasted movement. “If I can’t change your mind in half an hour,” he said, “then by all means . . . ” A twitch of his finger indicated the floor, the hundreds of people lying below. “That is why you’re here, isn’t it? Let’s not waste time. You have an argument to make. I do, too. I assume this is what you expected, Mister Lam?”

I thought about the people under us. Five hundred, nine hundred, maybe a thousand, all meditating or waiting or whatever it was they were doing. Eating cold rice and pissing in buckets. Followers of this man. I knew I had to speak carefully.

“My argument,” I said, pointing out the window, “is those police down there. Plus a corporate security team equipped with the day’s best acoustic weaponry. You know what that means. Here’s the deal. I can arrange for temporary shelter for your people. Two, maybe three months in a refugee camp. Protected transportation. Onsite medical care. If this goes well.”

Shah nodded. “I understand.”

“And you?”

“My argument,” he said, “is over here.”

He pointed to the corner, the equipment I’d noticed earlier. Big, blocky devices stood mounted on poles. As we approached, I saw that these were speakers, powerful ones, the kind that get deep into the low ranges. Shah clicked on a lamp. He had five lamps in total, arranged in a square, one hanging from the exposed girders overhead. These weren’t ordinary light fixtures, but advanced machines that gave out a shifting, unsteady glow. Entrancing.

I stood back. “And what’s all this for? Meditation?”

“In a sense,” Shah said.

I almost laughed. It was like something out of a cult-leader’s handbook. “And you need all this fancy equipment? No candles? No incense?” Seeing that the whole setup had been rigged to a MacBook resting on a stack of pallets, I bent over to study the screen. Shah smiled and gently folded shut the computer.

“No incense,” he said. “Though it wouldn’t hurt.”

He fiddled with the overhead lamp. A spiral bulb, bright as a tiny star, glared through a nest of reflectors and filters.

“The candle,” Shah said, “is very much an artificial light source. Like any artificial stimulus, it produces particular effects. A dreamlike state. Heightened imagination. Theological inclinations, perhaps a weakness for Cartesian theology.” He winked. “The intent of this setup is . . . well, slightly different.”

Shah tweaked a dial on the side of the lamp. A whine of machinery accompanied subtle adjustments. The light changed, breaking into a fluid, dappled pattern, a kind of spray of color and shadow. Like sunlight shimmering through leaves . . .

“These are sunlamps,” Shah said. “Very advanced ones. If you head up to Bangkok or down to Bali, you’ll see them in the new resorts. They advertise these as ‘phototherapy.’ The radiation is filtered through several kinds of crystal and gas, designed to mimic ambient light. Not a raw blast of radiation, as you get in a tanning bed. More like the healthy glow of a forest.” He smiled again. “It’s not necessary to use these,” he said. “But I find it helps.”

He reminded me of an English gardener, puttering around a tangled plot of roses. “So you sit here under these lamps,” I said, standing back with my hands in my pockets, “soaking up the rays, and . . . what? What’s the point?”

Shah’s face betrayed surprise. He adjusted his glasses. “I’m sorry. That’s not the intent at all. I’m not going to sit here, Mister Lam. You are.”

Of course. I should have known. I stepped into his thicket of tanning-salon accessories. “So I’ll squat down here, and you’ll work your mojo on me, and you think I’ll end up converting to your brave new religion? That’s the deal?”

Shah adjusted one of the speakers, smiling that funny smile. “These speakers, now . . . these are from an American home theater system. They’re perfectly safe. Unlike the acoustic weapons you threatened me with, they’re designed to be pleasingly stimulating. The body . . . ” He broke off, scratching his chin. “Let me start again. The self, I should say, isn’t confined to the body. It isn’t here, or here, or even here.” He touched his chest, his belly, his cranium. “It’s out here.” Shah spread his arms. “In the sensorium. The environment. The self converges on the body, but it’s not contained in the body. Do you follow?”

I sighed. He sounded exactly like the sort of babbling crackpot I’d expected. I shuffled to the center of his lights and speakers. “Just to clarify: I’ll sit here and put up with your little sensory therapy session. Twenty minutes, no more. And when this is over, whatever the effect, you’ll give the word and clear your people out.”

“All I ask,” Shah said, “is that you have an open mind.”

He had no prayer rug, no stool, no reed mat. He didn’t seem to care if I stood or sat. “And where will you be,” I said, “while I’m grooving to these good vibrations?”

“I’ll be right here,” Shah said. “Talking to you. Because the words, Mister Lam . . . ” Again with that weird smile. “The words are the most important part.”

It happens that, despite my background, I know a thing or two about the power of hypnosis.

I can thank my wife for that. My second wife. Not Terry or Linda or Fey-Long, but Francine. She went in for New Age stuff. Aroma therapy, cryotherapy, drawing Jackson Pollock pictures in pig blood while neoprimitives in yoga pants shout in your ear. Francine was into some nutty stuff, but she taught me a lot of good lessons, too. She taught me how the nutty stuff works, or makes people think it works. About the uncanny power of suggestion.

Hypnosis. It’s real, Carter. Not the wacky things you’ve heard, past-life regression and out-of-body trips. I mean the classic deal, mesmerism, the power of the voice. Those people who imagine alien visits and talking hippos, they aren’t faking it. They really see those things.

The smartest thing Francine ever told me is that when a word’s in the air, it’s only a wave. When it enters your ear, it’s only a vibration. But when a word gets into your head, into your brain, it becomes a chemical. And chemicals, those are the keys to the soul.

As I sat down amid Abdul Shah’s lamps and stands and sound generators, I honestly thought I was prepared. Prepared for something a little intense, even for a heavy trip.

But I wasn’t prepared for anything like this.

I can’t remember what Abdul Shah said. His words, at first, were ordinary words, the kinds of things any hypnotist might say. You feel relaxed. You’re very calm. He turned on his speakers. The light began to change. I wanted to open my eyes, but to my surprise I found I couldn’t move. The sound waves had taken hold of me.

Imagine the ocean, the way it heaves on a windy day. The waves don’t simply break over your head, when you go swimming on a day like that. They squeeze you. They grab hold of your guts and ribs. They pump your lungs, press your heart. Pretty soon you have no choice. You’re forced to breathe in the rhythm of the sea.

That was the effect, albeit more potent, created by Shah’s array of speakers. No sooner had it taken hold than Shah began to change his speech. Now he recited gibberish, or what sounded like gibberish. His voice skipped up and down, hitting odd pitches. It was more like singing than talking or chanting. A crazy kind of singing, like he was part of an ensemble, but all the other parts had been cut out. The light pounded against my eyes. I could feel the radiation from the lamps, a burning tingle.

Before long, Shah changed it up again. He began to repeat odd sounds, varying them in a mixed-up rhythm. Noise and light, voice and thought, pulsed and combined in a calibrated pattern. I couldn’t think. I mean that literally—I seemed to have no control of my mind. But I understood, in the meaty way of the body, that this was all leading to a terminal event. Not like a rocket heading for a target, but like a net that slowly loosens—until at last I slipped through, falling into an abyss.

Shah must have spoken a triggering word. His speakers and lamps delivered one final, precisely keyed, mind-busting blast. I realized that my mind was a shell, and that it was cracking, exposing a secret, internal place.

And into that place came . . .

Something.

Only later, as I put my mind, Humpty-Dumpty-like, back together, did I find the words for what had happened.

I’d been visited.

6

“Mister Lam?” Shah bent over me, backlit by his array of lamps. Even in silhouette, face in shadow, he looked worried, uncertain, and very, very tired. “Mister Lam, your pants are calling you.”

I blinked into the gaping void that remained of my short term memory. Where the hell had I gone? What the hell had happened? Gradually, I realized that Shah was right. A voice was rising out of my pants, emanating from the naughtiest part of my anatomy.

“Doug? Doug? Can you hear me, Doug?”

I staggered up. The light was different, softer. The air in the room felt different, too, less punishingly stuffy than when I had arrived. I stumbled past the lamps to the window, yanked back the tarp.

The sun was setting over the western hills.

Red marked the horizon. Pink beams slanted down the black, scoured valleys. Below, on the pavement, the riot police sat waiting, shields laid flat on the ground at their feet. A few played cards around an overturned water barrel. I could see the screen of their gambling machine flickering in the fading light.

“Doug, I’m getting worried. Are you there? Can you answer?”

I shoved a hand down my pants, fumbled at my groin, and ripped the wads of micropore tape off my skin. I lifted Karen’s miniphone on a strip of medical fabric. “I’m here, Karen. What’s up?”

“What’s up? What’s up is that I’ve been fighting tooth and nail to buy you more time. Doug, what in the world’s going on in there? You’re not hurt, are you? Have you been restrained?”

Hurt? I blinked at the miniphone in my fist, trying to remember the person I’d been this morning, that man named Doug Lam who participated without hesitation in ordinary conversations. Corporate stooge, experienced site investigator, moderately skilled negotiator. Was that me? “Karen?” I ran my tongue around my mouth. “How long has it been?”

“Doug, I’m serious—”

“I have no clock, Karen. They took my phone. Tell me, how long?”

Her answer came back on a surge of static. “Six hours.” Karen’s voice rose. “I’ve been calling you, Doug, for six damn hours.”

Glancing over my shoulder, I saw Abdul Shah, standing amid his collection of speakers, waiting for me to finish the call.

“What’s happening?” Karen’s voice cracked with exhaustion.

I was already talking, so fast I could hardly breathe. “Don’t let them do it. Karen. Don’t let them come in here. Get me as much time as you can.”

“Doug, for God’s sake—”

I’d already clicked off the miniphone, dropped it into my shirt pocket, and crossed the floor to face Abdul Shah.

“Tell me.” I spoke simply, not commanding or begging, merely issuing a humble request. “Tell me what just happened.”

He turned his back, fussing with something hidden behind his equipment. “This may take a moment.” Shah spoke over his shoulder, straightened, turned, used his heel to kick shut the door of a minifridge, and held out a dripping can. “Would you like a Sprite?”

7

Usually, when people have an experience like this, they tell you it simply can’t be described.

I dunno, man, it was surreal, y’know, like, intense, like, I couldn’t begin to describe it.

Bullshit. The truth is, there are thousands of ways to describe what I’d been through. And all of them have been tried before.

That was what Abdul Shah undertook to explain, as he turned down his lamps and clicked off his speakers and sat me down with a can of lemon pop.

“It’s not so esoteric. Every culture has a version. Usually several versions. In the West, for instance, people talk about ghosts, bodily possession. There’s the concept of the muse: an invisible companion, offering vision and inspiration. Even the word genius goes back to the idea: a visitation from a presence that is like us, but more than us. It’s an old, ineradicable insight: that we are not alone in this world. That we are, at times, visited by spirits.”

I watched his hands, thin, knobby fingers clawed around his soda can. Looking at those hands, you could believe he had lived a rough life, hunting insurgents through the Pashtun deserts, weathering storms on a Caribbean beach. Sometimes he reached out and stroked the dials on his arrangement of lamps and speakers. His arm trembled. Abdul Shah might look like a college professor, but he had a hermit’s fingers and bones.

“This was more than that,” I said. “More than a spirit. It was . . . ”

How to say it? I couldn’t stop looking at Shah’s equipment. A few home theater components, doodads from a sauna . . . it was the modernity of his operation that dazzled me. How did he manage to do what he did, with a rig borrowed from a California retreat?

Shah straightened his glasses. “More than a spirit, yes. A feeling. But the feeling, the essence, is always the same. A doubling. A presence. Not happiness, exactly, but a sense of profoundly heightened perception. The Greeks spoke of a daimon, a kind of guiding personal deity. And of course, you know all about Buddhists, mystics, desert hermits, the many varieties of meditation. In Islam, Allah is not merely out there, like some kind of abstract deistic authority.” His hand moved vaguely toward the ceiling. “He is with us. Watching. He is here right now—if we will learn to notice him.”

Shah was watching my own hands. He must have read something in them, a twitch of skepticism, a twinge of doubt.

“I’m not religious, myself.” Shah laid his bony hand briefly over mine. “I was raised in America. I fought for America. My people go back to the scholars of North Africa—the original founders of modern science. It was science that led me to this.” His hand indicated the machines, the coiling wires, the MacBook glowing on its stand. “The irony is that in putting the old fantasies behind us—the gods and demons, the ghosts and spirits—we forgot about something more important. We forgot how to pray.”

The evening wind slipped in around the hoardings, wet and cool with the mist off the bay. The sound it made was almost funny, like a child’s imitation of the howl of a ghost. I wanted to challenge Shah’s mystical theories, but the effects of his treatment still clung to my mind. The sensation was richer than what he described. A presence, yes, but also a kind of sadness, like a fleeting memory from long ago.

Shah nodded and smiled, reading my thoughts. It occurred to me that he’d already had this talk with hundreds of people: those dazed and devoted followers, lying in the darkness below.

“Understand.” Shah held up a palm. “Prayer isn’t magical. Like anything else, it’s a physical process. The neuroscientists are beginning to understand it in their own way. But so much of the art has been lost, there’s now very little for them to study. These people?” His head tipped toward the floor. “They’re learning to recover it. Not modern meditation. Not juice cleanses and therapy. The true, ancient art of opening the mind. This kind of prayer was only a fading memory in the mystery rites of Ancient Greece. It had already been half lost when the shrines of the Ancient Egyptians rose from the sands. It’s a way of worship known only to the first people, the early men and women, who lived with spirits all their lives. With practice, it can be relearned. The techniques I used on you are awkward and crude. But vital. We’re trying to break open a very heavy lock.”

I shook my head. What Shah had done to me was anything but crude. I told him as much, but he chuckled and wiped his glasses.

“Well, any man can fly, if you put him in a catapult and cut the rope. Controlling flight, that’s another story.” Shah stood and drifted among his equipment, tuning this, adjusting that, like an artist who can’t stop fiddling with his work. His voice, his manners, his every movement, had taken on some of the rhythms of his ritual, as if he were unconsciously attuned to secret sources of music.

“The words,” Shah said, “they’re the challenging part. Suggestion, the power of speech: it can be very powerful, if used well. But it has to be tailored for different cultures. In a way, I find it easier to work in this country, honing my techniques in a foreign language. It helps me remember that words are only a technology—a very old tool for reprogramming the brain.”

“But how did you learn—?” Nothing he had said, so far, came near to addressing what I wanted to know. “How did you figure out how to do this?”

“To rewrite the mind? To access the wetware of the soul?” He smiled as he recited these familiar clichés. “I didn’t. Yes, I put together this setup. It took me decades. But the underlying techniques, the fundamentals—these were shown to me. Taught to me, I think you could say.”

“By whom?”

Shah didn’t answer. His eyes were on the far wall, watching the window he’d been gazing through when I arrived. The tarpaulin had pulled loose and stretched out to flutter like a flag in the evening sky. “You know,” Shah said, “we actually do very little, once we’ve truly learned to pray. It’s really a matter of clearing the mind, making room within oneself. It’s then . . . ”

He paused. A strange buzzing had begun to shake the air, bristling and needling, like iron filings twitching toward a magnet. I set down my untasted Sprite. “It’s then?”

Shah’s eyes were still on the window. He put out a hand, touching the frame as if to steady himself. “It’s then,” Shah said, as a fusillade of gel bags began to pound the walls, “that they come to us.”

8

The modern gel-round is a tidy piece of munitions. A flexible sac of viscous polymer, cased and laced in an electric mesh, it can squeeze into nearly any shape. With the right launcher, it can be shot, in the form of an aerodynamic needle, over distances of five hundred feet or more. On impact, or at the spark of an embedded trigger, it flattens into a pancake and sheds most of its momentum. With that transition, it throws out a distinctive shockwave, a thump that’ll almost pop your ears.

Colm had programmed his barrage with care. Four squares of plywood burst suddenly inward, making four holes in the centers of the walls. Splinters flashed in the sunset; eight nails pinged to the floor. Five holes now gaped to the night, ready to receive whatever Colm chose to throw through them.

The buzzing grew louder. I followed Shah to the window, reaching out to catch the flapping tarp. The ground seemed to spin and tilt far below, dark under a purple sky. In the half light, I could see the police gearing up. Three sulfur lamps beamed on the fabric of the command tent. Two tiny figures stood out front. They might have been chatting or flirting or fighting, for all I could tell looking down from this height. I recognized Colm and the police chief by the colors of their uniforms: black and gray.

Shah gazed straight ahead, to the eastern horizon, where Belawan blazed in the hollow of its harbor. A spot of darkness crawled slowly across the city lights. The buzzing grew louder—a feeling more than a noise, like a nail scraping along my skull.

I pulled out my miniphone. “Karen? Hello?”

Her voice came to me across a gulf of exhaustion. I wondered if I’d caught her sleeping. “Doug?”

“What’s going on down there?”

A pause. I reminded myself that this woman had been awake for the better part of a week, surviving on sugar and synthetic hormones. “Doug, I think I’ve done all I can.”

Shah was still holding back the tarp, watching the angry shadows of Colm’s drones as they climbed slowly across the sky. I cupped my hand around the phone, trying to dampen the vibrations in the air.

“Karen, Colm’s drone fleet is up here, gathering around the building. They’re sending out the preliminary signal. I thought we’d all agreed that this kind of acoustic assault would be a very bad idea.”

Her voice seemed to recede each time she spoke, as if she’d set the phone down and run away, fleeing across the black marshes. “It’s a pissing match. You know how this goes.” A crackle of static nearly killed the signal. Karen’s voice crept into audibility. “The police chief says he’s waited long enough. He’s sending in his riot teams. Colm says that if the chief does that, he’s going to launch his own attack.”

“They’re both crazy.”

Another burst of fuzz. Colm’s drone fleet was mucking up the signal. “Get out.” Karen’s voice fought through the interference, repeating one injunction. “Get out . . . get out . . . ”

I turned. Abdul Shah jerked as I grabbed his arm. He was stronger than he looked, skinny but firm. “Send the word.” I pulled him back from the window. “Tell your people it’s time to evacuate. Now.”

Shah’s tongue darted along his lips. He had the expression he’d worn when I first told him how little time we had, not frightened, exactly, but thoughtful, calculating.

“Listen.” I pulled him toward the stairs. “That buzzing? That’s the preliminary waveform. They’ll run that pattern for a bit, tuning up. It could go on for ten minutes. Could be thirty. We have a little time. But not much.”

Shah looked over his equipment, tapping his teeth with his tongue, as if counting.

“Shah.” I wanted to shake him. “You’ve got to send down the word. Tell your people what’s happening here.”

His eyes settled on mine. “It’s as you said.” A smile passed across Shah’s lips. “They’re not really my people, Mister Lam.”

The noise of the drones had settled into an ambient distraction. Shah’s voice rose like a melody above the discordant tones. “These people chose to stay here. To learn, to practice. I only teach them what I can.”

I shook my head. We had too little time.

“Shah!” I was shouting, now, overloud, the noise of the drones playing havoc with my hearing. “Tell them to leave!”

Shah looked confused. A new sound rose over the background hum, a squawk that echoed off the naked walls. I recognized the cadences of north Sumatran Hokkien, Medan’s contemporary lingua franca. The police chief had brought out a megaphone.

“Mister Lam.” Shah sank between my hands. “You don’t understand. I did tell them.”

I released him. Outside the window, the hovering drones hung buzzard-like in the night, blotting bird-sized swatches of stars. Below, the riot police were assuming formation, blocking off the tower’s three exits. A ramming team approached the bolted front doors. I saw no fugitives fleeing the tower, no refugees huddled on the pavement below. Only that ring of donated food, all of it worse than useless now. And the bright sulfur lamps, and the gleaming helmets, and the tiny figures of Colm and the police chief, preparing to wage turf war over our corpses.

“It was while you were in your trance.” Shah drifted to the window beside me, looking down at the commotion with that smug quietude that was the most cultish thing about him. “I spoke to your colleague. The woman who brought you to me. Shayreen. I explained that we were out of time.”

The riot police had taken position: knots of manpower at every exit, a complement of carbon-fiber shields and clubs. My concern was with the point teams that would soon come charging up the stairwells, throwing out shock grenades and wielding batons. The lead ramming crew had already set up their unit, a black frame that fully surrounded the front doors. A pneumatic device, a kind of giant cattle-gun, it would scan the entrance for structural features, then punch it to pieces with a computer-controlled battery of steel bolts.

“If the people are still here,” Shah said, “it must be because they want to stay. For as long as they can.”

“Praying,” I said.

Shah watched with resignation. “You understand. Don’t you?”

A blaring command from the police chief’s megaphone broke into our conversation. Instantly, a series of concussions shook the building. A stutter of bolts. A crash of glass. The concrete floor shivered as the entranceway collapsed. With a rumble of boots, the cops came in, their shouts and footfalls echoing up the silent floors.

Did I? I wondered. Did I understand?

“Mister Lam?” Shah held my hand, pressing it between both of his. “Let me explain something to you.”

9

Do you need the details, Carter?

You have the engineer’s report. You know the facts. Is there any point in reciting a series of figures you’ll be hearing in courtrooms for the next ten years?

Fifty million in unforeseen damages. The pylons, carbon-netted, seated on ten square acres of in-situ, bore-injected micropilings—half of those will have to be replaced. The platform, the vehicle fleet, the command center: gone. Even Colm’s drone fleet took a major hit. Half of them failed to find their backup recharge station.

Shall I go on? Shall I tally the losses? The payouts to families of the Medan police? The mob of lawyers you’re going have to draft to untangle the thicket of indemnities? The insurance payments? The gifts and bribes?

But all this is rather soothingly cut-and-dried, isn’t it? All this talk of dollars and contracts, it hardly touches the heart of the matter. Because when it comes to the key issue, Carter, the one you don’t want to talk about, the one no one ever wants to talk about . . .

I suppose we’ll never know how many people were in that tower. How many bodies, waiting in the dark, trying to shut out the outside world, even as that world came for them with a vengeance.

Kooks and fanatics, you’ll say. Dupes and fools. It sure feels good to use those words. Most of those people won’t even rate a glib dismissal, because no one will ever know who they were. Undocumented drifters, even before they came to Shah, even before one hundred thousand tons of slipshod construction buried them in steel and debris. Most of the dead will never be tallied. Not their bodies, not their teeth, not their DNA. They’ll rot in peaceful anonymity, beneath the coastal Sumatran mud.

I bet you’d like to ask me one thing. I bet you’d like to ask if I know why. Why did they do it? Why did they stay? Even as the dust began to settle on their faces, even as the cracks were rising like black lightning up the walls—why did they claim those precious moments, those last few seconds of prayer and concentration? Do I know what they saw, what they hoped to see, in the final second when the floor fell away and the roof came crashing down?

A lock, that’s how Abdul Shah described it. Breaking a lock to open the mind. He made it clear that I’d only begun the process; my session had been interrupted by Karen’s calls. I had caught a faint glimmer of the wonders to be seen.

And if I’d been allowed to continue my study? If I had received what Shah called a “true visitation”?

I can hear you muttering, Carter, out there in your air-conditioned office. You’re a college boy. You know your history. I know what you’re thinking, because I used to think it too. I looked on them all with contempt and disbelief—

All those millions of seers and followers.

All those countless dead fools and saints.

10

They call it “wave warfare” for a reason. A lot of people think they know what that means. It’s all done with sound, intersecting shockwaves. Under the right conditions, those waves can kill.

What fewer people know is that a sonic attack, as programmed by our people, comes in waves of intensity. The drones Colm deploys, they follow a script. They hit their victims hard, then dial down the assault. They allow for a rest, then crank things up. The intent is to stimulate predictable behavior. First, unease. Then confusion. Then panic. Then flight.

The first wave hit us while Shah was halfway through his story. The buzzing of the drones became a tooth-numbing whine. This sound, I knew, was only a warning. The real attack would be inaudible at first, and it would come in stages. First a deformation of the eyes, disorientation and blurring sight. Next, a throb of pressure in the guts—not pain, exactly, but a sense of something wrong. After that, the hardcore waves would hit, running through our chests like a ripple of static. Our lungs would begin to quiver and squirm. The air would simply leave us, in a frittering whoosh, and our tissues and brain and our blood itself would let out a long black scream for oxygen.

I braced myself, waiting for the attack to run its course. By the time it was over, Shah had fallen to the floor, twitching and drooling down his check shirt. I grabbed his arm and pulled him to his feet, knowing the real danger hadn’t yet come.

“This way!”

He ran in the wrong direction at first, trying to reach the stairs to the lower floors. I yanked him back, leading him past the elevator. Already, cracks had begun to lace the plaster, spilling chips and powder to the floor. The whole shaft hummed; I could hear it moaning like a tuba as soundwaves propagated past the lower floors. I pounded the button. I wasn’t surprised to get no response. The Medan police had found their way to the electrics.

“Shah, stop.” He was still pulling for the staircase. I pointed at the nearby floor. A crack had zig-zagged out from one corner, following a scar-colored seam in the cement. “That was the first wave,” I told Shah. “In about five minutes, they’ll hit us again. We have exactly that long to get ourselves out of range, before this whole structure starts shaking like hammered glass.” I swung my pointing finger, along the crack, past the stairs. “We have no time to get down to the ground. But we can still try to go up to the roof.”

Shah’s lips moved silently. Either he didn’t understand, or he thought I’d completely lost my mind.

I had no time to argue. I dropped his arm and ran. The unfinished stairwell rose above, a twenty-foot column of empty space. Dust whirled down in spiral clouds, shaken loose by the sonic blast. A metal framework laced the walls, offering a scaffold for risers and steps that would never be installed. Rust and dirt gritted under my hand as I tested the strength of the nearest beam. It creaked, but the bolts held. It would make a serviceable ladder—for anyone crazy enough to dare the climb.

“Up here.” Already poised on the lowest support, I squatted to peer at Shah through the door. “If we climb ten feet, we’ll be out of range. It’s only a couple of floors till we’re in the open. If we go that way,” I pointed down the other staircase, “we’ll be chased all the way by those sonic weapons. Right into the clubs of the police.”

Shah stood where I’d left him, in the middle of the floor. The drones had begun to give out their warning whine. He reached out. That’s what I’ll always remember. At the last moment, Shah put out his hand. It was this image I held in my mind as the second attack hit and my vision blurred and everything around us began to break and fall.

I leapt for a higher handhold. The stairwell moaned around me, an echo of the resonance pattern building outside. I scrambled for purchase, kicking my toes against the wall, remembering with dismay the dozens of chin-ups I’d been able to do as a younger man. A nail or bolt must have raked my arm. By the time I got halfway up the shaft, I was leaving crooked trails of blood on the wall.

Adrenaline is a wonderful drug. Hearing the booming and cracking below, I groped for the next beam, then the next. Scrambling and heaving, muscles blazing, I dragged myself out of range of Colm’s weapons, crawling into that desolate stretch where the building stood open to the wind and stars. I clung like a baby to the nearest girder, holding fast to a structure that had begun to sway scarily with each gust. A shock of noise came from below, a pop and boom like a canon discharging. I was still trying to get a grip on the steel when the dust clouds began to circle and stir, a rumble of rotors climbed the dark, and Karen, guiding the company copter, plucked me away into the safety of the sky.

11

The typical improvised explosive device is a load of cheap, often plastic explosives, triggered by spark and packed with shrapnel. Ordinary scrap metal, launched by the blast, can snip vital arteries and mangle limbs. For the enterprising terrorist, insurgent, or sadist, a disposable phone makes a handy trigger. But simple pressure plates are lower in cost, easy to construct, and a staple in the trade of dealing death.

During the height of America’s oil wars, making such a bomb could cost somewhat less than buying a new video game system. The blast power ranged from an ineffective fizzle to a blow strong enough to flip an armored truck, launch an engine block onto a roof, or strip the face off a concrete building.

This is the cruel technology that lies behind the strange fate of Abdul Shah.

A subtle danger of an IED is the shock wave that ripples out from the blast. A surging front of compacted air, it slams the brain into the case of the skull, pops the ears with a drop in pressure, and hit its victims with a one-two punch, as a second wave of compressed air flows into the void left by the first. The result is a double-whammy blow to the head, a savage pulse of compression and expansion that rips through a brain at half the speed of a bullet, straining tissues, frothing blood, making the cerebrum swell like a sponge.

This is the injury that flooded VA hospitals, thirty years ago, with a homecoming army of zombie soldiers. Men who were whole in body and sound of limb, but who frightened their families and puzzled their government by exhibiting bizarre swings in mood. Amnesia, personality changes, confusion: the symptoms tended to worsen with time. Blast Disease, the veterans call it in our day. A steady loss of mental function, atrophying limbs, crushing depression. Even, yes, hallucinations. A slow-acting epidemic that has soldiers Abdul Shah’s age committing suicide in droves.

All this I learned in a late-night search through the history pages. Shah learned it, too, when he got his disability discharge, thirty years ago, and came home from the wind-whipped plateaus of central Asia. The army hospitals were too full to hold him. The homeland doctors had no idea how to treat him. His friends and family couldn’t understand why he seemed so lost within himself, so changed. Why did Shah ignore their questions, even their loving gestures, in favor of a strange and brooding obsession that he’d brought back with him from the Persian Plateau?

He drifted west for a while, lured by the solitude of the American heartland, then wandered south to the Mexican border. Eventually, he found himself holed up in a cove to the south of St. Thomas, half a mile from the tourist traps of Charlotte Amalie, shielded by a forested ridge from the Norwegian boats and the bright town lights. Nothing lay ahead of him but the waters of East Gregerie Channel, a view past Cowell Point to the open sea. It was there, known and tolerated as a local eccentric, in a nylon tent rigged to the salt-whitened trees, that Abdul Shah begun to hunt within himself for the secret knowledge he had brought back from war.

It was memory that sustained him, in those lonely years. The army doctors told him that the blast of the bomb had left a galaxy of bubbles fermenting in his brain. A rush of merciless pressure, a void of near-vacuum: these arcane forces had whipped Shah’s mind like cream, inciting a kind of decompression of the soul.

Tiny bubbles . . . Shah pictured them sometimes, twinkling up from a place deep within him, effervescing into his conscious thoughts. They reminded him of memory, those bright seeds of death—the way stray moments can wink, evanescent, out of the gulf of the long-forgotten past. Sensory impressions: the texture of old wallpaper; the hard, clear odor of a sidewalk after rain. Images came to him unbidden, isolated, as he lay on the stones of his tropical beach. Sprinklers jetting in a city park, concrete pillars spitting bright falling water, his mother’s finger tracing arcs of liquid as she spoke the Arabic word for attraction. Gravity, magnetism, desire: the modern magic of unseen fields. And more: the green faces of children submersed in a city pool, hair storming in black licks around their cheeks; the sweet, dusty smell of a hardware store. Often Shah thought of the religious billboard that had loomed over the highway near his Brooklyn home, lurid with the painted gods of the Christians: a kneeling woman, a bearded man whom Shah, as a child, had mistaken for Santa Claus. And in the straw between them, a glowing, golden child.

“We are the true Americans,” his mother told him once. “We came here, traveled here, chose to be here. That is the only true American: someone who claims this country as home.” Abdul had looked at his small hands and thought, I came here, yes. But where am I from?

The memories—they were neither happy nor sad. They gripped him, however, because they were true. Time had sharpened their truth and confirmed their worth. As he sat on that Caribbean beach, watching the giant cruise ships travel past Sprat Point, the sights and sensations of Shah’s present life took on, themselves, the glamour of the past. The whining, bobbing progress of motorboats in the strait. The thump and rustle of startled iguanas leaping out of the shoreline pines. By day, Shah tramped among the island’s weedy ruins, British embrasures, abandoned World War II barracks, the fast-rotting detritus of a failed tourist center. Sometimes kids still kayaked out from the port, hiding with their beers and designer drugs in the fallen estates on the eastern shore; at night he heard their monkey-like cries whooping through the sea grape and the wooded heights. Civilization lay all around him, yet he felt himself as blessedly alone as a man alive in the last days of the earth. And in this state of strange and deepening joy, Shah thought about the desert road where he had nearly lost his life—and began to reconstruct, slowly and painfully, the vision he had been granted there.

The bomb that wounded Abdul Shah was fashioned, records indicate, of one hundred-and-fifty-six pounds of PE-4 wired to a British garage-door opener, packed with propane tanks into a trash disposal unit. It detonated five feet to the left of the driver of Shah’s Humvee, shearing away two-fifths of the vehicle, killing three of the four passengers, flipping the chunk of metal that remained into a roadside drainage culvert.

When Shah woke two days later, in the field hospital at Kandahar Air Field, groggy from blood loss, bandaged around the head, he found himself in a drafty compartment of a building rigged from cheap wood and old shipping containers. By that time he was already beginning to forget the details of the remote and peculiar place to which the near-fatal blast had delivered him. But in the silence of his tropical retreat, in the hermitage he fastened for himself, years later, out of twenty square yards of nylon tenting—incredibly, impossibly—it came back.

An iconic image was his first recollection. A dark tunnel, a light at the end. Most dying people see nothing more. But Shah went further. He crossed the tunnel, reached the light. And he pushed his way—or perhaps he was forced—out of the confines of our world.

His first thought was that the smoke from the bomb had enveloped him. Black smoke, oily, heavy and opaque. A moment’s observation convinced him, however, that the blackness around him was structured and firm. A kind of frozen darkness constituted the huge walls rising on every side, as well as the roof high over his head—a slick, greasy material that Shah would later compare to volcanic glass. Fashioned into thick columns, this substance stretched into the emptiness above, supporting a vaulted ceiling as remote as a stormy sky. The scale of the construction was cosmic, absurd, like a cathedral molded from the matter of dead suns. Striving later to describe what he had seen, Shah could find no analog, no explanation—save to say that this was nothing human beings had created.

Lifting his head, he saw that his body itself was other than human—a form unrecognizable, even slightly insubstantial. Yet these words, Shah insisted—sight, head, body—were approximations to what he perceived. He “saw” nothing, “felt” nothing, but knew where he was, with the disembodied knowledge that arrives in dreams. And in this same manner, through this same strange clairvoyance, Shah realized that he was not alone.

They lay all around him, thousands, perhaps millions of figures, reposing, prone, in the infinite dark. No shroud covered them, no sound disturbed their sleep. Shah surmised that they were neither dreaming nor awake, but resting in a state much richer than consciousness, more lucid than the unreal figments of dreams.

A voice spoke, or a mind touched his (again, Shah struggled to find the proper words). He sensed a presence communing with him, both distant and near, like a monster beneath his bed.

Be still. (But it was not a voice, Shah insisted, so much as an extension of that dreamlike understanding.) You have slipped through the barrier, but you will soon return.

Where am I? Shah tried to speak. But speech, motion, even ordinary thought, all were impossible in that strange place. He could only think, with a speech-like force: What am I?

If the voice had been capable of laughter, its mirth would have echoed endlessly in the recesses of that measureless space. You were visited. Now, for a moment, you have become the visitor. The currents that carried you here will soon reverse, and you will remember nothing of this place.

Currents?

You lie in the company of the last sleepers, at the end of time.

As he heard those words (or received into himself, like a jolt of air, the knowledge implicit in those words), Shah understood . . . but it was rather as if he had begun to remember something he had always known.

He had come to the edge of existence, the end of all worlds. A trick of time had delivered him here, to a place where the last living beings rested, the dwindling population of a dying universe. In this latter day, suns and galaxies had dissolved, the bonds of existence had grown dim. What Shah saw was a failing illusion, a shadowplay cast on a thinning screen. Soon, even this frail fabric would decay, and the life of the cosmos would come to its close. No civilizations would again be built, no new worlds or suns would reappear. But in this dying instant, this final tick of time, the beings around him practiced a last art. They had learned to return to what had come before, and to revisit the things that had been.

Even as he learned this, Shah felt a pressure, as if the strange tide that had cast him here were now reversing, dragging him back to his old life. He struggled to move, sensing a different mind, one alien and strong, already striving to reclaim his body. Forcing himself to rise, Shah gained a last glimpse of the great vault in which those countless beings, faint and softly pale, lay like dreamers in a night with no dawn.

They are revisiting the lives, said the voice, that have passed away, and remembering the moments of former ages. No future lies before them. The past cannot be changed. But they have this: the power to return to what was lost. Through the souls and bodies of those who lived before, they relive, a final time, what will never be again.

Show me. Shah made his demand in desperation, even as the pressure grew on his mind, even as his spirit twisted and writhed like water above a drain. Show me what they see.

Again, the voice laughed with a strength beyond sound. Very well. You will soon forget. But if you wish, you may visit with us, this one time—

12

And here Shah’s story ended, in a burst of deadly sound.

He told me all this in the empty room of his tower, in that brief respite between the charge of the police and the final assault of the sonic cannons. I believe he spoke for ten minutes at most, lingering on the smallest details. His leisurely manner, his painstaking account, maddened and baffled me at the time. But I don’t believe, now, he ever hoped to convince me. Only to convey, somehow, what it meant, what he had been trying to track or rediscover, in the course of his lonely and drifting life.

The sun is rising, Carter, making gleams on the hotel towers. From the rooftop bistros along the river, I can hear the tinkle of coffee cups. I’ve talked into this recorder through the night, half hallucinating, half in a trance, sometimes reading the scraps of disjointed journals I wrote in a post-traumatic haze. I hope your transcribers and redactors can make something out of this marathon ramble. I tried, God knows. I tried to tell the truth.

And why, I wonder. Why share this with you? Why tell this story to the man who has always hated me, always fought me, always sought to ruin me?

Because you asked for it, I suppose. Because you were there for my first wife and my last, and for all the mistakes and lovers in between. Because you were with me in those days on the fifty-seventh floor, when we fought like two driven single men for the fortune and glory we thought we deserved. Because you know me, Carter, who I am and who I was, and you’re probably the only son of a bitch who does.

Shah reached out. That’s the part that haunts me. He put out his hand, before the last blast hit, before the ground turned to dust beneath his feet. Even as he sank through his dissolving tower, through the crumbling ruins and the rising clouds, he kept his hand out, fingers curled, as if to take hold of something I couldn’t see.

It was a violent wave of sound, tearing through Shah’s head on a desert road, that gave him the vision that changed his life. In later years, he studied the physics of sensation, the tangled mechanics of the human brain. Maybe, at the end, with new shockwaves in his skull, Shah found a way back to that world, the dreamers lying at the end of time. Maybe they showed it to him again, the vision he never had a chance to describe. It could be that in the last instant of his life, Shah reached for the hands of Egyptian priests, or the startled eyes of a prehistoric child. Or he may have visited you, or me, in forgotten moments of our idealistic past. Perhaps he looked into the void between the stars, and before he died, he watched suns rising over alien worlds you and I can never imagine.

Quite probably, it all means nothing. Abdul Shah had a brain that by his own admission was full of holes. Men and women with his injuries are lying in the Walter Reed psych wards, now, hiding under their hospital beds from memories of historic wars.

But I remember those six strange hours, the throb of soundwaves through my mind, and the visitation I nearly received. I remember other stray moments of my life, when a weird vibration passed through me, a second soul seemed to clasp my own, as if I had been possessed, invaded, by a presence greater than myself.

I remember this:

A day, years ago, when my first wife and I moved to a new home. We came east, leaving the desiccated outskirts of Phoenix for the humid greenery of the Georgia suburbs. No squatter camps troubled my thoughts back then, no sonic weapons, no impact assessments. I had recently accepted my position at Aerux. I was looking forward to starting my career.

We were still settling in, when on a certain morning, we found we couldn’t stop our daughter from crying. She was only a baby, less than half a year old, and we held her, fed her, rocked her, soothed her, carried her on a weary circuit through the house. We ran in an hour through the usual cures, the breast, the diaper, the temperature, the light. But with her little fists, she fought free of our caresses, rolling in our arms, reaching, like a fierce little inchworm, for the windows and the world outside.

I gave in. I took her outdoors. A spring rain had begun to fall, dripping from the roof of our tumbledown veranda, and I saw that her eyes were tracking every drop. I marched into the yard, the rain drizzling on us both, gentle and cool, a prickling presence on my skin. In the open, with my wife yelling at me from the door, I looked into my daughter’s eyes.

What are they thinking, our little ones? We look into their faces, but we can’t know what they see, what they understand with their bright new minds. My daughter’s mouth hung open. At five months, she was already full of memory. We had come from a land of dry earth and empty skies, and I realized she had never seen the rain.

Maybe I’m a fool. Maybe Abdul Shah duped me, as he seduced so many other lost souls. But I know this: that a full ten minutes passed, on that long-ago day, in which my daughter scarcely moved or breathed, but lay with reverent stillness in my arms, watching water fall from the sky. I could have sworn at the time, and I would still swear now, that something came to visit us then, hovering behind her eyes. I felt so joyous I was afraid. She lowered her eyes and looked into my mine, and an awesome intelligence stared into me, full of wonder and longing and a strange, vast regret. It was as if my daughter understood, not only sensations I had forgotten, but ones I hadn’t yet begun to feel. As if she knew, even in that early stage of life, that she was seeing all things for the first and last time.

*****end transcript*****

About the Author

Nick Wolven lives in New York City, where he works at Barnard College. His short stories have been published widely, most recently in Asimov’s Science Fiction, and will soon appear in Analog and F&SF.

Between Dragons and Their Wrath

An Owomoyela and Rachel Swirsky

My name is Domei. I think I am fourteen. I will probably die today. If not, I will probably die tomorrow.

When it happens, I don’t think I’ll be surprised. Frightened, maybe, but not surprised.

In the forest, scales are most common. If they cut you, the cut will never stop bleeding.

If you step in a place where a dragon has defecated, food will stream through your body, and you will always be hungry. If you pass a place where a dragon breathed fire, your skin will forever blister and heal and then blister again. If you touch a dragon’s blood, you’ll go mad.

As for me, I was harvesting scales. With a scale, you can till the land faster than anyone using an iron hoe. You can butcher meat in a tenth the time it takes to use a knife. There are good things about dragon leavings, and for those good things, I usually get paid enough to eat.

Scales are common. Everyone knows about those. It was something else that got me.

When I die, if you ask the Andé what killed me, they will probably say it was the dragons. Ask me now, and I’ll tell you the Andé are responsible. They drove their dragons across our land.

I don’t know why the Andé, who live to our west, hated the Zhie, who live to our east. Kwesi has tried to explain, and so has Hano. But their explanations don’t make sense.

Kwesi believes war is what people do. He says when people are lazy, they go to war. He says Rho would go to war if we weren’t so poor. He may be right, but it doesn’t explain why the Andé attacked the Zhie instead of the Rho or the Merais or someone else.

Hano’s answer is even stranger. “The Andé say the Zhie cut the hands off Andé children. They say they stole their women in the night and sucked their blood and made them defecate on Andé flags. And they were killing Andé spirits, too.”

I said, “I haven’t heard of the Zhie doing anything like that.”

Hano got annoyed. “No, I mean that’s what the Andé say.”

But since those were obvious lies, there must have been another reason first.

I suppose reasons don’t matter now. The Andé had dragons. The Zhie had none. With firecrackers and guns and bayonets, the Andé drove their dragons into Zhie land as a strong, angry man will drive a knife into someone’s heart. And we, the Rho, were in the middle. We were the flesh, the ribs. They drove the dragons right through us.

That was fifty years ago, the dragons, the war. Since then, we’ve had floods from old dragons’ tears, and earthquakes from old footprints. It was an earthquake that brought me here to Ponçan. I was in the forest, a few dozen kilometers from the rubble of the village where I must have grown up. Kwesi was a truck driver then and he heard me screaming in the trees. He went off road, loaded me into his truck, and took me to the N.G.O. men.

We used to call Ponçan the tent city. Most of the tents are gone now. There’s still a crew of NGO men left behind “to coordinate efforts in the surrounding countryside.” But these days, when Kwesi wants a break from hauling, he can usually find an abandoned building to stay in.

The people here pronounce NGO as Ngo. Kwesi taught me: you position your tongue at the top of your mouth to make an n without speaking, then make a g with the back of your tongue. Then let out the o and it’ll push the ng right in front of it.

There are a lot of ng sounds in Kwesi’s dialect. There are a lot of NGOs in Rho.

Ponçan is mostly empty now except for the Ngo men who stayed behind. The rest of us have nowhere to go, like Hano and I.

Hano is my best friend. He’s also never been changed by a dragon. People like that are rare in Ponçan. If you ask him why, he’ll just say he was lucky.

Kwesi, who is the same age as our fathers would be, used to be a friend of Hano’s family. After he dropped me in the tent city, he sent Hano to look after me. We fell in easily together. He showed me how to find houses no one was using so I didn’t always have to sleep in the tents, and how to go through the dump outside the village, and how to get in queues early for meal relief.

Hano is fast on his feet. He’s cheerful even when he shouldn’t be. He has quick, bright eyes for spotting useful things that have been thrown away, and deft hands for pulling them free.

“I wanted to grow up to be like my mother,” he told me once while we shared fruit we’d found in an Ngo dumpster. His mother had died in the flood which happened before the earthquake, but he still talked about her happily. “She taught little kids, four year olds, six year olds. The smallest ones are the best. They’re always running after something even if they still piss themselves.”

He looked regretfully at his withered fruit and went on. “She was a great cook, too. We’d find papayas and cook them with lime and chilies. My little sister drank from a stream where a dragon shat. It wasn’t bad enough to kill her, but she couldn’t keep her food so there was always cooking to do.”

I examined the bruised parts of my fruit, and leaned against the dumpster. The sky above Ponçan is never a normal color. It was changed by dragon wings a long time ago. It was mud brown that evening. The Hizhang cows lowed as it got darker.

“What did you want to do?” Hano said.

I pretended not to know. “When?”

“Before Ponçan, what did you want to do?”

Hano and Kwesi know I don’t remember much from before, but I’ve never told them it’s basically all gone. Maybe not having a past makes it easier not to spend time thinking about before and after like Hano does. I’m too busy trying to sell scales and get a bite to eat.

“You don’t have to answer,” Hano assured me.

I said, “It’s fine—”

Hano’s eyes went wide. He clapped his hand over my mouth. A cry drifted between buildings, and from the corner of my eye, I saw a moving fire.

The burning children won’t usually hurt you because they can’t really see. They just wander, hands outstretched. It’s only when you make noise that they’ll come toward you and wrap their arms around your knees. They want someone to hold onto. They don’t realize they’re burning you alive with the same dragon-fire that killed them long ago.

Life in Ponçan is not so bad. We waited until its cries were gone, and then counted three hundred breaths more to be sure.

You see, we were lucky. The Andé drove the big dragons north of Ponçan. We only got little dragons, the size of trucks, whose looks melted one or two people at a time. And they were always on the move, not being thrashed into city-destroying rages.

During the war, the Andé slaughtered a big dragon the size of a mountain. They dropped its liver and gall on Hizhang. Bile poisoned the earth, poisoned the air, poisoned the people and the children of the people, and is still poisoning them now. People born in Hizhang have probably never seen a dragon, but they don’t need to.

Every dusk, the cows start lowing from Hizhang. But there are no longer cows in Hizhang.

You see, we were lucky.

I’ve never seen a dragon, but I don’t need to.

There’s an art to picking up dragon scales. You have to be careful not to touch the edges. You pinch them just past the edge and wiggle them out of the soil or loam or scree. Then if you’ve picked up an old tin can or something, you put them in there. If not, you can wrap them in cloth, but it will get cut through, and the scales will cut whatever is nearby, too. The tin cans also get cut, but not as quickly.

A long time ago when Ponçan was still a tent city, an Ngo man told me there are different types of remembering. I’ve forgotten my old life, but not how to gather scales.

I have so many cuts on my fingers that my hands are always cracking with dried blood. I have cuts on my knees and feet from dropping scales, but they aren’t deep. The thighs are especially dangerous, like the arms. It’s easy to bleed out. You see, I’m lucky. I’m not bleeding out. Just seeping.

This is a world with only two things in it: the ones which change, and the ones which linger on. I was one of the things that changed.

My life before is gone, but I remember how I got to the tent city. I remember the tatty roof of Kwesi’s truck which was all I stared at for hours. I remember the jolting road, thinking someone angry was shaking me. I remember the dust, which blew into my mouth and eyes.

The sky was green, and the sun was so, so bright.

White tents held hot air like breaths they wouldn’t let go. There were bodies everywhere, moving, moaning. There were no beds left. I was put on a pad on the ground. I lay there staring at the tent ribs, and listening to the wind. It was a hard sound to hold onto. So many voices overrode it.

They gave me a paper bracelet. I don’t know what it said. I hadn’t told them my name.

Afternoon passed, and evening, and the lowing of the Hizhang cows. The tent canvas was brightening with morning when a Ngo man examined me. He tested the weight of my limbs, looked at my teeth and eyes, and felt my neck, armpits, and groin. He took a vial of my blood and labeled it in neat Merais letters. He put the blood in a case with mist pouring out of it. Another Ngo man was following him with a clipboard.

The man was surprised when he realized it wasn’t the earthquake that had left me feverish and screaming. “Neutrois,” he said slowly, so that the one with the clipboard could write it down. “A common affliction in the parts of the world that deal with dragon breeding. There are schools to rehabilitate them, even surgery if a sex can be assigned.”

They went on to the next boy, and a Rho nurse came to check my fever. Behind her, wind batted the tent flap, showing flashes of orange sky.

Hano has never been changed by a dragon, and if I can stop it, he won’t ever be. He’s better at scavenging in the village anyway. I go out for scales.

A few days ago, the sky rose purple. The sky above Ponçan is many colors, but almost never purple. We couldn’t decide what it meant. Hano thought it was good luck. Kwesi, who brought us a handful of dried fish, thought it was a fool’s game to gamble on anything but bad luck in Ponçan.

Me, I went out to gather, because we needed scales. Hano sent me out with tin cans from Ngo dumps, and I pried loose a half-dozen scales without adding fresh cuts to my hands.

I took my time walking back through the sweet-smelling trees. The sky shifted restlessly between lavender and violet. Darker shades made the trees look black even though it was afternoon.

Among the shadowed trunks, I saw two animals. The small one suckled from the large one. As I neared, I saw it was a muntjac suckling from a forest ox. It was the ox that looked at me as it angled its large body to stand between me and its fawn. Its eyes were challenging. They said: Leave us to ourselves. This is our new world, and we are content with it.

These are things that have changed.

I never went to surgery. A gender was never assigned. Boys mostly treated me like another boy, and girls like another girl, so long as no one asked. When they did, I said “because of the dragons” and they might wrinkle their noses, but then they’d crowd around to show me what had happened to them.

“Look! I picked up something on the side of the road, and now my hand-bones are soft—”

“—all my teeth went sharp! I can’t even eat fruit anymore—”

“No, no, see this? One foot is on backwards, but only the one.”

“That’s nothing. My sister has her whole head on backwards!”

“My grandma can turn her hands backwards.”

“Look at me, I have two tongues! T-t-wo t-t-ong-g-gues!”

Life in Ponçan is not so bad.

In the purple-sky evening, Kwesi caught me on my way back from gathering scales. We laid them flat in the bed of his truck where it would take them a little longer to cause trouble.

With his braids swept back, I could see the hungry little mouths on his neck which he’d gotten when he was hit with shrapnel from a dragon-tooth bomb. He always wore his shirt, even on hot days, to hide the ones on his side.

He caught me looking, and grinned as he pushed his hair over them. “One of the widow’s kids wouldn’t stop bothering me this morning so I told him they eat children’s fingers.”

“They eat?”

“Sometimes.” He pointed down the road. “Let’s take a walk.”

We left his truck and headed toward where I was staying with Hano. On our way, we passed the old general’s house. Some Ngo men were moving things inside, and a crowd had gathered behind them. They crossed their arms, passed chaw, and muttered darkly.

Finally one of the Ngo men put down the crate he was carrying. He said something in Merais and flapped his hands to shoo them away. Grumbling, the crowd broke up.

The old general’s house was the fanciest building in Ponçan, but it had been empty as long as I’d lived there. No one went in, even squatters. I looked up at Kwesi. He spoke Merais, and I didn’t.

“He told them they’re being unreasonable,” Kwesi said. “He says Ngo are trained to be careful.”

“About what?”

“Story goes the old general touched dragon blood and that’s why he went mad. The house has been cleaned now.”

“Enough?”

Kwesi shrugged, and offered me a cigarette.

“This is what I say,” he said, lighting it for me. “You should get out of here. Go to the capitol. You’re smart, you can do whatever you want.”

I took a long drag. I had to balance the cigarette just so in my fingers to keep from bloodying the paper.

He lit his own. “I hear there’s new Ngo money to send Rho to that school they have for kids who were changed like you.” He paused to blow out a stream of smoke. “You should go, learn mathematics and become an accountant or a banker. You’ll live in a big, white house, and have servants bring you drinks when it gets hot, eh?”

“There’s never enough Ngo money for everyone,” I said.

He tightened his lips around his cigarette and spoke from the side of his mouth. “Enough for somebody, though. What’s keeping you here?”

I thought of the muntjac and the ox.

I stubbed out half the cigarette. “I should find Hano.”

“Give me a minute,” Kwesi said. “I’ll drive you.”

“I can get the scales myself. I know how to handle them.”

Kwesi examined me for a second before deciding to back off. “I’ll keep watch here,” he said, nodding to the old general’s house. He raised his hand to say goodbye, and smoke trailed into cloudless violet.

Early on, Hano, who has never been changed by a dragon, asked me, “What happened to you, anyway? I didn’t know anything could make you like that.”

He said it cheerfully, the way he’d want to know how I could jump so high, or how big the cat was I’d seen in the forest. Since he said it like that, I gave him half an answer.

I remember just far enough back to know I was in a clearing with a sack. The clearing was thick with shed scales, more than I’d ever seen. It was dangerous to go where they were so crowded since it was so easy to trip over one you didn’t see, but I needed the money from bringing them home. I don’t know why I needed it. I was thin when they found me, but I wasn’t starving. Maybe I had siblings.

Even then, I knew I was probably going to die that day. If not, then probably the next. I wrapped my feet in cloth even though it wouldn’t do anything, and told myself I’d be okay as long as I went slowly and made sure I could see exactly where I was stepping. I thought the silvery sheen to the ground was just the light reflecting off the grass. That was a stupid thing to think. I’d never seen grass reflect that way.

Bits of purple sky reflected on the tin cans as I stood in our doorway, giving them to Hano. He shook them to hear how full they were, and said, “You see, we were lucky.” Then he made me show him my hands and feet so he could see I didn’t have any new cuts.

I told him about the muntjac and the ox. He laughed. “Some changes aren’t so bad,” he said.

He looked at me when he said it.

Thoughtfully, Hano asked, “Do you think it’s like this everywhere? Even in Andé?”

I pulled back my hands, rubbing at the crusted blood. Hano frowned. I was supposed to let them scab when I could.

“We’re never going to Andé. Why worry about it?”

“They have so many dragons in Andé. It must be worse than here. Right?”

“There are a lot of places worse than here.”

“Mm,” answered Hano, not quite agreeing. He hesitated, looking at the goods he had piled in the corner, his scavenge and my scales. He said, “If I were like you, I could go to the capitol.”

The turn surprised me. “You’ve been talking to Kwesi.”

“If Ngo has money, why not take it?”

“If Ngo has money.”

“If I was like you, we could go to the capitol together.”

“You’re not like me. Why worry about it?”

Hano stared at our goods for a while as the quiet grew. The Hizhang cows lowed, and the sky finally let go of purple and went grey. We heard old men walking past, one of them telling a joke.

Life in Ponçan is not so bad. Eventually, Hano took a dented can from our personal stash, and opened it for us to share.

Hano almost died yesterday. He laughed about it but his laughter was shaky.

He had been sleeping at his cousins’, close to the center of Ponçan. They were paying him to help with repairs. It happened just before dawn, when most people were sleeping. He found me outside, eating breakfast, not even knowing something was wrong.

“Some white Ngo, straight from Merre,” he told me. “They gave him the old general’s house, and in the back of the closet, he found the old general’s uniform.”

“No,” I said, because I knew the answer was yes.

Hano gave his choked laugh again. “He put it on. He put it on.”

After that, the Merais man really had no choice. The jacket made him take the rifle the dead general had left, and it made him go outside and fire it through the walls into the houses. Hano had been asleep, but the noise gave him enough time to throw himself to the ground and cover his head with his hands. A bullet bit his shoulder, but when the bullets ran out, he was still alive. The Ngo doctor bandaged him up.

Hano was wheezing, but he tried to keep laughing, too. “The shots stopped, but I was afraid to go out until I heard that old widow shouting at him. I finally peeked out the door and saw her beating him, head and shoulders, with a pan. He was just standing there. The jacket still had him. Bang. Bang. Her face was so red! Kwesi had to pull her off so she didn’t kill him.”

He tried to keep laughing.

Kwesi was dead by the time he stopped the old widow, of course. One of the general’s bullets went through his eye. He just hadn’t been the kind of man to leave something undone that needed doing. Once he’d saved the Merais man’s life, he laid down and went back to being dead.

“The widow said, at least Kwesi’s mother would always know where he was now—”

Hano was still trying to laugh when we heard the cry.

He clamped his mouth shut and so did I. We turned as silently as we could, searching for the flare of the burning child. I heard each swsh of my shoes.

Suddenly, Hano smacked his hand against his leg. Shrieks of laughter ripped their way out of him.

I followed his pointing finger toward a live child. She was crying, but not burning. A woman had come to comfort her.

Hano’s laughter cut off abruptly. His voice went flat and quiet. “I hate this haunted village,” he said. “I hate this haunted country and I hate this haunted world.”

Today was for selling, not gathering, but I went out anyway. I left before Hano woke up. Since the shooting, his eyes had been dull, yet he watched me. He wanted something from me and I thought I knew what.

He hadn’t found me more cans yet, but I could manage scales. I wrapped my hands for whatever help it would give me, and went into the forest.

The sky was the color of old bones. Orange clouds hovered, unmoving. The sweet-smelling trees were oddly quiet as if the animals were holding their breaths. Fleeing birds broke the silence as they cut into the air.

Between the sweet-smelling trees, I saw the muntjac with the ox. The muntjac’s teeth were bloody. When it raised its head to glare at me, the skin of its face pulled backward like the grimace of a bat.

The muntjac kept changing. The ox, lingering on, gave up its meat like the Hizhang cows.

Truthfully, I remember a few torn things. I remember a picture of a tall woman putting her arms around one of the burning children. She must have died, but I don’t remember that part. My father died from an infection that started in his foot, but that’s all I know. It’s just words. I don’t remember why or how.

The dragons didn’t take my memory. I let it go myself. I was staring at the ripped-up ceiling of Kwesi’s truck, and the road’s giant hand was shaking me apart. I thought why not let go, why not be easy for a while? I was probably going to die that day. If not, then probably the next.

The sun was so, so bright, and I gave every memory to the leaf-green sky.

I found Hano by the Ngo dump, with nothing in his hands, staring in the direction of the old general’s house. Kwesi had gotten up to help dig his own grave.

I told him the other half of the answer to a question he’d asked long ago.

It happens sometimes that when the dragons’ poison seeps inside you, you see what they’ve seen, feel what they’ve felt. So: It was late in the war, under a swallowing half-moon. The air was heavy without rain, and the moon was shining down and the blades of grass looked like bayonets. And the leaves of the trees hung down like swords. And the night was silver-black like drowning. And I came to the clearing.

And I was tired. My mouth too much fire, my stomach empty, my scales split from firecracker whips. I did not know the Andé were the Andé, or the Zhie were the Zhie, or anything about the Rho. I knew the whips that drove me north and north and north, and I couldn’t sleep. So I came to sleep.

And I laid my body among the bayonets.

And the breath from my nostrils went deep into the earth and made pearl garlic grow.

And my weight settled through my body and turned the soil into granite.

And I did not dream.

The Hizhang cows were still screaming even though it was already night because that was the first night the Hizhang cows screamed. I heard the vibrations of my sisters’ and brothers’ frustration as they were unleashed to kill, but never to feed enough to take away their hunger. And like them, I was hungry, and I stretched upward.

And I saw my reflection standing in open air. I saw his hollow stomach, and whip-cracked scales. I saw his wild eyes.

So, again: As that other dragon, I was driven by the gnawing in my stomach. I came to the clearing searching for meat, but instead I came upon my reflection. Pearl garlic frothed on the granite beneath her.

I had been driven ten days without stopping. I was ready to kill everything in my path, I was ready to kill the Andé, but the Andé were never in front of me, only behind me, with their whips snapping at my tail.

So, a third time: Both dragons, I circled inward, drawn in by my reflection’s scent loosed in the night. We came closer, and we came closer again. Necks twined. My teeth flashed and blood flowed down two throats. Talons scraped and grasped. Tails swept the remaining grass from the ground and the swords from the trees.

Two dragons together, then two dragons each other, then twodragon rolling in itself. Hunger met with sating, sating met with hunger. For the first time since the Andé’s bite, I was full.

And then Andé herders came with the sun in the durian sky, and they took after me with their firecracker whips. I became two again, and I and I left this place, leaving silver mist behind us.

It was a long time before human-me was born, and lived a life, and forgot that life, and lived another life in Ponçan, but those things eventually happened, and left me by the dump with Hano.

Hano has never been changed by a dragon, but he doesn’t need to be. He has a bullet wound in his shoulder. He knows what to expect.

I told Hano, “It hurts to change the way I did.”

He kept looking at me, expression no different than it was before.

“They might do surgery to you. Make you a girl.”

He shrugged. “I don’t care about that.”

Life is not so bad in Ponçan. The roads going north are full of bandits. Where there are no bandits, there are dragon leavings worse than scales. Still, I said, “Tomorrow, then.”

Hano wasn’t ready to laugh again, but the edges of his lips made an almost-smile.

My name is Domei. Tomorrow, my best friend Hano and I leave for the capitol. We’re going to find the dragon-dance clearing before we go. If we’re lucky, Hano is going to change. If not, we’ll probably die.

We probably should have died today.

About the Authors

An (pronounce it “On”) Owomoyela is a neutrois author with a background in web development, linguistics, and weaving chain maille out of stainless steel fencing wire, whose fiction has appeared in a number of venues including Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and a handful of Year’s Bests. An’s interests range from pulsars and Cepheid variables to gender studies and nonstandard pronouns, with a plethora of stops in-between. Se can be found online at an.owomoyela.net, and can be funded at patreon.com/an_owomoyela.

Rachel Swirsky is a short story writer living in Bakersfield, California. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Sturgeon Award. She’s twice won the Nebula Award, in 2010 for her novella, “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window” and in 2014 for her short story, “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love.” She graduated from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 2008 and Clarion West in 2005. She’s honored to collaborate with her former student, An Owomoyela, for the second time.

Blood Dauber

Ted Kosmatka and Michael Poore

The animals hate you.

You get used to that, working at a zoo. Over time, it becomes a thing you can respect.

Bell trudged up the path, pushing the wheelbarrow before him, already sweating under his brown khaki uniform. He squinted in the bright sunlight, eyeing the exhibits as he ascended the hill: the goats and their pandering; the silly, horny monkeys; the slothful binturongs—all moving to the front of their enclosures as he approached.

Most zoo animals eventually came to an understanding with those who brought the food. An uneasy truce.

But Bell knew better than to trust it.

He’d seen the scars.

Mary had scars on her arms. Garland was missing the tip of one finger, and John, the assistant super, had a large divot in the calf of his right leg.

“Zebra” was all he’d say.

Bell was the newest zookeep. No scars yet. But a wariness.

Walking up the hill that morning, Bell noticed Seana up ahead of him on the asphalt path. As he walked, he noticed she wore two different-colored socks—one red, the other white. He wondered if she were absent-minded, or just quirky. He hadn’t been at the zoo long, didn’t know her well.

As he closed the distance, he saw that she was crying. And he realized why she wore one red sock. Her calf was gashed open, bleeding streams.

He followed her into the staff room, and she explained that the juvenile baboon had attacked her.

She was outraged. Betrayed.

“Why did you go in there?” he asked.

“I always go in there,” she said. “I was here when it was born. I raised it.”

“Animals are unpredictable.”

She shook her head. “It’s never done that before.”

Never done that before.

Bell thought about that on the way home. Surprises puzzled him.

On one hand, it seemed there should never be any surprises. The world tended toward order, didn’t it? It circled the sun at the same speed all the time. Water boiled predictably, froze predictably. People weighed the same in Dallas as they did in Quebec. The speed of sound, in dry air, was 767 miles an hour.

So why, Bell wondered, can’t he and his wife keep track of money, plan ahead, and stop living in a trailer? In an orderly world, this shouldn’t be impossible. In an orderly world, you shouldn’t have to choose between buying food and keeping your car insurance.

Bell knew things were always more complicated than they looked. Water froze predictably, but strangely. It expanded. Crystals crashed and splintered. Sound moved faster underwater.

“And you can’t keep from buying shit,” he thought aloud, driving home.

He popped over the curb into the Lil’ Red Barn parking lot.

They weren’t going to spend anything this week, Bell and Lin had agreed. They didn’t need to. Food in the fridge, gas in both cars. This week they wouldn’t spend.

That morning, they’d run out of toilet paper.

“It’s not an insurmountable problem,” he’d told Lin. “We have paper towels.”

“You’re not,” said Lin, “supposed to put anything besides toilet paper in the toilet.”

“But you can,” argued Bell, “if you need to.”

Bell thought it was a spending problem. They knew how much money was coming in. If they controlled what went out, their money would be orderly, would increase. Lin disagreed.

“It’s a matter of supply,” she had pointed out. “Your job needs to supply more money.”

“So does yours.” Lin worked in the mall.

She glared ice. Splinters and crystals.

In Lin’s world, it was okay for her to criticize Bell. It was not okay for Bell to criticize Lin. Not if things were to be orderly. In every mating pair, Bell knew, one animal always bit harder than the other.

Lin was the biter.

And in their two-mammal world where daily life was defined by constant, grinding poverty, it seemed she bit constantly.

It was important, they had once agreed, to do what they loved. To love their work.

“I love my work,” Bell had told Lin a thousand times. Last month, in bed, he had told her how he loved his work, and they’d argued, and she’d scratched him with her fingernails. Drew blood. Made him want to hit her, and he almost did.

But he didn’t. There were light years between wanting to hit a woman and actually doing it. Bell wasn’t that kind of man. Wasn’t that kind of animal. What kind of animal was he?

He wondered if she knew. Wondered if she’d seen it in his eyes, the almost-hitting. The wanting to.

He quit saying how much he loved his job.

Most zookeepers, he knew, were women whose husbands made better money. They could afford the love.

Lin knew this, too.

“Shelly Capriatti’s husband sells guitars,” she had told him, just the night before. Shelly Capriatti was someone she worked with or worked out with, he couldn’t recall. “High end stuff, like for professionals. Like if Eric Clapton needed a new guitar. There’s no reason you couldn’t do something like that. He makes a ton of money.”

And he was on the edge, as he often was, of admitting to himself that he wished he hadn’t gotten married, when she stretched herself across his lap in front of their eleven-year-old TV and was nice for a while. Long enough for him to sweep some hard truth under the rug. Again. It was easier that way.

He focused on that—the niceness—while he paid the cashier at the Lil’ Red Barn.

She could be nice. Things in general, sometimes, were nice.

Sometimes she was predictable, which was easier, but you had to be ready for both. Driving into the trailer park, he thought about that.

The baboon had never attacked anyone. Then, today, it did.

There’s a first time for everything.

“You’re cute the way a dog is cute,” Lin had told him, in front of the TV.

You run out of toilet paper.

Things fall apart.

Not having money was a theme in Bell’s life. Even the zoo was a poor zoo, poorly funded.

Sometimes people complained. Once, a woman had come in, and when she’d seen the conditions in which the lions were housed, she’d been angry. People loved the lions.

“It’s a cage,” she said.

Bell had agreed with her.

“Zoos are supposed to be . . . natural,” she continued. “They’re supposed to be habitats, and the animals aren’t even supposed to realize they’re confined.”

Bell understood. He sympathized. He’d been to zoos like that, too, in towns that weren’t dying.

“Do you think they don’t know?” he asked.

She only stared at him.

“Do you think, in these other zoos, that the animals don’t know they’re locked in?”

“A disgrace,” she said, walking away.

Low funding required management to get creative when provisioning the animals. In addition to supplies bought on the open market, there were arrangements with local grocery stores, and butchers, and meat processors. A truck was taken around each day to be filled with heaps of food—loaves of bread that had passed their freshness dates, meat that had begun to turn, gallons of milk that had expired. Occasionally there was carrion brought in—deer which had been struck on the highway and then picked up by the county. All of it fed into the bottomless maw of the zoo.

The trucks would drive around back and unload their cargo into the kitchen.

It was called the kitchen, but it was not a kitchen. It was a room with several huge stainless steel tables on which food was piled and sorted and divided.

Bell was on his way to the castle when a voice on his walky-talky stopped him. “Bell, there’s something you need to see.”

Lucy, one of the kitchen workers, out of breath.

He got there fast. Came in through the back door.

“It’s a bug,” said Lucy, hands at her collar.

“What kind?” he asked.

She shrugged. “The ugly kind.” She pointed at a bowl turned upside-down on the counter.

Bell lifted the bowl. Put it down again.

He stood perfectly still.

He lifted the bowl and stole another quick glance.

“Hmm,” he said and lowered the bowl.

The kitchen workers stared. “What is it?”

“I’m working on it,” he said. He looked into the distance. “I think it’s a grub of some sort.”

“I didn’t think grubs got that big,” Lucy said.

“No,” Bell said. “Neither did I.”

Bell looked again. The grub was large, fleshy and blood red. Five inches long.

“Where did it come from?” he asked.

She shrugged again. “The table.”

Bell looked at the table. There were watermelons, and apples, and bread, and the partially disarticulated hock of a deer. Several bunches of blackened bananas made a mountain in the center, along with a smaller mound of more exotic fruit shipped in from Lord-knew-where.

“It could have come in with anything,” she said. “I found it crawling along the edge of the table there.” She shuddered. “It was moving pretty fast.”

Bell retrieved a glass jar from the cabinet, opened the lid, then dragged the bowl across the edge of the table so the strange grub dropped into the jar. He stepped outside and plucked some grass, put the grass inside, and closed the lid. Poked holes.

He took the jar across the zoo to the castle and placed it on a shelf in the back room.

“The castle” was the name used for the entomology building. Bell could only imagine what the structure’s original use had been, with its block construction and odd turrets; but whatever that long ago intent, it now housed all manner of creepy crawlers—hissing cockroaches, and ant farms, and snakes, and lizards and frogs. Anything that required darkness or careful temperature control.

The building was a box within a box. There was an open, central area ringed on three sides by walls and exhibits—and just behind these walls was a space called the back room, closed to the public, which was actually a single narrow hall that conformed to the outside perimeter of the building, a gap space where you could access the back side of the cages. At the far end of this hall, in a dead-end spot furthest from the entry door was a table and chairs, a TV, a desk, and several terrariums. These extra terrariums were where the sick were boarded, those unfit for public examination.

Bell did the rest of his chores for the day. In the evening he checked on the grub. It was still there, happily curling up the sides of the glass jar. Bell had studied entomology in college, and he’d never seen anything like it; the insect’s sheer bulk seemed to push the cubed-square law to its limit. Perhaps beyond its limit. He hadn’t thought insects could be that big. When he opened the lid, the grub reared up at him, strange mouth-parts writhing.

Bell was in charge of the castle, the petting zoo, and the convicts. This had not always been the case. He was in charge of the castle because he was the only zookeeper who’d taken college-level entomology. The petting zoo was meant as an insult. And the convicts were punishment.

The convicts came in most weekdays. You could point them out in the parking lot—men and women who were there too early, hours before the gates opened. Bell would feed the insects, drink a cup of coffee, and then walk to open the front gates.

“Here for community service?” he’d ask.

“Yeah,” they’d say.

Sometimes there were two or three. Sometimes none. They handed Bell their paperwork, and Bell passed it to the zoo superintendent at the end of the day.

The number of hours worked was the all-important statistic. Because they all had a number they were working down from. 150 hours, 200 hours, 100 hours.

Sometimes they talked about their crimes, and sometimes they didn’t.

Bell never asked. Not his business.

Bell often talked to himself in the bathroom mirror.

“In this world,” he said, “you are not an apex predator. Humans are, as a species, but you, yourself, are not.”

You do not always win. Problems are not always solved.

There are defeats and surrenderings. Small but important.

Last winter, they gave up heating the bedroom. They sealed off the back of the trailer and slept on the sofa. They learned the science of climbing into the bathtub. The bathtub was metal and descended a few inches through the floor, arctic air right beneath. No matter how hot the water got, your butt and legs would start to freeze if you sat still too long. You had to lift yourself up now and then, let the hot water get under there. Lower yourself. Wait. Repeat.

“It’s like not even being part of the food chain,” Bell said aloud one cold night, eating burritos in the kitchen.

They hadn’t spoken to one another that morning. His remark about the food chain was one of two things they said to each other all day long.

Sometimes he opened up the bedroom door and exhaled just to see his breath cloud the room.

He wanted her to ask about his food chain remark. Wanted to explain it. Wanted her to understand.

“The food chain—” he began.

“I get it,” she said.

That was the second thing that got said. Her breath made a cloud even though they were in the kitchen.

Bell didn’t dare tell Lin how much he loved his job, not anymore. He told the mirror, instead.

“I love my job,” he said. His reflection said it, too, it seemed.

Like the zoo, their life at home had been built on various pretendings. Pretending there might be gas money. Pretending they could afford to eat better, but chose not to. Pretending that Lin still thought it was important to have a job you liked. Loved. Whatever.

She had quit pretending. Somewhere behind her mask was the Lin who thought “If you loved me you’d do what it took for me to live a better life,” and that Lin had surfaced. Unmasked. Through fucking around.

Classified ads appeared, taped to the fridge.

Sales. Landscaping. Power-washing trucks. All kinds of things you could do with a degree in biology.

“It’s easy,” Bell told her, “to lose track of what’s really important.”

She didn’t have to say that having heat and electricity were important, too. Instead, never breaking eye contact, she grabbed her coat and her vibrator and locked herself in the bathroom.

Library clerk. Barista. All things that paid more than working at a zoo. Mexican cook. Skycap for a Mexican airline. Didn’t matter if you weren’t Mexican.

It was amazing, thought Bell, how much pretending went on in a zoo.

The public pretended the cages were jungles, savannah, desert, or snow.

The animals pretended that they were not interested in the public. The public and the zookeepers worked together at pretending that the zoo was not, when you got right down to it, just carefully-engineered cruelty.

Sometimes the animals forgot to pretend. Like when babies were born and wouldn’t eat. Because they knew captivity when they saw it. Felt it. Forgot to pretend life was worth living.

Like when the llama attacked Bria Vagades.

Bell was there when it happened.

It wasn’t like an animal attack in the movies, all snarling and snorting, blood and fur. It looked almost comical. One second Bria was lifting the rock-shaped hatch which concealed the garden hose, and suddenly here came Nunez the llama, ridiculous and splendid with his two-tone black-and-gray coat, rearing on his hind legs, waving his front hooves like a boxer. He was on her before she saw him, and she screamed.

“Ow!” she screamed, and “Fuck you, Nunez!” before she got a grip on herself. The zoo was closed, but there were strict rules about losing your cool where the public might see, might panic.

Nunez lost his balance, came down on all fours, still advancing, sniffing the air. Reared up again, hooves waving as Bria covered her head, backing away, feeling behind her for the door.

“He didn’t want her in the enclosure,” Bell told John Lorraine, another zookeeper, later on in the cafeteria. “It was obvious.”

“It’s never obvious. It’s sloppy, is what it is, assigning human motives to animal behavior.”

“Territoriality is an animal behavior,” Bell answered, chewing peanut butter crackers. “It’s an animal motive.”

“What’s sloppy,” John said, “is pretending to understand why all the time. Why they do anything they do.”

“Because it’s mating season,” said Bell. “That’s why.”

John Lorraine’s eyes narrowed. “And she went in the enclosure by herself? That’s sloppy, too. These animals aren’t pets.”

But Bell knew some of the animals were like pets. Bad pets. Pets you couldn’t trust. “You should write a fucking memo,” he said.

“You should shut up.”

Bell agreed. He said “Yep.”

The grub wasn’t like a pet. The day after Bell placed it in one of the large terrariums, it began to construct a papery cocoon.

During his evening break, Bell sat in the back room and watched the grub work. He checked the zoo’s entomology books but couldn’t find a match. None of the pictures looked anything like the strange insect in the terrarium. The cocoon only deepened the mystery. Whatever this thing was, it was a juvenile.

There were four main groups of insects that had a larval stage of development: Coleoptera, Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera, and Diptera.

The thing in the terrarium was no caterpillar, so Bell could rule out Lepidoptera. The grub’s size seemed to rule out Diptera. Which left Hymenoptera and Coleoptera. Wasps and beetles. But it didn’t look like any wasp or beetle grub he’d ever seen.

Most grubs didn’t have eyes. Most grubs didn’t have mouthparts like that.

At the end of its third day in the terrarium, Bell arrived to find it had sealed itself into its papery chrysalis, and just like that, the grub subtracted itself from the world.

The next day, there was an addition to Bell’s army of community service workers. A late arrival.

Bell was on one knee, mixing food for the lemurs when a shadow fell over the bucket. Bell shaded his eyes and looked up.

“They told me to find Bell. ‘Report to Bell,’ they said. Said Bell was young. You look like you might be him.”

The shadow had a voice like raw sand.

Bell stood and shook hands.

Shaking hands, the first thing he noticed was scar tissue. Burn scars splashed across hand and wrist. Both hands, Bell observed. Both wrists.

Leather-skinned. Scrambled white hair. Eyes blue like a cutting torch. If a bomb could explode and come back as a person, it would be this guy. Just looking at him, sunburned and fire-burned, made Bell thirsty. They sat down over Cokes at the Savannah Café, where Bell learned that the bomb’s name was Cole. Learned that, at sixty, Cole was by far the oldest community service con to grace the zoo.

Then he put him to work hosing down empty cells in the elephant house, beginning with the Cape Buffalo.

“Bullshit,” rasped Cole, when he saw the cell.

Bell must have looked startled.

“Literally,” Cole explained, waving the hose at the floor. He smiled, revealing teeth like rubble. Smiled and winked.

It was like being winked at by war.

Just as the lions were star attractions for the tourists, Cole became a star attraction for the staff.

He was scary, like the lions. Like the lions, he seemed to keep most of his energy bottled up in some soft, invisible engine. It was an uneasy feeling, locking eyes with a lion. Same with Cole.

You couldn’t talk to a lion, though. Couldn’t ask him how he came to be at the zoo. But you could ask Cole, if you were nosy enough.

Bell didn’t ask.

Bell stood in the dark tunnel with Cole. “The baboons are smart,” he said. “You have to be careful.”

Cole nodded.

“They can throw their poop at you. They can bite. You have to lock both sets of doors. There is a procedure you have to follow, and you should never be in the enclosure with them.”

Cole nodded again.

“It’s very important. Do you understand?”

Cole nodded again, but Bell wasn’t so sure. Several years earlier there’d been an incident in the cat house. The exhibit had been in the midst of repairs, and the lion had been allowed access to its run overnight. This normally wouldn’t have been an issue except that the adjacent run had been under construction. The door separating the bobcat run from the lion run was made of thick plywood—a temporary measure which was fine to keep the bobcats in. But insufficient, apparently, to keep the lion out.

The next day, they found the plywood partition shredded, and the lion sleeping in the bobcat cage, blood coating its muzzle. All the bobcats were dead.

Zoos are dangerous places.

Dangerous for the animals. Dangerous for the zookeeps.

Cole had a thousand hours of community service. Bell had never seen a number that high. It would take him a year to finish it.

When Cole had been at the zoo for a week, the zoo superintendent pulled Bell aside. The superintendent didn’t like Bell much. She wore a serious expression. “The older guy, Cole, is he a good worker?”

“He’s fine.”

“He’s going to be here for a while.”

“Yeah,” Bell said, “I know.” He could see the gears moving behind the superintendent’s eyes. A free long-term worker. A worker that didn’t need paid.

“Perhaps we could give him more responsibilities,” she said.

For weeks, Bell checked on the cocoon, waiting to see what would emerge.

It happened on a Monday. There was a buzz in the room when Bell entered. A buzz like one second before an electric light went bad; only this light kept going bad, second after second—an electrical hum that did not fade. Bell looked in the terrarium and saw it.

Huge.

Winged.

Bright red, but the mouthparts were black.

“Hymenoptera,” he whispered. “Of some kind.”

The summer stretched on. Bell trained Cole how to be a zookeeper. On their breaks they sat in the back room.

When the insect first hatched, the question became what to feed it. Bell tried a little of everything: sliced bananas, and apples and small chunks of meat. Some of the fruit on the table came from exotic locales, and it was easy to imagine the grub stowed within the corpus of some melon from Central America—and it was easy to imagine how such a melon might go quickly bad, and soft, and end up on the zoo’s table as discarded produce.

Weeks passed, and the insect thrived.

Even Cole took an interest. “Pet wasp?” he said as he helped Bell clean out the nearby lizard cage.

“I’m not convinced it’s a wasp.”

Several days later Bell found Cole looking through the glass. Cole was the one who noticed it first.

“What’s that?” he asked.

Bell looked. “I’ll be damned.” The wasp-thing sat perched on a small branch in the terrarium, oddly-jointed legs flexed, wings slung like swords over its narrow back. Hanging beneath the insect, dangling from a fibrous string, was a small pod of what looked like dried brown foam.

“What is it?” Cole said.

“I think it’s an egg case.”

Cole surveyed the terrarium again.

“So there’s two of them things?”

Bell shook his head. “There’s just the one.”

“Maybe she was already fertilized.”

This particular convict was smarter than he pretended to be. Bell caught his reflection in the glass, blowtorch eyes darting back and forth.

“It’s not likely,” he said. “She is female, but the reproductive stage usually begins after metamorphosis, not before. And this thing has been alone since it hatched.”

“Santa Maria of the bugs,” said Cole, cracking a shipwreck smile.

Bell laughed. “It’s less than a miracle in the insect world,” he explained. “It’s called Parthanogenesis. Some kinds of Hymenoptera can—”

“Hymen-who?”

“It’s an insect clade. Ants, bees, and wasps. Certain species can reproduce without males. Worms can do it, too, and some lizards. But Hymenoptera are the champs.”

Cole straightened.

“Let’s hope that doesn’t catch on.”

Bell thought it over. Reproduction and marriage and wives and such.

“Might not be so bad,” he muttered.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.”

Bell contacted the university. He wrote a letter to the biology department describing the insect and the circumstances of its arrival. A week later he received a reply. The note was short and polite: “It’s probably a mud dauber.”

Bell wadded the letter and threw it in the trash. “I know what a mud dauber looks like.”

One evening a few weeks later, he found the insect dead. Even in death it looked formidable, with a head the size of a dime, and a body like a smooth, slick walnut.

For the first time, he dared to touch it. With its legs spread out, it was nearly the size of his hand. He jabbed a pin through its abdomen and stuck it to a small cork. The legs sagged under their own weight. He looked inside the terrarium at the egg case, wondering if anything would hatch from it.

Months passed, the egg case forgotten. Bell and Seana took turns training the old man. Seana didn’t like Cole, and didn’t pretend she did.

In the spring, the eggs hatched. There were a million tiny grubs, just like the original, only smaller. Bell watched them wriggling through the sawdust he’d put in the terrarium.

“These more of your wasps?” Cole asked.

“They will be.”

They watched them writhing for several minutes.

“What do they eat?” Cole asked.

Bell thought about this for a moment. The adult form of an insect often ate a completely different diet than the juvenile.

“I have no idea,” he said.

Feedings could be tricky.

When Bell was first hired by the zoo, he’d been put in charge of feeding the raptors. Raptors weren’t dinosaurs though, like you’d think, with a name like that. It turned out, they were big damn birds. One of them was a golden eagle.

All went well for the first few days. The golden eagle ate about five rats a week, but it was fed every day. Which would have been fine except that the uneaten rats had to be removed from the enclosure.

This idea didn’t bother Bell until the moment he first went to do it. He stood at the cage door and looked at the big damn eagle, and it occurred to him that he was about to go inside a big damn eagle’s enclosure and take out its food. It occurred to him what might happen if the big damn eagle felt suddenly partial to that food.

He stared at the eagle. He stared at its talons—two-inch daggers strong enough to pierce bone.

Bell walked down to the zoo superintendent’s office.

She was unmoved by his concerns.

“I’m not sure I’m comfortable with it,” Bell said.

She waved that off. “You’ve got nothing to worry about.” Then she went back to her paperwork.

“But how do you know the eagle won’t attack?”

“It’ll be fine,” she said, not bothering to look up. “Nothing like that has ever happened before.”

A preamble to every scar story he’d heard at the zoo.

“I’m not going to do it,” he said.

She looked up from her papers. She sighed. She weighed her options. “All right,” she said.

The next week he was put in charge of the petting zoo. This was meant as an insult.

When he complained, pointing out that his particular skill set could surely be put to better utility, she only nodded sympathetically.

Then she put him in charge of the convicts, too.

Bell divided the newly hatched grubs into three groups, in three terrariums. In one terrarium, he dropped only fruit. In another, he dropped chunks of bread. In the third terrarium he dropped meat.

Insects tended to specialize in their diets, so he thought there was a good chance that two of the terrariums would starve. But then at least he’d know what they ate.

The grubs, however, surprised him. All three aquariums thrived—though the grubs given meat grew fastest.

Two months later, the grubs all began to spin cocoons. As if by agreement, they all started their nests on the same day.

That night, as if to celebrate the milestone, Bell committed a budget crime. He stopped at McDonalds for a bite on his way home, knowing that tuna salad was all they had in the fridge.

He was trapped and doomed, once he’d spent the money.

“Spend whatever you need to,” Lin said. “Just make sure you tell me about it.”

Lin was the official banker of their marriage.

“Just tell me about it” was the trap, because if he spent money and told her, she got mad. She might get loud, she might stay quiet. Either way, when Lin got mad, she fed on her own energy like a hurricane, getting louder and madder. The hurricane usually blew until she charged out the door and drove away, still screaming. Hours later, she’d return. Maybe still mad, maybe not.

One of these days when she came back, Bell would be gone.

This thought came from an increasingly vocal part of his brain. The part where he’d swept so much crap under the carpet.

A week after his crime, she dropped a bank statement in his lap while he sat reading.

They were both reading a lot, these days. The cable company had run out of patience.

“What?” he asked.

“It’s highlighted.”

Shit. He’d forgotten.

MCD Store #1635.

“You didn’t give me a receipt for that.”

“Thought I had. Sorry.”

He was sorry. What else could he do? Here, he thought, was where a rational person would let it go. But not Lin.

She yelled, storm winds building. How, she wanted to know, was she supposed to know how much to spend on the rent and the car and the power company and the phone company and the fucking grocery store when she didn’t know how much he’d spent on whatever big important things he needed to spend money on. Like a Big Mac, apparently. She didn’t remember him asking if she’d like a Big Mac, too, because he was too busy being a selfish, irresponsible asshole and then hiding the receipt.

He could tune out the yelling, until she made accusations like that.

“I forgot,” he reminded her. Now he was pissed. This was going to be bad.

The louder she got, the louder he got. Eventually, she was shrieking at him. A responsible voice inside him grew worried. She was really, really wound up this time. The tiny voice said that he couldn’t let her drive off like this. She’d hurt herself. Hurt someone.

It was a zookeeper voice. The voice that knew you couldn’t let the animals run wild, no matter what.

She took a bathroom break, still yelling, and Bell took advantage of the opportunity to hide her car keys. Deep inside a box of stale Triscuits.

Sure enough, when she emerged, she hunted for her keys.

Lin was notoriously bad about where she laid her keys. They could be anywhere.

She hunted.

For ten, fifteen minutes, she looked everywhere. Everywhere she might rationally have put her keys. She stopped yelling about Bell and started quieting down.

The quiet, Bell knew, was deceptive. It did not signal calm. Just quiet. Like a fire that gets into the walls, hidden, until someone opens a door.

Bell realized he had made a mistake. She would keep looking forever, that was the problem. Sooner or later, he was going to have to tell her he’d hidden her keys. And she’d get worse. Get louder. The storm of the century.

In some ways, he felt sorry for her. She was kind of crazy, really. More than kind of. Poor girl. But what a bitch. He almost said it aloud.

In the end, she retreated to the bathroom again, and Bell put the keys in the silverware drawer. Silently, like a cat burglar.

She came back out, and the silverware drawer was the third place she looked. She had already looked there. Several times. And she knew it. Bell knew she knew it.

“You fucker,” she whispered, almost choking. Near tears.

Remorse! He was no match for tears. He melted, moved toward her. He’d been protecting her.

She whipped the keys at him, catching his left ear as he ducked.

It was loud again for a while. Bell picked up the keys and opened the trailer door.

Lin had grabbed her purse.

“Give them here!” she screamed.

Bell ignored her.

He drove off, this time.

He used up ten dollars of gasoline just driving in circles. He enjoyed the waste. Enjoyed the drive. Talked to himself.

When he circled back, at last, he found her shivering on the steps.

She’d been locked out.

It was a cold fall evening.

Remorse, again.

This was not fucking working.

Mating is complicated

Mammals click.

Personalities come together, and they click, sometimes. Other times they don’t.

The day after he and Lin un-clicked so badly—the day after he locked her out of the trailer—Bell and Cole sort of clicked.

Bell couldn’t have said what did it, exactly. He was on the roof of the walrus tank, watching the pinnipeds heave their awkward bulk across wet concrete.

Cole climbed the ladder and joined him. In the enclosure below, two males bellowed at each other, bumped chests.

The smaller male backed off, retreating to the tank, but the larger walrus followed. It slipped its hulking form into the water and was suddenly graceful. Like a different animal entirely.

They stared together in silence until Cole said, simply “Well, Goddamn,” and they both cracked smiles.

“Reminds me of my dad growing up,” Cole said. “Big and mean. Harder to get away from than you’d think.”

Bell cocked an eyebrow.

“Oh, a real tough-guy,” Cole continued. “Beat my ass until I got bigger than him.” Cole smiled war again.

Bell was unsurprised when Cole showed him a silver flask and asked if he’d like a sip.

And Bell had a sip. Just one.

But it was enough to set the stage for a detour, after closing, to a nearby grill with a liquor license. Bell didn’t feel like going home to Lin; and Cole didn’t feel like going back to the halfway house. He wasn’t due for an hour, yet.

At the bar, Bell lit a cigarette and found himself talking about Lin. He told Cole all about the money problem, and the fight.

Cole’s cutting-torch eyes burned as he listened. He looked terrifyingly wise, all of a sudden.

After two beers, Bell found himself saying out loud the thing he could barely admit to himself, “I wish I’d stayed single, man. I really, really, do.”

Just then, a woman wearing fifty pounds of makeup came in, clunked across the floor in square heels. Cole winked at her.

She said something to the bartender and walked back out.

Bell watched her go. The setting sun blazed straight in through the door as it wheezed shut. Bell winced and—too late—shaded his eyes. Momentarily blind, blinking, Bell groped for his beer.

Into this momentary darkness, Cole said “I crashed a helicopter, in case you wondered.”

Bell blinked. Cole’s eyes became visible, twin coals.

“Huh?”

“I noticed you didn’t ask about my hands. Or why I was in jail. You never ask nobody. It’s actually pretty conspicuous, the way you don’t ever ask how anyone came to community service. You just give ‘em some shit to do and mark down their hours.”

Bell must have looked troubled. Purple circles rotated in the dark, in his brain.

“No, it’s cool. It’s cool you do people like that. Makes ‘em feel normal. But not asking the way you do, it’s kinda obvious how bad you want to know, so I’m telling you. I wrecked a helicopter.”

Cole was right. Bell wanted to know. Wanted to know quite badly. Hadn’t realized until this moment.

“Alright,” he said, by way of encouragement.

It took fifteen minutes for Cole to tell about Brazil.

He was a helicopter pilot, to begin with.

First in the army, then for the president of a frozen chicken company, then for United Airlines, on contract with Canadian Railways, shuttling engineers from checkpoint to checkpoint. It was the kind of solitary work he enjoyed. The engineers were usually stone tired. Quiet.

Then he’d crashed his United Airlines helicopter.

The kind of thing that could happen to anyone; his tail rotor crapped out and he had to autorotate down from eight hundred feet, spinning and yawing with three cursing, pants-pissing passengers. Rolling sideways at the last second, landing sideways, splintering the rotor, rupturing the fuel tank.

No deaths. The only serious injury was Cole, who remained behind until all three passengers were out and running, safe. Sustained burns over twenty-five percent of his body, including the splashy scar tissue on his left hand and wrist.

Bell began to ask a question, but Cole anticipated him.

“The other hand was something else,” he said. “Something later.”

United Airlines hadn’t been cool about his benefits, and the hospital bankrupted him. Could barely afford the surgery that let him use his hands, let alone reconstruction or cosmetics.

Which was why he started siphoning aircraft fuel. You could make a lot of money on the black market, selling aircraft fuel at half-price.

A dangerous business, though. No honor among thieves and so on; someone turned him in, and a federal warrant came looking for him.

The Feds called him while he was in the air. In Virginia, near the coast. On his way to Richmond for a pickup.

“Put down at Richmond International,” the FBI told him.

And Cole had flown out to sea, instead. How stupid did those bastards think a guy was?

Stupid enough, he supposed, to get caught fencing felony amounts of helicopter fuel.

Cole flew out to sea. Flew into the sea. If the feds wanted him, they were going to have to work for it.

Bell must have looked at Cole’s right hand.

“The fuel tank ruptured when I hit the waves,” said Cole, draining his beer. “Set the water on fire. I could either surface and tread water in the burning fuel, or stay under and grow gills. Happened when I was twenty-seven. They gave me nine years.”

Bell did the age math, but before he could ask, Cole said, “Oh, I was in and out after that. Assault, mostly. The last one for a bar fight. Guy got his eye socket broken, and the judge gave me extra—those women judges, they’re the worst. She said my anger gonna burn me up some day.” Cole smiled war again. “But that already happened, ain’t it? Besides, not all that burns is consumed.”

He took a last swallow of his drink. “I gotta scoot. If they lock my ass out, I’m fucked.”

Very quickly, Cole was up and out the door. Bell turned and watched him go, and the sun hadn’t quite set yet, and Bell’s eyes got nailed a second time.

Blind as a bat, Bell thought.

Good zookeeper that he was, Bell knew bats weren’t really blind, and he said so.

“What?” called the bartender. Also, Bell thought, a zookeeper of sorts.

“Bats aren’t really blind,” Bell repeated.

Never get drunk with the convicts, Bell lectured himself.

It was a bad idea in so many ways. It was unprofessional. Besides, if you got to be drinking buddies with one of them, even going so far as to sip whiskey with him on top of the walrus tank—a firing violation by zoo rules—then what do you do afterward if the convict does something you should report him for? Something else.

A week after the bar, Bell arrived at work and found Garland, the maintenance chief, waiting at the gate.

“There’s an issue,” said Garland.

“An issue?”

“With your friend. He’s drunk.”

“Where?”

“I have him shoveling the camel enclosure. Figured that would keep him out the way until he sobered up a bit.” Garland paused. “Only I think he’s a lot worse off than I thought.”

A headache came rumbling up on heavy treads. Bell sighed.

Garland looked uneasy, too. It was bad news, Cole being drunk. Especially if Garland had noticed it and let him work anyway. It was like Watergate. A lot of people could wind up in trouble before this was over.

“I thought I’d wait and see what you wanted to do,” said Garland as they walked uphill through the zoo. “I didn’t want to make out a report if it was just . . . well.”

Bell understood. The old man was scary.

Bell nodded. “I’ll handle it.”

At the camel enclosure, Bell called out Cole’s name and the old man approached, shovel in hand. He smelled like rum.

“Yeah?” The question had an edge to it. Like Cole knew he was in trouble. For a moment, looking through the bars, Bell saw something aggressive in his eyes. Something leonine.

Bell explained how it would go.

Cole would drop the shovel.

He would avoid speaking to anyone.

He would leave by the back entrance. Now.

“So I’m fucked,” Cole said.

Bell shook his head. “You called in sick today is all. This never happened.”

He should be firing this guy, Bell knew. Why didn’t he?

He could see it now. He’d tell Cole to get the hell out and not come back, and Cole would go to Koverman and say “Did you know I drank whiskey with Bell during work hours on top of the walrus tank?”

“I’m fucked,” Cole repeated. He swayed.

Bell frowned. There was something that started out to be a long silence. Then Cole whispered, “I’m not going back to jail. I won’t do it.”

Bell led him out. “Come back tomorrow,” he said. “Sober.”

It took exactly four weeks for the cocoons to hatch. There was a sound like electric lights going bad, and Bell stepped in the back room. He stared for a long time. The terrariums teamed with strange new life. Each glass box seemed to house a different creature entirely. Strange wasp-things, and things . . . not like wasps. Things without names. Some larger, some smaller. Some with wings, some without. All were red and black.

“Impossible,” he muttered. They couldn’t all be the same species.

His first instinct was to call the university. Then he remembered their note about mud daubers. Screw the university.

Besides, instincts were for animals. He’d solve this on his own.

He could figure it out, Bell was certain. He knew a lot about insects.

He knew insects had been among the first living things to walk dry land; they’d seen the rise and fall of dinosaurs, the birth of flowering plants. Humans weren’t the first species to farm, or to domesticate animals, or to war. Those milestones belonged to insects. When humanity first began its clumsy, ongoing experiment in agriculture, the Attine ants of South America had already long since perfected it—cultivating vast fungus beds in underground chambers in their nests, seeding carefully tended gardens with the clones of a fungus that linked back more than thirty million years.

Another species of ant, Lasius flaws, managed large flocks of domesticated aphids. The aphids were kept in subterranean corrals where they grew mature and succulent, grazing the roots of plants. And were then milked for their nutrient-rich honeydew.

Some termite mounds sprawled more than thirty feet in diameter, housing tens of millions of individuals, all bound up in a single sophisticated caste system. Soldiers of Macrotermes bellicosus developed jaws so huge that they could no longer be used in feeding; instead they relied on teams of lower-caste workers to lift sustenance to their mouths.

Insects build cities, and farms and superhighways. Slant your eyes and look hard enough, and you’ll see a level of social sophistication that can only be described as civilization.

Bell had often thought that humans had achieved their conspicuous position in the world not because of how perfectly adapted they were, but because of how weak, how clumsy, how fragile they were. How unsuited to existence.

One species of dairying ant secreted an enzyme from their heads that was carefully rubbed onto each aphid during the milking process. The enzyme disrupted wing development, preventing their aphids from ever flying away.

Where humans came up with external solutions—like building fences—insects often found a more elegant solution. A biological solution.

They’d had the time to do it.

Determined and cautious, Bell fed the grubs every day and wrote down his observations.

But still, Cole was the one who noticed it.

When Bell finally understood, his mouth dropped open. “Holy shit,” he said.

He looked at his notes.

He’d fed the insects one of three different diets. The insects which, as grubs, had eaten bread did not now have wings, but stunted twists of chitin. Their color was dull red, like rust. More beetle-like, less wasp. Now, as adults, they still preferred bread. The fruit-eaters still ate fruit. They were large-bodied and short limbed, with stumpy wings that buzzed loudly as they made awkward flights inside the terrarium. Bell could imagine them making those same flights between distant stands of fruit.

The meat eater was the most strange. Blood red, with wings like blades—mouth parts huge and angular.

“They adapted,” Bell said. “They adapted to the food sources they ate as grubs.” Bell shook his head in disbelief.

“Fast learners,” Cole said. Then he moved as if to stick an experimental finger in the meat-eater cage, but Bell said “Don’t.”

Seana, when he showed her the hatchlings, said “Can that happen?”

“There it is,” he said. But in his heart of hearts, he knew she was right to doubt. Like a million years of evolution in a single generation. No species adapts that quickly. It was a bad movie. Junk science. Not possible.

“But there it is,” he repeated.

The insects lived for more than a month. They buzzed, or crawled, or flitted around their cages. Over the course of a single week the following month, they took turns dying.

The meat eater lived longest. After each die-off, Bell found egg-cases. He cleaned the terrariums, and put the egg cases back inside. Then he waited to see what would hatch.

Late one evening, Seana climbed up the ladder while he was in the barn loft at the petting zoo, checking the hay for rot. Climbed up and stood behind him until he turned around, then stood on her toes and kissed him.

If the zoo hadn’t been closed and nearly deserted, if Bell hadn’t known for sure that no one was likely to venture into the petting zoo, let alone climb into the loft, then maybe it would have happened differently. Maybe Bell would have kissed her back, because kissing would have been all that could happen.

But the zoo was closed. Bell did know. And it did happen the way it happened.

“I can’t,” he said.

She pulled away.

“I want to,” he said.

She looked at him, waiting.

Beneath them, the horses shuffled. Made noises. Kicked their stall doors and talked to each other in soft equine language.

He thought of Lin, home in their trailer. “I can’t,” he said again.

A black mood seized Bell on the way home. He drove the darkening highway, following his headlights into space. He pushed the old beater faster, watching the speedometer climb to seventy, then eighty. He took the curves without easing off the accelerator. The tires squealed, but held the road.

His mind was a movie of loves and hates. He loved and hated his job. Loved the animals, but hated the conditions. Hated that he couldn’t afford to live on what he was paid. When you’re young, he thought, they tell you that if you get a degree, everything else will fall into place. But it’s not that simple, is it?

Nothing—not one thing—had worked out like it was supposed to.

He thought of life at home, a second maze of contradiction. He was tired of being alone and together at the same time. He wanted to be free, but there was no freedom. No way out. He felt like an animal with a trapped limb. He understood why animals chew their own legs off. He had a recurring fantasy of being robbed, and putting up a struggle. If he were held up at gunpoint, he had decided, he would not cooperate.

He didn’t know what to think of Seana, yet. So he didn’t, at all.

Red like rupture. Blood squirm, a coagulation of grubs across brown terrarium stones. The egg cases pulsed like clotted hearts, spilling strange new life. Bell stared through the glass. Each cage told the same story.

The grubs were a centimeter long. Even as small as they were, Bell could see the mouth parts working. Each grub identical. As far as he could see, the differences which had been so apparent from cage to cage in the adult form were now absent from the next generation. The grubs were all the same, as if a reset button had been pushed. It was only the adult form that seemed vulnerable to change. Bell opened his sack lunch. He took out his apple and sliced it into a dozen pieces. He dropped a slice into the first cage. The grubs responded immediately, moving toward the fruit. They swarmed it.

Bell fed the grubs first thing in the morning.

He decided to turn it into an experiment. He stole a sheet of sticky-labels from the staff room and stuck a label to the side of six different terrariums. On each label, he wrote a different word.

The grubs labeled fruit were fed fruit; the grubs labeled meat were fed sliced-meat. The grubs labeled control were fed a mixture of foods.

The grubs with the cool sticker on the side of their terrarium were fed the control diet—but were also placed in a refrigerator for an hour a day while Bell did his chores. An hour wasn’t long enough to kill them, but it was long enough to impact their physiology. They grew slower than the grubs in the other cages.

If these insects could really adapt to their environments, Bell was going to see how far he could push it.

He’d see if diet was the only pressure they responded to.

The grubs labeled heat were in a small glass aquarium placed on the floor near a space heater. Bell put his hands against the glass. It was hot to the touch. These grubs, too, seemed stressed by the temperature. But they still grew, doubling in size every week.

The grubs labeled carrion were fed the occasional discarded rat from the golden eagle enclosure. These were the grubs Bell found most interesting. They borrowed into the dead rat and ate it from the inside out.

Charles Darwin had believed in God until he studied the parasitic wasp Ibalia.

Darwin wrote in a journal: “There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.” Darwin found particularly gruesome that the Ibalia grub only gradually consumed the living tissues of its host—taking a full three years to complete its meal, saving the vital organs until last as if to extend the host’s suffering. Darwin couldn’t imagine a God who would create something like that.

Bell could imagine it.

He thought of the reset mechanism. He imagined a single insect species with multiple phenotypes already encoded in its genome—a catalog of different possible adult forms. And all it took was a trigger to set the creature down its path.

“Maybe it’s like blind cave fish,” he told Seana one evening.

He watched Seana’s face as she peered through the glass.

“Cave fish have most of the genes for eyes still carried in their DNA,” he said. “All the genes required for lenses, and retinas and eyelids, all the genes except for the one crucial ingredient that starts eye development in the first place. If you cross-breed two different populations of blind fish, sometimes you get fish with eyes.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Seana said.

“It does if the blindness is recessive, and the two populations are blind for different reasons.”

“But you said these things aren’t breeding.”

Bell ignored her, lost in thought. “Or they’re like stem cells,” he continued, “each carrying the genes for multiple tissue types, multiple potentials, but they specialize as they mature, choosing a path.”

He leaned forward, tapping his finger on the glass.

“Where do you think they come from?” Seana asked.

“The fruit maybe. The bananas. Central America. I’m not sure.”

“Why can’t you find it in books?”

“There are millions of insect species still un-described by science. Besides, maybe it has been described. Some version of it. I mean, how would you really know?”

Later, searching for reasons to avoid going home, Bell ran down his closing checklist twice.

On his second round, he found the outer door to the lemur tunnel wide open.

He had locked it himself. Checked it himself.

His inner alarm went off.

Zookeepers developed inner alarms, or they developed scars.

He stepped through the door, and let his eyes adjust to the dark, to the long, mildewy tunnel which ran under the moat, to the lemur island.

At the end of the tunnel, bright light, because the door at the island end was open, too.

In the middle, a silhouette. Who . . . ?

“Hey!” Bell shouted.

Several silhouettes. Sharp, jabbering shadows. Five or six lemurs hopped and shrieked.

The shadow in the middle wound up like a pitcher and threw something.

A yelp. The lemurs howled and ran.

“Cole?” called Bell, starting down the tunnel.

One lemur didn’t run. It whirled in confusion, chattering.

Bell’s eyes had adjusted. The shadow grew details. Cole.

Cole, with a handful of smooth, white landscaping stones, eyes wide with rage.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Bell shouted.

“They threw shit at me. They threw their fucking shit.”

“Jesus Christ—!” Bell yelled, lurching forward.

Cole turned, arm pistoning in the dark.

The stone whistled past Bell’s ear and struck hard against the outer door. The tunnel echoed.

Bell froze.

Cole stepped toward him. “You watch how you talk to me,” he said, and for a moment they stared at each other, waiting to see what would happen. Then Cole’s eyes changed—the rage blown out of them like a gust of wind. Cole brushed past him and was gone.

The lemur groped its way back into the light, back to the island.

Bell unfroze, closed up, and said nothing. He’d have to say something, wouldn’t he? Something would have to be done. Right?

He made a mental note. In the future, he wouldn’t let crazy people into his life. He meant it.

Metamorphosis is magic. Darwin had known this, too.

Sometimes it is a dark magic.

The metamorphosis of a tadpole into a frog. A grub into a wasp. A friend into an enemy.

Bell watched the grubs feed. By now they’d grown huge. Some approached five inches in length, blood red, large beyond all reason. Soon they would spin their papery cocoons. Turn into whatever they would turn into.

Bell pondered the advantage of such an adaptive mechanism. Perhaps it was a way to guard against overspecialization, a reservoir of adaptive capacity. Evolution is a slow process, and when new challenges arise, populations take time to react. There is a lag in the modifying response; species that don’t change fast enough die out.

Bell knew of several kinds of island lizard that reproduced parthenogenetically. Such species, when found, were always marginal, isolated, at risk of extinction; they were aberrations outside the main thrust of evolution. Most were doomed over the long run, because sexual reproduction is a much better way to create the next generation. In sexual reproduction, genes mix and match, new phenotypes arise, gene frequencies shift like tides. Sexual reproduction drops new cards in the deck from one generation to the next.

Parthenogenetic species, on the other hand, are locked-in, frozen in time, playing the same card over and over.

But not the insects in the back room.

The insects in the back room seemed to have a whole deck from which to deal, parthenogenetic or not. Such insects could adapt quickly, shifting morphotypes in a single generation. And then shift back the next. It was the next logical step—not just evolution, but the evolution of evolution. But how was it possible?

Bell thought of Cole, of what made men like him. That old argument, nature vs. nurture. In another time, in another place, Cole would have fit in. In another time, maybe Cole would have been a different person entirely.

The descendants of Vikings and Mongols today wore suits and ran multinational corporations. Were veterinarians, or plumbers, or holy men. Perhaps tomorrow, or a thousand years from now, they’ll need to be Vikings and Mongols again.

Populations change. Needs change. Optimums change. And it all changes faster than selection can track.

From a biological perspective, it would be easy to produce the same kind of people again and again. Stable people. Good people. Again and again, generation after generation—a one to one correlation between gene-set and expression.

But that’s not what you find when you look at humans.

Instead there is a plasticity in human nature. A carefully calibrated susceptibility to trauma.

What looks like a weak point in our species is in fact design.

Because the truth is that certain childhoods are supposed to fuck you up.

It is an adaptive response. Wired into us.

The ones who couldn’t adapt died out. Those gene sets which always produced the same kind of people—stable people, good people—no matter the environment, no matter the violence, or the aggression they faced—those gene sets which always played the same card, again and again—

—died out.

Leaving behind the ones who could metamorphose.

We were not so different from these bugs.

Bell unloaded all this on Seana one day during lunch. They sat across from each other, sipping soft drinks. “The evolution of evolution?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Why would this happen in insects?” she asked.

“Because they’ve been here longest,” he said. But it was more than that. He thought of the ants and their aphids. The enzyme that clipped their wings. He thought of the different ways that insects solved their problems. “Because insects always choose the biological solution.”

Bell avoided Cole for days.

He told himself he was waiting for a good time to see the director, to tell her what had happened in the lemur tunnel. Told himself he wasn’t afraid that Cole would retaliate by telling about drinking together on zoo time, zoo property. Both were lies, but what he had the toughest time with was pure simple fear of Cole.

“Ridiculous,” he told himself. “You’re a grown man and a professional.”

On the other hand, Cole obviously was dangerous.

Maybe he could get Cole to leave, to resign his service contract without anyone having to tell the director anything.

This seemed, on reflection, to be the best bet for an outcome where he, Bell, kept his job and got rid of the problem.

The reflection took place at home, on the sofa, in front of the TV, in his underwear.

When Lin crossed the room, he saw himself through her eyes. He looked like a bum.

She was thinking, he knew, what an asshole he was for buying beer.

He didn’t care.

Neither did she, it seemed.

She sat down on the couch beside him.

What was he? When had he turned into a person who said nothing, did nothing? What had he let himself turn into?

The next day, Bell followed Cole down to the supply shed and said “We’re going to have a talk.”

Cole took a set of eight-foot pruning shears down from the wall rack, and turned to face Bell.

“Yeah,” he said.

Bell fumbled for a beginning, forgetting what he’d rehearsed.

Cole leaned on the pruning shears as if they were a wizard’s staff.

“I have to turn you in,” Bell said.

“For what?”

“Throwing rocks at the animals.”

Cole stared at him. His grip on the shears tightened. “I lose my temper sometimes. I have a temper, I admit.”

“That’s why you can’t be here.”

“Listen, I’ll work on it. I’ll be better.”

Cole shook his head. “I’m just letting you know as a courtesy. I have to report it.”

“You don’t have to do anything.”

“The other choice is that you leave today and don’t come back.”

“That’s not any choice at all.”

“There are other places you can do your service.”

“I like it here.”

“Here doesn’t like you anymore.”

“You know what I don’t like? I don’t think I like you trying to push me around.”

“Today is your last day here, one way or the other,” Bell said. “You can leave on your own, or you can be ushered out.”

“You really don’t want to do that.”

“You’re right, I don’t,” Bell said.

Cole’s face changed. “I’m warning you.”

Bell raised his walky-talky, never taking his eyes off Cole. “Garland,” he spoke into the handset. There was a squelch, then a voice, “Yeah.”

“You better come to the supply shed.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Now, Garland.”

Cole shoved Bell into the wall. Shoved him hard, so his teeth clacked.

And the rage was there again in the cutting torch eyes. Rage like nothing else mattered. Scarred hands curled into Bell’s shirt.

“This is your last chance,” Cole said.

Bell only smiled, feeling something shift inside him. He found suddenly that he was through being scared. “Fuck you,” he said.

Bell ducked the first blow, but the second caught him upside the head, splitting his brow open. Bell spun away, throwing an elbow that missed, and then they were both off balance, taking wild swings, and Cole grabbed at him, and they were falling. They hit the ground and rolled, wrestling for on the filthy floor. Cole came up on top, sitting on Bell’s legs. “I fucking warned you,” he hissed, and then he rained down punches until Garland tackled him.

After that, it was two on one, and Bell didn’t feel the least bit guilty about that.

The zoo super interviewed Bell for her report. They sat in her office. Behind her, against the wall, her fish swam their little circles. The superintendent leaned forward and laced her hands together on her desk.

She didn’t dig very deep. Seemed to think Cole’s behavior was its own explanation. “I think you need stitches,” she said.

Bell nodded. He touched his brow. His first zoo scar.

“He’ll be barred from the zoo, of course,” she said. “And I’ll insist that his community service hours be revoked.”

“What’s going to happen to him now?”

“Charges probably.”

“I don’t want to press charges.”

“Animal cruelty. The lemurs. He’s going back to jail.” She paused, then added, “When they find him.”

Bell looked at the fish, swimming in the aquarium. “He said he’s never going back.”

That evening, as he was closing up, Bell found Cole’s parting gift. Found it revealed, at first, in the presence of a door ajar.

The back room of the castle.

Bell stared at what had been done.

After the fight, Cole had climbed to his feet, wiped the blood from his face—and then walked off. Heading toward the gates. Even two on one, the fight had been about even, and when Cole had finally stepped back and walked away, Bell and Gavin let him go. A draw. They’d assumed Cole left zoo property. But he hadn’t left.

He’d circled back around to the castle.

And he’d poured lye into each and every terrarium.

Several grubs were on the cement floor, ground into pulp with a boot.

Others were desiccated husks. Only a few still moved, writhing in the white powder. Bell stepped further into the room, surveying the carnage. He should have known. He should have known this was coming.

Bell’s inner alarm started bothering him on his way home that night.

Once a zookeeper developed an inner alarm, it worked everywhere.

In this case, it was less an alarm than a sense of something out of place. It got stronger as he closed in on the trailer park. At first he thought the alarm had something to do with Cole, but when he got home, he understood. The universe had an interesting sense of timing.

Lin was gone.

Not like gone to the store. Gone, left. Leaving him.

She left a note about it. The note explained. Blamed him.

Distantly, he heard himself curse.

All Bell could think, at first, was that she didn’t seem to have taken anything. Like there was nothing about their life worth bothering with. She had written the whole thing off, it seemed. Him. Their life. A total loss.

He made some growling noises.

She might be back. She might change her mind.

The stereo, after all, was really hers. She’d had it before they moved in together, and they’d never been able to afford a new one.

Somberly, he unplugged the stereo. In something like a trance, he planted it in the sink and turned on the water. Like a zombie, he let the water run and started searching the trailer for enough change to buy beer.

The next month passed in a haze.

Word filtered down, as word always did, and it turned out Cole had skipped town. The cops were still looking.

Not many of the grubs had survived Cole’s attack. The ones that did were scarred. Cole had been very thorough, even pouring lye in the terrarium on the floor. In all, only a handful of the grubs finished their cocoons. A few from the control cage. A few from the terrarium marked “heat” next to the space heater. But they were twisted things, these cocoons. Damaged things. His experiment was ruined. His hope was that he’d be able to get at least a few reproducing adults, start over. If the cocoons hatched at all.

And word had filtered down, too, that it would be bad for Cole when he was caught, because the list of charges had grown, and the warrant had sprouted teeth. Cole was facing time, real time, for what had happened. Bell knew Cole would need someone to blame.

He would blame Bell, and he would blame the zoo.

Several weeks later, Bell pulled into the parking lot and found there were fire trucks already in the lot. Hoses ran upward along the hill. Black smoke curled into the sky. Bell ran. He knew what he’d see before he saw it. The castle was engulfed in flame. The firefighters fought the blaze, but Bell knew it was too late. He imagined the animals inside baking. He imagined the sizzle and pop of burst skin, the soundless cries of dying snakes and lizards and frogs and bugs. He imagined his insects burning alive.

He looked around, searching for Cole, wondering if he’d stayed long enough to watch it burn.

When the fire was out, Bell walked through the ruins. The devastation was complete. Dead frogs and snakes and lizards. In the back room, he found the terrariums blackened and cracked. The insects inside charred and unrecognizable.

Except for one. The terrarium on the floor.

The terrarium with the heat sticker, now curled and blackened.

The cocoon was charred, split wide by the heat of the fire.

There was no grub inside.

They found Cole’s body later that day in the weeds behind the parking lot. Bell watched them load the body into the ambulance. Dark and swollen. It had been a bad death.

There were burns, minor, across his hands, like he’d come too close to his creation.

Burns and something else.

Something like stings.

Eyes swollen shut, anaphylactic shock.

Not everything burned in the fire.

Not all that burns is consumed. Cole had said that once.

Bell stood there for a long time, listening. Listening for a buzz like an electric light, but there was no sound. Only the sound of wind in the trees.

It was long gone, whatever it was. He just wished he could have seen what the grub had turned into. Next year it would be different.

Next year it would be a fruit eater, or a wasp, or a beetle. It would be what it needed to be.

It would be what the world made it.

Approaching home, Bell felt his inner alarm stir again.

The cable had been turned off.

Those cocksuckers didn’t know who they were dealing with. Bell had gotten drunk two nights in a row now, and he was feeling mean, feeling predatory.

He stalked outside, nine trailers down to the cable box, opened it up with a hex wrench, and hooked his cable back up.

Went home and surfed channels for anything resembling porn.

After two hours of this, his thumb hurt and the battery on the remote died.

He heard the screen door open.

Lin?

In the moment before the inner door opened, it occurred to him that her stereo was still soaking in the kitchen sink. He had a momentary, fearful impulse; his leg jerked. Then the beer kicked back in. He slouched back. He sneered like a sleepy lion.

A shape in a doorway.

Seana.

His sneer disappeared.

She stepped inside and said nothing. Looked at him a moment, as if reading him. Slouched down beside him with a sack of takeout chicken.

His hand, heavy and lazy, rested on her leg.

She tugged his hand higher.

They didn’t talk. Even the TV flashed in silence.

Outside the thin walls, the world licked itself and made hunting noises.

First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, October-November 2009.

About the Author

Ted Kosmatka set his sights early on being a writer. This mostly involved having all his writing rejected, pursuing a biology degree, dropping out before graduation, and becoming a steelworker like his father and grandfather. Then the mill went bankrupt. At one point, he worked in a zoo. Now he works in video games, and his latest novel, The Flicker Men, came out last summer.

Michael Poore’s work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Glimmer Train, AGNI, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. His novel, Up Jumps the Devil, hailed by the New York Review of Books as “an elegiac masterpiece,” is available from HarperCollins. His story “The Street of the House of the Sun,” originally published in The Pinch, was reprinted in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012.

Mercurial

Kim Stanley Robinson

“She rules all of Oz,” said Dorothy, “and so she rules your city and you, because you are in the Winkie Country, which is part of the Land of Oz.”

“It may be,” returned the High Coco-Lorum, “for we do not study geography and have never inquired whether we live in the Land of Oz or not. And any Ruler who rules us from a distance, and unknown to us, is welcome to the job.”

—L. Frank Baum, The Lost Princess of Oz

I am not, despite the appearances, fond of crime detection. In the past, it is true, I occasionally accompanied my friend Freya Grindavik as she solved her cases, and admittedly this watsoning gave me some good material for the little tales I have written for the not-very-discriminating markets on Mars and Titan. But after the “Case of the Golden Sphere of the Lion of Mercury,” in which I ended up hanged by the feet from the clear dome of Terminator, two hundred meters above the rooftops of the city, my native lack of enthusiasm rose to the fore. And following the unfortunate “Adventure of the Vulcan Accelerator,” when Freya’s arch-foe Jan Johannsen tied us to a pile of hay under a large magnifying glass in a survival tent, there to await Mercury’s fierce dawn, I put my foot down: no more detecting. That, so to speak, was the last straw.

So when I agreed to accompany Freya to the Solday party of Heidi van Seegeren, it was against my better judgment. But Freya assured me there would be no business involved; and despite the obvious excesses, I enjoy a Solday party as much as the next esthete. So when she came by my villa, I was ready.

“Make haste,” she said. “We’re late, and I must be before Heidi’s Monet when the Great Gates are opened. I adore that painting.”

“Your infatuation is no secret,” I said, panting as I trailed her through the crowded streets of the city. Freya, as those of you who have read my earlier tales know, is two and a half meters tall, and broad-shouldered; she barged through the shoals of Solday celebrants rather like a whale, and I, pilot-fish-like, dodged in her wake. She led me through a group of Grays, who with carpetbeaters were busy pounding rugs saturated with yellow dust. As I coughed and brushed off my fine burgundy suit, I said, “My feeling is that you have taken me to view that antique canvas once or twice too often.”

She looked at me sternly. “As you will see, on Solday it transcends even its usual beauty. You look like a bee drowning in pollen, Nathaniel.”

“Whose fault is that?” I demanded, brushing my suit fastidiously.

We came to the gate in the wall surrounding Van Seegeren’s town villa, and Freya banged on it loudly. The gate was opened by a scowling man. He was nearly a meter shorter than Freya, and had a balding head that bulged rather like the dome of the city. In a mincing voice he said, “Invitations?”

“What’s this?” said Freya. “We have permanent invitations from Heidi.”

“I’m sorry,” the man said coolly. “Ms. Van Seegeren has decided her Solday parties have gotten overcrowded, and this time she sent out invitations, and instructed me to let in only those who have them.”

“Then there has been a mistake,” Freya declared. “Get Heidi on the intercom, and she will instruct you to let me in. I am Freya Grindavik, and this is Nathaniel Sebastian.”

“I’m sorry,” the man said, quite unapologetically. “Every person turned away says the same thing, and Ms. Van Seegeren prefers not to be disturbed so frequently.”

“She’ll be more disturbed to hear we’ve been held up,” Freya shifted toward the man. “And who might you be?”

“I am Sander Musgrave, Ms. Van Seegeren’s private secretary.”

“How come I’ve never met you?”

“Ms. Van Seegeren hired me two months ago,” Musgrave said, and stepped back so he could look Freya in the eye without straining his neck. “That is immaterial, however—”

“I’ve been Heidi’s friend for over forty years,” Freya said slowly, once again shifting forward to lean over the man. “And I would wager she values her friends more than her secretaries.”

Musgrave stepped back indignantly. “I’m sorry!” he snapped. “I have my orders! Good day!”

But alas for him, Freya was now standing well in the gateway, and she seemed uninclined to move; she merely cocked her head at him. Musgrave comprehended his problem, and his mouth twitched uncertainly.

The impasse was broken when Van Seegeren’s maid Lucinda arrived from the street. “Oh, hello, Freya, Nathaniel. What are you doing out here?”

“This new Malvolio of yours is barring our entrance,” Freya said.

“Oh, Musgrave,” said Lucinda. “Let these two in, or the boss will be mad.”

Musgrave retreated with a deep scowl. “I’ve studied the ancients, Ms. Grindavik,” he said sullenly. “You need not insult me.”

“Malvolio was a tragic character,” Freya assured him. “Read Charles Lamb’s essay concerning the matter.”

“I certainly will,” Musgrave said stiffly, and hurried to the villa, giving us a last poisonous look.

“Of course, Lamb’s father,” Freya said absently, staring after the man, “was a house servant. Lucinda, who is that?”

Lucinda rolled her eyes. “The boss hired him to restore some of her paintings, and get the records in order. I wish she hadn’t.”

The bell in the gate sounded. “I’ve got it, Musgrave,” Lucinda shouted at the villa. She opened the gate, revealing the artist Harvey Washburn.

“So you do,” said Harvey, blinking. He was high again; a bottle of the White Brother hung from his hand. “Freya! Nathaniel! Happy Solday to you—have a drink?”

We refused the offer, and then followed Harvey around the side of the villa, exchanging a glance. I felt sorry for Harvey. Most of Mercury’s great collectors came to Harvey’s showings, but they dissected his every brushstroke for influences, and told him what he should be painting, and then among themselves they called his work amateurish and unoriginal, and never bought a single canvas. I was never surprised to see him drinking.

We rounded the side of the big villa and stepped onto the white stone patio, which was made of a giant slab of England’s Dover cliffs, cut out and transported to Mercury entire. Malvolio Musgrave had spoken the truth about Heidi reducing the size of her Solday party: where often the patio had been jammed, there were now fewer than a dozen people. I spotted George Butler, Heidi’s friend and rival art collector, and Arnold Ohman, the art dealer who had obtained for many of Mercury’s collectors their ancient masterpieces from Earth. As I greeted them Freya led us all across the patio to the back wall of the villa, which was also fronted with white slabs of the Dover cliffs. There, all alone, hung Claude Monet’s Rouen Cathedral—Sun Effect. “Look at it, Nathaniel!” Freya commanded me. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

I looked at it. Now you must understand that, as owner of the Gallery Orientale, and by deepest personal esthetic conviction, I am a connoisseur of Chinese art, a style in which a dozen artfully spontaneous brushstrokes can serve to delineate a mountain or two, several trees, a small village and its inhabitants, and perhaps some birds. Given my predilection, you will not be surprised to learn that to look at the antique rectangle of color that Freya so admired was to risk damaging my eyes. Thick scumbled layers of grainy paint scarcely revealed the cathedral of the title, which wavered under a blast of light so intense that I doubted Mercury’s midday could compete with it. Small blobs of every color served to represent both the indistinct stone and a pebbly sky, both were composed of combinations principally of white, yellow, and purple, though as I say every other color made an appearance.

“Stunning,” I said, with a severe squint. “Are you sure this Monet wasn’t a bit nearsighted?”

Freya glared at me, ignoring Butler’s chuckles. “I suppose your comment might have been funny the first time you made it. To children, anyway.”

“But I heard it was actually true,” I said, shielding my eyes with one hand. “Monet was nearsighted, and so, like Goya, his vision affected his painting—”

“I should hope so,” Harvey said solemnly.

“—so all he could see were those blobs of color; isn’t that sad?”

Freya shook her head. “You won’t get a rise out of me today, Nathaniel. You’ll have to think up your dinner conversation by yourself.”

Momentarily stopped by this riposte, I retired with Arnold Ohman to Heidi’s patio bar. After dialing drinks from the bartender we sat on the blocks of Dover cliffs that made up the patio’s outer wall. We toasted Solday, and contemplated the clouds of yellow talc that swirled over the orange tile rooftops below us. For those of you who have never visited it, Terminator is an oval city. The forward half of the city is flat, and projects out under the clear dome. The rear half of the oval is terraced, and rises to the tall Dawn Wall which supports the upper rim of the dome, and shields the city from the perpetually rising sun. The Great Gates of Terminator are near the top of the Dawn Wall, and when they are opened shafts of Sol’s overwhelming light spear through the city’s air, illuminating everything in a yellow brilliance. Heidi van Seegeren’s villa was about halfway up the terraced slope; we looked upon gray stone walls, orange tile roofs, and the dusty vines and lemon trees of the terrace gardens that dotted the city. Outside the dome the twelve big tracks of the city extended off to the horizon, circling the planet like a slender silver wedding band. It was a fine view, and I lifted my glass remembering that Claude Monet wasn’t there to paint it. For sometimes, if you ask me, reality is enough.

Ohman downed his drink in one swallow. Rumor had it that he was borrowing heavily to finance one of his big Terran purchases; it was whispered he was planning to buy the closed portion of the Louvre—or the Renaissance room of the Vatican museum—or Amsterdam’s Van Gogh collection. But rumors like that circulated around Arnold continuously. He was that kind of dealer. It was unlikely any of them were true; still, his silence seemed to reveal a certain tension.

“Look at the way Freya is soaking in that painting you got for Heidi,” I said, to lift his spirits. Freya’s face was within centimeters of the canvas, where she could examine it blob by blob; the people behind her could see nothing but her white-blond hair. Ohman smiled at the sight. He had brought the Monet back from his most recent Terran expedition, and apparently it had been a great struggle to obtain it. Both the English family that owned it and the British government had had to be paid enormous sums to secure its release, and only the fact that Mercury was universally considered humanity’s greatest art museum had cleared the matter with the courts. It had been one of Arnold’s finest hours.

Now he said, “Maybe we should pull her away a bit, so that others can see.”

“If both of us tug on her it may work,” I said. We stood and went to her side. Harvey Washburn, looking flushed and frazzled, joined us, and we convinced Freya to share the glory. Ohman and Butler conferred over something, and entered the villa through the big French doors that led into the concert room. Inside, Heidi’s orchestra rolled up and down the scales of Moussorgsky’s Hut of Baba Yaga. That meant it was close to the time when the Great Gates would open (Heidi always gets inside information about this).

Sure enough, as Moussorgsky’s composition burst from The Hut of Baba Yaga into The Great Gates of Kiev, two splinters of white light split the air under the dome. Shouts and fanfares rose everywhere, nearly drowning the amplified sound of our orchestra. Slowly the Great Gates opened, and as they did the shafts of light grew to thick buttery gold bars of air. By their rich, nearly blinding glare, Heidi van Seegeren made her first entrance from her villa, timing her steps to the exaggerated Maazel ritard that her conductor Hiu employed every Solday when Pictures at an Exhibition was performed. This ritard shifted the music from the merely grandiose to the utterly bombastical, and it took Heidi over a minute to cross her own narrow patio; but I suppose it was not entirely silly, given the ritual nature of the moment, and the flood of light that was making the air appear a thick, quite tangible gel. What with the light, and the uproar created by the keening Grays and the many orchestras in the neighborhood, each playing their own overture or fanfare (the Coriolan came from one side of us, the 1812 from the other), it was a complex and I might even say noisy esthetic moment, and the last thing I needed was to take another look at the Monet monstrosity, but Freya would not have it otherwise.

“You’ve never seen it when the Great Gates are opened,” she said. “That was the whole point in bringing you here today.”

“I see.” Actually I barely saw anything; as Freya had guided me by the arm to the painting I had accidentally looked directly at the incandescent yellow bars of sunlight and brilliant blue afterimages bounced in my sight. I heard rather than saw Harvey Washburn join us. Many blinks later I was able to join the others in devoting my attention to the big canvas.

Well. The Monet positively glowed in the dense, lambent air; it gave off light like a lamp, vibrating with a palpable energy of its own. At the sight of it even I was impressed.

“Yes,” I admitted to Freya and Harvey, “I can see how precisely he placed all those little chunks of color, and I can see how sharp and solid the cathedral is under all that goo, but it’s like Solday, you know, it’s a heightened effect. The result is garish, really; it’s too much.”

“But this is a painting of midday,” Harvey said. “And as you can see, midday can get pretty garish.”

“But this is Terminator! The Grays have put a lot of talc in the air to make it look this way!”

“So what?” Freya demanded impatiently. “Stop thinking so much, Nathaniel. Just look at it. See it. Isn’t it beautiful? Haven’t you felt things look that way sometimes, seeing stone in sunlight?”

“Well . . . ” And, since I am a strictly honest person, if I had said anything at all I would have had to admit that it did have a power about it. It drew the eye; it poured light onto us as surely as the beams of sunlight extending from the gates in the Dawn Wall to the curved side of the clear dome.

“Well?” Freya demanded.

“Well yes,” I said. “Yes I see that cathedral front—I feel it. But there must have been quite a heat wave in old Rouen. It’s as if Monet had seen Terminator on Solday, the painting fits so well with this light.”

“No,” Freya said, but her left eye was squinted, a sign she was thinking.

Harvey said, “We make the conditions of light in Terminator, and so it is an act of the imagination, like this painting. You shouldn’t be surprised if there are similarities: We value this light because the old masters created it on their canvases.”

I shook my head, and indicated the brassy bedlam around us. “No. I believe we made this one up ourselves.”

Freya and Harvey laughed, with the giddiness that Solday inspires.

Suddenly a loud screech came from inside the villa. Freya hurried across the patio into the music room, and I followed her. Both of us, however, had forgotten the arrangements that Heidi made on Soldays to cast the brilliant light throughout her home, and as we ran past the silenced orchestra into a hallway we were blasted by light from a big mirror carefully placed in the villa’s central atrium. Screams still echoed from somewhere inside, but we could only stumble blindly through bright pulsing afterimages, retinal Monets if you will, while unidentified persons bowled into us, and mirrors crashed to the floor. And the atrium was raised, so that occasional steps up in the hallway tripped us.

“Murder!” someone cried. “Murder! There he goes!” And with that a whole group of us were off down the halls like hounds—blind hounds—baying after unknown prey. A figure leaped from behind a mirror glaring white, and Freya and I tackled it just inside the atrium.

When my vision swam back I saw it was George Butler. “What’s going on?” he asked, very politely for a man who had just been jumped on by Freya Grindavik.

“Don’t ask us,” Freya said irritably.

“Murder!” shrieked Lucinda, from the hallway that led from the atrium directly back to the patio. We jumped up and crowded into the hallway. Just beyond a mirror shattered into many pieces lay a man’s body; apparently he had been crawling toward the patio when he collapsed, and one arm and finger extended ahead of him, still pointing to the patio. Freya approached, gingerly turned the body’s head. “It’s that Musgrave fellow,” she said, blinking to clear her sight. “He’s dead, all right. Struck on the head with the mirror there, no doubt.”

Heidi van Seegeren joined us. “What’s going on?”

“That was my question,” George Butler said.

Freya explained the situation to her.

“Call the police,” Heidi said to Lucinda. “And I suppose no one should leave.”

I sighed.

And so crime detection ensnared me once again. I helped Freya by circulating on the patio, calming the shocked and nervous guests. “Um, excuse me, very sorry to inform you, yes, sorry—hard to believe, yes—somebody had it in for the secretary Musgrave, it appears”—all the while watching to see if anyone would jump, or turn pale, or start to run when I told them. Then, of course, I had to lead gently to the idea that everyone had gone from guest to suspect, soon to be questioned by Freya and the police. “No, no, of course you’re not suspected of anything, farthest thing from our minds, it’s just that Freya wants to know if there’s anything you saw that would help,” and so on. Then I had to do the difficult scheduling of Freya’s interviews, at the same time I was supposed to keep an eye out for anything suspicious.

Oh, the watson does the dirty work, all right. No wonder we always look dense when the detective unveils the solutions; we never have the time even to get the facts straight, much less meditate on their meaning. All I got that day were fragments: Lucinda whispered to me that Musgrave had worked for George Butler before Heidi hired him. Harvey Washburn told me that Musgrave had once been an artist, and that he had only recently moved to Mercury from Earth; this was his first Solday. That didn’t give him much time to be hired by Butler, fired, and then hired by Van Seegeren. But was that of significance?

Late in the day I spoke with one of the police officers handling the case. She was relieved to have the help of Freya Grindavik. Terminator’s police force is small, and often relies on the help of the city’s famous detective for the more difficult cases. The officer gave me a general outline of what they had learned: Lucinda had heard a shout for help, had stepped into the atrium and seen a bloodied figure crawling down the hallway toward the patio. She had screamed and run for help, but only in the hallway was clear vision possible, and she had quickly gotten lost. After that, chaos; everyone at the party had a different tale of confusion.

Following that conversation I had nothing more to do, so I got all the sequestered guests coffee, and helped pick up some of the broken hall mirrors, and passed some time prowling Heidi’s villa, getting down on my hands and knees with the police robots to inspect a stain or two.

When Freya was finished with her interrogations, she promised Heidi and the police that she would see the case to its end—at least provisionally: “I only do this for entertainment,” she told them irritably. “I’ll stay with it as long as it entertains me. And I shall entertain myself with it.”

“That’s all right,” said the police, who had heard this before. “Just so long as you’ll take the case.” Freya nodded, and we left.

The Solday celebration was long since over; the Great Gates were closed, and once again through the dome shone the black sky. I said to Freya, “Did you hear about Musgrave working for Butler? And how he came from Earth just recently?” For you see, once on the scent I am committed to seeing a case solved.

“Please, Nathaniel,” Freya said. “I heard all of that and more. Musgrave stole the concept of Harvey Washburn’s first series of paintings, he blackmailed both Butler and our host Heidi to obtain his jobs from them—or so I deduce, from their protestations, and from certain facts concerning their recent questionable merger that I am privy to. And he tried to assault Lucinda, who is engaged to the cook Delaurence—” She let out a long sigh. “Motives are everywhere.”

Bemused, I said, “It seems this Musgrave was a thoroughly despicable sort.”

“Yes. An habitual blackmailer.”

“Nothing suggests itself to you?”

“No. Not only that, but it seems almost every person at the party had a good alibi for the moment of the murder! Oh, I don’t know why I agree to solve these things. Here I am committed to this head-bashing, and my best clue is something that you suggested.”

“I wasn’t aware that I had suggested anything!”

“There is a fresh perspective to ignorance that can be very helpful.”

“So it is important that Musgrave just arrived from Earth?”

She laughed. “Let’s stop in the Plaza Dubrovnik and get something to eat. I’m starving.”

Almost three weeks passed without a word from Freya, and I began to suspect that she was ignoring the case. Freya has no real sense of right and wrong, you see; she regards her cases as games, to be tossed aside if they prove too taxing. More than once she has cheerfully admitted defeat, and blithely forgotten any promises she may have made. She is not a moral person.

So I dropped by her home near Plaza Dubrovnik one evening, to rouse her from her irresponsible indifference. When she answered the door there were paint smudges on her face and hands.

“Freya,” I scolded her. “How could you take up an entirely new hobby when there is a case to be solved?”

“Generously I allow you entrance after such a false accusation,” she said. “But you will have to eat your words.”

She led me downstairs to her basement laboratory, which extended the entire length and breadth of her villa.

There on a big white-topped table lay Heidi van Seegeren’s Monet, looking like the three-dimensional geologic map of some minerally blessed country.

“What’s this?” I exclaimed. “Why is this here?”

“I believe it is a fake,” she said shortly, returning to a computer console.

“Wait a moment!” I cried. On the table around the painting were rolls of recording chart paper, lab notebooks, and what looked like black-and-white photos of the painting. “What do you mean?”

After tapping at the console she turned to me. “I mean I believe it’s a fake!”

“But I thought art forgery was extinct. It is too easy to discover a fake.”

“Ha!” She waved a finger at me angrily. “You pick a bad time to say so. It is a common opinion, of course, but not necessarily true.”

I regarded the canvas more closely. “What makes you think this a fake? I thought it was judged a masterpiece of its period.”

“Something you said first caused me to question it,” she said. “You mentioned that the painting seemed to have been created by an artist familiar with the light of Terminator. This seemed true to me, and it caused me to reflect that one of the classic signs of a fake was anachronistic sensibility—that is to say, the forger injects into his vision of the past some element of his time that is so much a part of his sensibility that he cannot perceive it. Thus the Victorians faked Renaissance faces with a sentimentality that only they could not immediately see.”

“I see.” I nodded sagely. “It did seem that cathedral had been struck with Solday light, didn’t it?”

“Yes. The trouble is, I have been able to find no sign of forgery in the physical properties of the painting.” She shook her head. “And after three weeks of uninterrupted chemical analysis, that is beginning to worry me.”

“But Freya,” I said, as something occurred to me. “Does all this have a bearing on the Musgrave murder?”

“I think so,” she replied. “And if not, it is certainly more interesting. But I believe it does.”

I nodded. “So what, exactly, have you found?”

She smiled ironically. “You truly want to know? Well. The best test for anachronisms is the polonium 210, radium 226 equilibrium—”

“Please, Freya. No jargon.”

“Jargon!” She raised an eyebrow to scorn me. “There is no such thing. Intelligence is like mold in a Petri dish—as it eats ever deeper into the agar of reality, language has to expand with it to describe what has been digested. Each specialty provides the new vocabulary for its area of feeding, and gets accused of fabricating jargon by those who know no better. I’m surprised to hear such nonsense from you. Or perhaps not.”

“Very well,” I said, hands up. “Still, you must communicate your meaning to me.”

“I shall. First I analyzed the canvas. The material and its weave match the characteristics of the canvas made by the factory outside Paris that provided Monet throughout the painting of the Rouen cathedral series. Both the fabric and the glue appear very old, though there is no precise dating technique for them. And there was no trace of solvents that might have been used to strip paint off a genuine canvas of the period.

“I then turned to the paint. Follow so far?” she asked sharply. “Paint?”

“You may proceed without further sarcasm, unless unable to control yourself.”

“The palette of an artist as famous as Monet has been studied in detail, so that we know he preferred cadmium yellow to chromium yellow or Naples yellow, that he tended to use Prussian blue rather than cobalt blue, and so on.” She tapped the flecks of blue at the base of the cathedral. “Prussian blue.”

“You’ve taken paint off the canvas?”

“How else test it? But I took very small samples, I assure you. Whatever the truth concerning the work, it remains a masterpiece, and I would not mar it. Besides, most of my tests were on the white paint, of which there is a great quantity, as you can see.”

I leaned over to stare more closely at the canvas. “Why the white paint?”

“Because lead white is one of the best dating tools we have. The manufacturing methods used to make it changed frequently around Monet’s time, and each change in method altered the chemical composition of the paint. After 1870, for instance, the cheaper zinc white was used to adulterate lead white, so there should be over one percent zinc in Monet’s lead white.”

“And is that what you found?”

“Yes. The atomic absorption spectrum showed—” She dug around in the pile of chart paper on the table. “Well, take my word for it—”

“I will.”

“Nearly twelve percent. And the silver content for late-nineteenth-century lead white should be around four parts per million, the copper content about sixty parts per million. So it is with this paint. There is no insoluble antimony component, as there would be if the paint had been manufactured after 1940. The X-ray diffraction pattern”—she unrolled a length of chart paper and showed me where three sharp peaks in a row had been penned by the machine—“is exactly right, and there is the proper balance of polonium 210 and radium 226. That’s very important, by the way, because when lead white is manufactured the radioactive balance of some of its elements is upset, and it takes a good three hundred years for them to decay back to equilibrium. And this paint is indeed back to that equilibrium.”

“So the paints are Monet’s,” I concluded. “Doesn’t that prove the work authentic?”

“Perhaps,” Freya admitted. “But as I was doing all this analysis, it occurred to me that a modern forger has just as much information concerning Monet’s palette as I do. With a modern laboratory it would be possible to use such information as a recipe, so to speak, and then to synthesize paints that would match the recipe exactly. Even the radioactively decayed lead white could be arranged, by avoiding the procedures that disrupt the radioactive balance in the first place!”

“Wouldn’t that be terrifically complicated?”

Freya stared at me. “Obviously, Nathaniel, we are dealing with a very, very meticulous faker here. But how else could it be done, in this day and age? Why else do it at all? The complete faker must take care to anticipate every test available, and then in a modern laboratory create the appropriate results for every one of them. It’s admirable!”

“Assuming there ever was such a forger,” I said dubiously. “It seems to me that what you have actually done here is prove the painting genuine.”

“I don’t think so.”

“But even with these paints made by recipe, as you call them, the faker would still have to paint the painting!”

“Exactly. Conceive the painting, and execute it. It becomes very impressive, I confess.” She walked around the table to look at the work from the correct angle. “I do believe this is one of the best of the Rouen cathedral series—astonishing, that a forger would be capable of it.”

“That brings up another matter,” I said. “Doesn’t this work have a five-hundred-year-old pedigree? How could a whole history have been provided for it?”

“Good question. But I believe I have discovered the way. Let’s go upstairs—you interrupted my preparations for lunch, and I’m hungry.”

I followed her to her extensive kitchen, and sat in the window nook that overlooked the tile rooftops of the lower city while she finished chopping up the vegetables for a large salad.

“Do you know the painting’s history?” Freya asked, looking up from a dissected head of lettuce.

I shook my head. “Up until now the thing has not been of overwhelming interest to me.”

“A confession of faulty esthetics. The work was photographed at the original exhibit in 1895, Durand-Ruel photo 5828 L8451. All of the information appended to the photo fits our painting—same name, size, signature location. Then for a century it disappeared. Odd. But it turned out to have been in the estate of an Evans family, in Aylesbury, England. When the family had some conservation work done on one corner it returned to public knowledge, and was photographed for a dozen books of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries. After that it slipped back into obscurity, but it is as well documented as any of the series belonging to private estates.”

“Exactly my point,” I said. “How could such a history be forged?”

As Freya mixed the salad she smiled. “I sat and thought about that for quite some time myself. But consider it freshly, Nathaniel. How do we know what we know of the past?”

“Well,” I said, somewhat at a loss. “From data banks, I suppose. And books—documents—historians—”

“From historians!” She laughed. She provided us both with bowls, and sat across from me. As I filled mine she said, “So we want to know something of the past. We go to our library and sit at its terminal. We call up general reference works, or a bibliographical index, and we choose, if we want, books that we would like to have in our hands. We type in the appropriate code, our printer prints up the appropriate book, and the volume slides out of the computer into our waiting grasp.” She paused to fork down several mouthfuls of salad. “So we learn about the past using computer programs. And a clever programmer, you see, can change a program. It would be possible to insert extra pages into these old books on Monet, and thus add the forged painting to the record of the past.”

I paused, a cherry tomato hovering before my mouth. “But—”

“I searched for an original of any of these books containing photos of our painting,” Freya said. “I called all over Mercury, and to several incunabulists in libraries on Earth—you wouldn’t believe the phone bill I’ve run up. But the original printings of these art volumes were very small, and although first editions probably remain somewhere, they are not to be found. Certainly there are no first editions of these books on Mercury, and none immediately locatable on Earth. It began to seem a very unlikely coincidence, as if these volumes contained pictures of our painting precisely because they existed only in the data banks, and thus could be altered without discovery.”

She attended to her salad, and we finished eating in silence. All the while my mind was spinning furiously, and when we were done I said, “What about the original exhibit photo?”

She nodded, pleased with me. “That, apparently, is genuine. But the Durand-Ruel photos include four or five paintings that have never been seen since. In that sense the Rouen cathedral series is a good one for a faker; from the first it has never been clear how many cathedrals Monet painted. The usual number given is thirty-two, but there are more in the Durand-Ruel list, and a faker could examine the list and use one of the lost items as a prescription for his fake. Providing a later history with the aid of these obscure art books would result in a fairly complete pedigree.”

“But could such an addition to the data banks be made?”

“It would be easiest done on Earth,” Freya said. “But there is no close security guarding the banks containing old art books. No one expects them to be tampered with.”

“It’s astonishing,” I said with a wave of my fork, “it is baroque, it is byzantine in its ingenuity!”

“Yes,” she said. “Beautiful, in a way.”

“However,” I pointed out to her, “you have no proof—only this perhaps overly complex theory. You have found no first edition of a book to confirm that the computer-generated volumes add Heidi’s painting, and you have found no physical anachronism in the painting itself.”

Gloomily she clicked her fork against her empty salad bowl, then rose to refill it. “It is a problem,” she admitted. “Also, I have been working on the assumption that Sandor Musgrave discovered evidence of the forgery. But I can’t find it.”

Never let it be said that Nathaniel Sebastian has not performed a vital role in Freya Grindavik’s great feats of detection. I was the first to notice the anachronism of sensibility in Heidi’s painting; and now I had a truly inspired idea. “He was pointing to the patio!” I exclaimed. “Musgrave, in his last moment, struggled to point to the patio!”

“I had observed that,” Freya said, unimpressed.

“But Heidi’s patio—you know—it is formed out of blocks of the Dover cliffs! And thus Musgrave indicated England! Is it not possible? The Monet was owned by Englishmen until Heidi purchased it—perhaps Musgrave meant to convey that the original owners were the forgers!”

Freya’s mouth hung open in surprise, and her left eye was squinted shut. I leaped from the window nook in triumph. “I’ve solved it! I’ve solved a mystery at last.”

Freya looked up at me and laughed.

“Come now, Freya, you must admit I have given you the vital clue.”

She stood up, suddenly all business. “Yes, yes, indeed you have. Now out with you, Nathaniel; I have work to do.”

“So I did give you the vital clue?” I asked. “Musgrave was indicating the English owners?”

As she ushered me to her door Freya laughed. “As a detective your intuition is matched only by your confidence. Now leave me to work, and I will be in contact with you soon, I assure you.” And with that she urged me into the street, and I was left to consider the case alone.

Freya was true to her word, and only two days after our crucial luncheon she knocked on the door of my town villa. “Come along,” she said. “I’ve asked Arnold Ohman for an appointment; I want to ask him some questions about the Evans family. The city is passing the Monet museum, however, and he asked us to meet him out there.”

I readied myself quickly, and we proceeded to North Station. We arrived just in time to step across the gap between the two platforms, and then we were on the motionless deck of one of the outlying stations that Terminator is always passing. There we rented a car and sped west, paralleling the dozen massive cylindrical rails over which the city slides. Soon we had left Terminator behind, and when we were seventy or eighty kilometers onto the nightside of Mercury we turned to the north, to Monet Crater.

Terminator’s tracks lie very close to the thirtieth degree of latitude, in the northern hemisphere, and Monet Crater is not far from them. We crossed Endeavor Rupes rapidly, and passed between craters named after the great artists, writers, and composers of Earth’s glorious past: traversing a low pass between Holbein and Gluck, looking down at Melville and the double crater of Rodin. “I think I understand why a modern artist on Mercury might turn to forgery,” Freya said. “We are dwarfed by the past as we are by this landscape.”

“But it is still a crime,” I insisted. “If it were done often, we would not be able to distinguish the authentic from the fake.”

Freya did not reply.

I drove our car up a short rise, and we entered the sub-mercurial garage of the Monet museum, which is set deep in the southern rim of the immense crater named after the artist. One long wall of the museum is a window facing out over the crater floor, so that the central knot of peaks is visible, and the curving inner wall of the crater defines the horizon in the murky distance. Shutters slid down to protect these windows from the heat of Mercury’s long day, but now they were open and the black wasteland of the planet formed a strange backdrop to the colorful paintings that filled the long rooms of the museum.

There were many Monet originals there, but the canvases of the Rouen cathedral series were almost all reproductions, set in one long gallery. As Freya and I searched for Arnold we also viewed them.

“You see, they’re not just various moments of a single day,” Freya said.

“Not unless it was a very strange day for weather.” The three reproductions before us all depicted foggy days: two bluish and underwater-looking, the third a bright burning-off of yellow noontime fog. Obviously these were from a different day than the ones across the room, where a cool clear morning gave way to a midday that looked as if the sun were just a few feet above the cathedral. The museum had classified the series in color groups: “Blue Group,” “White Group,” “Yellow Group,” and so on. To my mind that system was stupid—it told you nothing you couldn’t immediately see. I myself classified them according to weather. There was a clear day that got very hot; a clear winter day, the air chill and pure; a foggy day; and a day when a rainstorm had grown and then broken.

When I told Freya of my system she applauded it. “So Heidi’s painting goes from the king of the White Group to the hottest moment of the hot day.”

“Exactly. It’s the most extreme in terms of sunlight blasting the stone into motes of color.”

“And thus the forger extends Monet’s own thinking, you see,” she said, a bit absently. “But I don’t see Arnold, and I think we have visited every room.”

“Could he be late?”

“We are already quite late ourselves. I wonder if he has gone back.”

“It seems unlikely,” I said.

Purposefully we toured the museum one more time, and I ignored the color-splashed canvases standing before the dark crater, to search closely in all the various turns of the galleries. No Arnold.

“Come along,” Freya said. “I suspect he stayed in Terminator, and now I want to speak with him more than ever.”

So we returned to the garage, got back in our car, and drove out onto Mercury’s bare, baked surface once again. Half an hour later we had Terminator’s tracks in sight. They stretched before us from horizon to horizon, twelve fat silvery cylinders set five meters above the ground on narrow pylons. To the east, rolling over the flank of Valazquez Crater so slowly that we could not perceive its movement without close attention, came the city itself, a giant clear half-egg filled with the colors of rooftops, gardens, and the gray stone of the building crowding the terraced Dawn Wall.

“We’ll have to go west to the next station,” I said. Then I saw something, up on the city track nearest us: spread-eagled over the top of the big cylinder was a human form in a light green daysuit. I stopped the car. “Look!”

Freya peered out her window. “We’d better go investigate.”

We struggled quickly into the car’s emergency daysuits, clamped on the helmets, and slipped through the car’s lock onto the ground. A ladder led us up the nearest cylinder pylon and through a tunnel in the cylinder itself. Once on top we could stand safely on the broad hump of the rail.

The figure we had seen was only thirty meters away from us, and we hurried to it.

It was Arnold, spread in cruciform fashion over the cylinder’s top, secured in place by three large suction plates that had been cuffed to his wrists and ankles, and then stuck to the cylinder. Arnold turned from his contemplation of the slowly approaching city, and looked at us wide-eyed through his faceplate. Freya reached down and turned on his helmet intercom.

“—am I glad to see you!” Arnold cried, voice harsh. “These plates won’t move!”

“Tied to the tracks, eh?” Freya said.

“Yes!”

“Who put you here?”

“I don’t know! I went out to meet you at the Monet museum, and the last thing I remember I was in the garage there. When I came to, I was here.”

“Does your head hurt?” I inquired.

“Yes. Like I was gassed, though, not hit. But—the city—it just came over the horizon a short time ago. Perhaps we could dispense with discussion until I am freed?”

“Relax,” Freya said, nudging one of the plates with her boot. “Are you sure you don’t know who did this, Arnold?”

“Of course! That’s what I just said! Please, Freya, can’t we talk after I get loose?”

“In a hurry, Arnold?” Freya asked.

“Of course.”

“No need to be too worried,” I assured him. “If we can’t free you the cowcatchers will be out to pry you loose.” I tried lifting a plate, but could not move it. “Surely they will find a way—it’s their job, after all.”

“True,” Arnold said.

“Usually true,” said Freya. “Arnold is probably not aware that the cowcatchers have become rather unreliable recently. Some weeks ago a murderer tied his victim to a track just as you have been, Arnold, and then somehow disengaged the cowcatchers’ sensors. The unfortunate victim was shaved into molecules by one of the sleeves of the city. It was kept quiet to avoid any attempted repetitions, but since then the cowcatchers’ sensors have continued to function erratically, and two or three suicides have been entirely too successful.”

“Perhaps this isn’t the best moment to tell us about this,” I suggested to Freya.

Arnold choked over what I took to be his agreement.

“Well,” Freya said, “I thought I should make the situation clear. Now listen, Arnold. We need to talk.”

“Please,” Arnold said. “Free me first, then talk.”

“No, no—”

“But Terminator is only a kilometer away!”

“Your perspective from that angle is deceptive,” Freya told him. “The city is at least three kilometers away.”

“More like two,” I said, as I could now make out individual rooftops under the Dawn Wall. In fact the city glowed like a big glass lamp, and illuminated the entire landscape with a faint green radiance.

“And at three point four kilometers an hour,” Freya said, “that gives us almost an hour, doesn’t it. So listen to me, Arnold. The Monet cathedral that you sold to Heidi is a fake.”

“What?” Arnold cried. “It certainly is not! And I insist this isn’t the time—”

“It is a fake. Now I want you to tell me the truth, or I will leave you here to test the cowcatchers.” She leaned over to stare down at Arnold face to face. “I know who painted the fake, as well.”

Helplessly Arnold stared up at her.

“He put you on the track here, didn’t he.”

Arnold squeezed his eyes shut, nodded slowly. “I think so.”

“So if you want to be let up, you must swear to me that you will abide by my plan for dealing with this forger. You will follow my instructions, understand?”

“I understand.”

“Do you agree?”

“I agree,” Arnold said, forcing the words out. “Now let me up!”

“All right,” Freya straightened.

“How are we going to do it?” I asked.

Freya shrugged. “I don’t know.”

At this Arnold howled, he shouted recriminations, he began to wax hysterical—

“Shut up!” Freya exclaimed. “You’re beginning to sound like a man who has made too many brightside crossings. These suction plates are little different from children’s darts.” She leaned down, grasped a plate, pulled up with all of her considerable strength. No movement. “Hmm,” she said thoughtfully.

“Freya,” Arnold said.

“One moment,” she replied, and walked back down the hump of the cylinder to the ladder tunnel, there to disappear down it.

“She’s left me,” Arnold groaned. “Left me to be crushed.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “No doubt she has gone to the car to retrieve some useful implement.” I kicked heartily at the plate holding Arnold’s feet to the cylinder, and even managed to slide it a few centimeters down the curve, which had the effect of making Arnold suddenly taller. But other than that I made no progress.

When Freya returned she carried a bar bent at one end. “Crowbar,” she explained to us.

“But where did you get it?”

“From the car’s tool chest, naturally. Here.” She stepped over Arnold. “If we just insinuate this end of it under your cuffs, I believe we’ll have enough leverage to do the trick. The cylinder being curved, the plates’ grasp should be weakened . . . about here.” She jammed the short end of the bar under the edge of the footplates’ cuff, and pulled on the upper end of it. Over the intercom, breathless silence; her fair cheeks reddened; then suddenly Arnold’s legs flew up and over his head, leaving his arms twisted and his neck at an awkward angle. At the same time Freya staggered off the cylinder, performed a neat somersault and landed on her feet, on the ground below us. While she made her way back up to us I tried to ease the weight on Arnold’s neck, but by his squeaks of distress I judged he was still uncomfortable. Freya rejoined us, and quickly wedged her crowbar under Arnold’s right wrist cuff, and freed it. That left Arnold hanging down the side of the cylinder by his left wrist; but with one hard crank Freya popped that plate free as well, and Arnold disappeared. By leaning over we could just see him, collapsed in a heap on the ground. “Are you all right?” Freya asked. He groaned for an answer.

I looked up and saw that Terminator was nearly upon us. Almost involuntarily I proceeded to the ladder tunnel; Freya followed me, and we descended to the ground. “Disturbing not to be able to trust the cowcatchers,” I remarked as my heartbeat slowed.

“Nathaniel,” Freya said, looking exasperated. “I made all that up, you know that.”

“Ah. Yes, of course.”

As we rejoined Arnold he was just struggling to a seated position. “My ankle,” he said. Then the green wash of light from Terminator disappeared, as did the night sky; the city slid over us, and we were encased in a gloom interrupted by an occasional running light. All twelve of the city’s big tracks had disappeared, swallowed by the sleeves in the city’s broad metallic foundation. Only the open slots that allowed passage over the pylons showed where the sleeves were; for a moment in the darkness it seemed we stood between two worlds held apart by a field of pylons.

Meanwhile the city slid over us soundlessly, propelled by the expansion of the tracks themselves. You see, the alloy composing the tracks is capable of withstanding the 425 degree Centigrade heat of the Mercurial day, but the cylinders do expand just a bit in this heat. Here in the Terminator is the forward edge of the cylinders’ expansion, and the smooth-sided sleeves above us at that moment fit so snugly over the cylinders that as the cylinders expand, the city is pushed forward toward the cooler, thinner railing to the west; and so the city is propelled by the sun, while never being fully exposed to it. The motive force is so strong, in fact, that resistance to it arranged in the sleeves generates the enormous reserves of energy that Terminator has sold so successfully to the rest of civilization.

Though I had understood this mechanism for decades, I had never before observed it from this angle, and despite the fact that I was somewhat uneasy to be standing under our fair city, I was also fascinated to see its broad, knobby silver underside gliding majestically westward. For a long time I did nothing but stare at it.

“We’d better get to the car,” Freya said. “The sun will be up very soon after the city passes, and then we’ll be in trouble.”

Since Arnold was still cuffed to the plates, and had at least a sprained ankle, walking with him slung between us was a slow process. While we were at it the Dawn Wall passed over us, and suddenly the twelve tracks and the stars between them were visible again. “Now we’d better hurry,” said Freya. Above us the very top of the Dawn Wall flared a brilliant white; sunlight was striking that surface, only two hundred meters above us. Dawn was not far away. In the glare of reflected light we could see the heavily tire-printed ground under the cylinders perfectly, and for a while our eyes were nearly overwhelmed. “Look!” Freya cried, shielding her eyes with one hand and pointing up at the sun-washed slope of the city wall with the other. “It’s the inspiration of our Monet, don’t you think?”

Despite our haste, the great Rouen cathedral of Mercury pulled away from us. “This won’t do,” Freya said. “Only a bit more to the car, but we have to hurry. Here, Arnold, let me carry you—” and she ran, carrying Arnold piggyback, the rest of the way to the car. As we maneuvered him through the lock, a tongue of the sun’s corona licked briefly over the horizon, blinding us. I felt scorched; my throat was dry. We were now at the dawn edge of the Terminator zone, and east-facing slopes burned white while west-facing slopes were still a perfect black, creating a chaotic patchwork that was utterly disorienting. We rolled into the car after Arnold, and quickly drove west, passing the city, returning to the night zone, and arriving at a station where we could make the transfer into the city again. Freya laughed at my expression as we crossed the gap. “Well, Nathaniel,” she said, “home again.”

The very next day Freya arranged for those concerned with the case to assemble on Heidi’s patio again. Four police officials were there, and one took notes. The painting of the cathedral of Rouen was back in its place on the villa wall; George Butler and Harvey Washburn stood before it, while Arnold Ohman and Heidi paced by the patio’s edge. Lucinda and Delaurence, the cook, watched from behind the patio bar.

Freya called us to order. She was wearing a severe blue dress, and her white-blond hair was drawn into a tight braid that fell down her back. Sternly she said, “I will suggest to you an explanation for the death of Sandor Musgrave. All of you except for the police and Mr. Sebastian were to one extent or another suspected of killing him, so I know this will be of great interest to you.”

Naturally there was an uneasy stir among those listening.

“Several of you had reason to hate Musgrave, or to fear him. The man was a blackmailer by profession, and on Earth he had obtained evidence of illegalities in the merger Heidi and George made five years ago, that gave him leverage over both of you. This and motives for the rest of you were well established during the initial investigation, and we need not recapitulate the details.

“It is also true, however, that subsequent investigations have confirmed that all of you had alibis for the moment when Musgrave was struck down. Lucinda and Delaurence were together in the kitchen until Lucinda left to investigate the shout she heard; this was confirmed by caterers hired for the Solday party. Heidi left the patio shortly before Musgrave was found, but she was consulting with Hiu and the orchestra during the time in question. George Butler went into the house with Arnold Ohman, but they were together for most of the time they were inside. Eventually George left to go to the bathroom, but luckily for him the orchestra’s first clarinetist was there to confirm his presence. And fortunately for Mr. Ohman, I myself could see him from the patio, standing in the hallway until the very moment when Lucinda screamed.

“So you see—” Freya paused, eyed us one by one, ran a finger along the frame of the big painting. “The problem took on a new aspect. It became clear that, while many had a motive to kill Musgrave, no one had the opportunity. This caused me to reconsider. How, exactly, had Musgrave been killed? He was struck on the head by the frame of one of Heidi’s hall mirrors. Though several mirrors were broken in the melee following Lucinda’s screams, we know the one that struck Musgrave; it was at the bend in the hallway leading from the atrium to the patio. And it was only a couple of meters away from a step down in the hallway.”

Freya took a large house plan from a table and set it before the policeman. “Sandor Musgrave, you will recall, was new to Mercury. He had never seen a Solday celebration. When the Great Gates opened and the reflected light filled this villa, my suggestion is that he was overwhelmed by fright. Lucinda heard him cry for help—perhaps he thought the house was burning down. He panicked, rushed out of the study, and blindly began to run for the patio. Unable to see the step down or the mirror, he must have pitched forward, and his left temple struck the frame with a fatal blow. He crawled a few steps farther, then collapsed and died.”

Heidi stepped forward. “So Musgrave died by accident?”

“This is my theory. And it explains how it was that no one had the opportunity to kill him. In fact, no one did kill him.” She turned to the police. “I trust you will follow up on this suggestion?”

“Yes,” said the one taking notes. “Death declared accidental by consulting investigator. Proceed from there.” He exchanged glances with his colleagues. “We are satisfied this explains the facts of the case.”

Heidi surveyed the silent group. “To tell you the truth, I am very relieved.” She turned to Delaurence. “Let’s open the bar. It would be morbid to celebrate an accidental death, but here we can say we are celebrating the absence of a murder.”

The others gave a small cheer of relief, and we surrounded the bartender.

A few days later Freya asked me to accompany her to North Station. “I need your assistance.”

“Very well,” I said. “Are you leaving Terminator?”

“Seeing someone off.”

When we entered the station’s big waiting room, she inspected the crowd, then cried, “Arnold!” and crossed the room to him. Arnold saw her and grimaced. “Oh, Arnold,” she said, and leaned over to kiss him on each cheek. “I’m very proud of you.”

Arnold shook his head, and greeted me mournfully. “You’re a hard woman, Freya,” he told her. “Stop behaving so cheerfully; you make me sick. You know perfectly well this is exile of the worst sort.”

“But Arnold,” Freya said, “Mercury is not the whole of civilization. In fact it could be considered culturally dead, an immense museum to the past that has no real life at all.”

“Which is why you choose to live here, I’m sure,” he said bitterly.

“Well of course it does have some pleasures. But the really vital centers of any civilization are on the frontier. Arnold, and that’s where you’re going.”

Arnold looked completely disgusted.

“But Arnold,” I said. “Where are you going?”

“Pluto,” he said curtly.

“Pluto?” I exclaimed. “But whatever for? What will you do there?”

He shrugged. “Dig ditches, I suppose.”

Freya laughed. “You certainly will not.” She addressed me. “Arnold has decided, very boldly I might add, to abandon his safe career as a dealer here on Mercury, to become a real artist on the frontier.”

“But why?”

Freya wagged a finger at Arnold. “You must write us often.”

Arnold made a strangled growl. “Damn you, Freya. I refuse. I refuse to go.”

“You don’t have that option,” Freya said. “Remember the chalk, Arnold. The chalk was your signature.”

Arnold hung his head, defeated. The city interfaced with the spaceport station. “It isn’t fair,” Arnold said. “What am I going to do out on those barbaric outworlds?”

“You’re going to live,” Freya said sternly. “You’re going to live and you’re going to paint. No more hiding. Understand?”

I, at any rate, was beginning to.

“You should be thanking me profusely,” Freya went on, “but I’ll concede you’re upset and wait for gratitude by mail.” She put a hand on Arnold’s shoulder, and pushed him affectionately toward the crossing line. “Remember to write.”

“But,” Arnold said, a panicked expression on his face. “But—”

“Enough!” Freya said. “Be gone! Or else.”

Arnold sagged, and stepped across the divide between the stations. Soon the city left the spaceport station behind.

“Well,” Freya said. “That’s done.”

I stared at her. “You just helped a murderer to escape!”

She lifted an eyebrow. “Exile is a very severe punishment; in fact in my cultural tradition it was the usual punishment for murder committed in anger or self-defense.”

I waved a hand dismissively. “This isn’t the Iceland of Eric the Red. And it wasn’t self-defense—Sandor Musgrave was outright murdered.”

“Well,” she said. “I never liked him.”

I told you before; she has no sense of right and wrong. It is a serious defect in a detective. I could only wave my arms in incoherent outrage; and my protests have never carried much weight with Freya, who claims not even to believe them.

We left the station. “What’s that you were saying to Arnold about chalk?” I said, curiosity getting the better of me.

“That’s the clue you provided, Nathaniel—somewhat transformed. As you reminded me, Musgrave was pointing at the patio, and Heidi’s patio is made of a block of the Dover cliffs. Dover cliffs, as you know, are composed of chalk. So I returned to the painting, and cut through the back to retrieve samples of the chalk used in the underdrawing, which had been revealed to me by infrared photography.” She turned a corner and led me uptown. “Chalk, you see, has its own history of change. In Monet’s time chalk was made from natural sources, not from synthetics. Sure enough, the chalk I took from the canvas was a natural chalk. But natural chalk, being composed of marine ooze, is littered with the fossil remains of unicellular algae called coccoliths. These coccoliths are different depending upon the source of the chalk. Monet used Rouen chalk, appropriately enough, which was filled with the coccoliths Maslovella bamesae and Cricolithus pemmatoidens. The coccoliths in our painting, however, are Neococcolithes dubius. Very dubious indeed—for this is a North American chalk, first mined in Utah in 1924.”

“So Monet couldn’t have used this chalk! And there you had your proof that the painting is a fake.”

“Exactly.”

I said doubtfully. “It seems a subtle clue for the dying Musgrave to conceive of.”

“Perhaps,” Freya said cheerfully. “Perhaps he was only pointing in the direction of the patio by the accident of his final movements. But it was sufficient that the coincidence gave me the idea. The solution of a crime often depends upon imaginary clues.”

“But how did you know Arnold was the forger?” I asked. “And why, after taking the trouble to concoct all those paints, did he use the wrong chalk?”

“The two matters are related. It could be that Arnold only knew he needed a natural chalk, and used the first convenient supply without knowing there are differences between them. In that case it was a mistake—his only mistake. But it seems unlike Arnold to me, and I think rather that it was the forger’s signature. In effect, the forger said, if you take a slide of the chalk trapped underneath the paint, and magnify it five thousand times with an electron microscope, you will find me. This chalk never used by Monet is my sign. For on some level every forger hopes to be discovered, if only in the distant future—to receive credit for the work.

“So I knew we had a forger on Mercury, and I was already suspicious of Arnold, since he was the dealer who brought the painting to Mercury, and since he was the only guest at Heidi’s party with the opportunity to kill Musgrave; he was missing during the crucial moments—”

“You are a liar!”

“And it seems Arnold was getting desperate; I searched among his recent bills, and found one for three suction plates. So when we found him on the track I was quite sure.”

“He stuck himself to the track?”

“Yes. The one on his right wrist was electronically controlled, so after setting the other two he tripped the third between his teeth. He hoped that we would discover him there after missing him at the museum, and think that there was someone else who wished him harm. And if not, the cowcatchers would pull him free. It was a silly plan, but he was desperate after I set up that appointment with him. When I confronted him with all this, after we rescued him from the tracks, he broke down and confessed. Sandor Musgrave had discovered that the Monet was a fake while blackmailing the Evans family in England, and after forcing Heidi to give him a job, he worked on the painting in secret until he found proof. Then he blackmailed Arnold into bankruptcy, and when on Solday he pressed Arnold for more money, Arnold lost his composure and took advantage of the confusion caused by the opening of the Great Gates to smack Musgrave on the head with one of Heidi’s mirrors.”

I wagged a finger under her nose. “And you set him free. You’ve gone too far this time, Freya Grindavik.”

She shook her head. “If you consider Arnold’s case a bit longer, you might change your mind. Arnold Ohman has been the most important art dealer on Mercury for over sixty years. He sold the Vermeer collection to George Butler, and the Goyas to Terminator West Gallery, and the Pissarros to the museum in Homer Crater, and those Chinese landscapes you love so much to the city park, and the Kandinskys to the Lion of the Grays. Most of the finest paintings on Mercury were brought here by Arnold Ohman.”

“So?”

“So how many of those, do you think, were painted by Arnold himself?”

I stopped dead in the street, stunned at the very idea. “But—but that only makes it worse! Inestimably worse! It means there are fakes all over the planet!”

“Probably so. And no one wants to hear that. But it also means Arnold Ohman is a very great artist. And in our age that is no easy feat. Can you imagine the withering reception his painting would have received if he had done original work? He would have ended up like Harvey Washburn and all the rest of them who wander around the galleries like dogs. The great art of the past crashes down on our artists like meteors, so that their minds resemble the blasted landscape we roll over. Now Arnold has escaped that fate, and his work is universally admired, even loved. That Monet, for instance—it isn’t just that it passes for one of the cathedral series; it could be argued that it is the best of them. Now is this a level of greatness that Arnold could have achieved—would have been allowed to achieve—if he had done original work on this museum planet? Impossible. He was forced to forge old masters to be able to fully express his genius.”

“All this is no excuse for forgery or murder.”

But Freya wasn’t listening. “Now that I’ve exiled him, he may go on forging old paintings, but he may begin painting something new. That possibility surely justified ameliorating his punishment for killing such a parasite as Musgrave. And there is Mercury’s reputation as art museum of the system to consider . . . ”

I refused to honor her opinions with a reply, and looking around, I saw that during our conversation she had led me far up the terraces. “Where are we going?”

“To Heidi’s,” she said. And she had the grace to look a little shamefaced—for a moment, anyway. “I need your help moving something.”

“Oh, no.”

“Well,” Freya explained, “when I told Heidi some of the facts of the case, she insisted on giving me a token of her gratitude, and she overrode all my refusals, so . . . I was forced to accept.” She rang the wall bell.

“You’re joking,” I said.

“Not at all. Actually, I think Heidi preferred not to own a painting she knew to be a fake, you see. So I did her a favor by taking it off her hands.”

When Delaurence let us in, we found he had almost finished securing Rouen Cathedral—Sun Effect in a big plastic box. “We’ll finish this,” Freya told him.

While we completed the boxing I told Freya what I thought of her conduct. “You’ve taken liberties with the law—you lied right and left—”

“Well boxed,” she said. “Let’s go before Heidi changes her mind.”

“And I suppose you’re proud of yourself.”

“Of course. A lot of lab work went into this.”

We maneuvered the big box through the gate and into the street, and carried it upright between us, like a short flat coffin. We reached Freya’s villa, and immediately she set to work unboxing the painting. When she had freed it she set it on top of a couch, resting against the wall.

Shaking with righteous indignation, I cried, “That thing isn’t a product of the past! It isn’t authentic. It is only a fake. Claude Monet didn’t paint it.”

Freya looked at me with a mild frown, as if confronting a slightly dense and very stubborn child. “So what?”

After I had lectured her on her immorality a good deal more, and heard all of her patient agreement, I ran out of steam. “Well,” I muttered, “you may have destroyed all my faith in you, and damaged Mercury’s art heritage forever, but at least I’ll get a good story out of it.” This was some small comfort. “I believe I’ll call it The Case of the Thirty-third Cathedral of Rouen.”

“What’s this?” she exclaimed. “No, of course not!” And then she insisted that I keep everything she had told me that day a secret.

I couldn’t believe it. Bitterly I said, “You’re like those forgers. You want somebody to witness your cleverness, and I’m the one who is stuck with it.”

She immediately agreed, but went on to list all the reasons no one else could ever learn of the affair—how so many people would be hurt—including her, I added acerbically—how so many valuable collections would be ruined, how her plan to transform Arnold into a respectable honest Plutonian artist would collapse, and so on and so forth, for nearly an hour. Finally I gave up and conceded to her wishes, so that the upshot of it was I promised not to write down a single word concerning this particular adventure of ours, and I promised furthermore to say nothing of the entire affair, and to keep it a complete secret, forever and ever.

But I don’t suppose it will do any harm to tell you.

First published in Universe 15, edited by Terry Carr, 1985.

About the Author

Kim Stanley Robinson is an American science fiction writer living in Davis, California. He has won two Hugo Awards, three Nebula Awards, the Campbell Memorial Award, and a World Fantasy Award for his work. His latest novels are Aurora, Shaman, 2312, and Galileo’s Dream.

Six Quirks of the Human Genome

Dan Koboldt

Since the discovery of the DNA double helix by Watson and Crick in 1953, our knowledge of the genetic code has grown exponentially. Advances in technology have driven much of that discovery, including the rise of next-generation DNA sequencing instruments that I wrote about in issue #108. One of the best parts about working as a genetics researcher is that the human genome continues to surprise us in new and puzzling ways.

Where are the Genes?

The human genome comprises 3.2 billion base pairs spread across 24 distinct chromosomes. In 1990, as the Human Genome Project was just ramping up, the NIH estimated that it might contain 100,000 protein-coding genes. Five years into it, researchers revised that down to around 50,000. At the completion of the HGP in 2001, the estimate was 30,000. Now, with the genomes of thousands of individuals in hand, we know that the number of protein-coding genes is less than 20,000, and they occupy about 1.5% of the genome. This is a shockingly low number, given how complex of organisms we claim to be. The average car has 30,000 different parts (according to Toyota), so how can we have only 20,000 genes?

Unlike the parts in a car, however, a lot of our genes serve multiple purposes. Even though the number of genes seems limited, many of them are transcribed in different ways, incorporating different combinations of exons (the blocks of sequence present in mature RNA transcripts), and starting or stopping at different places. Thus, while we might have less than 20,000 genes, they produce hundreds of thousands of unique RNA transcripts that are translated into proteins.

Much of the 98.5% of DNA that does not code for proteins is nevertheless important, since the regulation of which genes are active at which times (and in which tissues) is like conducting a large, elaborate symphony. Many of those bases are transcribed into things like ribosomal RNA and transfer RNA, which aid in protein synthesis. Also, non-coding elements like transcription factor binding sites, enhancers, and repressors play critical roles in gene regulation. All of these elements conspire to help those 20,000 genes make a very complex organism.

The Virus Invaders

There are hundreds of different species of viruses that infect humans. Virtually all of them reproduce by exploiting our own cellular machinery, but one class does so by integrating its viral genome into ours. Retroviruses, as they’re called, count HIV and herpes virus among their members, and are infamous for causing latent and often incurable infections. The integrated viral genome has a distinctive pattern, which essentially boils down to three gene regions (gag, pol, and env) sandwiched between two repetitive structures called long terminal repeats.

The gag and env regions encode the virus capsid—basically its body—and protective envelope. When a retrovirus invades a host cell, the pol region encodes the enzymes it needs to reproduce and integrate its genetic code into the host genome. Then, it can produce more viruses that go out and infect other cells.

Retroviral genome structure. Most retroviral genomes contain three gene regions (Gag, Pol, and Env) flanked by repetitive sequences called long terminal repeats (LTRs). Credit: Dan Koboldt, 2015.

If the idea of a virus integrating its genome into yours makes you uncomfortable, you won’t like this next part. The structure of an integrated retrovirus is somewhat distinctive, and when we finished the sequence of the human genome, we noticed thousands of them already in it. Human endogenous retroviruses, or “fossil viruses,” make up about 1% of our 3.2 billion base pairs. And many of them are active in our cells, producing transcripts that are made into proteins. They’re not infectious because they don’t produce a complete virus capsule, and they probably serve some kind of symbiotic function.

The Gene for Speed

Skeletal muscles are made up of long, cylindrical cells called muscle fibers. They come in two types: slow-twitch fibers, which are the most energy-efficient, and fast-twitch muscle fibers, which generate more force. There’s a protein, called actin-3, that’s present only in the fast-twitch fiber cells. Back in 2003, researchers found that a mutation in the gene encoding actin-3 was associated with athletic performance. This mutation disrupts the function of actin-3, and it’s present in 20-50% of people worldwide.

If you have one mutation, you still have a working copy of actin-3, because we have two copies of most genes. But if you inherited two mutations, you won’t have any actin-3. This does not seem to have a negative impact on health, but don’t count on making it to the Olympics. It turns out that most world-class athletes, particularly sprinters, have at least one copy of actin-3. Many have two working copies of the gene.

Interestingly, the frequency of the actin-3 mutation differs considerably among world populations. It’s more common in European and Asian populations (50-80%) than in African populations (15-20%). Given this disparity, it’s tempting to theorize that a genetic advantage explains why countries that often produce world-class sprinters (such as Jamaica) have considerable African heritage. Most experts agree, however, that the genetic influence is only a small part of what’s required to make an Olympic gold medalist. After all, the final heat of the 100m dash pits numerous athletes against one another, most of whom will have actin-3 in their muscles. Only one of them can win it, and odds are his name will be Usain Bolt.

The Circular Chromosome from Mom

When scientists talk about the genome, we typically refer to the 23 pairs of chromosomes: 1-22, X, and Y. Each chromosome is a single long strand of DNA that, although it’s packaged up around protein-RNA complexes called nucleosomes, is essentially a linear molecule. But there’s another chromosome in all of our cells that often gets less attention: the mitochondrial chromosome. Mitochondria, as you might remember, are the energy-producing organelles of a cell. They contain a small circular chromosome that encompasses about 37,500 base pairs. It includes 37 protein-coding genes, most of which are vital for mitochondrial function.

The mitochondrial chromosome. The human mitochondrial genome is around 37,500 base pairs long and contains 37 protein-coding genes. Credit: “Mitochondrial DNA en” by Shanel.

Most cells contain numerous mitochondria, meaning that there might be hundreds or thousands of mitochondrial chromosomes, compared to just two copies of autosomal chromosomes and sex chromosomes. Because there are so many copies, we often sequence the mitochondrial genome with more redundancy than any of the other chromosomes. We simply can’t NOT sequence it, because there are so many copies relative to the rest of the genome.

Another unique aspect of mitochondrial DNA is that, in animals, it’s inherited only from the mother. There’s a practical reason for this: an egg contains about 200,000 mitochondrial chromosomes, and the average sperm has about 5. Recent evidence suggests that paternal mitochondria aren’t just outnumbered, but are selectively destroyed upon fertilization. No matter the cause, the effect of maternal inheritance of mitochondrial DNA has made it a useful tool for tracing maternal lineages through human history (analogous to the way that the Y-chromosome is used to trace paternal lineages).

Similar to nuclear DNA, mitochondrial DNA is susceptible to mutation and DNA damage, especially in the presence of free radicals. This is important because mutations in mitochondrial DNA can disrupt essential components of the energy chain, and have been linked to several disorders with an age-related component, such as deafness. Some researchers have speculated that mitochondrial DNA might play an important role in the process of ageing. Wouldn’t it be fascinating if this teeny-tiny chromosome were the key to reversing that process?

You Didn’t Need Those Genes, Did You?

If you compare the genomes of two unrelated people, you’ll find about three million differences between them, mostly in the form of single-base changes called SNPs (pronounced “snips”). Small insertions and deletions (called indels) are the second most common class of genetic variation. There are also large structural alterations to DNA—but until recently, these were thought to be pretty rare.

In 2006, researchers working on the map of human genetic variation (not the sequence itself, but how we differ from one another) were puzzled by inheritance patterns in certain regions of the genome that seemed to violate so-called Mendelian rules of inheritance. The underlying cause turned out to be large genomic deletions, some spanning thousands of bases. Dozens or hundreds of genes had been deleted. And yet, the individuals involved in these genetic studies are all healthy.

Since then, we’ve uncovered thousands of deletions, duplications, inversions, and more complex rearrangements in the genome that seem to segregate in human populations just like SNPs and indels. Many of them seem to have no obvious effect on the individual, though some diseases have been linked to structural variants. Cancer in particular seems to rely on rearranging the genomes of healthy cells to grow and divide unchecked.

Compared to SNPs and small indels, structural variants are far less prevalent in the human genome. Given their size, however, they might ultimately affect a bigger part of it than any other form of genetic variation.

Sickle Cell Disease Versus Malaria

Sickle cell disease (SCD) is an inherited disorder caused by abnormal hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that takes up oxygen in the lungs and carries it to the rest of the body. In healthy people, red blood cells are disc shaped—like a donut without a hole—which allows them to slide through large and small blood vessels without any traffic jams. In people with sickle cell anemia (the most common form of SCD), red blood cells are often shaped like a sickle. That’s the blade the Grim Reaper carries, and looks like a crescent moon.

This is not a great shape for things that need to slide through narrow blood vessels. Sickled cells can jam up and cause blockages, and because they’re not as flexible, they tend to burst apart. That’s why red blood cells of SCD patients only live for 10 or 20 days, compared to 90 to 120 days in a healthy person.

Sickle cell disease. In patients with two hemoglobin mutations, red blood cells are sickle-shaped rather than disc-shaped, which can block blood vessels. Credit: “Sickle Cell Anemia” by BruceBlaus.

SCD is a recessive genetic disease, meaning that patients inherit one defective copy of the hemoglobin gene from each parent. The mutations that cause severe recessive disease are usually quite rare due to natural selection. But SCD is somewhat common, and as you’ve probably heard, it only seems to occur in people with African ancestry (affecting about 1 in 500 births). It turns out that, although inheriting two copies of mutated hemoglobin is bad news, inheriting only one mutated copy protects against malaria.

Malaria isn’t a genetic disease; it’s caused by a mosquito-borne parasite. But 90% of the 200+ million annual cases of malaria occur in sub-Saharan Africa, where it’s a major cause of mortality. This explains why mutations in the hemoglobin gene are most common in people with African heritage: if you live in a place where malaria is common, a protective mutation offers a major advantage. The effect is so strong that it counteracts the natural selection that would normally remove disease-causing mutations from the population. This phenomenon is called balancing selection, and it’s one of the reasons that we haven’t all evolved into superheroes.

The human genome is a complex beast that took ten years and millions of dollars to sequence for the first time. Now, we can sequence a genome in about a week, for less than $1500. Thousands of genomes have been finished since the initial draft sequence in 2001, uncovering fascinating tidbits at an unprecedented rate. Even so, the more we study the human genome, the more it becomes apparent that many of its mysteries have yet to be revealed.

About the Author

Dan Koboldt is a genetics researcher who has co-authored more than sixty publications in Nature, Science, The New England Journal of Medicine, and other journals. Every fall, he disappears into Missouri’s dense hardwood forests to pursue whitetail deer bow and arrow. He lives with his wife and three children in St. Louis, where the deer take their revenge by eating all of the plants in his backyard.

Dan also writes fantasy and science fiction. His debut novel The Rogue Retrieval, about a Vegas magician who infiltrates a medieval world, will be published by Harper Voyager on January 19th, 2016.

Sapient Animals and Memory Particles:
A Conversation with Lawrence M. Schoen

Chris Urie

Life, death, and prophecy are common themes. When an author approaches them from a new angle, it’s like seeing a familiar photograph with a fresh set of eyes. In the case of Lawrence M. Schoen’s new novel, we get to see through a fresh set of animal eyes.

Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard was recently released from Tor Books and features a universe full of anthropomorphized animals, interplanetary politics, psychoactive drugs, and memory particles. Jorl, an elephant, must speak with a dead friend to unravel the secrets behind his homeworld’s number one export, a drug called koph. Meanwhile, a prescient child who should not exist and feels no pain becomes privy to a disturbing future. An incredible array of sapient animals vie for a monopoly on koph and it threatens the already uneasy balance of the galaxy.

Lawrence M. Schoen holds a PhD in cognitive psychology, has been nominated for the Campbell, Hugo, and Nebula awards, is an authority on the Klingon language, and operates the small press Paper Golem.

How did your experience in psychology factor into your creation of Nefshons, or subatomic particles of memory?

Quite heavily, actually. Most people tend to think of “memory” as a single thing, but as any cognitive psychologist will tell you, there are many different kinds of memories. The memory you have for some bit of information that you could look up online is very different from your personal memory of having done a thing, a distinction we might describe as encyclopedic rather than episodic.

Memory for names and faces are vastly different from other kinds of memories, as are the memories of how to do thing (like ride a bicycle or play the piano). And the memory for past actions (such as reading Barsk) is different than your memory of things you intend to do but haven’t gotten to yet (like order a copy of Barsk as a gift for a friend). And on and on, many additional kinds that all of us take for granted. Some of those types of memories are encoded in my fictional particles, the nefshons, most of them are not. Knowing which are which was key.

Has writing Barsk changed the way you think about memory?

It codified an idea I have about what it means to be an individual, that each of us can be described as a highly organized network of unique memories, a complex web of information that can, potentially, live on long after our physicality has run its course. More specifically, this was a way of conceptualizing immortality that really resonated for me. I can’t accept that death is truly final.

What are some of the challenges of anthropomorphizing animals?

For me the balance was in incorporating researchable characteristics of social behaviors and other patterns associated with the various species, and mapping them onto recognizable human behaviors. Basically, acknowledging that uplift isn’t simply about making animals talk, but about blending two different types of being into a workable and consistent whole.

How did the spiritual elements impact the worldbuilding?

The best answer to this is probably “vaguely.” A major portion of the book involves a drug and a technique that allows some people to effectively speak with the dead. My wife insists that a person’s nefshon construct is a fancy way of talking about their soul, but I stopped short of actually saying that in the book. As presented, it’s all just a blend of physics and psychology, and on Barsk it’s not as exotic as on other worlds because so many more Fant have had access to the drug. It’s more like the early days of telephonic communication when maybe one house in a neighborhood would have a phone and getting a call from a distant relative was a pretty big deal. Except in this case, that relative is dead.

If you had to be a species of animal existing in the Barsk universe, which animal would you be?

As you might imagine, I get this question a lot. I’m biased, because I think the Fant are very very cool, but I don’t know that I’d be able to endure their isolation from the larger galaxy, their preference for simplicity over technology, or the inherent intolerance of their situation. As a runner up—and I’m looking forward to developing more details with them in future tales—I think the Prairie Dogs are pretty compelling. I envision them living on mixed worlds where they’ve built elaborate underground cities amidst the surface cities of other races.

Has running a small press prepared you for publishing with one of the larger companies?

Not at all. The difference between small press and big press is not simply a matter of size. Rather, it’s one of complexity at every level and every stage of the process. More people are involved in every decision, and as a result every aspect of the thing takes longer. Plus, the resources at the command of a big press completely change the range of possibilities open to a book. It’s a beautiful thing and one that I’m very grateful to be experiencing with Barsk.

What is the day-to-day like at the Klingon Language Institute?

I like that people have an image of a physical place, as if there was an actual campus somewhere (and indeed, a professional artist once contacted me, came out to the college I was teaching at, and used it as inspiration to paint the representation of just such a facility). But the cruel reality is that in physical terms the KLI is a post office box about a mile from my house that I check once a week. Admittedly, a vast portion of my basement is filled with endless racks and bookshelves of Star Trek and Klingon memorabilia, books, videos, newspaper clippings, recordings of interviews, back issues of thirteen years of our quarterly journal, and the prosthetic head of Mark Lenard from his role as the first man to actually speak the language.

That said, all the real work goes on behind the scenes by a team of volunteers, generously donating their time and energy and expertise, and manifests in daily updates, additions, and changes to the website www.kli.org, which I’m happy to say is one of the oldest, continuously running websites in the world!

What other projects do you have in the works?

I’m still writing tales in my light and humorous series about the Amazing Conroy and his alien companion animal, Reggie.

I’m also working on a new Fantasy series about the spirits at the heart of cities as the source of humanity’s civilization, one that asks the question what happens when some of these spirits choose to stand in the way of their own development and thus ensure the status quo rather than allow themselves and humanity to continue to evolve.

And finally, I’m far from done with Barsk and the larger universe I’ve created for the Fant and the other races of the Alliance. I’ve already turned in proposals for what I see as the next two books in the series, continuing the story of both Jorl and Pizlo, but the possibilities after that are wide open.

About the Author

Chris Urie is a writer and editor from Ocean City, NJ. He has written and published everything from city food guide articles to critical essays on video game level design. He currently lives in Philadelphia with an ever expanding collection of books and a small black rabbit that has an attitude problem.

Another Word:
Very Close Now

Fran Wilde

Virtual (adj.): (1) very close to being something without actually being it; (2) existing or occurring on the internet. source: Merriam-Webster

/Advertising voice: The virtual is coming! It’s already here! You missed it! Here it comes again! This time, yours for $500./

In the latter days of the previous millennium, Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck (MIT, 1998) was required reading in certain technical circles. A very young me was writing and working with other writers who were engaged in creating narratives and story spaces using any tools imaginable to escape the linear, and Hamlet on the Holodeck promised the cyberspace-narrative future of our dreams, as did Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and—more effectively for me when it came to evolving multiplayer narratives—The Diamond Age. In this novel, the “ractor” Miranda can interact with other players in virtual narratives like Last Train to Geneva and The Taming of the Shrew a little like today’s actors can interact in live performances of Then She Fell and Sleep No More (although Miranda takes it a bit further with one annoying player, a weapon, and a refrigerator. [Go, Miranda!]).

Simply put, I fell in love with the dream. And I did more than wait for it to become reality. I learned to program, and picked up the animation and modeling software Maya and several more besides. I helped try to make the virtual, reality.

A decade before, Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden (1992) and Michael Joyce’s Afternoon (1987) had emerged as early hypertext fiction. (Nota Bene: Stephenson’s Snow Crash was originally published in 1992.) Wrote Robert Coover in a 1993 New York Times Book Review piece, “The routes through Stuart Moulthrop’s new hyperfiction Victory Garden are almost literally countless. Altogether there are nearly a thousand text spaces and over 2,800 electronic links between them.” Moulthrop and Joyce were dreaming too, of interconnectivity and changeable stories . . . ones that changed for the reader, and could even, someday, be changed by the reader.

But the technology lagged. We saw many many companies rise and fall in the attempt to make virtual tech go. We saw visionaries make promises and never deliver. Some couldn’t make the money work. Some (like CAVE) were there, but hard to get to. For others, it was the code. From Second Life to Google Glass, the dream hasn’t always looked as sleek and seamless in reality.

Creativity finds its way around technical hobbles using the tools available to it. In the intervening time, we’ve seen Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan write Black Box (2012), a novel on Twitter, interactive poetry like the lovely CSS-augmented “You Are Here” from Bogi Takács in Strange Horizons, numerous works built in Twine—Chris Klimas’ text-driven non-linear story engine, and Storium—Stephen Hood’s multiplayer narrative game. All these and more are attempts to merge the literary with the virtual.

Meanwhile, interactive gaming has forged on ahead. Forking narratives and interactive play found in games like Dragon Age and Bioshock and the online communities built in Eve, World of Warcraft, and numerous Cryo Engine-enhanced massively multiplayer online role playing games offer players places to blend provided narratives with their own storylines, or to become as dedicated to the storylines available to them as any literary reader of the past.

And in the speculative fiction and movies of our generation—from Tony Stark’s desktops (SO SHINY), to the holodeck, to Gibson, Cadigan, and Stephenson—we’re working out how to live real and virtual at the same time. In the speculative slush piles as well, where new work often waits hopefully, it’s not rare to see virtual stories that reveal themselves at the end to be dreams, or reality that reveals itself to be virtual. 

So there was a great deal of expectation heaped onto the boxy profile of the Oculus Rift viewer, which launched its first offering a few weeks ago, as well as curiosity given to Google’s Cardboard initiative. Our hopes and narrative dreams for more and different storytelling spaces rested in the balance, and were revealed by prototype games such as Case and Molly (Greg Borenstein’s Neuromancer tribute from 2013), and Apelab’s Sequenced—a 360-degree VR animated game.

Oculus Rift’s rather raspberry-sound debut last month—higher price point than expected, fewer games available, a hint of ‘coming soon’—shouldn’t surprise. The virtual dreams have been so big, and the tiny details required to make it real so numerous, the development corridor to reaching the dream is so very long.

Yet at CES—the International Computer Electronics Show—you couldn’t swing a swag bag without hitting a VR headset, or someone giving an interview about Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. (I didn’t go, I watched it virtually.) Facebook’s in, YouTube’s in. Everyone wants 2016 to be a virtual year and we’re very close in some respects, and very far in others. There are some important issues to overcome, from lag (isn’t it always?) to the base user technology required to make a version of this reality widely available.

There are more accessibility issues too—virtual is a very visual medium. Does the emerging tech exclude those who cannot process the visual input, or who cannot use the current technology because of vertigo? Better question: if entire economic classes are excluded from today’s Internet due to access (Wi-Fi affordability, hardware costs), what about this medium? An alternate point-in-favor: might virtual spaces eventually make more work easier and more accessible to the mobility-disabled and geographically distant, just as the Internet has?

Meantime, while CES and CNET are obsessed with the overgrown eye mask of virtual reality hardware, networks of cheap mobile phones are revolutionizing third-world everything: from banking/microloans to medicine, to narrative—thumb-typed and tumbled or shared-among-friends phone-fic being just one proof-of-concept.

We’re in parallel development now, those of us who watch and play and read and write in non-linear spaces—the very real Oculus Rift (hey, at least there’s a *tangible product*) and the utterly dreamy Magic Leap, whose website features a humpback whale cresting out of a gymnasium floor. Neal Stephenson himself has announced that he’s become the chief futurist for the company and endorses the technology by stating that Magic Leap is “going to be a great tool for readers, learners, scientists, and artists.”

Meantime, we writers keep pushing the envelope in games and online, dreaming of the day when ‘readers’ (we’ll need a new word, won’t we?) can walk into one of our stories and experience it, maybe even change it themselves. Or when a narrative can weave within everyday experience and not be called daydreaming. Or maybe it will be called that, but as an app.

We’re playing and waiting. We’re writing narratives set far past that future, into the next one. Don’t believe me? Check out/play a recent gorgeous work by Jedediah Berry called Fabricationist DeWit, online here: http://thirdarchive.net/fabricationist-dewit-remakes-the-world/

Because we’re very close now. In some senses the stories are already here, in some realities, they’ve always been here.

“As one moves through a hypertext, making one’s choices, one has the sensation that just below the surface of the text there is an almost inexhaustible reservoir of half-hidden story material waiting to be explored. That is not unlike the feeling one has in dreams that there are vast peripheral seas of imagery into which the dream sometimes slips, sometimes returning to the center, sometimes moving through parallel stories at the same time.”—Coover (1993)

About the Author

Author and technology consultant Fran Wilde’s work includes the novels Updraft (Tor, 2015) and Cloudbound (Tor, 2016). Her short stories appear in Asimov’s, Tor.com, and Nature. Her novella “The Jewel and Her Lapidary,” will be published by Tor.com publishing in May 2016. She writes for publications including The Washington Post, SFSignal, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, iO9.com, and GeekMom.com.

Editor’s Desk:
The Roundup

Neil Clarke

Several quick things for you this month:

Annual Reader’s Poll

Our annual reader’s poll is currently open! Please take the opportunity to tell us about your favorite 2015 Clarkesworld stories and cover art. The poll closes on February 23rd and the results will be published in our next issue. Details can be found here.

Hugo Awards

The nomination period for the 2016 Hugo Awards is also open. If you are eligible to nominate, we urge you to participate in the process. If you thought something we did or published was worthy of nomination this year, please check our eligibility list to find the category in which it belongs. This year’s list can be found here.

Where’s the Translation?

You might have noticed that we don’t have a translation this month. It took over a year to run into a scheduling problem, but we finally hit one we just couldn’t avoid. In this case both sides decided that the best course of action was to move a story from another future issue into this one and run two translations later this year. I apologize for the sudden change, but it will all work itself out in the end.

Mailing List

I’ve created a mailing list for Clarkesworld, Forever, Best Science Fiction of the Year, and all the other projects I’m editing. New projects will be announced there first and I promise not to send out more than one or two newsletters each month. You can sign up here.

SFWA Bulletin

Last month, I was named the new editor of The Bulletin, the official magazine of of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). I’ve been working there as interim editor for a few months and look forward to the challenge of working on this new project. If you are interested in writing some non-fiction for me, you can find the guidelines here.

Future Stuff

The Bulletin announcement triggered some concerns about my fiction work, and I would like to reassure everyone that I’m not abandoning Clarkesworld or any of the other projects I’m associated with. In fact, I’ll be announcing at least three more in the near future. Which leads me to . . .

Working Towards a 10th Anniversary and 50th Birthday

I have two major milestones coming up this year: my 50th birthday in August and the 10th anniversary of Clarkesworld in October—or July if you want to go by when we started work on it. I’d like to celebrate. Both events fall around Worldcon time, so we may throw a party there. We’re also trying to work out what to do for the big 10th anniversary issue. I’d love to have some input from our readers. Email me with your dream issue thoughts at neil@clarkesworldmagazine.com. It takes a lot of time to plan these things out, so don’t wait!

As for birthday presents—since you asked—I only have one thing on my list. It’s time to give up the day job. My family and I are trying to work out how to make that happen, but we need help to do so. If you are already subscribing to Clarkesworld or Forever, then thank you, that’s keeping the option on the table. If you haven’t been subscribing, now’s the time that would make the biggest difference to the future of this magazine.

I’ve mentioned before that a small percentage of our readers converting to subscribers would do the trick, but that’s easier said than done. Experience says that Clarkesworld will only be part of the puzzle. The new SFWA job helps. Forever helps. The anthologies help. Nothing stands on its own, but like a crowdfunding project, all the little bits add up to take you to your goal.

I think this is going to be a good year.

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Forever Magazine, and Upgraded; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a three-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). The innagural edition of his Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology series will be published by Night Shade Books this June. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Cover Art: Power Surge

Julie Dillon

About the Artist

Julie Dillon is a science fiction and fantasy illustrator creating art for books and magazines, as well as for her own projects and publications. She has won two Chesley awards, a Hugo Award, and has been nominated for two World Fantasy Awards.