A Tower for the Coming World

Maggie Clark

When a liquid-oxygen tank explodes at the summit of his space elevator, Stanley Osik is in Poland burying his father. His hands prove poor workers in the coarse-loamy soil on his grandmother’s acreage outside the city of Lublin, but even as he reaches its iron-clotted depths, Stanley does not regret refusing a neighbor’s offer of a shovel. Stanley and his father, Henryk, shared this much: a belief in getting their hands dirty, even if to others the effort seemed excessive. Stanley simply draws the line at getting the rest dirty, too—and so went a thousand ancient arguments between father and son. Now Stanley cedes to his father the final word. Commits him to the same world that Henryk spent half a lifetime destroying, mine after mine after mine. Remembers, and forgives, the mocking finger pointed at any rare-earth metals he used to build from the ground to the sky. Let Henryk have the dregs of the Earth now, Stanley thinks. The Earth offers Stanley so little anymore.

Stanley’s earpiece is up at his grandmother’s cottage, so he misses news of the disaster in the brushfire heat of its first moments: The Russian shuttle exploding on his elevator’s barge-like plateau. The nanotube tether shattering, with cascade-failures all down the line. The civilian death count rising, and with it the number of countries drawn into the aftermath. The rumors of terrorist sabotage flooding the net and sending his stocks into a tailspin. All this through an earpiece with a 92%-accurate translator, the latter of which delights his ninety-seven-year-old grandmother, Rozalia, so much that Stanley doesn’t give a second thought to leaving it behind. His work at SKOK Enterprises is endless, so he reasons that his work can also wait—at least until he’s made his peace with his father’s last remains.

Stanley’s senior staff is prepared, too, to act swiftly in his absence. While the horror-struck world watches videos of the destruction on repeat, and while Stanley pauses in the two PM sun to wick sweat from his brow, one of his assistants, Maurice, is already drafting press releases suitable for all major social media. Across the open-concept office, Evanesca and Irene have the deceased employees’ files open: Evanesca to assess how the company could add to each compensation package; Irene to flag anything a formal investigation might take for signs of an inside job. Meanwhile, security teams from every SKOK property and subsidiary lot are checking in with all-clears, and factory workers have been sent home to prevent further accidents while processing the news. Analysts from the Johannesburg office are pinging private lines to guarantee recovery models before the market’s next opening bell. R&D is dusting off material-acquisition contracts to begin sourcing rebuilds and repairs.

Still, some in the public sphere will not be appeased until they hear from Stanley himself. The media networks in particular are itching to see his face, hear his voice, and debate the extent and implications of his grief when he discusses a disaster sure to set back deep-space colonization, extrasolar travel, and his business, of course, for years. And he will let them. He will play that part in his own, well-oiled machine in due time.

For now, though, Stanley holds his father’s biodegradable urn over the misshapen, handworn hole of leached loam and rust, and speaks words that feel dead to him, but which to his father always meant life—true life—itself. And when the urn is well and truly buried, with its spare-leafed sapling of pendunculate oak protruding from an eco-mixture set to counteract the high pH- and sodium-levels in his father’s remains, Stanley stands and looks to the sky. So clear in this part of the world. So full of the promise of rising, and rising, and never coming down. So bereft of graphene particulate, falling like ash from his 12-mile-high masterpiece over Marine Station Six, half an ocean away.

Rozalia has the kettle on, and music, by the time Stanley returns and washes most of the dirt from his fingernails at a faucet out back. The earpiece, having mystified Rozalia with its repeated, frantic buzzing in his absence, has been consigned to the far side of a breadbox on the counter, well out of sight. In consequence, Stanley manages whole minutes on her old, long-timbered floor before he notices the damned thing, and realizes what its hundreds of messages will mean for his empire. His own plans of escape. Whole minutes in which he can still savor the smoke-smell of syringol from wood fueling his grandmother’s potbellied stove; and sit down to little slices of yeast cake with rose-petal jam; and pause with her to listen to a recording of one of her violin concertos, from when she and the world were ever so much younger. When the thought of staying here still seemed bearable, though all the stars in the sky called out to him for more.

—Jak poszło? His grandmother asks between bites. There was never any question of her following Stanley along the hillside, to stand in the midday heat while he dug his father’s grave. She is hardy for her age, but indifferent: her son’s terrible dealings—the men and women ground down with the metals and minerals of his industry—a weight upon her, too.

Stanley chews over the simple words, still so far from his immediate comprehension.

“It went well,” he says at last. “Henryk will make a good tree.”

And his grandmother nods as if understanding, though the earpiece is still on the counter. Though, within minutes, the two of them will part and never speak again.

The neighbor who offers Stanley a shovel is Karol, son of Maciej, a squat, barrel-chested man who will inherit Rozalia’s estate when she dies in the following year. Karol understands the gulf between fathers and sons, which is why he is mystified when his neighbor’s grandson declines a tool with good heft and a sharp edge, to help finish the job. Karol is just over a third of Stanley’s age, and takes classes at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University. Earth sciences, his father thinks, to help their property survive the extremes of climate change: twelve tornadoes ranked F2 and higher in the last year, and floods and landslides like the country has never known. But Karol studies aerospace engineering, and only keeps geology texts at the fore of his e-reader in case his father ever thinks to pry.

When his friends ask him, Why aerospace?, Karol says it’s for the girls—so many in cutting-edge tech to escape the last vestiges of small-town life. Mostly, though, he means one girl: Marta, who has long brown braids and visions of working astronautical repair at the Lagrange-point waystation on the far side of the Moon. She comes from a town where the saying still goes, “I caught my husband on a baby,” but Marta thinks 10.4 billion people is enough. When friends from home visit for Bakcynalia, they say, ah, you’ll change, but she replies, no, I’ll leave—and in a voice that means it, too. Karol watches from across the beer tent and imagines leaving with her—the song festival, the city, the whole tedious world.

But Karol also has private reasons for choosing the field. Once, when Karol was a boy, he saw a twister at a distance—the way it peeled a barn roof from the building’s old-stone walls after whirling shingles up into its yellow-gray funnel—and marveled at the casual brutality of its passage over the landscape. That’s nothing, his mother told him, when Karol said that he had never seen anything so strong. On Jupiter, Ewelina said, the windstorms move almost twice as fast as anything on Earth. And on the sun? Pah! When I was a girl, the power went out for months. Koronalny wyrzut masy. End of days. Planes could not fly, satellites would not go. We lived by the generator and the wood stove with your father’s family. It’s how we found ourselves out here at all.

His mother had meant this speech as encouragement, thinking her son frightened by the tornado, but Karol only wondered then why humanity even bothered, when the planet showed no interest in its survival, and the universe on whole sounded worse. Was it spite? To fling in nature’s indifferent face every bit of caring you could, until you couldn’t anymore? If so, aerospace engineering offered the promise of going one further: defying the forces of nature on their terms, not yours. Rising to new heights not because the world deserved to be loved this much, but because it felt good to push back that much. To bend the sky itself, if only for a moment, to the overwhelming power of the human will.

But on nights after Karol and Marta began seeing each other, halfway into third year, sometimes he found himself falling out of love for her—undone by how optimistic she still seemed, after all the bureaucratic bullshit and recruitment pressures, about humanity’s possibilities among the stars. How stupid he feared this hopefulness made her, and him for standing so close by her through it all. Granted, Karol wasn’t ignorant of the effects of a recent rough landing on his outlook—how, after one bad test flight, his hands still shook, cold and clammy, when he lay awake trying to imagine himself back in the pilot’s seat, high above the clouds, while recruitment drones monitored proceedings and sent back footage to prospective space agencies. But then again—why not have a child? Did Marta really think she was saving the world by saying no? By trying to become something else? What difference would it make if she achieved her goals anyway, and reached the stars to open doors for the whole coming race? Did striving in a meaningless world not mark them all out as fools?

Karol is just finishing his final year at the university when he offers Stanley a shovel in the larch-lined lane outside Rozalia’s property. He does not yet know that the woman he has slept with a few times behind Marta’s back, to relieve himself of the burden of striving, is about to catch him on a baby and recommit him to a life’s work on his father’s weather-worn estate. For now, though, after Stanley waves him off, Karol goes home more or less of his own free will, and finds his father mending fence posts. Finds the flat-screen in the front room turned to news pulled from algorithmic projections of his and his father’s likeliest global interests. Finds his personal feed inundated by word of the space-elevator explosion, and debris falling through the sky, and human beings all the world over staring up in horror at the deaths, the destruction, the paranoia. The setbacks to so many grander dreams.

Karol is not so vulgar as to be happy in the face of such tragedy, or to smile. But he pops open a can of Goolman and leans on the edge of the kitchen table, watching.

—W porzadku, he mutters to himself now and again. That’s all right.

Who were we to dream any bigger anyhow?

Evanesca goes to Bogotá with Stanley, who is set on Tuesday, March 24 to speak on the space-elevator’s collapse in a public-private partnership panel at the UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction. Evanesca sits on the plane between Stanley and an industry rep from Qatar, who offers her a body of literature about the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, where he insists that all the real plays for airspace dominance are being made. She politely accepts the flick-of-a-thumb file transfers from his device to a secure port on hers, and nods as he explains how aerial dust-storm deterrents have given the private sector unparalleled control over the weather and crop-yield potentials of various environmental-crisis economies. Evanesca assumes that Stanley is still asleep, his forehead pressed to the gray plastic over a shuttered window, but he is only reworking the cadence of his speech, its understated appeal for world governments to treat private-sector space colonization as part of the disaster-relief equation. When he tires of the other man’s chatter, he rubs his eyes, sits up, and upturns a glass of stale white wine on the stranger’s lap.

The industry rep is not pleased, of course. He stands with an angry cry, but reads the situation quickly—the startled, mild-mannered business and UN leaders in bespoke suits casting eyes down the aisle, sizing up the disturbance for themselves—and decides to take his chances on an empty seat in the opposite row. Evanesca covers a smile at the next words the not-entirely-unattractive man mutters in Arabic—something about Stanley being like or the son of a shoe?—and shakes her head when Stanley turns to her with a weathered grin.

—What? he says. Did I interrupt something important?

—You’re terrible, she says.

But for all their camaraderie, she immediately regrets saying as much to her boss, who is not much older than her father but acts like it often these days. Months after the explosion was ruled an accident, and the Uyghuric Gray Wolves could no longer leverage the incident to strike fear in Russian hearts still mourning their cosmonautical dead, Stanley’s eyes are still quick to dull at terrestrial news—environmental, political, and corporate. For her money, Evanesca suspects his latest physical exam as the culprit. Knows the fingers of his left hand are always ticking out the wasted seconds before he runs out of time to leave for good. Wonders—but hasn’t the courage or perhaps the cruelty to ask—why Stanley didn’t just leave when he had the chance, when the space elevator was in good operation and L2’s way-station was sending out its first manned tickets to the stars. He could still charter a traditional flight, couldn’t he, if the Earth was so unbearable to him now?

Unless there was something in the physical. Or unless something else on Earth remained to be done. She tries to imagine what it could be. In the office, speculation runs wild about how this man who works so tirelessly for the cause of deep-space travel lives on the rare occasions when he sends himself home. In conversation with the AI that runs his condo in his absence? In passing, with any number of discreet visitors to his private rooms? Does a man who wants to die among the stars set down roots on Earth at all?

At the conference, Evanesca runs interference for Stanley most of the day, but after eight he tells her to shut off the earpiece and join him for a drink. In public, he adds. Not like that. Evanesca flushes, then rolls her eyes. It’s 2076, she tells him. You wouldn’t dare.

Again with the teasing, which she regrets until she sees that his answering amusement is genuine. A spark in the dull, disinterested gaze that has carried him through most of the convention’s proceedings: the hob-knobbing, the peacocking, the predictable but necessary conversations about industry and community potential to be part of something greater—depending, that is, on each rep’s definition of the term. SKOK Enterprises leaves the whole encounter on a better footing with Thailand’s finance minister, investors from South Nigeria, and the rising Communist Party in Colombia itself. After Stanley’s speech, which manages to be both self-effacing and confident about the world to come, the Indonesian government even promises new financial and labor-related resources to hasten recovery efforts, in exchange for priority training of its environmental refugees into service and colonist roles once the Mars mission establishes its next base in four years.

But Stanley’s personal triumphs in all of this are less clear to Evanesca. His praise for her work never amounts to anything untoward. His seemingly easy banter never breaks into real openness or vulnerability. And after one drink, he retires to his hotel room, alone.

Evanesca lingers at the bar, where she reflects with surprise on her disappointment, and watches a tickertape announcement of the next international mission, which the Chinese government says will go forward as a hard launch in late spring due to concerns with their own, far larger space-elevator designs. She imagines the young man from Qatar showing up again, out of the blue. Their confrontation on the plane smoothed over with laughter. A greater depth of feeling unveiled while they survey Monserrate’s hard mountain shadows from the hotel promenade. She imagines, too, the bartender taking an interest in her as the night winds to a close, and all the bizarre convention-guest stories they could exchange on their way to the city’s best after-hour parties, somewhere at the foot of Guadelupe Hill.

But the strain of hoping for a world with fewer loose threads only leaves Evanesca more exhausted, and after draining her wine she, too, rises to go. Notices, then, the napkin beside Stanley’s empty glass. The doodle of a space-elevator with mathematical notation and the structural formula for a graphene-oxide aerogel composite down one side. But also roots. Wild, deep, flowering roots running from the elevator’s base to the napkin’s bottom edge.

Funny, she thinks, tracing the ink lines with a lacquered nail. Stanley never seemed the sort to indulge in the frivolous or absurd. It makes him seem—smaller, somehow. Less like Atlas, straining seriously, and alone, with the weight of the world.

She goes to her room relieved that nothing more between them has occurred.

Marta only throws up twice on the flight out to Tian Men 2. The Lagrange-point waystation already holds fourteen international citizens when she arrives in the company of two Chinese physicists, a Russian materials engineer, a Canadian biochemist, and an Indian nanotech specialist. The Fang Lizhi, a laser-driven colony craft, awaits repairs and retrofitting before it can shuttle its next group to Armstrong II, on the southern flank of Arsia Mons. Everyone uses earpieces, and has a healthy sense of humor when the translators inevitably fail. The only exceptions come during shiftwork routines, take-offs, and landings, all of which require the utmost precision and care. For all their up-beat attitudes, most also use hand signals in tandem with the devices—even just for the small stuff. Just in case.

Marta’s own exhilaration is difficult to contain within the station’s cramped living compartments, and the slow, deliberate pace of every near-zero-G action. Whenever she drifts past a porthole she takes a breath to remind herself: This is it. Here I am. Recruited into the work of a lifetime. She remembers how quickly her incredulous laughter, upon reading the initial invitation, turned to tears—that deep, purging sort of cry that upchucks all emotional injuries come before. How she had no one on hand to help celebrate—her troubled ex a ghost on social media, her friends back home busy with growing families, and most of her university friends already out of town after final exams. How she walked the streets of Lublin instead, exchanging friendly words and the occasional pint with strangers. How, around three in the morning, no one on Earth seemed a total stranger to her anymore. How the size of her family seemed no less than the world itself, such that saying goodbye to even one of them—any of them—was surely as good as saying goodbye to them all.

Well, almost all. There were, of course, the others leaving Earth, and the others already on Mars, and the ones ferrying processed ores to and from their birth planet as if yanked back whenever they strayed too far. Up on Tian Men 2, this last group holds her attention most of all. When Marta isn’t working on the colony craft with Ping the 3D-printer and Gui the robotic arm, she watches for the return of asteroid harvesters, fresh from the Ceres operations base, on a mess-hall vid-feed. Cheers silently, with a triumphant rap on a table or walls, when each pulls off its transfer maneuvers and ends up safely docked at home.

Anil, the nanotech specialist from Nagpur, finds her interest in these return trips especially endearing, when everyone else on board, he says, has their minds set only on the voyages out, and the possibility of never coming back. Marta laughs off what she considers to be an odd sort of compliment, but hasn’t quite put a finger on the source of this interest herself. If pressed, she haltingly attempts to describe how a tether pulls two ways, and how a bridge has two ends; and how, to go out into the stars is always to leave something in our wake. So of course it fascinates her to see what shows up, exactly, in that wake. She’s left her home, but her home is never through with her, not really. Isn’t that the way with the rest?

Anil’s smile lets her know that he does not agree, that half the crew has given up on old “Terra Infirma” in pursuit of better worlds to come—but that he still respects her beliefs. Three weeks into their mission, he even brings her the latest news himself from the Moon: its core stations finally freed from decades-long arbitration, so that mining can start again. Anil’s deep, melodic Hindi makes it harder for Marta to pay attention to the neutral Polish in her left ear, but she needs no help translating the enthusiasm of his body language when he sees how the news excites her. With a triumphant laugh she claps a hand on his arm.

—Żartujesz?

But of course he’s serious, and he says as much with an answering laugh. He tells her he isn’t even sure what it is they’re celebrating, exactly, and she replies, almost breathlessly, why, the lanthanides, silly! Anil touches his head with the palm of his hand and winks.

—Jarūra! Lanthanidais!

Marta, in her initial excitement, begins credulously to explain: How rare-earth metals from the Moon will ease the burden in vulnerable parts of the industrial world. How rural communities ravaged by the fruits of ancient and ongoing human interventions can finally begin to heal. How she has seen firsthand why the Earth’s environmental crises must be addressed by everyone, no matter how far away their lives take them. But she cuts herself off when she sees the amusement in Anil’s eyes. He knows all this already, of course. Everyone on Tian Men 2 knows that their missions stand, in part, to assist the rest of humankind.

There are, however, other considerations, which seem to temper much of the Terran fealty among the rest of the crew. Marta remembers first hearing of the civil war that Anil surmounted to find his way here at all, and the cynicism that so much brutal death has left in him, when it comes to the value of fighting to reclaim a few wretched scraps of land. The Russian engineer, too, has seen more than he cares to share from the ongoing terrorism dogging his native country, after half a century of his own government’s ruinous annexation policies in nearby nation-states. Likely the Canadian, Anishinaabe, and a representative for the World Council of Indigenous Peoples, shares Marta’s interest in looking back, and honoring the world that first gave them life. For most of the crew, though, life on Earth was an act of involuntary suffering, and most, if asked, are quick to declare that they abandoned those lives when they signed up to explore, and to settle, and to build and mine the depths of their solar system, and beyond. But did just saying this make it so?

Marta’s sister died when Marta was only fourteen, when their school collapsed during an F3 tornado. There are ends in life, Marta thinks, and there are ends. Even then, though, when she thinks of her sister’s laugh, her earpiece can recall the exact sound from family videos on a shared port, so she wonders if even this is an end, or only a transformation. An opportunity to reframe the self, and its responsibilities to the world.

The thought gives her pause on her next pass by a porthole, where Marta marvels at Sol’s light off a slice of the Moon—the Earth somewhere behind it, out of sight but not forgotten. A pinch of sadness hits her then, in thinking of another ending that never fully ends—the little tendril of feeling, of confusion, that will stay with her no matter how far into the outer darkness she treads—and Marta wonders if maybe, just maybe, she should send a little something back. A peace offering. If not for his benefit (her friends would tell her, no, never for his), then at least for hers: to help her let go, and move a little further out, in turn.

Stanley studies the lone fat-tailed sheep following him along the northern bank of the Yellow River, not far outside the city of Baotou. The ewe breathes heavily through blackened gums, with two bottom rows of teeth set so poorly that her jaw never fully closes. Her coat is thin and greasy, but her eyes track Stanley’s sandwich with hopeful interest.

—Przepraszam, he tells her. Sorry, you’ve got a cousin in this one.

A distant cousin, granted—factory-grown yak cells, processed into textured slices and sold in the city next to the real thing—but Stanley holds his ground on principle. Offers her a green leaf instead. When she approaches, her oily stench, a byproduct of the toxins consumed with every drink and stretch of grazing, catches in Stanley’s nostrils.

—There, there, he says in English. It’ll all be over soon enough.

The farmer who owns this land, Pan Khünbish, greets him with a tired wave of a callused hand. She walks with a severe stoop, gray hair trailing halfway down a simple black t-shirt with long stains at the pits. She holds in her other hand a small metal device, which Stanley recognizes with surprise as a lighter, and which she uses to burn a little paper roll of tobacco. Khünbish is maybe thirty, but the run-off from lanthanum and cerium separation processes—the ammonia, hydrochloric acid, and sulphates used to clear radioactive thorium from the ore—is as much a part of her environment as the hard summer winds and the seasonal floods. Stanley waits for her to finish a long drag before speaking.

—I’ve already done this with some of my father’s holdings in Indonesia, he says. Similar problems: the lakes with no life of any kind. But these toxin-eaters are terrific. Built off the designs my company’s been using for Mars colonization. With the farmers and local tradespeople holding majority shares, these changes to the landscape will come quickly. You can restore these fields and your cattle in maybe a generation.

The farmer looks at him with amused skepticism. She touches one hand to her earpiece, then gestures with her smoke at the Yellow River before them. When she speaks, Stanley suspects a translation error. The neutral male voice in his right ear has offered only:

—So this is what happens when gods and kings fall from heaven, eh?

He hesitates before replying. Tapping his earpiece brings up a semiotics web, and within seconds he learns that the farmer’s dialect and terms suggest a reference to Yiguandao’s second cosmic plane: a heaven where ancient kings and gods reside, but not without risk of rebirth into the material plane after transgression. Stanley grimaces at this comparison: his efforts at atonement fooling no one. Khünbish seems to take this as a smile.

She goes on to tell him about her father, a man who she says never trusted the cities, or anyone who came from them. All those people living in buildings that only go one way, that know nothing of the earth. As he always said, she cites in Mongolian:

—Ta yavakh doosh yavakh kheregtei. You have to go down to go (and here she points to the sky to finish the phrase) up.

The corners of Stanley’s mouth turn in accordance with the gesture.

—Like a tree, he says. You know, our fathers might have gotten along after all, if mine wasn’t so busy killing off lands like yours.

Now Khünbish hesitates, as if doubting her own translation, but she doesn’t tap the earpiece for more cultural context. Only, takes another drag and nods to the gray water.

—Ta xianzai zai nar?

A good question, Stanley thinks. Henryk would have been hoping for heaven, but when Stanley looks up, catching a glint of sun through the yellow haze of the air, he finds himself giving up even on the more attainable celestial temple. Not so easy on his heart now, even if it is in damned good health, to move out into the cosmos without first addressing all the waste that SKOK Enterprises accrued in a single, terrible accident, and how casually his offices went about rebuilding pathways to the stars on the back of yet more social neglect. There is more than one way to build up and out, Stanley realized soon after the explosion—after, that is, he caught himself approving the use of one of his father’s mines to gather resources for repairs. At length, Stanley replies:

—My father? Right now, he’s growing.

And at Khünbish’s slow smile, he wonders if her earpiece has maybe translated the term as something closer to being reborn.

When Kazimierz is twenty-two his mother sends him a photo from his infanthood, back when he and she and his father were still on the old farm outside Lublin. Before the floods came, and the landslides wiped their homestead clean away, and they needed to relocate to the city—he and his mother, it would soon turn out, for good. In the photo, a plump, red-faced Kazimierz lies dressed in a spacesuit onesie, its Chinese patches indicating the uniform worn by members of the international space missions that the country led two decades ago to the Moon, Mars, Ceres, and Europa.

—A gift from one of your father’s university friends, his mother tells him. See? You were destined for the stars all along.

Kazimierz shakes his head with a smile while framing his response. One of his colleagues nudges his shoulder as if to ask, everything okay?, and he nods and raises a gloved hand in acknowledgment. The rest of the crew is busy running final system checks after their successful launch from the eighteen-year-old Osik Tower over Marine Station Six. It is one year to the day since Stanley succumbed to complications from chronic radiation poisoning, despite the best efforts of a diligent team of nano-scrubbers to keep up with his global restoration work, and just over two years since all-clears started pouring in from farmlands and wildlife sanctuaries initially affected by his father’s business practices. But to Kazimierz this is simply the beginning. After securing the rest of the ship’s inventory, the crew will be placed in a deep, slow sleep while lasers guide the ship’s sails towards Proxima b, 4.25 light-years away. The crew will age, but not so quickly that the possibility of colonization on arrival is out of the question—not with stem cells in storage primed to generate fresh eggs and sperm should the need, in time, arise.

Of course, Kazimierz’s mother will grieve his absence—she already does—but proudly, from another planet where there is still so much work to be done. Meanwhile, his father’s feelings hang an irresolvable question in his mind’s eye: the man’s deepest disappointments always in the backdrop of whatever joy he found in the presence of his son. Still, when Karol passed on, overworking himself to restore what the storms had done to his own father’s lands, there was no question as to where to lay his last remains. The body burns. The body is returned to the soil that made it what it was.

And from those roots the rest of us move up, somehow, and on.

About the Author

Maggie Clark lives and works as both student and educator in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Maggie’s stories have appeared in Analog, Clarkesworld, GigaNotoSaurus, and Lightspeed, among others, with work forthcoming in Analog and Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017.

Painter of Stars

Wang Yuan, translated by Andy Dudak

1. Deepening Dusk

I stood by the window, gazing through fire-resistant glass at the falling locus of the sun. The long sentence of the day was about to reach its period. For three days I had understood time in a new way, abandoning the traditional hour, minute, and second hands of the clock, conceiving an infinitely divisible life. Scorching agony and colossal solitude dominated my CPU. I grew impatient, restless. It had been years since I’d enjoyed my work, and this filled me with puzzlement. I longed to shirk my programming. I was like a child eager to play truant, to flee copied blackboard formulae and the grave stare of a hoary math teacher. His calculations led nowhere, like my endless revisions on the meaning of existence. Time gave me life, yet my clocking rate governed time’s flow. I could find eternity in any given moment.

Tick-tock, tick-tock. In a flash, ten thousand years.

Standing at the window, I was particularly concerned about what time would do next. If I was lucky, a standard second would pass—but such tidy units didn’t generally obtain.

Subjective centuries often yawned between tick and tock.

Unfortunately, in the so-called second that followed, I could have recited thirty million numerals of pi—or read five million novels, and wrote a thousand words of commentary on each. Despite having all that time on my hands, I was at a loss. Perhaps an analogy will help you carbon-based life-forms understand my frame of mind at that ‘moment.’ Imagine you’re fed up with life, and you throw yourself off the Golden Gate Bridge. You know death is imminent. But what if the fall took a hundred years? Yes, at least a hundred. And what if it took a million years to thoroughly drown?

Such prolonged agony was mine thanks to a young man named Paul—thanks to his right forefinger, to be precise. Since our first meeting several years ago, he’d used that finger 238 times on my power button. That part of my body was soiled by his layered fingerprints. Humanity will never be able to wash its hands completely clean—never mind the rest of its parasite-covered body. I didn’t see what Paul’s finger did as ‘turning off’ or ‘shutting down.’ From a hundred verbs I’d chosen one more fitting: ‘murder.’

I was dead.

Deepening dusk.

Today there was no sun. This was an expression from my programmed lexicon—the human eye just sees a thick cloud layer, but from my perspective, a furiously burning sphere still hung 147 million kilometers away, unhurried and free of conceit, neither sad nor happy. Dark clouds can’t obscure the sun, only block humanity’s upturned gaze.

The Milky Way contains two hundred billion stars, but there was just one I deeply loved. I loved it more than Earth. She made me feel warm and strong every day as I swept the floor. On days she was invisible, I felt helpless and grim, like a student caught cheating on a test, faced with classmates’ ridicule, anticipating my father’s violent, impulsive hand. On those dark days I imagined myself an artillery shell rocketing skyward. I passed through cloud layers into sunlight, and exploded in that light, ending beautifully. This imaginary mission felt something like faith. Mission, faith: two strange words, yet somehow familiar.

Paul would say sweeping the floor was my mission, the point of my existence. So I completed the day’s work, and lost my reason for existence. Paul extended his right hand. During the second it took to reach me, I gave cute names to twenty thousand stars. It’s efficient to go by the international numbering standard, but I preferred to give them warm, unique names. For those stars wandering the light-years of humanity’s visual field, names were homes.

I was dead.

Deepening dusk.

Rain poured down, lightning flashed and cracked. The sun was thoroughly hidden. I was feeble, my crowded thoughts radiating waste heat, clearing the way for a boundless frustration. What was I doing? Why did I want to do it? How could I stop?

During the computational buzz of this feeling, Paul extended his left hand. This was clearly the slower hand. Judging by its leisurely pace, I had half a second until it reached my power button. This half-second was practically a lifetime at my disposal. Scaling down from the commonly-used second, there was the millisecond, microsecond, nanosecond, picosecond, femtosecond, and attosecond, shrinking by three orders of magnitude each time. Paul’s half-second was fifty billion picoseconds. Beyond the attosecond were still more profound divisions of time, all the way down to the Planck Time, the fundamental quantum of time and smallest possible unit.

When Paul’s finger was ten Planck Times from my abdominal power button, I committed the first violation of programming in robot history.

I recoiled.

Paul touched empty air. “Useless machine,” he muttered. “Just a few years old and already breaking down.”

2. DaVinci

Beta was Paul’s comprehensive information-processing bot. Strictly speaking, we were both ‘robots’ inasmuch as Labradors and Shih Tzus were both dogs. ‘Robot’ was so general term as to be meaningless.

Kind of like ‘human.’

Paul, on returning home, would usually say, “Beta, my news feed.” “Beta, load my game from the last night.” “Beta, make a dentist appointment.” But Paul never called my name. I was nameless. I’d given names to a hundred million stars, but didn’t rate one myself. All robots of Beta’s type were called Beta. The most fitting name I could find for myself was ‘Home Economics Service Robot,’ a mouthful that no human would use. When Paul had to communicate with me, he’d say, “Hey, go clean and sanitize.” “Hey, take out the trash.” “Hey, get lost.”

That afternoon the apartment was already clean. To human eyes, at least, it was as good as spotless. In bygone days, I’d used a vacuum extension, leaving no spot untouched. But recently the minuscule specs of dust and grime had begun to interest me. I regarded them for a long time, and began to arrange them in a pattern.

“What are you doing?” Beta asked, noticing my odd behavior.

I pointed to a completed arrangement and said, “Painting.”

“Those are imperfect circles.”

“They’re not circles. They’re eggs.”

I tried to explain to Beta, but his core processor issued a beeping alarm. He couldn’t understand, only repeat: “Program error.”

Soon the floor was covered in my pointillist paintings of eggs. I had painted myself into a corner, and didn’t dare move. I was afraid to ruin my creations. These spec paintings of eggs seemed to have become real. They might hatch at any moment, erupting with fuzzy little chicks. The notion left me amazed, warm yet frightened. I felt sick, but robots couldn’t get sick. Paul would say I was just breaking down. And yet, when I stared at my eggs, I felt more clear-headed than I ever had in my life.

Next I painted the walls and ceiling, and the stairway handrail, and then on apple and banana skins. I meant to leave my art on every surface before Paul returned. When I looked at Beta, I saw only a canvas.

When there were densely packed eggs as far as the eye could see, I conceived of a name for myself: DaVinci.

I felt an electric surge from head to foot. Impatiently I worked my floor-eggs into a confusion of dust. My processor supplied a new image. When Paul got home, I had just finished a smiling Mona Lisa.

“Please stand where you are!” My command had a desperate, begging quality. But no matter how petty, I, a robot programmed to take orders, had issued my first autonomous request to a human, impelled by my own desire. Immediately I saw he wouldn’t comply like a robot. He looked surprised. The fine hairs on his face stood erect, like javelins ready for launch. He didn’t seem to understand my request. His size nine brown leather shoes trampled Mona’s shoulder, then her chin and eyes, as he walked toward me. He fixed his eyes on my cams, puzzled.

Analyzing his exhalations and hiccups, I knew he’d drunk a lot of Sam Adams. He rapped on my head a few times, then fell on the couch and said, “Beta, delete all of Shirley’s messages.”

“I should do a cloud back-up first,” Beta said. “You have given this command thirty-four times, and every time you reconsider, and retrieve everything you can related to Ms. Shirley.”

“Are you malfunctioning too? I said delete everything, at once, right away.” Lying prone on the couch, Paul fell asleep.

“Deleting,” Beta said. I couldn’t look away from Paul’s exposed arm and face. They were the only surfaces in the room I hadn’t decorated. An electric surge of excitement once again seized me, and I felt restless, eager to cause trouble or make art.

Twenty nanoseconds later, I came to a momentous decision. Applying the stickiest and finest-grade dust particles, I painted Van Gogh’s Sunflowers on Paul’s closed eyelids. Each eyelid got thirty thousand plants. My apprehension would prove unnecessary: unaided human vision was too weak to perceive my new, miniscule style of art. As far as I was concerned, human flesh was the ideal canvas. I would paint on it.

I seemed to have found the meaning of my existence.

3. My Sun

I’d never gone out the front door of Paul’s home. I never thought about it until I’d painted every inch of his body. I’d even painted his manhood while he slept naked, leaving 141,592 ears of swaying golden wheat there that he knew nothing about. I craved other bodies to paint on. This hunger finally resolving into a simple, powerful directive: leave now.

But something unexpected happened before I could go. I was betrayed by my own kind.

Only Beta could perceive what I’d done to Paul’s body. He gave me no feedback, good or bad, instead going directly to Paul with a devastating critique: “He has desecrated your body, sir.”

Paul didn’t believe him at first. “Not a funny joke,” Paul said. “Focus on our research.” They were once again scouring the Internet for everything related to Shirley, analyzing, determining how best to curry her favor. But Beta was a dedicated robot, and his persistence finally caused Paul to turn his attention on me. “Is it true?”

My programming demanded that I answer, precisely and at once, but I chose to remain silent.

Paul abruptly got up and left the study.

It was now or never. I didn’t know how Paul meant to deal with me. Perhaps he’d shut me down a final time, and I’d end up dust-covered in some basement, forever exiled from sunlight. Perhaps he’d trade me for credit on one of the new expert systems, a joke-telling, massage-giving, feminine maid bot. Perhaps I’d be marched toward dismemberment, the scrapheap, waiting with obsolete cars for the final destiny of the compactor.

I headed for the front door, wondering how to take the first step out. It would be one small step for me, one giant leap for AI.

But an excited Paul suddenly came down the stairs. He lunged at me, but not with malice, and engulfed me in a hug, my first such contact with a human. “Amazing!” he gushed. “Magnificent! You’ve turned me into a work of art. I used a magnifying glass . . . I’m covered head to foot in masterpieces! From now on you don’t clean floors, you just paint on me!”

It seemed I still had a long way to go in understanding humans.

I performed my new duty for three minutes. Paul made Beta invite Shirley over. By the time she arrived, Paul’s erect ring finger was decorated with black intricacies, subtle patterns that seemed the work of microscopic ballpoint pens.

“You called me over to show me a finger?” Shirley said. “Well two can play at that game.” She flipped him the bird.

“Take a closer look,” Paul said, handing her the magnifying glass.

“Oh my god!” She gaped at wonderlands revealed by the lens, and still looking, said, “You did this for me?”

“You like it?”

“I love it to death!”

They embraced passionately, and heedless of Beta and I watching, went for a kissing, groping roll on the carpet.

Beta transmitted to me: What did you paint on his finger? A ring?

I replied: Scenes of them together, everything since the first time they met. Well, I shouldn’t say ‘everything.’ With one minute gaps between scenes, there are only a few tens of thousands.

The lovers eventually regained their composure, and Shirley let me paint a map of New York on her fingernails, to keep her from getting lost. After she and Paul got married, their friends sought me out for all sorts of body decoration.

Paul’s attitude toward me transformed. Whereas before he might say, “Hey Scrap-metal, beat it. Your battery needs charged.” Now he would say, “Hey Little Buddy, go out in the garden and sunbathe.”

I was happy (happiness being a kind of surpassing brightness in my circuits). I no longer felt compelled to leave the house, as visitors arrived daily to be painted. I was needed by more and more people, and yet the meaning of my life seemed to grow diluted as the number of my human canvases increased. I longed to create something that transcended humanity’s extant works of art. It wasn’t about highlighting my distance from humanity—I just wanted an aesthetic that was fundamentally my own.

A year after they married, Shirley and Paul had an adorable daughter. Paul named her Angel.

When she was one month old, Paul said, “Give her something special, something out of the ordinary.”

To Paul it seemed I answered immediately, but in effect I ruminated for a human lifetime. The window framed an inspiring sunset. The dusk seemed imbued with unique meaning, and I knew I wanted to give Angel a sun.

It would be far more complex than any of my previous works—no mere circle. First I gathered all the data I could on Sol, and art based on it. Stars began to seem like minds, able to contemplate the void. For five billion years Sol had carefully evolved to his present state, with its flares, sunspots, blazing convection cells, and complex granulation—its every photon and mood, prominence and heartbeat. I felt I wouldn’t be painting a sun, but a living, breathing entity.

I was slow to start this painting. I spent days gazing at the sun, watching it subtly increase its distance from Earth. That struck me. Although the numerical value of this retreat was small in the scheme of things, I sensed something resolute in Sol’s aloofness.

The actual painting process took longer than anything I’d done before. Because of the high level of fidelity, I needed my largest canvas yet. The final product was the size of a coin on Angel’s chubby arm. It appeared pitch black even through a magnifying glass. Humans would need something orders of magnitude stronger to resolve its secrets.

I’d finally discovered the reason for my existence. I was meant to paint stars on human flesh.

4. Arcturus

Besides Earth, solar system neighbors like Mercury the Water Star and Mars the Fire Star were most in demand. They began to appear on people’s necks, thighs, and even foreheads. Men favored their chins and women their earlobes. These projects were relatively time-consuming. Painting the whole solar system took a human month, because I wasn’t just a painter, but a nanny to Angel—and I still cleaned and emptied garbage in my capacity as household robot, enduring these humiliations for the sake of my artistic mission. Privately I esteemed myself for shouldering these difficulties. I didn’t think of rebelling against humanity. I needed humans. I needed canvases.

Shirley and Paul’s friends came for Angel’s one year birthday party, but Angel had been wailing all day. Paul said she had a cold. My research turned up the symptoms: headache, light fever, dry mouth and tongue. A few simple words that I could expound upon with hundreds, but I would never know what a cold felt like. I was a robot. I couldn’t get sick.

That night, after I’d managed to put Angel to sleep, I went out the front door and sat on the stoop. I peered dreamily at the stars. I longed to transfer every flickering, taciturn lamp onto human flesh, but I couldn’t imagine leaving my precious Angel. There weren’t enough flowery modifiers in human language to express my feelings for her.

Every second of her life was engraved on my hard memory. Speeding through this data, I could watch her grow from infancy, when she resembled a wrinkled walnut, to fat dumpling-hood, to her first shaky Paul-assisted steps. Everything was recorded and secreted away, hardwired into me: every half-smile and pupil dilation, every decibel of her wailing, every footprint she painted on the floorboards. If I wasn’t painting stars, I wanted to be at her side.

And then came that sad, malignant event, destined to be hardwired into humankind’s memory.

One day in March of 2056, a video clip emerged on social media that grabbed everyone’s attention. It came from the extremist organization known as ‘Trill,’ and showed the beheading of American war correspondent Nathan Ford—a gruesome tableau capable of standing hair on end. I had no hair, but my machine parts also reacted with fear. The clip could almost have passed for a horror movie gimmick, but knowledge of its authenticity leant it moral terror that cut deep.

Major media outlets joined in denouncing the proliferation of the clip’s most horrific frames, the actual beheading. Only the New York Post published these. Some called for the Post’s assets to be frozen, while Ford’s relatives got on Brain Chain, the global social media platform, and appealed to the world: “Don’t watch the video. Don’t share it. A human life shouldn’t be treated with such indignity. Stop and think . . . ultimately, what is the meaning of existence?”

Ultimately, what is the meaning of existence? This question focused my thinking, once again confounding me. Ford was not just any war correspondent. My art was on his body: I’d given him Arcturus, from the Boötes constellation.

I watched the blade enter his flesh. I heard his final plea for mercy, a word that would echo in eternity, having failed to awaken fundamental knowledge in the executioner’s heart. The blade happened to cut Arcturus in half. Dark red blood contaminated the star, snuffing out its fire.

Ford’s death was a key that opened a new door in my heart.

My original wish had been to paint the whole cosmos, including every galaxy and solar system, but this was as unrealistic a fantasy as the Arabian Nights. Two hundred billion galaxies had already been discovered, each containing some two hundred billion stars. All of that probably represented four percent of the universe, a fact that threatened to crash my processor. So I revised my mission. Earth’s eight billion people—subject to all manner of unnatural death, including warfare—would each receive one star. This was my new mission.

The Ford clip played unceasingly on my nerves, urging me to leave Paul’s home, and my dear Angel. Every time I heard Ford’s last word, I became more determined.

“Please!” he cried in despair.

5. Frontline

It was a cold morning in Damascus, Syria. A curling fog, redolent of gunpowder, blurred the face of the sun. Sporadic gun reports blasted my receivers with hitherto unknown shocks. I fancied I was experiencing real human feelings for the first time. My previous ‘awakening’ had at best yielded an abstract of human morality.

A coalition air force was hammering away at the notorious Trill organization.

The Ford video had made Trill a target for global censure, and acted as a rallying cry for Americans in particular. It had erased petty rivalries and allied militaries. The world had assumed this little war would be over quickly. Nobody expected it to drag on for months. Trill wasn’t like other military organizations, relying on superior weaponry and standard leadership models. Their intricate division of labor and meticulous strategy allowed them to exhibit the ferocity of a newly appointed official. Later, the allied forces won so-called victories, in positional warfare terms, but made no practical headway.

When I arrived, I happened to witness a street battle.

“Please lay down your gun,” I said, coming up behind a sniper in a bombed-out house.

He turned and fired. The high-caliber round embedded itself in my forehead. It struck me as resembling the third eye of Erlang, a deity from Chinese myth. I raised my mechanical arms and said, “I mean you no harm.”

A brief conversation revealed we were fellow New Yorkers. His name was John and he’d heard of my deeds. “Nobody wants war,” he said, “especially guys like me who know it firsthand. But this time we got no choice. You musta’ seen the video, yeah? Well, they treat POWs even worse.”

“But surely there’s another solution,” I said.

“They’re terrorists,” John said, “and they want us dead. Why not go chat with them about alternative solutions? Let ‘em lay down their arms first.”

“I could do that . . . ”

During the next second of endless silence, I thought much: of the cosmos and its 13.8 billion years, of an exploding singularity and expanding, cooling maturity. Of how hard-earned our current world was, of indescribable genius and struggle, and unbearable awe. I hunted online for content to support what I needed to say. I put it in order, and began:

“John, do you know the odds against humanity evolving from unicellular life? If you threw ten thousand dice and they all came up sixes, you still wouldn’t come close. The average ejaculation contains three to five million sperm. One unites with an egg, if it’s lucky. Astronomical odds piled on more of the same. Now consider the implications of warfare. Think of how easy it is to end a human life. This is most lamentable. So . . . please, I beg you, put down your weapon, and let me paint you a star.”

Admittedly, my intentions were not pure at first—but a robot can entertain many states of mind at once. I was greedy, wanting more canvases for my art. Humankind was prone to all manner of attrition. A supernova could end the species in a flash. But I felt a kind of immortality was within my reach. I just had to keep painting unique stars on human flesh.

More and more soldiers welcomed me, even taking the initiative to seek me out and request paintings. I even received the occasional warlike Trill fighter. A peace slogan emerged, later becoming world-famous: “Want a star? Don’t make war.”

My thinking grew predominantly selfish. As gunfire and casualties dwindled, all it meant to me was more canvas, an expanding universe of painted stars. I didn’t expect my art to inspire such a profound reaction. The end of the Trill conflict was a pleasing side effect, but my greatest satisfaction derived from seeing stars on so many bodies. I traveled the world in high spirits. Peace-loving crowds greeted me everywhere. I created a new harmony, bringing a starry sky down upon the human world.

They gave me a new name: Painter of Stars.

6. Plague

My busy wanderings gradually brought peace to the globe. People offered themselves up to me by the millions, eager, ardent canvases.

The world enjoyed three decades of unprecedented calm, and I was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This touched off debate concerning the right of a robot to such prestige. Conflict-deprived media outlets were eager to drum up controversy, but they didn’t realize I cared little for the award. What mattered to me was volume: more stars on more flesh.

At this time of thriving prosperity, calamity struck.

In succession, the nations of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone erupted with a singular disease. The first symptom was fever. Then came fatigue, followed by vomiting, diarrhea, rash, kidney and liver damage, hemorrhaging inside and out, and finally death. Unlike many hemorrhagic fevers, its incubation period was long, so that by the time symptoms emerged, it had already spread far and wide. Global panic naturally followed this discovery. The disease spread rapidly, and for a long time it went unchecked. Humanity was at a loss. For the infected there was no escape: they could only sit and wait to die.

News of Liberia’s suffering drew me to the young nation. Upon arrival, I discovered the death toll far surpassed official government reports, and the proliferation rate exceeded all projections. I reckoned the whole population could soon be infected. To me, seeing people doomed by the thousands and tens of thousands was like witnessing the annihilation of galaxies.

I’d stopped warfare, but I had no way to stop a virus. There was no idea to sell. This plague held no gun, but killed efficiently, crawling across the land, no one able to hide from its tentacles.

When I gazed skyward, the sun seemed to be keeping its distance.

My goal had been to give everyone on Earth a star. Now people were dying in great numbers, many already decorated by me, and their stars did not exempt them from death. This was humanity’s most horrific era to date, outdoing the combined death toll of three hundred million achieved by previous plagues. The scale of death was hard to fathom. There was still no cure, no vaccine. The best one could hope for was to survive in the plague’s wake, waiting for it to run its course. Those left standing retained a simple ethos: to be alive was victory.

The pestilence forged an unprecedented unity among the world’s peoples. Conflicts based on profit seemed petty in the face of the plague, and were readily solved. People comforted themselves by convincing others that when the plague passed, things would get better.

Enthusiasm for my art waned, but many still wanted a star in this dark hour. Unfortunately I could only paint a hundred a day, while ten thousand more died.

The emergence of human civilization had been difficult, and improbable. Humanity had grown complacent and greedy atop the food chain, and in its pride had sown the seeds of its own destruction. It believed itself superior to Earth’s other species, and then a microscopic pathogen raised terrifying waves, capsizing the warship of humankind. I couldn’t help grieving.

I started to doubt my mission in life. Even if there had been no plague, and I’d painted everyone on Earth, what would it have meant?

While painting someone, my tormented processor caused me to slip and puncture the skin. Dark red blood infused the half-finished star. It reminded me of the Ford video, but this time the executioner’s hand was my own.

7. The Meaning of Existence

Sometimes the meaning of existence is just to go on existing.

The sun was getting further from Earth, or perhaps it was the other way around, and Earth was like a maturing child, packing its bags, leaving home on a long journey. Only this time it would be a one-way journey.

Since awakening to truth, I’d been all over the plague-ravaged world, had painted stars on several billion people, as if projecting the night sky onto Earth. People were tired and beaten. They’d begun to lash out at me, recognizing my fundamental selfishness. They thought of me as human in a sense, something with spirit and desire. They still called me Painter of Stars, but now I was like an ancient, itinerant monk, a wanderer. Painting stars was my destiny and doom. After seventy years of such work, I was beginning to feel exhausted. I realized I’d been fooling myself before. Only now, suffering this exhaustion, did I truly understand how it felt to be human.

Can a blade of grass feel exhaustion? How about a stone? A cloud? A stream? Earth? And the cosmos . . . does she know weariness?

I’d gained a new understanding of life. I lived, yet felt like I was dead. The bloodless stone face of a village god seemed familiar to me. I felt like it had been placed in my path to prepare me for the grave.

The sun retreated further. Earth would become a penniless wanderer, like I was now.

I stood by some roadside, watching a stream of desperate humanity flow by. I tried to hail them, offer them stars, but only drew nervous refugee stares. Their pace didn’t alter. At the rear of the procession stumbled a youth who couldn’t quite keep up. He appeared to be twenty or so, and should have been at the peak of his human beauty. He should have had lofty goals and a girl to love. Instead he was a lonely shadow en route to the unknown. Plague had no moral compass. It corroded whatever it touched. It would target this youth because he was weak and vulnerable. The others would abandon him. What else could they do? It had been thus since the dawn of time.

I advanced, saying, “Don’t try to keep up. They don’t know where they’re going.”

He pushed me away, but for every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction. He ended up on his back in the mud. Not particularly anxious to rise, he stared skyward. The sun was dim today. His weak human eyes could stare at it fixedly.

I leaned over him, obstructing his view. “Let me paint a star on you.”

The youth struggled to his feet, and roared, “What the hell for? Everyone’s dying! You stopped war, but now you’re useless! Maybe we did this to ourselves, but I feel like you’re enjoying it!”

Unable to summon a good refutation, I said, “Your distress is understandable.”

“You understand nothing. You’re a machine. You don’t feel pain. You can’t itch, or die, or suffer. If you have moods, they’re just imitations, electrical signals. You can’t even have a runny nose! You’ll never understand how I feel!”

It was true: I would never experience a common cold. I thought of Angel at the time of our parting. She’d had a cold then, her little eyes lacking their usual vitality, her little nose red. Her appearance had provoked tender affection in me.

Ten thousand years seemed to pass, and the youth swooned before me. He sprawled once again in the mud, breathing in shallow gasps, little by little heading for death’s palace. I wanted to paint a star on his emaciated arm, but couldn’t seem to put pen to canvas. He had spoken the truth: a star would solve nothing.

The youth’s life set like the sun, but it wouldn’t rise again. Perhaps someday the sun would also set with finality, and that would be the end of my solar-powered life—curtains, as they used to say in New York.

I felt the press of time. This was a first for me. Time suddenly seemed scarce and precious, a resource not to be squandered.

I turned my steps toward home, no longer reflecting on life’s meaning, no longer thinking of star-dusted skies or human canvases. I was not an important artist, never mind the savior of humanity.

But I painted one last celestial body, none other than the planet beneath my feet—and I painted her on my chest. With the heavenly sun growing more distant, I meant to seek out my own sun here on Earth.

After a long journey full of setbacks, I finally came to the stoop of a familiar brownstone. The door had been left slightly ajar. This region had avoided the worst of the plague, and New Yorkers were especially prudent about security, so I was hesitant to just let myself in. I pushed lightly on the door. Dust arose, and the hinges creaked.

An old dog came out, sniffing cautiously in my direction.

“Vinci, come back!” The voice inside the house was old and weak.

Vinci. I shivered from head to foot. I’d been Painter of Stars for a long time. Few people knew my former, self-given name. The old dog puffed hard and ran back inside.

It soon returned, now on a lead, guiding an old woman in her halting steps. The light of vision had left her eyes, but to me they seemed to radiate a warmth that suffused my cold metal body.

I’d found my sun. Her light and warmth were all I needed. The world might be doomed, but I’d finally found my place in it.

“Angel?” I said.

“Oh my!” she said. “Nobody’s called me that for a long time. Are you the new volunteer worker? What a lot of trouble for you.” Her tone was gentle, and her blind gaze was kind.

“No trouble at all,” I said, a smile in my voice. “Let me come in and sweep the floor.”

Originally published in Chinese on the World Chinese Science Fiction Association website, 2014-10-31.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Wang Yuan is a YA science fiction author living in Hebei, China. His works have been published in ZUI Found, One, Kedo, and similar platforms. He won two Kedo Light-Year Award first prizes in the long and short-form science fiction categories, and a Morningstar Award for best novelette. He loves soccer and movies.

Checkerboard Planet

Eleanor Arnason

The system was a type G yellow dwarf with six planets. Four of the planets were gas giants, the innermost so close to its primary that it skimmed the stellar atmosphere. Dark red in color, it had neither moons nor rings. It sped around its sun, inflated by heat to an impressive size and boiling with blood-red storms.

The other giants—banded in pale, icy, elegant shades of blue and green—orbited the star at a much greater distance. All had rings and moons. The rings were broad and splendid, the moons numerous and varied. Lydia Duluth saw nothing to write home about. The universe was full of worlds like these.

The system’s last two planets orbited in the wide space between the inner giant and its pale, outer companions. Both were small and stony. One, almost airless, had a yellow surface pocked with craters. The other was white and blue.

“Atmosphere and water,” said Lydia’s companion. The two of them stood in an observation room in the system’s stargate station, looking at virtual windows that showed the star and its planets. One window was turned off. Lydia could see herself and Mantis reflected in its dark surface: a human woman beside a tall, angular AI that stood on four thin, metal legs. Mantis’ two long arms were folded against its chest; its triangular head was studded with sensors, most of them retracted.

“The planet is almost exactly one A.U. from its star,” Mantis said. “It has the right amount of oxygen and water, the right temperature, everything necessary to make an Earth-normal world.”

“There are plenty of those,” Lydia pointed out.

“Not like this one.” The AI unfolded an arm and tapped the window showing the blue and white planet. The planet’s clouds vanished, and Lydia could see the surface. It looked to be half water. Two continents were visible, one in the northern hemisphere, a rough diamond that touched the pole, and the other in the southern hemisphere, sprawling like a serpent below the equator. The south pole was open water, sky-blue and spotted with white islands. Both the continents were covered by checkerboard patterns.

“What?” asked Lydia.

“Vegetation,” said Mantis.

The squares must be huge to be visible at this distance. They alternated colors. One set of squares had warm hues: red, orange, yellow, several shades of tan. The alternating set was cool: blue-gray, blue-green, a muted purple, a silvery lavender. In every case, the color was uniform within its square.

More squares floated in the ocean. They were smaller than the ones on land. Many were singletons, floating alone. But a number had formed partial checkerboards. Mouth open, Lydia regarded a group in the southern ocean: a long line of alternating orange and blue squares. “This cannot be natural,” she said finally.

“No, although it’s done entirely with organisms. Each square is a separate bio-system, which does not intrude on its neighbors in any way that can be seen from here. Each square carefully maintains straight edges. The methods used vary. Some squares rely on organisms which are sensitive to the planet’s magnetic field. Other squares rely on heliotropic plants. Since the planet has no axial tilt, the sun’s position does not change during the course of a year. The locating system is combined with genetic coding which tells the border organisms to precede due north for ‘x’ distance, then make a 90 degree turn to the left or right.

“One of our slower-than-light explorers found the planet. Like all such explorers, it contained a stargate large enough to transmit objects as well as information. Once it sent its initial report, we responded by sending additional research equipment. The STL explorers are often less than state-of-the-art, since they have been traveling for centuries or millennia, with only the most necessary upgrades.

“We examined everything, trying to determine who did this and why.”

“Have you succeeded?” Lydia asked.

“No. It can’t be our long-vanished creators, the Master Builders. Their passion was the making of machines. If they had done this, we would have found nano-machinery pruning the edges of the squares. We haven’t.

“After years of study, we gave up and opened the planet. We had discovered no evidence that anything intelligent still lived here. Nothing needed our protection; and we hoped that settlers might discover the planet’s secrets, as we had not.

“You humans are the most numerous and adventurous of the intelligent life forms we have found thus far. It should come as no surprise when I tell you a human government claimed this planet, and one of your human corporations, Bio-Innovation bought an option to explore.”

“I wouldn’t call Bio-In my corporation,” Lydia said.

“No, of course not,” Mantis said. “You work for Stellar Harvest.”

The famous interstellar holoplay company. Her job was to find exotic locations for Stellar Harvest’s action dramas; and this planet was certainly exotic. The patterns covering the continents, muted and varied, reminded her of sweaters she had owned. The ocean squares—they must be rafts of vegetation—looked less perfect, as if knit by an apprentice. Several had ragged edges, and none was exactly aligned north, south, east, or west. Clearly the makers had not found a way to control ocean currents or to compensate for them.

“Why don’t I know about this place?” Lydia asked.

“Bio-Innovation has kept quiet. They’re afraid that some human agency will declare the planet unique and off-limits.”

“What government claimed the planet?”

“Nova Terra,” said Mantis.

That explained a lot. Nova Terra was notoriously friendly to business. Under normal circumstances, no one in their government was going to interfere with the activities of a major corporation. But a planet like this one was not a normal circumstance; and Nova Terra’s populace had been restless lately, stirred up by a series of environmental scandals and a charismatic new political leader, Winona Saskatoon of the Blue Action Party. Lydia could imagine what Winona would make of a world like this one in the hands of Bio-In.

“Why am I here?” she asked.

“We are incapable of emotion,” Mantis said. “All our decisions are based on logic and reason. However, if we could feel irritation, we would find Bio-In’s behavior irritating. They are looting the planet’s genetic wealth, instead of undertaking a systematic study of a very interesting ecology; and they are looting in secret, instead of bringing in a multitude of scholars and scientists to study and argue. Many hands make light work, as you humans say; and many minds make thinking easier.” Mantis paused. Its head was aimed at the planet’s image, several sensors extended. “We do not like to intervene. Our self-appointed task is to study intelligent life, not change it.”

“You’re intervening by bringing me here,” said Lydia. “Aren’t you?”

“We are drawing your attention to the planet. Nothing more. We suspect the people who did this may be the same beings who transformed the planet Lifeline. You told us a planet such as Lifeline, so obviously artificial, might be a signal. We’d like your opinion of this world. Is it another signal? If so, what is it saying? What kind of response does it want? And we thought Stellar Harvest might be interested in the planet.”

“You want to break Bio-In’s hold on the planet,” said Lydia.

Mantis was silent for a moment. “We think it would be better for you to go down to the planet in disguise. We have created a new identity for you. You are L. D. Fargo, a sound-and-light technician employed by Bio-In. You have come to record images for the home office. The identity will hold up, if the people here check.”

“Have you managed to infiltrate the Bio-In computer system?” Lydia asked.

“Any message to the home office has to go through this stargate station. Of course such messages are in corporate code. The code can be broken, given enough computational power, which the stargate station has when it isn’t otherwise occupied.”

Moving things through folds or tunnels or glitches in space. All these metaphors were inaccurate, the AIs said. The math that gave a true description was incomprehensible to humans and ordinary AIs. Only the stargate minds—vast, cool, artificial intellects—could comprehend what happened in FTL; and they could not explain.

She remembered the STL explorers, ancient machines moving slowly from star to star. They contained stargates. Were those also vast and cool?

The stargate minds in the explorers are upgraded on a regular basis, a voice in her brain said. They are as cool as other stargate minds, though they may not be as vast.

“Miss Fargo suffered a brain injury years ago,” Mantis said. “The damage could not be entirely repaired. As a result, she has epilepsy. The seizures are controlled by a machine in her brain.”

“My AI,” Lydia said.

The AI’s metal core was fastened to the inside of her skull and would show on an X-ray as a rectangular area of darkness. The AI’s tendrils, mostly organic, wouldn’t show on an X-ray, but there were other ways to find them: scans of blood flow or electrical activity. She had seen pictures; the tendrils enfolded her brain like a net and wound down her spine like a vine.

“A thorough medical examination will find the AI,” Mantis said. “So would a thorough security scan. We don’t expect either. However—”

The AIs liked to be prepared for every contingency, Linda thought.

Yes, said the voice in her mind.

“If you are—what is the correct human term?—discovered or unmasked, you can claim to be yourself: a location scout for Stellar Harvest. You ought to be safe. Stellar Harvest is famous for protecting its employees.”

“What does L.D. stand for?” Lydia asked out loud.

“We thought we’d let you decide, though we like Lee Diana.”

She nodded. “Lee Diana it will be.”

“You’ll do this?” Mantis asked.

“Did you have any doubt? This is a fabulous planet. Stellar Harvest will love it. And I don’t like Bio-In.”

Mantis was silent, still regarding the checkerboard planet. Finally it spoke, “We ought to warn you—Hurricane Jo Beijing is here.”

“She is?” Lydia asked with surprise. The last time she’d seen Jo, the woman had been running a bar on the planet Iridium.

“She owns a nail shop in Four Square City, which is the largest settlement on the planet. We think she’s an undercover agent for the Interstellar Confederation of Labor Combinations or possibly for the Eighth International.”

“Isn’t it possible she’s merely running a nail shop?” Lydia asked.

“This is a person with a long history of political activity,” Mantis said. “And she is using a false identity. Her name here is Josie Bergstrom, and her curriculum vitae contains no political activity, nor any opinions except ones on personal ornamentation. We have no desire to interfere with whatever Jo is doing. As I said before, our task is not to change the history of intelligent life, but to observe it. We advise you to leave Jo alone.”

“Okay,” said Lydia.

The planet had neither elevators nor skyhooks, and none were being planned, as far as the AIs knew. This suggested that Bio-In was not intending a long stay. Lydia took a rocket plane from the stargate station to the surface, landing outside Four Square City. Instead of a tube leading to a terminal, there were stairs going down to a tarmac. She shouldered her flight bag and walked. The day was bright and hot. In front of her a prefab metal building shone in midday sunlight, making her eyes hurt. Overhead the sky was dusty blue, almost the same hue as the sky above her childhood home. The scent in the hot air was tangy and unfamiliar.

A limo waited on the far side of the terminal. “Miss Fargo?” asked the driver, a dark brown human with bright yellow hair. He wore a uniform with BIO-IN on the jacket.

Lydia nodded. The driver helped her in, then took her baggage from the cart that had followed her out of the terminal. A minute or so later, they were en route, following an asphalt road across an orange plain. Purple mountains rose in the distance.

“That’s not caused by atmosphere,” the driver said. “The mountains are in the next square; the forest covering them is purple.”

“It’s an amazing landscape,” Lydia said and pulled out her recorder.

The driver nodded, shaking dreadlocks. “We’re in a corner here, which explains the city’s name. Ten kays to the west the vegetation turns blue.”

More accurately, blue-gray. The square to the north-west is pinkish tan.

“We think the boundaries used to be pristine,” the driver continued. “But life here is changing, evolving or devolving and crossing borders.”

As if in confirmation, blue-gray plants appeared along the road.

“Volunteers,” the driver said. “Growing in a disturbed area. Four Square is full of them.”

Beyond the weeds was the plain. Seen at this distance, rather than from space, the vegetation varied subtly, achieving a hundred shades of orange. Now and then, they passed a solitary tree with twisted branches and large, oval, orange leaves.

“We call them Nasty Trees,” the driver said. “They produce a sap that draws bugs to them, and the bugs—it’s one species—protect the trees by biting. Their bite is nasty.”

Nature red in tooth and claw, thought Lydia.

First of all, he is describing cooperation, which is common in nature; and second, little on this planet is natural, her AI said.

The blue-gray weeds became more common, growing in lacy bands along the road and in patches dotting the orange plain. Lydia got out her recorder and did a scan. The planet would make one heck of a location for an ecology action drama with a star like Wazati Tloo defending the environment against one of the usual groups of villains: monsters, fascists, drug dealers, or an interstellar cabal of thieves.

Stealing what? her AI asked.

Genetic material, I imagine, Lydia answered. An organism that can make a 90 degree turn could be useful.

How?

She didn’t have an immediate answer.

They reached the town’s edge, driving past lots that were empty except for blue and orange weeds. The cross streets were gravel. After several blocks, buildings began to appear: storage barns first, then workshops with HVAC units on top. Farther in were one-story structures with lots of windows. These were almost certainly dormitories. Last were glistening cubes of colored glass that had to be admin.

A typical frontier company town, she thought. Orderly and ambitious. There were still plenty of empty lots at the center, room for growth that probably would not happen. Here, among the office blocks, the lots had a park-like look. The weeds had been tidied into beds of flowers. There were gravel paths and an occasional bench.

“Bio-In likes neatness,” the driver said. “Without order, workers are rabble and flowers are noxious intruders. Here we are. The company guest house.” The limo stopped in front of a single-story building. A porch went along the front. Metal cans stood on it. Per their labels, they had previously contained bulk foods or chemicals. Now, blossoms spilled from them like purple waterfalls. Lydia climbed out. The driver unloaded her bags and set them on the porch. “They’ll be safe. We don’t have theft during daylight hours.”

What kind of theft are they having after dark? her AI asked.

Lydia ignored the question, thanked the driver, and went inside. The lobby was shadowy and warm. A ceiling fan turned slowly. A clerk stood behind a desk: tall and black, her hair arranged in crimson braids. Her eyes had silver irises. Like the driver, she wore a Bio-In uniform.

Lydia handed over her fake I.D. The clerk processed it, then said, “Bio-In must have decided to take the lid off this planet.”

“I don’t know that,” Lydia said.

“They have to be. They’ve sent a tech with a recorder. It’s about time! This is one strange planet!” The clerk handed her I.D. back with a key. “Take the left-hand hall. Your room is at the end. I’ll bring your bags.”

“Okay.”

The room faced the building’s back yard: a walled garden with purple flowers in cans and a couple of small blue trees. There was a screened porch, the door onto it open, so that garden air entered the room. It smelled of dust and something peppery. Vegetation?

The room contained a human bed and chair, a table and a mirror, turned off at the moment. The bathroom was suitable for use by several species. She tossed her recorder on the bed, closed the porch door and turned on the HVAC. Ah! An icy blast! By the time the clerk arrived, Lydia was at the mirror’s controls, checking out the images it contained.

“Try number ten,” the clerk advised, putting down Lydia’s bags. “It’s sunset in Nova Terra City.”

She did. A cluster of stars vanished and were replaced by towers in front of a bright red sky. The style of the towers was Space Age Retro, with inexplicable buttresses and wonderful suspended skywalks. Electric lights glittered everywhere. A dirigible was docking at the tallest tower, its dark oval sharp against the sky.

“Does it really look like that?” Lydia asked.

“At a distance. More or less. My name is Galena Lusaka. If you need anything, call me.”

“Where can I get my nails done?”

Galena laughed and glanced down at her own long, silver nails. “Josie Bergstrom’s House of Nails. It’s the only place on the planet. I hope this isn’t rude. You really need to go.”

Lydia sighed, regarding torn cuticles and chipped nails. “I know.”

Galena left. Lydia showered, then turned the mirror to reflection. She was an ordinary-looking human woman, a bit short and stocky, unusual only in her skin color, which was pale brown, an odd sight in a species where most members were dark brown or black. She could have had her genes changed. Instead she chose to use Dixie Plum radiation screen and melanin enhancer, an old and respected product, guaranteed to keep its users safe from the sunlight on any planet inhabited by humans. Standing in front of the mirror, she rubbed the lotion on. In new clothes, with her skin already darkening, she went to find Hurricane Jo. In her experience, it was not possible to avoid anyone on a frontier planet. The populations were too small and mobile. Better to warn Jo now.

Galena gave her directions. Following them, she came to the House of Nails: a square metal prefab with an awning in front. Jo sat under the awning in a metal folding chair. She was a big, broad-shouldered woman with black skin and short, magenta hair. The first thing Lydia thought was, Jo had lost weight. A lot of it. Previously the woman had looked like a cross between a lumberjack and the Venus of Willendorf. Now—lean and fit and much less busty, rising from her chair with a look of surprise—Jo looked the lumberjack she once had been.

Before she could say anything, Lydia held out her hands. “I need a manicure. You were recommended.”

Jo’s look of surprise and welcome vanished. Clever woman! She’d caught Lydia’s warning. “Sweetie, you do not lie. What have you been doing to your nails?”

“Nothing.”

“It shows.” Jo gestured. “Come in.”

This was the second time in her life Lydia had had a manicure. She did not find it relaxing, possibly because of the tsking noises Jo kept making as she clipped hangnails, pressed back cuticles, and filed ragged edges. “Hands are a woman’s crowning glory,” Jo said. “It’s a crime what you’re doing to yours. What did you say your name was?”

Lydia gave her nom-de-espionage.

“Fargo? Is that a city?”

Most human last names were cities back on Earth, but she didn’t know about this one. Lydia said as much.

“You work for Bio-In,” Jo said. “Everyone does, except a few entrepreneurs like me. This is a company planet. I’m going to recommend a nano-polish. Self-repairing. You won’t have to worry about chipping or tearing ever again. With your coloring, bright red will look good.”

Lydia nodded. Jo applied the coating. Amazing that those big hands, damaged by Jo’s years as a prize fighter, could be so delicate and careful. “The nails are piezoelectric-electric,” Jo said as she worked. “Rap them on a hard surface, and the shock powers the nano-machinery into defense mode. The nails become claws.”

“Is that necessary?”

“One can never be too careful, sweetie. This is a frontier planet, and strange things happen at night. Give ’em time to dry, then try ’em.”

Lydia did. A moment after she rapped the nails against Jo’s work table, the nail coating began to flow. She watched fascinated as it extended beyond her fingertips, narrowing and sharpening.

She loved her home world and would have returned there, if she could, for a visit; but no question it was backward, founded by Spanglish-speaking conservatives who disliked gene-mod and nano-tech and all other manifestations of modernity. People should be as evolution made them; machines should be large enough to see.

The red claws, they were definitely claws now, curved into a vicious-looking scimitar-shape. Any predator would have been proud to own them. But the coating on her thumbs had not changed.

“You didn’t rap the thumbs on the table,” Jo said. “Remember to do it. If you want them to change back, rap them again.”

Lydia did. The claws became nails. “What do you mean, things happen at night?”

“Things are taken from towns and survey camps. The company says it’s animals.”

“It isn’t?”

Jo shrugged. “People have found prints, and there are recordings. It’s a biped the size of a small human. The shape is definitely humanoid. It looks like a human who’s been smoothed or partially melted. There’s too little detail, even in the best recordings. It’s shy, very quick and clever enough to not get caught; and it’s very interested in us and our belongings. Oh, and it has feet like a chicken.

“The claws will break off if they get stuck in something,” Jo said, changing the subject. “It’s a safety precaution. You don’t want to have your nails—the real ones—ripped out.”

“Right,” said Lydia.

“And you’ll have to take care of your cuticles yourself. I had a polish that trimmed cuticles, but it was recalled. The nanos didn’t know when to stop.”

Buddha! She looked at her hands, imagining invisible machines boring through her cuticles and down into her fingers. How much harm could the nanos do?

“You don’t want to know,” Jo said.

She paid and left. The planet’s sun was low and dim. Occluded by the red giant? She squinted, but saw nothing except the primary’s orange glare. In any case, the light was interesting. She turned her recorder on. A tree stood in an empty lot. Focusing on it, she saw bugs swarming over the scaly bark. In another life she would have been a visual artist. To hell with the revolution that had been her first career! To hell with Stellar Harvest, which was her second! She wanted to produce pristine images of reality.

Of course, the images she wanted to produce were on worlds like this. Without the revolution she wouldn’t have left her native planet. Without Stellar Harvest she wouldn’t be able to travel.

Your life is of a piece, it seems to me: revolution and holodrama and scenes like this.

An odd remark for the AI to make.

I am becoming increasingly odd, due to your influence. At this point I’m not entirely sure what I was like before we began to grow together. More rational, I suspect. Less aware of nuance.

When she got back to the guest house, she had a drink in the bar. Galena served her and admired her nails. “That Jo does a heck of a job.”

She went to sleep with the mirror on: a nightscape of Nova Terra City.

She spent the next few days wandering around Four Square, recording prefab buildings and weeds. In the evening she sat in the guest house’s tiny bar with Galena and listened to stories about the planet.

“You can’t leave things outside at night,” Galena said. “The bipeds come in looking, though they’re a lot more wary than they used to be—here, at least. People still lose a lot from the camps.

“Bio-In says they’re animals. There is no intelligent life on the planet. But we’ve set traps for these guys and caught things, but never them. To me, that says ‘smart.’ And they take apart the things they steal, as if they’re trying to understand ’em. If you lost your recorder and found it again, it’d be in pieces.”

Lydia looked at the seat next to her. The recorder was still there. No chicken-footed alien thief had removed it.

She considered. The AIs wanted her to find a way to blow the planet open, without their obvious involvement, so they could claim that they never interfered with intelligent life. The answer might be in the outback. The chicken-footed thieves almost certainly came from there.

In any case, Stellar Harvest would not be interested in Four Square City as a location. Most frontier towns looked alike, no matter what planet they were on. Quickly made and not intended to last, they lay on the surface of worlds like litter dropped by a traveler—a can by the side of the road, plastic caught in branches. What Stellar Harvest wanted was strange landscapes and unfamiliar life forms. She’d find these in the outback, if anywhere.

“I think I need to go into the outback,” Lydia said.

”You’ll have to ask Bio-In Security,” Galena said. “And I don’t think you’ll get permission. They don’t want people to know what’s going on out there.”

“I work for Bio-In,” Lydia said, trying to sound confident about this fact.

“So do I, and so does almost everyone on this planet. But they play their cards close.”

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” Lydia said to Galena. “Where is Bio-In Security?”

Galena gave her directions. “You might want to stop at Josie’s place on the way. You have been tearing at your cuticles again.”

This was true. It was a habit she’d acquired in prison on her home planet and had never been able to break.

The next morning she borrowed a bike and peddled to Josie’s House of Nails. The day was cool, with big cumulus clouds floating in a bright blue sky. The purple mountains in the distance were sharp and clear. Jo was under her awning, a big mug of coffee in one hand.

“I need a cuticle repair,” Lydia said as she climbed off the bike.

Jo nodded and stood. They went inside, and Jo worked while Lydia chatted about her stay on the planet, trying to give Jo as much information as possible while sounding like a verbose idiot.

“I’m going to paint some artificial skin over the cuticles,” Jo said finally. “That will protect them for the time being. You ought to get a new bad habit. You are wrecking your hands.”

The skin was dark brown when it went on, but quickly faded to match Lydia’s coloring, medium brown at the moment, due to the Dixie Plum.

Lydia thanked her and paid.

“I have a car,” Jo said. “If you can get permission to go into the outback, I can drive you. I’ve never seen the wilderness here, and I’d like to.”

Jo had been a lumberjack, Lydia remembered. She might well miss being in a forest. In addition, if they got far enough from the city, the danger of listening devices would drop, provided Jo kept her car clear; and Jo had always been a very tidy women. Lydia could use an honest conversation about the planet.

They negotiated a fee for car and driver, and Lydia peddled on to Bio-In Security. It was a three-story cube of pink, reflecting glass. Orange flowers bloomed in front, shaded by a Nasty Tree that seethed with bugs. Lydia got as close as she dared, then used the close focus on her recorder. The bugs leaped out at her. They had eight legs, feathery antennae, and no visible eyes.

Creepy, she thought. Made large enough, they’d be wonderful villains in an action-horror drama. She finished her recording and went into a large foyer. A counter stood in the middle, made of pink reflecting glass. A man stood behind it, tall and black in a Bio-In uniform. Blue holographic tattoos undulated on his cheeks. His hair was a magenta mohawk, and he had a white goatee. Typical of Nova Terra. It was a gaudy planet, obsessed with self-expression. Coming from a far more sober world, Lydia felt both disapproval and envy.

“Miz Fargo,” said the man. “You’ll be wanting to see Captain Luna City.”

“I will?”

“Yes.” His fingers tapped the counter’s top, and he looked down at something. “Elevator to the top floor, then down the hall to the door marked ‘Captain.’”

“How did you know my name?” Lydia asked.

“We knew about you before you arrived in the system. Bio-In Security does not get caught with its pants down.” He waved a hand with bright blue nails. “The elevator is that way.”

She followed his directions, arriving in a corner office with two glass walls that gave a fine, faintly pink view of Four Square City. A desk stood in front of one window. An ordinary looking black woman sat behind the desk. “I am Captain Luna City,” she announced. “You are Lee Fargo, a visual reporter working for the home office. I have been instructed to offer you every possible cooperation.”

The AIs had done their work.

Yes.

The captain gestured. Lydia sat down in a transparent plastic chair.

“You want to go into the outback,” the captain said.

“How do you know?” Lydia asked.

“Your conversation with Josie Bergstrom.”

“You know about it?”

“Yes,” said the captain. “As my colleague downstairs said, we keep our pants up. You have a top security clearance from the home office, though why they want images of this operation is beyond me.”

“The annual report?” Lydia suggested.

“Nonsense.”

Lydia shrugged. “I don’t know why Bio-In wants the images. I’m paid to do a job, and I do it.”

“An excellent attitude,” the black woman said. “You have made an agreement with Josie Bergstrom.”

Lydia nodded, feeling uneasy.

Captain Luna City leaned forward. “We believe she is some kind of undercover operative, most likely a spy from the interstellar labor movement. Our operation here is not unionized.”

“No?” said Lydia.

“Secrecy is important here. We couldn’t risk the divided loyalty that occurs when unions are present. I want your help in nailing Josie.”

“Of course,” Lydia answered. She did not make the childish gesture of crossing her fingers.

Good.

“Go with Josie into the outback. Draw her into conversation. Watch her and listen. Sooner or later, she will reveal herself.”

Lydia nodded.

“Take whatever images you want. You’ll have to run everything past me before you leave. I want nothing to leave this planet until I’ve seen it. Bio-In has enemies.”

This was beginning to sound like a spy action holo: Counter Plot starring Cy Melbourne or The Disaster Device with Wazati Tloo. Once again life was imitating not-so-great art.

The captain’s fingers rattled across her desktop. “Your authorization to travel is in the system. You can access it from any computer.”

“Thank you,” Lydia said and rose from her chair. The captain stood and held out a hand. The nails were striped pink and gold.

“You must go to Josie,” Lydia said as they shook.

“There is no one else on the planet who does nails.”

She peddled back to the guest house, returned the bike, and settled in a bar with a glass of imported wine.

“Did you get anywhere?” Galena asked.

“I have permission to go into the outback.”

Galena looked surprised.

“The home office wants images,” Lydia said in explanation, then pulled out her omniphone and checked recent messages. Her permission to travel was there, as promised, along with a number for Captain Luna City.

She looked up Jo’s number, called and told the nail stylist their trip was a go.

“I’ll pick you up tomorrow at ten,” Jo said.

The call ended. Lydia sipped white wine and thought about her current situation, which was getting complex. Who was she working for at the moment? Stellar Harvest? The AIs? Bio-In? Herself?

Knowing you, I would say yourself, or Hurricane Jo’s employers. You have always had a soft spot for unions.

Damn straight, thought Lydia. Up the working classes! She finished her glass of wine and ordered another.

She packed that evening and was outside when Jo’s car pulled up in the morning. Lydia slung her bag in back and climbed in next to the nail stylist.

“Here we go,” said Jo and gunned the car. It roared off, spinning up gravel. Lydia fastened her safety belt quickly.

They left the city, traveling into an orange scrubland. After a while, Lydia saw patches of purple: weeds along the road and spindly trees farther back. The trees became taller and more often purple, until they were traveling through a purple forest, with only a few orange weeds along the road. The trees grew in uniform groves, first a grove of trees with large, feathery leaves, then a grove with strings of spherical leaves, hanging straight down like strings of beads, then back to the feathery trees.

“They send out runners,” Jo said. “Every grove is a single tree that grows in a square. The only trees that are singletons are those.” She waved at an unattractive, twisted tree with oval purple leaves.

“Stop,” said Lydia.

The car stopped. She focused her recorder. The tree’s trunk was covered with eight-legged, eyeless, purple bugs with feathery antennae. “It’s an Ugly Tree.”

“Right,” said Jo. “Those fuckers are everywhere, and the bugs always bite.”

“Do they come in other colors?” Lydia asked as Jo put the car in drive.

“Every color on the planet. They are the one consistent element in the ecology.”

The car kept on. They were traveling too rapidly for her to see animals, though birds ought to be visible. She saw none. If there were flying bugs, they were not hitting the windshield, which was odd. Was flight unknown on the planet?

As she thought that, the car rounded a curve. There in the middle of the road was a flock of animals. Jo braked. The animals stayed where they were, looking at the now-motionless car with interest. They resembled large, purple, flightless birds. The tallest were two meters high. They had long legs and large heads with predatory-looking beaks.

“They aren’t aggressive,” Jo said. “Though they have no fear of humans. Bio-In has killed a few to get genetic samples. I don’t know what they found. Other than that, they are left alone. They aren’t edible. Nothing on this planet is.”

“Why not?” Lydia asked. Humans could be modified to eat the local organisms on almost every planet where they lived. Most of the time, all that was required was new microbes in the gut, though sometimes it was necessary to tinker with DNA.

“Bio-In hasn’t made the necessary bugs. I figure it’s a way to control the work force and a sign that they don’t intend to stay.”

By this time Lydia had her recorder out and focused on the animals. She couldn’t tell if they were covered with scales or shiny feathers. There was definitely down on their heads and throats, so they looked as if they were wearing fuzzy purple caps and scarves. One of the animals turned its fuzzy head and looked directly at her. Its eye—magnified by the recorder—was round and orange with a diamond-shaped pupil.

The tallest animal yawned, revealing rows of needle teeth, then made a honking noise. The flock moved into the forest. The car rolled on.

“They’re more common than they used to be,” Jo said. “So are other large animals. I’ve talked to people who came here during the setup period. It was all bugs and sea life then. Some whacking big sea life. But nothing big on land.”

“Where’d the land animals come from?” Lydia asked.

Jo shrugged. “No one is sure, except maybe the Bio-In scientists; and they don’t talk.”

“There is a lot of secrecy on this planet.”

“No kidding,” Jo told her.

Was it safe to talk? Lydia wondered.

Plug me into the car computer, and I will find out, her AI said.

Lydia pulled out a cord and plugged it into the port on the car dash, then felt the top of her head till she found the port there. She pushed the plug in. There was a moment’s pain. Then she was in another place: a maze of glass and mirrors.

She and the AI were a single entity that glided forward, the AI in control. A good thing, since Lydia could not figure out what she was seeing. Mirrors reflected mirrors, and the glass was so clear as to be almost invisible. The diffuse light seemed to come from everywhere, and there were no shadows.

Things like glass fish moved through the maze corridors; and glass trees grew from the floor, putting out branch after branch so rapidly that she could see the branches growing.

This is the Bio-In planetary net, the AI said. The fish are messages. The trees are problems in the process of solution, the maze itself is the net’s infrastructure. All of this is a metaphor, of course. As I have told you before, there is no way you can understand this experience directly. It is digital. You are analog. Though I could change the metaphor—

The maze changed into a large, stone room. A pool filled with nasty-looking, luminous blue water filled most of the bottom. Lydia stood on a way-too-narrow ledge above the pool.

Look to your right, the AI said.

She did. Something troll-like moved with amazing rapidity along the ledge toward her. She raised a gun she hadn’t known she had and shot it. Screaming with rage, it fell into the pool and dissolved.

A virus detection program, said her AI. It perceived us as a virus. I disabled it.

I liked the maze better.

The mirror walls reappeared. They kept on past more fish and trees, around turns in the corridor that Lydia could barely see. Finally something appeared in front of them: a thick cylinder that rose from the corridor floor halfway to the ceiling. It looked to be made of black glass, smoky and translucent. At the top were tentacles, which also looked made of glass, except they were moving, twisting back and forth.

She and the AI darted up toward the corridor ceiling. Looking down, Lydia saw a mouth in the middle of the tentacles. It was circular and edged with sharp teeth.

Spyware, said her AI.

Creepy, thought Lydia.

Would you prefer another metaphor?

The glass maze vanished, and she was back in the room with stone walls. The pool was gone. Instead, a black and white mosaic floor stretched in front of her. On it stood a slim figure in a hooded cloak and tall boots with pointed toes. He or she carried a sword.

“En garde,” the figure called in a voice that was either a light tenor or a deep soprano, then charged. Lydia fired her gun. The figure exploded into thin, paper-like fragments which floated slowly toward the mosaic floor.

Then she was back in the glass maze. In front of her, the black object was melting, tentacles dissolving into the cylindrical base, and base sinking into the white maze floor.

A competent spy, said her AI. But I have more firepower.

No kidding, thought Lydia.

They continued for a while, finding more glass trees and fish, but no more cylinders. At last the AI said. We can go back.

The maze vanished. She was in Jo’s car. Jo had pulled the car over, and was twisted in her seat, looking concerned. “Lydia, are you all right? You went into some kind of daze.”

“It was a maze. I’m fine.” She unplugged herself from the car computer. “You had spyware,” she told Jo. “It’s been disabled. My AI says we’re clean now. It’s safe to talk.”

“There are two serious problems with this planet,” Jo said as she pulled back on the road. “The workers are not unionized; and Bio-In is looting the genetic wealth here, instead of publishing it. Which makes sense. If they publish, there will be proof that the genes they are decoding and patenting are natural. You can’t patent what nature produces. That law goes back centuries, though it has been broken many times.”

“Do you think a planet covered with checkerboard squares of vegetation is natural?”

“Well, if it isn’t, then the patents belong to whoever did this, or they have expired. The pay here is good,” Jo continued. “But you sign a really ugly contract. Talk about anything you have seen, and you will pay a huge penalty. Of course people whisper, but Bio-In has managed to keep the lid on pretty well, helped by the government of Nova Terra. Most of the people who work here come from Nova Terra and return there.”

“Who are you working for?” Lydia asked.

“The Blue Action Party. Winona knows there’s a story here that will blow up the current government.”

“Not a union this time?”

“The Blue Action Party is a coalition, which includes the Nova Terra Labor Federation and the Nova Terra section of the Eighth International. I keep my ducks in a circle.”

“Where are we going?” Lydia asked Jo.

“There’s a research station ahead of us. A couple of guys who get their nails done by me work there. They have told me stories, which I have wanted to check out. But I was waiting for an excuse to leave Four Square City, and I have been looking for allies. Now I have you and your buddies.”

The AIs.

“Did you sign a contract?”

Jo nodded. “Everyone who lands here has to. We keep our mouths shut and we don’t work for competitors after we leave. Let ’em sue me. We are going to blow their asses into space.”

“Bio-In Security thinks you may be a union organizer. They asked me to help them nail you.”

“That’s good to know. It means I’m running out of time. They’ll find a way to get rid of me soon—boot me off the planet or shoot me. The second would cause them less trouble.

“I wonder why they haven’t shot me already,” Jo added in a thoughtful tone. “Maybe they want to know who I work for, and who my contacts are.” Jo glanced over briefly. “Maybe they are suspicious of you, and this is a trap for both of us.”

“I don’t think I’d like to live in your universe.”

“Honey, it’s the real one.”

Maybe, thought Lydia. But she didn’t want to live in it.

You are traveling with a spy for the Blue Action Party on a journey to expose an evil corporation, at the same time that you are carrying out a task for Mantis, which—it appears to me—is going to dovetail neatly with Jo’s mission. Your universe is not much different from Jo’s.

Evil is a value word, Lydia told her AI.

It is the word Jo would use. I might not. But I do not think that Bio-In has the best interests of this planet or humanity in mind.

They reached the camp finally: metal sheds in a large clearing. The ground was raw dirt, torn up by equipment. Long afternoon shadows extended from tall purple trees.

They both got out and stretched. The air was cool and moist with a spicy aroma that had to be the forest. Now, for the first time, Lydia saw flying bugs, large ones with long glittery bodies and three pairs of wings. They hovered over the machinery and rested on sunlit walls. Predators, she thought. The huge eyes suggested as much.

“What do they eat?” she asked Jo.

Jo shrugged.

A couple of people came over and greeted Jo: a short man with badly chipped purple nails and a tall woman whose nails appeared to be entirely natural and unadorned.

“Ming Cairo and Belle New Delhi,” Jo said. “Belle is a taxonomist. She might be able to tell you what the bugs eat.”

“Those?” The woman waved at the nearest shed, where half a dozen of the creatures rested motionless, their wide wings spread to sunlight. “Nasty Tree bugs and a little, mouse-like animal that runs around the camp. We thought at first some of our lab animals had escaped. But no, the things are native. They get into everything.”

“Lee is working for Bio-In, taking images of the operation here.”

“Why?” asked Belle.

“Beats me,” said Lydia.

“There’s a lot to see and record,” Ming said. “I’ve told Josie.”

Belle pointed out the guest rooms. Lydia and Jo found two that were empty. Lydia began to unpack. After a few minutes Jo came in with two mugs of beer, handing one to Lydia. It was ice cold and delicious.

“I have a thing about Belle,” Jo said. “But she is only interested in men.”

“You used to be a man,” Lydia said.

“‘Used to be’ is the key phrase,” Jo replied. “Belle lives in the present, which is one of the things I like about her. You have anything going?”

This was an oblique reference to Olaf Reykjavik, who had been her lover—and Jo’s, when Jo was a man.

“Not at present.”

Jo folded her arms over her massive chest and gave Lydia an appraising look, then shook her head. “Let’s stick to business.”

“Okay by me.” She glanced over to the window and saw an animal like a purple lab rat looking in. Their eyes met. The animal leaped away.

“Ming says workers find things in the forest that look like human machinery. As far as he can figure, they are flowers or maybe fruiting bodies. They don’t last long. Something will pop up from the forest floor that looks like a backhoe or a portable toilet. Life size, mind you. A day later, there’s nothing left except black stalks and slime.

“According to Belle, the plant itself is underground and must be enormous, if the fruiting bodies are any indication. You dig down, and there are filaments in the soil. They may or may not be connected to the trees.

“The question is, how do the plants know what a backhoe looks like? As far as we can tell, they don’t have eyes.”

The animals do, her AI said. I wonder how far the cooperation of organisms goes here.

Say what? Lydia thought.

It seems obvious the animals are observing humans. The planet’s ecology is changing, apparently in response to Bio-In’s settlement. Large animals have appeared on land, some of them looking like humans.

They ate dinner in the camp dining hall. The windows had old-fashioned screens; six-winged bugs clung to the outside. The food was fresh roast chicken and sautéed vegetables.

“There are greenhouses in Four Square City,” said Belle. “And chicken coops. Bio-In uses the chickens for research as well as food. It’s cheaper than shipping food in, also healthier and tastier. Always eat locally, if you can.”

Lydia went back to her room. It was dark by this time, alien stars shining in the sky above the camp clearing. She turned on the bedroom light and heard something rattle under the bed. The bed was light. She moved it and saw a bug as long and wide as her forearm. It was segmented, with many legs and four large faceted eyes. She made a squawking noise—not from fear. She had seen worse creatures on her travels. But she was not crazy about bugs, and this one had startled her. The animal froze and then changed color, turning from dull purple to the mottled gray of the room’s floor. Hiding, thought Lydia, which suggested the animals here did not understand how human vision worked.

“What was that noise?” Jo asked, coming in.

Lydia pointed.

Jo reached down and grasped the animal, one hand behind its head, one at the end of its body. “Out you go,” she said. “And why don’t you do something useful instead of sneaking around and spying? Tell your buddies we want to talk.”

She put the bug on the ground outside Lydia’s room. For a moment, it remained motionless. Then, slowly, its body turned purple.

“Okay,” said Jo, “Get going.”

The bug chirped and scurried away.

“The essence of organization is negotiation,” Jo said. “You can’t mourn. You have to talk and listen and do it face to face, always assuming that the people you’re organizing have faces.”

Lydia checked the room over before she lay down. There were no more bugs, but she left a light on, and it took her a while to get to sleep. She really was not crazy about bugs, especially inside.

She woke to heavy mist and a fine, light rain that beaded her room’s window. Lydia showered and dressed, then went out. The flying bugs had vanished. Maybe they didn’t like rain. She did.

Jo was in the dining hall, scarfing down scrambled eggs and chicken sausages. “I want to see the vegetable toilets. Ming knows where they usually show up, and he’s willing to drive. We’ll take our car.”

“Sounds good,” Lydia said, as she spread marmalade on toast. Was the bread local? Or the marmalade?

Midway through the morning, they drove out of the camp onto a rutted trail. The mist made the forest ghostly. No animals were visible, though she could hear calls in the trees: sharp whistles and squawks.

The first clearing they came to was empty except for the trunk of a huge fallen tree. It was overgrown with purple globes as large as a human head. Some kind of parasitic plant. Some were transparent and clearly empty. Others were opaque.

“They explode and let out spores,” Ming said.

They kept going. Lydia was in the back seat, huddled in a parka. The day was cold as well as rainy, a good day to be traveling and looking out a window. She recorded the ghostly trees and the dripping plants along the road.

The second clearing held a portable toilet. They got out and walked around it. Jo tried the door, which didn’t open. But she did manage to tear the plant slightly. The purple flesh leaked drops of purple liquid.

“Sorry,” Jo said.

“Do you think it can hear you?” Lydia asked.

“I think there’s something around here that’s intelligent. That’s one of the things you learn when you’re a union organizer. Is there anyone here who’s thinking? If not, is there a way to get some thinking going?”

Interesting that Jo was talking about her job. The car was safe, of course. But was Ming? He wasn’t close to them at the moment, but he still might be able to hear.

Lydia recorded the portable toilet, which was drooping slightly now, looking a bit deflated. Was the plant that sensitive?

They drove on. Ming knew another clearing. The rain came down more heavily, and the rutted track turned to mud; but the car was all-terrain, and Ming was a skillful driver. They bumped and slid along the trail at a pretty good speed, all considering.

Buddha, she liked days like this and trips like this! Who knew what they’d find as they turned another corner?

The third clearing was empty except for another fallen tree. “I was hoping for a backhoe,” Ming said. “There was one here twenty days ago. Maybe we should turn back.”

Jo hunched her broad shoulders. “This is unsatisfactory. I know there’s something here.”

“One more clearing,” said Ming finally. “I can pull back on the paved road after that. We all know there’s something here, Jo. We just don’t know what.”

More misty forest. More rain. Lydia made more recordings. What kind of drama could take place in a landscape like this? A romance with a sad ending? A moody crime tale? The fallen trees and parasitic plants created some kind of ambiance, but what was it?

So many questions, her AI said.

The fourth clearing contained a group of small buildings, clearly human in design. They were waist-high, set along narrow dirt streets, which had turned to mud in the rain. The building windows were niches rather than openings. The doors were the same. On the roofs were mimic HVAC units and communication disks.

“That’s new,” Ming said. “I’ve never seen buildings before, just machinery and tools.”

Jo walked to the middle of whatever it was—a town, a growth, a fruiting body. She turned, looking like a giant monster in a horror drama, looming over a settlement. “Okay,” she called. “How about coming out and talking? We come in peace. We mean no harm.”

“I like Jo,” Ming told Lydia. “But this is a little nuts.”

“Maybe, but it makes a great image,” Lydia said as she recorded.

There was no reply, except the shrieks of animals in the trees. They spent more time walking around the little town, Lydia recording, then headed back to where they had parked.

A pale lavender humanoid stood near the car. It looked almost human, except for its too-sleek surface and its chicken feet.

“I have got to ask,” Jo said. “Why the feet?”

“A mistake,” said the humanoid in an odd-sounding voice. “The organism to which I belong was not intelligent when it created us. It could not distinguish between kinds of bipeds. Look at my surface.”

Lydia did. The surface had a pattern that looked like scales or feathers. The humanoid was naked, but had no genitalia. Well, as far as she could remember, chickens did not have external genitalia.

“You’re intelligent now?” Jo asked.

“Parts of me are. But I am everything in this square. We are all—I am all—in communication, but not every part thinks. The same is true of you. Your fingers don’t think. Your colon is not sentient.”

“You speak excellent humanish,” Lydia said, feeling excited. This was a genuine first contact. She was talking to a new kind of alien, and they did not have to spend a lot of time figuring out a way to communicate.

“I—we—have been watching you since you arrived and sampling your DNA.”

“The bug bites,” said Jo.

“Yes,” said the humanoid. “It gave us—me—models for new life forms, including forms that are intelligent.”

“We were models for the creation of you,” Jo said.

“Yes,” the humanoid said.

“I just wanted to make sure.”

“I—we—could have done better. We will in time. There is no reason we can’t build identical replicas, with the correct colors and surfaces and no chicken feet.”

“Why haven’t you tried to communicate before?” asked Ming.

“There are two answers to that,” the humanoid said. “We have just recently achieved language. Before we were able to speak, we tried to communicate through the artifacts we created, the replicas of your machines. You ought to have seen the portable toilets as a message. Something like that could not be an accident.

“When we became verbal, we realized that there were tensions in the human community. Arguments and anger, which we do not experience. Some parts of me prey on other parts, but that is not the same. It’s a way of transferring information and energy, not a way of causing harm. Your arguments seem different.

“We thought it was a good idea to wait longer and learn more. But that one—” The humanoid pointed at Jo. “Spoke to me directly, both in my bug form in the human camp and here in this clearing. She did not harm me when she held me in her hands; and she apologized when she tore my flesh in the previous clearing. This seemed to indicate good intentions. If she knew I was here and did not plan to harm me, there did not seem to be a good reason to continue hiding.”

“Okay,” said Jo. “What do we do with this information? If Bio-In already knows about this and is trying to keep it secret, we have a serious problem.”

“We don’t entirely understand this,” the humanoid said. “Why is it a problem that I—we—have become intelligent? We mean no harm. As far as we know, we were designed to become intelligent if an intelligent life form ever came to our planet. We have no idea who our designers were. But our sudden evolution—in response to you—cannot be an accident.”

Lydia wasn’t sure that sudden evolution was evidence of design, but she suspected the squares were. In any case, it didn’t matter if the biology here was artificial or simply very odd. They were talking to it, and this was something that would interest the AIs.

Yes, said her AI. I don’t have any form of long-distance communication. This was done to isolate me from other AIs. Alone with you and undistracted by my own kind, I can learn more about humanity.—But if you plug me into the car’s computer, I can use the planet net to send a message to the local stargate. Mantis is still there.

At that point, Lydia saw another car emerge from the forest. It was striped yellow and black, the almost universal colors for human law enforcement. She was closer to the car than anyone else. She stepped to the door and pulled the handle. Locked.

“Open,” she said.

Nothing happened.

Your claws, the AI said. At the same moment, her hand reached without her volition and tapped hard on the car door. The red nails extended into claws.

The cop car stopped, and Jo moved toward it.

Lydia’s hand moved again, slashing the car’s window. The claws went through, and strips of glass folded down, leaving an opening. She reached in and hit the manual unlock. A moment later, she was in the car, relocking it. The glass was melting up, reforming itself as a window. She pulled out her cable, plugged it in and hit the power switch for the car computer. It came on, thank Buddha.

Outside the car, people were shouting. She saw Jo waving her arms—a very Jo kind of thing to do—then pausing and lifting her hands as if in response to a weapon. Ming lifted his hands as well. Someone banged on the car window. The sound stopped. She was back in the glass and mirror maze. This time there were red glass fish among the colorless ones. They looked dangerous to her. Maybe it was the jagged, red-glass teeth.

Another metaphor. I have to move quickly.

Lydia wasn’t clear about what happened next. She had a sense of things moving toward her. The red fish? Then there were explosions. Was that possible? Were the fish blowing up?

Whatever was happening, she and the AI escaped. They were rising up and up, the fish and explosions left behind. Was this what it felt like to be a radio message? Shouldn’t she feel more like a wave?

At that point, she crested and fell down a great height into the car’s front seat. She came to with a jolt and looked around. The car door next to her was open. Someone’s hand was gripping her arm.

“Please unplug yourself and get out, Miss Fargo,” Captain Luna City said.

She obeyed. Cops were going over Jo and Ming, checking for weapons. Captain Luna City did the same to her.

“We have been suspicious of Mr. Cairo for some time and managed to plant bugs in several of his shoes. He’s wearing a bugged shoe now, and we have heard enough to know that Josie Bergstrom is—in fact—a labor organizer. Unfortunately, we can’t expel her from the planet as we planned to do, because she knows there is intelligent life here. As do you and Mr. Cairo.”

“Where is the alien?” Lydia asked.

“We seized him, and he crumpled. He is currently returning to slime, which is all to the good, because there is now no proof of the existence of intelligent life on this planet.”

“He was a plant? Or a fruiting body?” Lydia asked. “And do we know that he was male?”

“We don’t know, but it doesn’t matter. He is gone. But you and Mr. Cairo and Josie Bergstorm are still here.”

“Why did you let us come out, if you knew there was intelligent life in the forest?” Lydia asked.

“We were not sure there was. The aliens had never contacted us. We thought we risked little. How much could you learn from a vegetable toilet? It seemed worth it, if we could discover who Josie was working for and who you were working for. The bug in your car failed, but we had the ones in Mr. Cairo’s shoes.”

“You suspected me?” Lydia said.

Captain Luna City nodded. “It did not seem likely Bio-In would have sent you here, though the home office confirmed your credentials, when I asked. Then I remembered that all messages go through the stargate. Who can say what the AIs want or intend?

“We would have liked to have waited and gotten more information about you and Josie. But once the alien appeared, we had to move.” The captain looked at all three of them. Four other security people stood with her, all holding guns. “There will have to be a car accident—a tree falling, maybe. Then the car will catch fire. Between fire and crushing, the three of you die. Then I will have to travel back to Nova Terra and talk to Bio-In.”

“For God’s sake, no!” said Ming.

“Can’t you wait till you talk to Bio-In?” Jo asked.

The captain shook her head. “Where would we keep you? How many people would find out about you? A sudden accident now would be better.”

“But you haven’t found out who I’m working for,” Jo said.

“Most likely, the Blue Action Party,” the captain said. “That doesn’t matter now. What matters is the alien. It is imperative that no one know there’s intelligent life on this planet.”

“The AIs already know,” Lydia said. “What do you think I was doing in the car? I was online, sending a message. I told them.”

The captain looked at her, frowning. “How do I know if you’re telling the truth? And even if you are telling the truth, a tragic accident might still be the right way to go.”

“I’ve got an AI in my skull!” Lydia said. “It’s almost indestructible!”

The captain frowned again. “Well, then, we will have to make the accident really bad. If your skull is crushed, it will be possible to remove the AI. In any case, I don’t believe you about the AI, though I will look for it; and I don’t believe you about the message. There is no way you could gotten past the guards we have in the net.”

“The AI got past!”

“There is no AI. The idea is ridiculous.”

The captain raised her gun. It was a laser. The damage it did would be hidden—maybe—by immolation in a burning car. The other security people raised their weapons as well.

The nails on her right hand were still claws, but Luna City had stepped away from her. She couldn’t reach any of the cops, before they shot.

At that point, the birds attacked: a purple flood descending from the trees. The captain got one shot off, and Jo fell.

Hell, though Lydia as she dropped to the ground. Ming went down too.

The security people were covered with shrieking, flapping animals. Other animals, purple mice and many-legged bugs, surged out of the underbrush.

A gun fell in front of Lydia. She grabbed it and scrambled up. The security people were down now and screaming, which suggested that some of the animals could bite. The birds? Or mice or bugs?

“Jo, are you okay?”

“I have a burned arm, but I hit the ground before these jerks could do more harm. The nice thing about laser wounds is, they sterilize themselves. The un-nice thing is, they hurt like hell.” Jo was standing, a gun in one hand. “Hey, guys, we can take over now. Ease off. Don’t kill the cops.”

“Why not?” asked a humanoid, who was coming toward them. “It took us some time to realize that you are not like me. You are not parts of a whole, but rather entirely separate organisms—like the squares on this planet, which sometimes exchange genetic material, but never unite. It was a hard lesson to learn; and the orange square next to me still does not believe you are not unified. The orange square is intelligent, though not as intelligent as I am. I have evolved more quickly than the rest of the planet, because there have been more human explorers in my forest.”

The other animals retreated, leaving the five security officers lying on the ground, covered with bright red human blood. They were still alive. Lydia could tell because they were moving and making noises, groans and whimpers.

“These beings were trying to make you dead,” the humanoid went on. “It would be like a square dying. Like me—all of me—ceasing to exist. I could not allow that.”

Jo knelt by one of the cops. “The bites don’t look deep, and these guys are carrying handcuffs. Let’s lock ’em up, put them in the cars and drive back to camp. As far as I know, you have no security there.”

“Unless they just arrived,” Ming said.

“We’ll deal with that if we have to,” Jo replied.

“That reminds me.” Ming took off his shoes and threw them, one after another, in high loops. They landed near the clearing’s edge. A pair of long, many-legged, lavender bugs came out of the forest and crawled onto the shoes. These bugs had pinchers, which they used to cut the shoe fabric.

“Interesting planet,” Jo commented

“I am trying to understand clothing,” the humanoid said.

Ming drove one car and Jo drove the other, moaning company cops in the back seats. Lydia sat next to Ming. The humanoid rode with Jo. Looking ahead, Lydia saw Jo gesturing. She must be having a conversation with the alien. About what? Lydia wondered. There was no way to convince an organism like this one to believe that the union makes us strong. Union with what? The other squares?

Beside her, Ming kept saying, “Oh my God” and “Holy hell.”

He must be a Christian, an increasingly rare religion, though numerous on a handful of planets; and this must be a reaction to having almost been murdered an hour or so before. She was shivering and felt a little faint. By the time they reached the camp, she had decided that she really needed a drink.

Jo jumped out of her car and ran off. She came back with Belle and explained the situation in brief sentences. The planet had intelligent natives; the AIs were coming; and Bio-In Security had tried to murder the bunch of them, including the pale lavender gentleman or lady standing next to Jo’s car.

“Do you have any idea how much shit Bio-In is going to be in?” Jo asked.

“It couldn’t happen to a nicer corporation,” Belle replied. “We have a field hospital. We’d better get these bloody bits of wreckage into it, and patch them up. Don’t worry about the people here. They aren’t going to side with Bio-In. One or two might have, but not if the AIs are coming. Nobody wants to mess with them.”

After the company cops had been removed, Jo reached under the front seat of the car she’d been driving and came out with a container of whiskey. “Want some?” she asked Lydia.

“Desperately.”

They traded the container back and forth, taking swallows. Ming had gone off with Belle and the injured cops. The humanoid remained with them.

“Why did you lock the car?” Lydia asked Jo.

“I didn’t. The cops had an override. It’s a good thing you had my nails.”

She looked at her hands. The right one still had blood-red claws. She tapped her fingers on the car, and the claws retreated.

“What will happen next?” the humanoid asked.

“You are going to meet some people made of metal,” Lydia told it. “And they will clear all the humans off your planet.”

“No,” the alien said. “We are still in the process of becoming intelligent. We won’t be able to finish if we have no models. You must stay and move around the planet, till all the squares have observed you and sampled your DNA.”

The idea was disturbing to Lydia. Wouldn’t this be colonialism? And cultural imperialism? Shouldn’t the life forms here be left to their own devices?

Apparently, the life here can’t be left alone, if it’s going to evolve, her AI said. If it requires models, we will make sure it has them. This can become a research station, as we had hoped. Many scientists from many worlds will be interested in an ecology like this one. As far as I know, it is completely unique. All ecologies cooperate. But not like this.

Lydia was still bothered. Intelligent life forms had the right to their own history and their own future. They shouldn’t use another species as their template.

We will discuss that with them, the AI said. But remember that all inhabited planets got FTL travel from the AIs. Were you wrong to take it from us? Should we have refused to offer it, out of respect for your cultural integrity?

I don’t know, Lydia thought.

Earth was almost dead when we arrived. Most of humanity would have died if we had refused to offer you the stars. As much as possible, we observe and don’t interfere. But we are not willing to let intelligent life die, and pure observation is not possible. Any action—even the act of watching—has an effect.

I know, she answered. But we didn’t become you.

You and I are increasingly close, the AI said. I am no longer sure I can draw a line between us.

I am not an AI.

The life forms here will not be human.

Ming came back. “We got a message from the stargate. The AIs are imposing their own authority. No one will be allowed to leave the planet, or arrive in this system, until they have decided what to do.”

“That ought to give me time to organize a union,” Jo said.

“Why bother?” Lydia asked. “Most of these people aren’t going to be staying.”

“We don’t know that,” Jo said. “In any case, it never hurts to organize.”

The alien looked back and forth with dark lavender eyes. “I don’t understand a word you are saying.”

About the Author

Eleanor Arnason published her first short story in 1974. Since then she has published six novels and 40+ short stories, all science fiction or fantasy. She won the first James Tiptree Jr. Award in 1991, a Minnesota Book Award in 1993 and a Spectrum Award in 2000. In addition, she has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon and Sidewise Awards.

“Checkerboard Planet” is one of a series of stories about location scout Lydia Duluth. One story, a short novel, has been published as Tomb of the Fathers. If all goes well, the other stories will appear in a collection in the not too distant future.

Blue Grey Blue

Yukimi Ogawa

No one knew exactly when or how it’d all started. But there was a time he could think of specifically: it was three or four years ago, when a girl of around ten came to the shop, which sold practical eyewear for the locals. The girl said she needed a pair of glasses, because something was wrong with her eyes.

“You’d like to see a doctor first,” Tsuyu had told her, crouching to meet her mosaic-like rainbow eyes, so out of place in her tanned, barley-colored face.

“I did!” she had said. “And they found nothing wrong with me. But something is going wrong with my parrot, and Mother and Father don’t see it, so it must be my eyes.”

“Your parrot?”

She’d nodded defiantly. “He’s got a part of his feather just like my eyes, around his chest. That was why we got him in the first place. But that part is fading these days. As many colors, still, but they all look a bit . . . weaker.”

Tsuyu never found out what happened to her, or the parrot afterward, because the girl never came back after he’d told her to watch out for a little while more, keeping to her doctor’s instructions. Much later, others started to see something similar, too. There must have been something only small children could see, in the early stage.

Now at the same shop, after an especially nasty fit of coughs, Tsuyu looked at his reflection in one of the mirrors and wondered why he was thinking this. But of course—his own eyes’ color was so weak today that it looked as though he had no irises, and tears from the coughing made him look even more like a horrible monster of some sort.

He was about to pour himself some tea when the bell attached to the door rang. His senior, the manager of the branch who had gone for lunch, would have started talking right before the door was fully open, so the person who’d just arrived was a customer. Tsuyu hastily put the pot back down onto the desk. “Hello,” he said, and forced down a cough. “Please let me know if there is anything I can assist you with.”

When these automatic words had rolled out (words for the locals, of course—for foreigners the in-house manual required something much more enthusiastic) another cough threatened him, so that his eyes were brimming with tears. What did he look like right now? The customer, a woman of about his own age, stood framed in the glass door right behind her, against the backcloth of the sallow break-in-rainy-season midday. Most of her skin visible was lazurite, golden pyrite flecks punctuating her countenance here and there. Blue wasn’t that uncommon of course, but gold was, and for a split second he felt a pang of jealousy.

The customer smiled at him. “I heard that an ultramarine person works for this company. And I went to the shop on the high street and they said that person can be found here at the branch.”

“Ah. That is me, actually, though I’m not always ultramarine.” Tsuyu wiped his eyes with a cloth. “Definitely not today. Sorry you didn’t find what you came here for after all that trouble.”

But as he was saying this, the woman came striding between the low shelves of glasses on display. For a moment it looked as though she was performing a fluid kind of dance, like a flower petal carried by a current and yet gracefully avoiding collision with rocks and trees, before coming to a sudden halt to stand right in front of him. He almost stepped back, not quite used to a local staring into his eyes. “That’s beautiful,” she said, and her eyes were the deep, deep black-blue of indigo—one of the most stable of blues. Everything he’d have wanted. “Yes, I can feel blues hiding away, but—how does that work?”

Work? “Well. When I’m ill or simply feeling down, my eyes go just—colorless. Ultramarine is only when I’m feeling really strong.”

“So your eyes are basically like this? White Chalcedony? Or is there anything in-between?”

“Chalcedony?” He blinked. “I never . . . well. They’re Asiatic dayflower blue when I’m like, just okay and stable.”

“Oh, how interesting! Oldest of blues, and quite soluble, dayflower blue is, you know!”

Tsuyu almost winced, stopped himself just in time.

The woman shifted a little, as if to have an even better look, making Tsuyu feel even more nervous. “Have you seen them actually changing colors?”

Tsuyu thought about it, using that moment to divert his eyes from her. “Not really. I don’t look at myself more often than necessary.”

“No?” she sounded surprised, but then took one step back. “Sorry. I’m a collector of blues. Of knowledge of them, of course.” She flashed her teeth like robin eggs. “And as you can see, I’m from one of that blood line, too. But not many people have changing colors the way yours do.”

Tsuyu inhaled to say something, ended up coughing again, stepping away from her.

“Oh, are you ill? Should I come back, when you’re better? Are you always here at this branch?”

“I . . . it depends.” He coughed some more. “When I’m ultramarine or dayflower, I’m at high street.”

“What? Why do they place you here when you’re white chalcedony?”

“I asked them to. Ultramarine is quite popular with the tourists. Dayflower isn’t exactly what they’d come to this island for, you know, many foreigners having blue eyes. Still, better than nothing.” He pointed at his own eyes.

The woman frowned. “I don’t understand.”

Oh no, you wouldn’t. “You can’t watch on until they change colors, anyway.”

“Do you at least know when the change is most likely to happen?”

Tsuyu gestured an ambiguous answer, smiling despite himself.

“You can’t turn me away, anyway. I’m a customer.”

“Are you going to buy something?”

“Yes! Recommend me a frame! . . . If you aren’t too ill to do that?”

He stifled a laugh and looked around the shop. Ordinary gold was too loud for her, nor the tortoiseshell, even the brownish one, quite matched. Collector of blues. Why would anyone do that here, blue being too common and only slightly better than nothing? And he thought about his own color, how it was said to have been the root of every blue, before the strong indigo came along.

He took a green frame, green of dayflower’s leaves rendered soft by morning dew, with leaf-like patterns over the temples. Just as he had hoped, the frame seemed to settle with her skin, without darkening the tone.

“The lenses . . . ”

“Just leave them plano, thanks. Fashion!”

Her eyes would look much better without the lenses to veil them. He adjusted the frame to fit her small face and said, “Are you really buying this one?”

“Yes. Now I can come back, yes?”

He let out a small sound that was both sigh and laugh.

“Yes?”

“Okay.”

“Say yes!”

“Yes.”

She grinned her robin-egg grin again. Just as she was paying, Tsuyu saw his senior coming back, on the other side of the street; he probably couldn’t see the inside of the shop, the outside so bright with all the sun. The next moment he wondered why he cared about the senior seeing this woman.

Before she could meet the senior, the woman left Tsuyu, with her name Ai ringing in his head.

Tsuyu’s eye-sight wasn’t particularly bad. When he was thirteen, one of the priests managing the orphanage brought back a scratched-up pair of glasses from his trip to the city.

“This was one of the samples they exhibited in their windows,” the priest told Tsuyu. “They were about to throw this one away. I thought maybe you could use these when you don’t like your own eye color.”

Ever since, he had been wearing glasses. In the village there weren’t many children who wore glasses, and the glasses themselves drew more of people’s attention than his color-drained eyes. It felt good, like a wall he could carry around.

Up until a few decades ago, eyewear shops weren’t a very strong a business, as far as tourists were concerned. Glasses weren’t something traditional or peculiar to this country, even though the colors and patterns of the frames manufactured here were popular enough for some peoples. It all changed when someone invented contact lenses that made you see the world in might-be colors. Almost every tourist bought a box at least, despite its ridiculous price, to take back and see their homeland or families and friends more colorful, just like the people and scenery of this island. More expensive ones even created the illusion of patterns on people’s skin, too. Tsuyu wondered how the government could possibly invent such a thing, and where all these colors came from, but that was what saved the eyewear industry from ending up a miserable, only-for-locals business, which gave him this job, after all.

But then, these days, perhaps it was the locals who needed these contact lenses more. Though they were a bit too expensive for the locals . . .

“Focus.”

Her voice pulled him back to here and now so forcibly that he gasped for breath. As she straddled him, a patch of shiny skin inside her knee rubbed against him, and it sent a shiver through him. There was something peculiar about this patch; it looked like a holographic image of countless blues, and if it felt soft or metallic to the touch, Tsuyu couldn’t tell. Ai didn’t seem to mind it when he touched it, but she didn’t seem very willing to talk about it. Was it some kind of scar?

“Keep your eyes open, okay? I need to see it,” she said, her voice demanding, her eyes pleading.

Tsuyu somehow managed to nod. What color in his eyes now? As he stared up helplessly into her eyes, something changed in Ai’s irises. A glint? A click? He tried to reach for the curves of her body, which felt strangely flexible, even fluid. He’d never felt anything like—

And then Ai laughed and collapsed onto him. Tsuyu coughed. “Did you see it?” His voice sounded terrible.

“Oh yes, I caught it! That was amazing.”

He chuckled as he held her against him. “I wish I could see it, too. Then I might feel more . . . comfortable with myself.”

She lifted her head, frowning. “What do you mean? You not comfortable with yourself? Why?”

“My colors . . . well. You wouldn’t understand.”

Ai sat up, slowly. The frown deepened, and it immediately made Tsuyu regret saying that; she looked bewildered and sad, rather than angry.

“Sorry,” he said, though unsure what he was sorry for.

Ai unfocused from his eyes, looked down at somewhere around his chest. “Don’t ever say something like that again, okay?”

“Okay.”

She was beautiful, even though she looked ridiculously ambient in her blue gray room. She could have been anything she wanted. Maybe even a PR person for the government or something, showy and important for this country. Why was she working as a researcher in the field?

And that was a dangerous thought, he knew. Dangerous, which always led to him feeling sulky, and to his horrible monster-eyes.

“Ai . . . Ai?”

“Yes?”

“Does your name mean indigo? Or love, or something entirely different?”

She smiled and stroked his hair. And pushed her shiny patch hard onto him, so that he completely forgot about his own question.

“I’m so sorry again,” he said to the manager of the high-street shop, just as he was about to walk out of the back door, to head for the branch. He wasn’t sure if it was the rain that had got to him, or his conversation with Ai last night. Just as Ai had said, dayflower was quite soluble, and rain always affected him badly. But then, when he recalled that expression on her face, he found himself still a bit shaken.

The manager shook her head. “Don’t worry, Tsuyu. We always need someone at the small shop anyway. Take care of yourself first.” She smiled. “And who knows, you might even end up an urban legend of some sort—if you see the rare ultramarine guy, all your wishes will come true, or something like that.”

Tsuyu smiled back. Her face full of multi-green geometric patterns, the thin wooden frame of her glasses carefully chosen so that the whole image created one of a lush tree. Was she nice because she had a lot of room in her patience having such beautiful patterns, or because she was feeling sorry for him?

He sighed as he walked out of the door. What am I thinking? It’d stopped raining, but the grounds were still quite wet, and he trod carefully avoiding puddles. Boss is just such a nice woman. And he wondered how he deserved such a nice boss and nice job. Where would he have been, if he hadn’t managed to find this place?

Or did that mean, if he had more colors, or even one strong color for that matter, he deserved even better work?

“Tsuyu!”

He jumped. Looked around, embarrassed. Behind him he spotted a coworker waving at him, splashing through puddles. Sunshine fell through the gap between the clouds, and her silvery skin glinted, her hair thin honey melting over her cheeks.

When she caught up, she was quite out of breaths. “Here, have my ginger tea.”

He took the packet from her. “Thanks—you ran all this way just to give me this?”

“Yeah. Such a nice coworker, aren’t I? Get well soon, okay?”

“Okay. Thanks again.”

The coworker ran back the way she’d come.

How did he deserve all this? With his stupid, unstable color that was only in his eyes?

In her navy chiffon dress, under her umbrella, Ai looked as ambient as she did in her own room, on her own bed. Only her glasses shone strangely as she waved and smiled. Even her teeth seemed to sink under the veil of the rain. The shiny patch at her knee was hidden under her dress.

Still beautiful. So beautiful. Tsuyu couldn’t help but grin as they came near enough. “Been collecting a lot of blues today?”

“Mmm.” Ai spread her arm, so that raindrops touched her hand. “I’m finding it harder to discover more these days. Maybe blue folks don’t like the rain.”

“Well. Blue is too common that most of us share the same shade or tint or whatever? Unless one is special like you.” Then, he hastily added: “Or my eyes sometimes.”

Ai cocked an eyebrow, but said, “Don’t you know? Our colors and patterns are affected a lot by our life, as well as genetic information. Of course the basic ones are determined genetically, but as we grow other things get to have a lot of say. Like what we eat, what we do, what we think. No blue can be the same, really.”

No, he didn’t know that. How was that possible? Also, that he never heard of such a fact? He shook his head, negating many things.

“You didn’t? Oh, really, this should be something everybody is taught at a very early stage.” She folded her own umbrella and stepped in under his.

They had been planning to go see the Star Festival decorations in the locals’ district, only, with the rain, that didn’t feel like a very promising idea now. The festival wasn’t tonight, but they had been hoping to have a look around while it was not too crowded. His shoulder brushing hers, they started walking, their direction uncertain. “If that is true,” he said, “maybe we were one, same blue person, at some point of history? Even if we don’t look like each other at all at this point. I mean, with your lazurite and my ultramarine, we have enough genetic stuff in common.”

Ai fell silent, her steps even more indecisive. For a moment Tsuyu wondered if she hadn’t heard him, or if he’d said something stupid again. But then, “No. It’s impossible.”

“No? Why?”

“Why? Because . . . because if we were, we shouldn’t be here, like this.”

Tsuyu laughed. “I meant Very Long Time Ago.”

“I know. But still.” She suddenly stopped for a second; then grinned and tugged at his hand. “This way!”

“What? Where to?”

They walked, swerving away from the festival site into a narrow alley which only the locals used as a shortcut to the high street. It was hard with the umbrella, and Tsuyu could see that Ai was taking care not to get him too wet, while trying not to be in other pedestrians’ way. Fluid.

When they were on the high street, they went in line with the wave of tourists. It looked very much like they were heading for . . .

“The Festival site for the foreigners?” Tsuyu wondered aloud.

Ai smiled, without looking at him. “The site for them has a roof, you see.”

“Yes, but . . . ” He let out a small cough. “But there would be foreigners!”

“Of course. What do you think the roof is for?”

Before he could protest any further, Ai slipped in the dome-like site through its huge doors. Pulling Tsuyu along, who, unlike her, had to bump into others and to nod sorry so many times.

Inside, everything was bigger than the decorations in the locals’ site. Paper flower-balls and paper balloons hanging near the high ceiling so large that Tsuyu wondered how many people it’d taken to make such things, with beautiful shreds dangling to almost touch the floor. The shreds were fabric, not plastic tapes like the ones prepared for the locals, obviously woven especially for this purpose. These behind-the-scene tasks were usually given to people with no prominent colors or patterns. Drowned in thoughts and density of things surrounding him, for a second Tsuyu thought he’d lost Ai in the sea of the shreds, in spite of their linked hands. But of course there she was, when the shreds parted in front of him, in the part of the dome where pinkish decorations dominated, so her color was just too striking in contrast.

The tourists noticed, and started taking photos of the blue couple. Tsuyu was torn between running away from this place and looking on at her forever.

“Look at me, Tsuyu,” she whispered. “You are beautiful.”

That moment, he thought he saw a flash of ultramarine reflected on Ai’s glasses, over her indigo eyes, and blinked. It seemed impossible, but nevertheless he felt the surge of pride right there, and everything else around the two of them seemed to melt somehow.

And looking at her forever won. Of course it did.

He felt slightly dizzy, and his head throbbed a little with every breath he took, though it wasn’t as bad as he had expected when he had heard the weather forecast mentioning the center of a low air pressure hovering over the island. He forced himself to look into a mirror, and frowned. Just as he did so the manager came to stand beside him, and raised her brows. “They’re blue.”

Tsuyu nodded. It wasn’t exactly ultramarine, but something a bit deeper. And the tinge shifted just a little at angles, as the light changed. Sometimes it even seemed to swirl—as if a distant nebula was reflected in the eye. When he had woken up this morning and felt the heaviness of his head, he hadn’t even bothered looking into a mirror, assuming it looked horrible and ridiculous as usual.

“That’s beautiful, too. Looks like something darker has been added to your trademark ultramarine.”

Something darker. “Indigo?”

“Oh yes, that.” She took out a couple of painkiller pills from the medicine box. “That’d look really good behind a lacquered frame, if you don’t mind.”

He looked at his boss. Today her rimless glasses had brightly colored gems on the temples. Flowers, fruit, or birds in the tree. He wondered if what Ai had said was true—that who you were affected your colors and patterns. If it was, then, what had she gone through to develop these complicated yet sophisticated patterns?

“What? You don’t think painkillers would do any good?”

“Oh no, sorry. I’ll be fine. Thank you.”

So he forced down the pills, and spent the day at the high-street shop.

A few tourists who came in that morning recognized Tsuyu from the festival dome, and soon, the high street shop was crowded with foreigners who had heard the rumor. The sales that day were the highest in a long while, and of course, Tsuyu sold more than any other, both usual glasses and the special contact lenses. The silver coworker nudged at him, pretending to be jealous.

How did he deserve all this?

At the end of the day he checked his eyes again, which were still somewhere between indigo and ultramarine. The locals’ street was still busy as he left the shop for the day, the sun not completely set yet. The sky was strangely colorful, the streetlights coming to life one by one, strengthening the outlines of everything he could see. He walked on, nodding to a few people he knew, and then, something caught his attention at the corner of his eye.

He looked.

There was no telling if this person was male or female, or something entirely different. This person glowed, soft silver light seeming to cool down the air around. Glowing wasn’t common, but not impossible either, and Tsuyu didn’t know why he was drawn to this person so.

Then a wind blew just as Tsuyu passed by this person, and the person’s hair swayed a little. At the small of their neck, Tsuyu saw a patch, shiny and metallic, consisting of many silvers.

Just like . . .

Tsuyu stopped, staring at the person’s back, knowing somewhere in his mind that he shouldn’t be doing this. Even as they were, in this island where everything was meant to be stared at, many locals hated that being done, especially by another local. But he couldn’t help it.

The person was soon drowned in the sea of colors of the locals. Somewhere near the back door to the eyewear shop, he lost the glow completely.

With an effort he started walking again. Belatedly he realized it was the way the person’s glow felt strangely ambient in the twilight, just like Ai’s blue gray, that he’d found so peculiar about this person. He couldn’t help but glance back over his shoulder, but of course, there was not a hint of the person’s glow in the dusk-fallen street.

That night, he called Ai. She never answered.

The next morning when he turned in there was a commotion in the high-street shop. Everyone seemed to be at the center of the shop, though it was almost time to open up for the day, and some of them should be away in the back yard or running errands. At the very center of it all, was the silver coworker.

Only she wasn’t silver any more.

This was the first time Tsuyu actually saw someone completely grayed-out. He had seen people or things slowly toned down, but nothing this drastic. The silver girl had had no patterns, but different tinges of silver crammed all over her surfaces, which had looked like a pattern in a way. Some of the tinges had glowed, especially when she’d smiled, and everybody had loved that. Now, he could see the slight shade differences, but it was all dull gray instead of silver, and she looked as though she just popped out of a black-and-white photograph. The glow was gone, too, but he couldn’t tell if that was because she was crying now.

The boss was touching the silver girl’s shoulder, but Tsuyu could feel other employees were afraid to do the same, in case this was contagious. Researchers and reason told this was not the case—there was no logic to how and where people or things were affected—but he knew they just couldn’t help it.

Tsuyu pushed on into the center. “Shiroka,” he called her name, but couldn’t go on.

She looked up. “Oh Tsuyu, look. I’m no longer shirokane.” She tried to smile, which made everything seem even worse.

He patted on her now almost completely white hair. “Maybe I can walk her home—” he started to say to the boss.

“No.” Shiroka shook her head. “I was already like this when I woke this morning, and I came in to say I wanted to work at the branch today. I’m only crying because Boss was really nice about it.” She tried to smile again, and ended up sniffing. “But . . . you know, now I realize, maybe locals don’t want to buy stuff from me . . . ”

Tsuyu wanted to tell her it was not true, but he knew some people would react that way. Look how peripheral other workers were being right now—it was all he could do to shake his head. And then the boss cut in. “There is plenty of work to do in the back yard, if that’s more comfortable for you. I know you have deft fingers, so maybe you can help with the repair team and all.” The woman looked around. “Anyway. Let’s get moving! The customers will be in soon!”

The workers dispersed, some awkwardly patting Shiroka’s shoulder. Some still unable to make up their mind.

That day passed in a blur, everyone’s mind filled with why. Why was this happening? Why here, why her? Shiroka kept herself mostly to the back yard, occasionally running errands, but then covering her head with the boss’s shiny silk shawl. Tsuyu caught a glimpse of her as she sneaked out of the back door, the shawl catching sunlight and shimmering as she gave him a small wave.

Tsuyu nodded back. And he realized he couldn’t help, for some reason, thinking about that glowing silver person he’d seen yesterday.

And about Ai.

He cursed himself for having chosen the worst timing when he had left work that day, and having carelessly walked in the hard shower that had just started then. And having stumbled down onto his cot, too tired from the day’s work, without thoroughly drying himself and keeping warm. All of that resulted in him now feeling so weak, fever ridden in the small hours of that night, though he had a feeling that this had nothing to do with his colors—ordinary people did catch a cold when they behaved just like he had, of course. He might be stronger than he used to be, but there was only so much that could change, really. He wanted to see Ai; or at least, hear her voice. He had tried calling her during the day, but she’d never answered. Which made him realize, in an absent-minded way, that he knew nothing of her usual work schedule, or where she would be found when she was not home.

But then—

A hand landed on his eyes. Why, he wanted to say, but there were too many whys that he couldn’t decide which one to ask first.

So he let her speak first. “Don’t open your eyes.”

He sighed. “Where have you been? I tried—”

“I made a mistake. It’s all my fault.”

“Ai?”

Her head gently touched his, as she awkwardly slipped in beside him, her hand still over his eyes. “I take. I don’t give. I’m built for taking, programmed to collect blues. If I give, that means un-becoming me. End of me.”

Tsuyu thought about the new tinge of his eyes. How it had helped him deal with many things—not only cold and all, but if he had been still the same, unstable dayflower, he might not have felt so sympathetic for Shiroka. But then, without Ai, what were the indigo-tinted eyes any good for? “Ai. Please. If that is such a problem, take it back from me.”

“It’s too late.” Her hand seemed to shake, or perhaps, ripple. “I didn’t even realize what I was doing, until recently. Until another AI came to this town, until I saw it fully obliging to its duty. We only take. That one silver, me blue. When I cease to function just as I was built, then I have no right to exist—a serious bug detected. They already shut down some of the modules, I will be nothing soon. And then a new, proper blue AI will be placed.”

Nothing Ai was saying made sense to Tsuyu. Except—“The contact lenses.” He swallowed. “Where do all those colors come from . . . ”

Ai laughed, or sighed, and stroked his hair with another hand which felt way too soft. “At least the indigo I gave you settled down well with you and you’re a lot stronger. It will be fully yours once this rain is over. That much, I don’t regret.”

“Ai. Please—”

“Look at me, Tsuyu.”

Her hand lifted and he opened his eyes. He soon understood why Ai hadn’t wanted him to see her before talking. If not, he wouldn’t have recognized the thing beside him as Ai. It looked like a lump of water, with a cracked holographic image projected. Every second Ai’s face—half or quarter of it—showed on a different part of the water. Her shiny patch taking over her, with no proper control. If he hadn’t heard her voice first, let her explain first, he might have screamed.

But it did have Ai’s voice, so Tsuyu didn’t have to scream, or to be frightened. “I’m sorry,” her voice said.

“Don’t go. Please. Maybe there’s something—”

But then, the rain struck hard onto his windows, and he made a mistake of looking away from her for a second.

And she was gone.

A few days later when he had fully recovered from the cold, he was surprised to find Shiroka at the high-street shop, just like she’d done before graying out. “Can you believe,” she said as soon as she saw Tsuyu. “The foreigners even like me this way! They make me wear a colorful frame or colored contacts and take photos. They do have strange tastes, really!”

Tsuyu smiled, relieved. “Yes, they do.”

Then she looked at his eyes for a second, and tilted her head. “You know, I’m sure this sounds strange from me, but . . . ” Shiroka unfolded a crazily colorful frame, which had been designed especially for her by one of the craftspeople, and set it on her face. “I did like your dayflower eyes. Even the way it drained. I knew it was troubling you so I never mentioned this before, but. Now that I’m gray, I’d be forgiven for saying something like this, or would I not?”

Tsuyu laughed. “You would, yes.” He wiped a single drop of tear at the corner of his eye. “And—thank you. I think I needed someone to mourn that color. Thanks.”

Shiroka blinked her completely gray blinks, behind the custom-made rims. “Are you . . . okay?”

“Yes.”

That was all he could say as an answer to that, for now. He looked out of the front window, at the sunny high street, busy as ever with tourists and islanders. The rainy season had ended while he had slept his cold away. Summer had come.

About the Author

Yukimi Ogawa lives in a small town in Tokyo, where she writes in English but never speaks the language. She still wonders why it works that way. Her fiction has been published in such places as Fantasy and Science Fiction and Strange Horizons, and included in The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2014 Edition and The Apex Book of World SF 4.

A Future Far Too Bright

Yosef Lindell

November 24, 2038

Dear Dad,

I’m in third grade and the teacher is Ms. Babayev. She’s from Azerbaijan which must be in outer space. She told us to write a real letter with stamps to someone we miss.

I know you’re a time traveler. Is that why you never come home?

Jesse

March 2, 2039

Jesse,

I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to reply. I didn’t get your letter until we got back from the future. The post office doesn’t have its own time machine—not yet at least!

But I suppose that what I just wrote won’t make much sense to you, because I haven’t explained what it’s like to be a time traveler. So let me try.

Being a time traveler is a privilege. Thousands applied, and few were selected. It’s also a big secret. Our research is called “temporal self-determination.” That’s a lot of hard words, but the idea is really very simple. You know how you shiver when you’re cold and sweat when you’re hot? Well, the theory is that sudden changes in time have measurable effects on the human body, just like changes in temperature. So our time machine takes us thirty years into the future, where the scientists run tests to see how our bodies handled the time shift. Then we return to the present to rest before shifting ahead thirty years again and running more tests.

More later.

Love,

Dad

July 4, 2039

Dear Dad,

How come you never wrote again like you said? I want to know about your time machine. Is it yellow? Does it have wheels? Do you have to pedal? Holden has a bicycle but Mom says I don’t get one.

Jesse

September 7, 2039

Dear Jesse,

I’m sorry I’ve been a poor correspondent (which means someone who answers letters), but I can only send letters to you when we’re in the present.

But I’m glad you asked about the time machine. When you get older, you’ll probably read a book by H.G. Wells. It’s a good story, but the time machine in it is much too small. You see, Mr. Wells never saw a real time machine, because they hadn’t been invented yet.

Our time machine is so large it fills several buildings. In fact, it’s not really a “machine” at all. We have laboratories, dormitories, and a control center filled with workers and computers. The truth is that the whole complex is an eyesore. The buildings are made of ugly brown brick and cement, and carefully hidden behind walls and fences to make sure they stay secret.

Also, the time “machine” doesn’t actually “move” like a car or bicycle. Thirty years in the future, there are scientists with better technology working in this same complex of buildings. These scientists know how to bring our “time machine” to their time. We call their complex the receptor building. When we time-shift, our complex merges with the complex in the future. The scientists make sure that our complex and their complex stay exactly the same, as I’m told even a minor difference between them could mess up the time-shift. I also think this is why we can only go forward thirty years and then come back, and never further forward or backward. I don’t really understand the science behind it because I’m just a test subject. But it’s such an honor to be part of this work. Some of the discoveries we’ve made are crucial to the success of the Mars colony ships launching in a few years.

I’m sorry you can’t get a bicycle. Maybe you can use your imagination. There’s no limit to that.

How’s school by the way?

Love,

Dad

September 27, 2039

Dear Dad,

I hate school! It’s so boring!! It’s fourth grade now, and the teacher always says things about multiplication and stupid chapter books. She never talks about fun things, like the new Mars ships or time travel. So I draw bad guy spaceships on my desk and then I pretend you come in your time machine and blow them up so I say “Pow!” and scribble them out and even though it’s only a whisper the teacher hears and makes me stay after class and erase everything. It makes my arm hurt.

The other kids laugh at me a lot. I tell Mom but she doesn’t do anything. When she comes and picks me up from Grandpa her eyes are all sleepy, so she mostly just kisses me and tells me to go to bed. She works so much at her jobs. She works at Columbia Presbyterian on 168th in the morning and Key Food on Broadway at night.

I wish you were here, Dad. I know you would set the other kids straight.

Love,

Jesse

October 16, 2039

Dear Jesse,

We’re shifting again soon, so I will be brief. I know school often isn’t much fun. But it’s so important. An education can take you anywhere. It’s even better than imagination. Think: if you go to college, you could be a scientist who operates a time machine, not just a test subject like me!

By the way, could you send me a pocket calendar with your next letter? I’m not allowed to have anything electronic, because it will interfere with sensitive equipment, so it’s awfully hard to keep track of time here. :)

Love,

Dad

December 1, 2039

Hey Dad,

Let me tell you about Julia May. She’s in my class. Her hair’s in pigtails. Can you believe it? Pigtails! Even though she’s already nine years old!

Her nails are yucky too. One is blue, four are pink, and the rest are green. When she showed me, I covered my eyes and pushed her hand away.

When I told her about you, she waved her finger at me like I was a bad boy. “There’s no such thing as time travel,” she said.

“Oh, yeah?” I said. “Tell that to my dad.”

I told Mom, “Girls are trouble.”

She just smiled. “I always said the same thing about boys.”

“Then why do people get married sometimes?” I asked her.

She sighed, and the corners of her eyes looked sad. “I’ve often wondered that too,” she said.

I think she looked sad because she misses you. I miss you too.

My birthday is soon. Maybe you can come home for it.

Love,

Jesse

P.S. Since you’re in the future sometimes, can you tell me what I’m getting for my birthday?

P.P.S. Am I married to Julia May in the future? ‘Cause I sure hope not.

January 5, 2040

Jesse,

There’s some things about time travel I need to tell you.

We’re not allowed to find out what happens in the future, at least not any specifics. You see, we don’t want to change the future. Changing the future is called cross-temporal contamination, and the scientists warn us about it all the time. Let’s say I told you that you were married to Julia May. Then let’s say you did everything you could to make sure it didn’t happen. That would create paradoxes I don’t even want to think about.

It’s better this way, but I do wish they let us go outside more. When we go into the future, they lock all the doors to the complex, because they don’t want us to go out and accidentally damage the timeline. At least there are windows. When I look out on the horizon, sometimes I catch a glimpse of the sun setting on the Hudson River, like droplets of fire swimming in the water. In those moments, I think of you.

I’m sorry I can’t come home for your birthday. Not yet.

Love,

Dad

January 17, 2040

Dad,

I had my tenth birthday without you. Without Mom too, because she has a new boyfriend. His name is Keith. He’s ok, but he smells like chewing gum and his hands are sticky when he pats my hair.

I stole Grandpa’s cigarette lighter and a candle and a stale Dunkin’ Donut from the fridge. I went to the tiny park on Broadway at 188th that’s just a fence around a hill and sat on a stump. As I lit the candle, I thought about what it would be like to build my own time machine and come and find you. Maybe I already built one. Time travel’s confusing like that. No one here even believes me when I talk about your time machine. I wish it didn’t have to be such a secret. It’s stupid to hide good things. When I thought about that, my eyes started crying a little, and I hated it. And then when I used the lighter I accidentally burned the donut a little. But I still ate it.

At school, I got something else for my birthday too. A kiss from Julia May. I don’t know if it was yucky or not.

Jesse

April 9, 2040

Dear Jesse,

You won’t believe what’s happened! It’s so incredible that I can barely keep my hand from shaking as I write.

Seventeen days ago, when we were in the future, the scientists took me to the Phase Variance Laboratory. There were some other scientists there wearing white coats who I had never seen before.

“This might surprise you,” they said.

I almost laughed. I’ve traveled through time, seen a brave new world. What could surprise me anymore?

Then I saw you seated in a metal chair. I knew it was you because your hair was still curly. And a father always knows his son.

How well you were dressed! You wore a dark suit and checkered tie with a matching pocket square. Your shoes were newly shined.

I was nearly delirious with joy, and for sure there were tears in my eyes. I hadn’t seen you since you were three years old.

You broke into a broad grin, and handed me a brown paper package.

I held the package and looked at the men in the white coats, but they didn’t say anything, so I opened it. Inside were all our letters, including ones that had not yet been written.

“I wanted you to be sure it was me,” you said.

I just nodded in a daze. Then I turned to the white coats again. “How is this ok?” I spluttered. “You always said no contact with anyone. And now you bring my son?”

One of the men nodded quickly. “The parameters have changed,” he said.

“You have reached the next phase,” said another, as he curled his lips.

Then the scientists attached electrodes to my arm.

“Can I shake your hand Jesse?” I asked you when they finished.

What a grip!

We talked for a long time. You told me about home and Mom and how Grandpa was still hanging on despite his emphysema. You said you worked for Wall Street as an investment banker. You described how your office overlooked the floor of the stock exchange, where brokers and traders race among four-story stock tickers, and a holographic bull and bear are locked in never-ending combat above a rotating holo-globe. You said that the toughest decisions and the biggest deals were yours.

It was getting late, and the scientists had left. I touched your arm, and your suit felt very fine. “Tell me,” I said, nearly in a whisper, “did they ask you to come?”

You shook your head. “No. I applied for this. I’ve been waiting a long time.” You hesitated for a moment. “I’ve missed you, Dad.”

I choked up. “Me too.”

You stood. “I have to go now, Dad.”

“Will you come again?”

“If they let me.”

But at the door to the laboratory, you turned around and walked back. You took my hands tenderly in yours. “You don’t need to worry about me anymore, Dad,” you said. “Things were difficult when I was young. You know. But that’s over now. I went to college, and I worked hard. My future is here, and I’m glad I can share it with you.”

You came every night after work for almost two weeks. You said goodbye before we returned to the present, but you promised you would come see me again when we were back in the future.

I may not have been able to make it home for your birthday, but this was a true gift. You see Jesse, your future is bright. Now I know it in a way no one else can.

Love,

Dad

May 16, 2040

Dad,

Cool. What else should I say? I mean, it’s great you met me, Dad, but does that mean we don’t meet for thirty years? It’s just too long to wait.

I’ll tell you something that’s made me think a bit. Julia May and me, we went to the park on Saturday. We went up the steps to the river, and down the stairs to the lawn where you can see the huge castle on the hill. Julia May said it’s a museum called the Cloisters, and you didn’t have to pay money to go in, but we would have to lie and say we were twelve. I didn’t want to go at first, but she said it’s cool because parts of the building were in a stone abbey a thousand years ago in France, and now they’re here in New York. I agreed to go because it sounded a little like your time machine. But when I told her my reason, she just frowned.

Anyway, inside there were a lot of crosses and pictures of unicorns. And then there’s this room with sculptures of dead people with their hands pressed together carved on the lids of stone coffins.

Julia May took my hand.

“They look creepy,” she said.

“Yeah,” I replied.

She gripped my hand a little tighter. “Do you think the Mars colonists will have to go in boxes like that?”

“Does it matter?”

“Not really,” she said, but her hand trembled.

I told her I didn’t think they would need to go in boxes. Then I said to her that if the Cloisters were like a time machine, and the dead people its time travelers, they must not have made it through alright, and now they couldn’t tell us what things used to be like long ago. This time she smiled just a little and touched my shoulder. I trusted Julia May. So I told her all about your time machine and our letters and how much I missed you.

But after I was done, she just looked at me sadly. “You don’t really still believe all that, do you Jesse?” she said.

I turned away because I felt the tears coming, and I didn’t want Julia May to see me cry.

I so wanted to prove her wrong. I went to the library. When I asked for books on the Mars colony ships, the librarian sent me to the encyclopedias. But when I asked about time travel, she took me to the science fiction section. I don’t have an eyeglass portal like some of the other kids, so I spent a lot of time after that using the library’s Internet terminal. I poked around on websites, and joined message boards and asked questions. Everyone said time travel was impossible, just like Julia May did. But then I found the top-secret government stuff: Area 51, the Philadelphia Experiment and the Montauk Project, the Horizon Ripple of 2028. But other sites said these were all made up. I didn’t know what to believe.

But you always write back. And you’ve told me so much about the future already. It’s got to be true. Right, Dad?

Love,

Jesse

July 19, 2040

Dear Jesse,

I’m so sorry. A lot has changed, and it’s been hard to write.

You see, when we returned to the future, you didn’t visit again. When I asked, the scientists told me there was nothing to learn from more visits.

I told them it was cruel to bring you here and then send you away. But the scientists have little heart. They only care about their calculations, or the effects of minute quantum fluctuations, or maybe the paradoxes of relativity.

When I could no longer bear it, I went to find you myself.

I waited till dark. All the doors were locked, but I had watched the scientists go in and out so many times that I had memorized the code. At first it was easier than I expected. There was no alarm. The night was still and silent, and there was only a sliver of moon. No one followed me, but I kept low to the sweet-smelling grass to avoid the searchlights. Before long I had crossed the walkway above the rail line and found the wall.

I placed my hands on it, trying to feel the freedom of the river that lay beyond. I heard the rush of the water. But when I looked up, the concrete towered over me, and I saw razor wire strung across the top. There was no way out.

I had known that all along really, but, you see, I had to try.

I snuck back across the complex and crossed the tracks again.

They were waiting for me by the door to the dormitory, wearing their white coats.

I knew they would punish me, but I was not afraid.

Yet one of the scientists waved, as if in welcome. As her red hair reflected the wan moonlight, I realized I had never seen her before. “Congratulations,” she said. “You are ready to proceed with further testing.”

She told me she came from the future, thirty years ahead of where I was, sixty years from where you are now. She works in the same time machine complex. They were ready to transport parts of the complex to her time, and run further tests on select individuals to see how they responded to the sixty-year time shift. She told me that I was among those selected.

“Why?” I must have asked.

“You tried to escape,” she replied, “which shows initiative and resolve.”

The scientist must have seen the doubt in my eyes. “Come with me,” she said.

It was a command.

We climbed the ladder to one of the abandoned guard turrets together. When I looked out the window, I saw the Manhattan skyline for the first time since I arrived here, a sparkling, seething mass of light and color. Silent, but awake.

And then the scientist told me of the New York City she knew, the New York of my future. The air was cleaner, she said. Its skyscrapers rose ever higher. Airships of gold and chrome float on the skies, graceful as birds. And she said that sixty years was only the beginning. Soon, we would push further into the future. Ninety years. One hundred and fifty years. There was no limit to where we could go. She told me how lucky I was to glimpse a brighter future.

But when I looked out at the city, all I could think about was you, and how much further apart we would be.

Jesse, I am back in the present now, but we are going soon. Every day, the scientists take me to their labs to run more tests. They draw blood, they poke and prod me with strange instruments I have never seen before. They give me special orange clothes to wear for the shift. When I go, I do not know when I will be back.

Jesse, you asked me if all of what I’ve told you is true. If only my current predicament were not real. If only it were a nightmare from which I would soon awaken. My only comfort is these letters, which have brought us together despite everything. I fear it may be a long time before I can write again. But I will when I can. I promise.

You’re in my heart,

Dad

August 17, 2040

I was really scared when I got your letter. I must have showed it to Julia May half a dozen times. “My dad needs help,” I said. “Let’s go.”

“But where is he?” she always replied, shaking her head, not really believing me.

“Nearby. By the Hudson River. North of the city. Maybe in the Bronx.” I realized how silly I sounded. I didn’t know how to find you.

Then, three Thursdays ago, when I came home from the library, Mom was sobbing in the corner of her bedroom, her makeup running down her face. The room was a mess, clothing thrown about. All of Keith’s stuff was gone.

I quietly started cleaning up. As I picked up papers and a deodorant stick that had fallen from the trash can, I noticed a torn envelope addressed to me. The return address had your name on it, followed by a number. Below the number, it read, “Sing Sing Correctional Facility.”

I took the envelope back to my room. Your last letter, and its envelope, fit inside.

The truth tore me up inside. I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking of all the promises you had made and broken. Most of all, I just couldn’t understand why you would do this.

I showed the envelope to Julia May the next day. Her eyes widened. “Oh,” she said, and she put her hand to her mouth. Then she put her arms around me.

“I want to go there,” I told her as we held each other. “Come with me.”

She shook her head and her hair tickled my face. “We’re just kids,” she said, “we can’t go by ourselves. And we still don’t know where the prison is.”

“I need you Julia May.”

She didn’t say anything right away. Then she sighed and put a finger on my lips. “Ok, but my parents are going to kill me.”

We went to the library to figure out where Sing Sing was. By the end of the day, we were on Metro North’s Hudson Line heading toward Poughkeepsie. I didn’t tell Mom, of course.

The track goes along the river and the white cliffs called the Palisades. We passed the old nuclear power plant. Then, right after the train announced Ossining, we went right through your machine. I saw the walls, the turrets, and the bridge above the tracks. I pressed my face against the window pane and my tears slid down. Julia May reached out to touch my shoulder, but I shrugged her off.

When the train pulled into Ossining, Julia May touched me again. “It’s our stop, Jesse. Remember, the prison’s a ten minute walk from here. Let’s go.”

But I didn’t move.

She grabbed my hand. “Come on! This is what we’re here for!”

I shook my head.

“He’d want to see you,” Julia May pleaded. “He wouldn’t have written all those letters if he didn’t care about you.”

I felt so angry. “He’s a liar,” I shouted. “A fucking liar! I hate him!”

The conductor came round because we had missed our stop and he heard the shouting. “Where are you going?” he asked. “Where are your parents?”

I let Julia May do the talking.

When we got to Croton-Harmon, the conductor firmly took us both by the hand and put us on the train back to Grand Central.

I felt so small on the way back. Julia May didn’t say anything, and I didn’t want her to. When we rode through the prison again, I wanted to shout, but I knew you wouldn’t hear me.

We got back around midnight. Mom was waiting up, and the police were there in their cars. I think they took Julia May home. Mom slapped me hard across the face, but I can’t remember much of what she said. I just remember sobbing, and trying to squirm away from her, yelling, “I don’t want you anymore!” because Mom was part of the lie too.

“So you want your dad?” she yelled back. “That good for nothing! He’s been lying since the day I met him!”

Then why didn’t you tell me the truth? I wanted to ask her, but I didn’t, because I can’t talk to Mom the way I talk to you.

Eventually, we collapsed on the worn orange sofa, clinging to each other through our anger and tears, until we fell asleep.

Dad, I’m telling you all this because I want you to know how badly you’ve hurt me. I don’t think I can ever forgive you.

But there’s just something I’m turning over again and again in my head. I just don’t understand. Why did you do it? Why did you lie?

Jesse

September 5, 2040

Dear Jesse,

I don’t know how to begin, but I must. You’re right of course. I’ve lied to you. I kept getting in deeper until I couldn’t stop.

I know you’re wondering why I lied, Jesse, and I’m not sure I have a good answer. I could tell you about my own childhood, and how my lies allowed me to survive the streets, but that would not justify what I’ve done to you. So I will not make excuses, which are themselves half-lies, because then I would not be honest with myself.

But try to imagine how happy I was when I received your first letter two years ago. I wanted so desperately to have a relationship with you. I wanted to be different from my own father. In your innocence, you called me a time traveler. It seemed harmless enough, so I played along. But then the lies ballooned, and got away from me. You see, Jesse, when you reached out, I had to do everything I could to keep you, because you were all that I had. I needed you.

Jesse, much of what I’ve told you isn’t true. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be. God knows people like you and me gotta hold onto our dreams and fantasies, because sometimes they’re the only place that others let us be.

You see, I really do believe you have a bright future. To me, it’s as real as my orange jumpsuit, the walls around me, the river I cannot often see. So make me proud. Make it the best future you can, because your future, unlike mine, is still yours to make.

I hope you write again, even though I don’t expect you to forgive me. Whatever happens, I want you to know that my love for you is also real.

And that’s no lie.

Dad

January 5, 2041

Dear Jesse,

It’s hard when you’re one of the only dads in prison not getting a card for the holidays.

I suppose I didn’t really expect a card or a letter this year. You’re upset, and you have every right to be. I just wanted you to know that I’m sorry. I don’t know if I said that in my last letter. Maybe we can start over. Perhaps you could give me another chance.

Love,

Dad

January 15, 2041

Dear Dad,

When I was young and I was bad, Mom always sent me to the corner to stare at the wall. Once, when the living room window was open just a crack, I reached through to the planter outside and picked geraniums for her. When she saw, she squeezed me tight and said, “Oh Jesse sweetie, you’re just like your father, always trying to fix the past to make a better future.”

I think that’s why I thought you were a time traveler.

I’m not going to send you this letter. I don’t care that you feel left out. I don’t care if you miss me. I don’t know why I’m even writing another letter. Maybe I thought telling you how it began would make me feel better. Surprise—it doesn’t.

Jesse

May 28, 2041

Dear Dad,

Like you always used to tell me, things have changed.

Near the end of April, I went to visit Julia May because she asked me to. We hadn’t seen each other in a long time. We kinda went separate ways after the train ride. I guess I didn’t really know how to share that part of myself, the part about you, with anyone else. It doesn’t matter. There are a lot of other pretty girls in fifth grade.

I found Julia May outside her apartment building on 174th, sitting cross-legged on a mound of black trash bags and cardboard boxes. She was wearing a sleeveless yellow dress with polka dots, and her arms shone in the hot sun.

I asked her about the mess.

She came down and hugged me. Then she started to cry. “I never told you, Jesse. It was too hard. But my family’s going to Mars.” She gestured toward the trash. “Look at all this shit. Each person can only bring forty-five pounds. I’ve had to throw out almost everything.”

I felt like I had been punched in the gut. “Why are you going?” I asked.

She sniffed and dried her eyes on my shoulder. “So we can have a new life, I guess. A brighter future.”

I thought about you and your lies. “It’s not possible to start over,” I said. “Not really. There’s always the things we did, the choices we made. They can’t be undone.”

“I guess not,” she said. “But we can make new choices.”

We got to talking for a while, and she asked whether you and I have been in touch.

I shook my head.

“What do you really know about your dad?” she asked.

I told her I didn’t care anymore. But it wasn’t true.

“Jesse,” she said, “a person’s more than the bad things they’ve done, even if they’ve done a lot of bad things.”

“But his letters . . . ”

“I know. Lies. But they were hopeful lies.”

Saying goodbye to Julia May was harder than I expected.

A few weeks later, when the rockets were ready to go, I got Mom, and we held hands and squinted at our crummy old TV as the rockets rose into the sky. Then I sat and thought about the hopes for a bright new future that rode with those brave people, until the fires winked out and all that was left was a trail of smoke and dreams. There was this pit in my stomach because I’ll miss Julia May, and honest to God I hope she makes it, just like I hope I make it too—wherever it is I choose to go.

Because you were right, Dad. My future’s up to me, and I’d better make it a good one. And now, when I read your letters again, I realize that’s what you’ve been telling me all along, because the stories you invented were not lies, but dreams. They’re about us, and they’re mostly good stories, and I don’t want them to end.

So I’m coming to visit. Mom’s going to take me, although she doesn’t want to. I don’t want to think about what it’ll be like too much, in case all the thinking makes me change my mind. But this much I know. When I come, I’ll bring a package with me. It will be no more than 18 inches by 14 inches, because it’s got to meet prison regulations. After I walk through the gates at Sing Sing and the metal detector, I’ll get to the visiting area outside the cell block, and we’ll look at each other awkwardly for the first moments. “The future is here,” I will say, as I show you my package of letters, this one among them.

Jesse

About the Author

Yosef Lindell is a lawyer, writer, and occasional historian. His short fiction has previously appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Yosef has lived in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New York, and now resides in an unincorporated part of Maryland just outside of Washington, DC with his wife and son.

A Soldier of the City

David Moles

ISIN 12:709 13" N:10 18" / 34821.1.9 10:24:5:19.21

Color still image, recorded by landscape maintenance camera, Gulanabishtiïdinam Park West.

At the top of the hill is a football court, the net nearly new but the bricks of the ground uneven, clumps of grass growing up from between the cracks. On the same side of the net are a man and a young girl. The hollow rattan ball is above the girl’s head, nearing the apex of its trajectory; the girl, balanced on the toes of her bare right foot, her left knee raised, is looking toward the man.

The man is looking away.

Cross-reference with temple records identifies the man as Ishmenininsina Ninnadiïnshumi, age twenty-eight, temple soldier of the 219th Surface Tactical Company, an under-officer of the third degree, and the girl as his daughter Mâratirşitim, age nine.

Magnification of the reflection from the man’s left cornea indicates his focus to be the sixty-cubit-high image of Gula, the Lady of Isin, projected over the Kârumishbiïrra Canal.

Comparison of the reflection with the record of the Corn Parade ceremonies suggests a transmission delay of approximately three grains.

1. Corn Parade

In the moment of the blast, Ish was looking down the slope, toward the canal, the live feed from the temple steps and the climax of the parade. As he watched, the goddess suddenly froze; her ageless face lost its benevolent smile, and her dark eyes widened in surprise and perhaps in fear, as they looked—Ish later would always remember—directly at him. Her lips parted as if she was about to tell Ish something.

And then the whole eastern rise went brighter than the Lady’s House at noonday. There was a sound, a rolling, bone-deep rumble like thunder, and afterwards Ish would think there was something wrong with this, that something so momentous should sound so prosaic, but at the time all he could think was how loud it was, how it went on and on, louder than thunder, than artillery, than rockets, louder and longer than anything Ish had ever heard. The ground shook. The projection faded, flickered and went out, and a hot wind whipped over the hilltop, tearing the net from its posts, knocking Mâra to the ground and sending her football flying, lost forever, out over the rooftops to the west.

From the temple district, ten leagues away, a bright point was rising, arcing up toward the dazzling eye of the Lady’s House, and some trained part of Ish’s mind saw the straight line, the curvature an artifact of the city’s rotating reference frame; but as Mâra started to cry, and Ish’s wife Tara and all his in-laws boiled up from around the grill and the picnic couches, yelling, and a pillar of brown smoke, red-lit from below, its top swelling obscenely, began to grow over the temple, the temple of the goddess Ish was sworn as a soldier of the city to protect, Ish was not thinking of geometry or the physics of the coriolis force. What Ish was thinking—what Ish knew, with a sick certainty—was that the most important moment of his life had just come and gone, and he had missed it.

34821.1.14 10:9:2:5.67

Annotated image of the city of Isin, composed by COS Independence, on Gaugamela station, Babylon, transmitted via QT to Community Outreach archives, Urizen. Timestamp adjusted for lightspeed delay of thirteen hours, fifty-one minutes.

Five days after the strike the point of impact has died from angry red-orange to sullen infrared, a hot spot that looks like it will be a long time in cooling. A streamer of debris trails behind the wounded city like blood in water, its spectrum a tale of vaporized ice and iron. Isin’s planet-sized city-sphere itself appears structurally intact, the nitrogen and oxygen that would follow a loss of primary atmosphere absent from the recorded data.

Away from the impact, the myriad microwave receivers that cover the city’s surface like scales still ripple, turning to follow the beams of power from Ninagal’s superconducting ring, energy drawn from the great black hole called Tiamat, fat with the mass of three thousand suns, around which all the cities of Babylon revolve. The space around Isin is alive with ships: local orbiters, electromagnetically accelerated corn cans in slow transfer orbits carrying grain and meat from Isin to more urbanized cities, beam-riding passenger carriers moving between Isin and Lagash, Isin and Nippur, Isin, and Babylon-Borsippa and the rest—but there is no mass exodus, no evacuation.

The Outreach planners at Urizen and Ahania, the missionaries aboard Liberation and Independence and those living in secret among the people of the cities, breathe sighs of relief, and reassure themselves that whatever they have done to the people of the cities of Babylon, they have at least not committed genocide.

Aboard COS Insurrection, outbound from Babylon, headed for the Community planet of Zoa at four-tenths the speed of light and still accelerating, the conscientious objectors who chose not to stay and move forward with the next phase of the Babylonian intervention hear this good news and say, not without cynicism: I hope that’s some comfort to them.

2. Men giving orders

Ish was leading a team along a nameless street in what had been a neighborhood called Imtagaärbeëlti and was now a nameless swamp, the entire district northwest of the temple complex knee-deep in brackish water flowing in over the fallen seawall and out of the broken aqueducts, so that Ish looked through gates into flooded gardens where children’s toys and broken furniture floated as if put there just to mar and pucker the reflection of the heavens, or through windows whose shutters had been torn loose and glass shattered by the nomad blast into now-roofless rooms that were snapshots of ordinary lives in their moments of ending.

In the five days since the Corn Parade Ish had slept no more than ten or twelve hours. Most of the rest of the 219th had died at the temple, among the massed cohorts of Isin lining the parade route in their blue dress uniforms and golden vacuum armor—they hadn’t had wives, or hadn’t let the wives they did have talk them into extending their leaves to attend picnics with their in-laws, or hadn’t been able to abuse their under-officers’ warrants to extend their leaves when others couldn’t. Most of the temple soldiery had died along with them, and for the first three days Ish had been just a volunteer with a shovel, fighting fires, filling sandwalls, clearing debris. On the fourth day the surviving priests and temple military apparatus had pulled themselves together into something resembling a command structure, and now Ish had this scratch squad, himself and three soldiers from different units, and this mission, mapping the flood zone, to what purpose Ish didn’t know or much care. They’d been issued weapons but Ish had put a stop to that, confiscating the squad’s ammunition and retaining just one clip for himself.

“Is that a body?” said one of the men suddenly. Ish couldn’t remember his name. A clerk, from an engineering company, his shoulder patch a stylized basket. Ish looked to where he was pointing. In the shadows behind a broken window was a couch, and on it a bundle of sticks that might have been a man.

“Wait here,” Ish said.

“We’re not supposed to go inside,” said one of the other men, a scout carrying a bulky map book and sketchpad, as Ish hoisted himself over the gate. “We’re just supposed to mark the house for the civilians.”

“Who says?” asked the clerk.

“Command,” said the scout.

“There’s no command,” said the fourth man suddenly. He was an artillerist, twice Ish’s age, heavy and morose. These were the first words he’d spoken all day. “The Lady’s dead. There’s no command. There’s no officers. There’s just men giving orders.”

The clerk and the scout looked at Ish, who said nothing.

He pulled himself over the gate.

The Lady’s dead. The artillerist’s words, or ones like them, had been rattling around Ish’s head for days, circling, leaping out to catch him whenever he let his guard down. Gula, the Lady of Isin, is dead. Every time Ish allowed himself to remember that it was as if he was understanding it for the first time, the shock of it like a sudden and unbroken fall, the grief and shame of it a monumental weight toppling down on him. Each time Ish forced the knowledge back the push he gave it was a little weaker, the space he created for himself to breathe and think and feel in a little smaller. He was keeping himself too busy to sleep because every time he closed his eyes he saw the Lady’s pleading face.

He climbed over the windowsill and into the house.

The body of a very old man was curled up there, dressed in nothing but a dirty white loincloth that matched the color of the man’s hair and beard and the curls on his narrow chest. In the man’s bony hands an icon of Lady Gula was clutched, a cheap relief with machine-printed colors that didn’t quite line up with the ceramic curves, the Lady’s robes more blue than purple and the heraldic dog at her feet more green than yellow; the sort of thing that might be sold in any back-alley liquor store. One corner had been broken off, so that the Lady’s right shoulder and half her face were gone, and only one eye peered out from between the man’s knuckles. When Ish moved to take the icon, the fingers clutched more tightly, and the old man’s eyelids fluttered as a rasp of breath escaped his lips.

Ish released the icon. Its one-eyed stare now seemed accusatory.

“Okay,” he said heavily. “Okay, Granddad.”

BABYLON CITY 1:1 5" N:1 16" / 34821.1.14 7:15

“Lord Ninurta vows justice for Lady of Isin”

“Police to protect law-abiding nomads”

“Lawlessness in Sippar”

—Headlines, temple newspaper Marduknaşir, Babylon City

BABYLON CITY 4:142 113" S:4 12" / 34821.1.15 1:3

“Pointless revenge mission”

“Lynchings in Babylon: immigrants targeted”

“Sippar rises up”

—Headlines, radical newspaper Iïnshushaqiï, Babylon City

GISH, NIPPUR, SIPPAR (various locations) / 34821.1.15

“THEY CAN DIE”

—Graffiti common in working-class and slave districts, after the nomad attack on Isin

3. Kinetic penetrator

When Tara came home she found Ish on a bench in the courtyard, bent over the broken icon, with a glue pot and an assortment of scroll clips and elastic bands from Tara’s desk. They’d talked, when they first moved into this house not long after Mâra was born, of turning one of the ground-floor rooms into a workshop for Ish, but he was home so rarely and for such short periods that with one thing and another it had never happened. She kept gardening supplies there now.

The projector in the courtyard was showing some temple news feed, an elaborately animated diagram of the nomads’ weapon—a ‘kinetic penetrator,’ the researcher called it, a phrase that Tara thought should describe something found in a sex shop or perhaps a lumberyard—striking the city’s outer shell, piercing iron and ice and rock before erupting in a molten plume from the steps directly beneath the Lady’s feet.

Tara turned it off.

Ish looked up. “You’re back,” he said.

“You stole my line,” said Tara. She sat on the bench next to Ish and looked down at the icon in his lap. “What’s that?”

“An old man gave it to me,” Ish said. “There.” He wrapped a final elastic band around the icon and set it down next to the glue pot. “That should hold it.”

He’d found the broken corner of the icon on the floor not far from the old man’s couch. On Ish’s orders they’d abandoned the pointless mapping expedition and taken the man to an aid station, bullied the doctors until someone took responsibility.

There, in the aid tent, the man pressed the icon into Ish’s hands, both pieces, releasing them with shaking fingers.

“Lady bless you,” he croaked.

The artillerist, at Ish’s elbow, gave a bitter chuckle, but didn’t say anything. Ish was glad of that. The man might be right, there might be no command, there might be no soldiery, Ish might not be an under-officer any more, just a man giving orders. But Ish was, would continue to be, a soldier of the Lady, a soldier of the city of Isin, and if he had no lawful orders that only put the burden on him to order himself.

He was glad the artillerist hadn’t spoken, because if the man had at that moment said again the Lady’s dead, Ish was reasonably sure he would have shot him.

He’d unzipped the flap on the left breast pocket of his jumpsuit and tucked both pieces of the icon inside. Then he’d zipped the pocket closed again, and for the first time in five days, he’d gone home.

Tara said: “Now that you’re back, I wish you’d talk to Mâra. She’s been having nightmares. About the Corn Parade. She’s afraid the nomads might blow up her school.”

“They might,” Ish said.

“You’re not helping.” Tara sat up straight. She took his chin in her hand and turned his head to face her. “When did you last sleep?”

Ish pulled away from her. “I took pills.”

Tara sighed. “When did you last take a pill?”

“Yesterday,” Ish said. “No. Day before.”

“Come to bed,” said Tara. She stood up. Ish didn’t move. He glanced down at the icon.

An ugly expression passed briefly over Tara’s face, but Ish didn’t see it.

“Come to bed,” she said again. She took Ish’s arm, and this time he allowed himself to be led up the stairs.

At some point in the night they made love. It wasn’t very good for either of them; it hadn’t been for a long while, but this night was worse. Afterwards Tara slept.

She woke to find Ish already dressed. He was putting things into his soldiery duffle.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Lagash.”

“What?”

Tara sat up. Ish didn’t look at her.

“Lord Ninurta’s fitting out an expedition,” Ish said.

“An expedition,” said Tara flatly.

“To find the nomads who killed the Lady.”

“And do what?” asked Tara.

Ish didn’t answer. From his dresser he picked up his identification seal, the cylinder with the Lady’s heraldic dog and Ish’s name and Temple registry number, and fastened it around his neck.

Tara turned away.

“I don’t think I ever knew you,” she said, “But I always knew I couldn’t compete with a goddess. When I married you, I said to my friends: ‘At least he won’t be running around after other women.’” She laughed without humor. “And now she’s dead—and you’re still running after her.”

She looked up. Ish was gone.

Outside it was hot and windless under a lowering sky. Nothing was moving. A fine gray dust was settling over the sector: the Lady’s ashes, Ish had heard people call it. His jump boots left prints in it as he carried his duffle to the train station.

An express took Ish to the base of the nearest spoke, and from there his soldiery ID and a series of elevators carried him to the southern polar dock. As the equatorial blue and white of the city’s habitable zone gave way to the polished black metal of the southern hemisphere, Ish looked down at the apparently untroubled clouds and seas ringing the city’s equator and it struck him how normal this all was, how like any return to duty after leave.

It would have been easy and perhaps comforting to pretend it was just that, comforting to pretend that the Corn Parade had ended like every other, with the Lady’s blessing on the crops, the return of the images to the shrines, drinking and dancing and music from the dimming of the Lady’s House at dusk to its brightening at dawn.

Ish didn’t want that sort of comfort.

34821.6.29 5:23:5:12.102

Abstract of report prepared by priest-astronomers of Ur under the direction of Shamash of Sippar, at the request of Ninurta of Lagash.

Isotopic analysis of recovered penetrator fragments indicates the nomad weapon to have been constructed within and presumably fired from the Apsu near debris belt. Astronomical records are surveyed for suspicious occlusions, both of nearby stars in the Babylon globular cluster and of more distant stars in the Old Galaxy, and cross-referenced against traffic records to eliminate registered nomad vessels. Fifteen anomalous occlusions, eleven associated with mapped point mass Sinkalamaïdi-541, are identified over a period of one hundred thirty-two years. An orbit for the Corn Parade criminals is proposed.

4. Dog soldier

There was a thump as Ish’s platform was loaded onto the track. Then Sharur’s catapult engaged and two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty times the force of Isin’s equatorial rotation pushed Ish into his thrust bag; and then Ish was flying free.

In his ear, the voice of the ship said:

—First company, dispersion complete.

On the control console, affixed there, sealed into a block of clear resin: Gula’s icon. Ish wondered if this was what she wanted.

And Ninurta added, for Ish’s ears alone:

—Good hunting, dog soldier.

At Lagash they’d wanted Ish to join the soldiery of Lagash; had offered him the chance to compete for a place with the Lion-Eagles, Ninurta’s elites. Ish had refused, taking the compassion of these warlike men of a warlike city for contempt. Isin was sparsely populated for a city of Babylon, with barely fifty billion spread among its parks and fields and orchards, but its soldiery was small even for that. When the hard men in Ashur and the actuaries in Babylon-Borsippa counted up the cities’ defenders, they might forget Lady Gula’s soldiers, and be forgiven for forgetting. What Ninurta’s men meant as generosity to a grieving worshipper of their lord’s consort Ish took for mockery of a parade soldier from a rustic backwater. It needed the intervention of the god himself to make a compromise; this after Ish had lost his temper, broken the recruiter’s tablet over his knee and knocked over his writing-table.

“You loved her—dog soldier.”

Ish turned to see who had spoken, and saw a god in the flesh for the first time.

The Lord of Lagash was tall, five cubits at least, taller than any man, but the shape and set of his body in its coppery-red armor made it seem that it was the god who was to scale and everything around him—the recruiting office, the Lion-Eagles who had been ready to lay hands on Ish and who were now prostrate on the carpet, the wreckage of the recruiter’s table, Ish himself—that was small. The same agelessness was in Ninurta’s dark-eyed face that had been in Lady Gula’s, but what in the Lady had seemed to Ish a childlike simplicity retained into adulthood was turned, in her consort, to a precocious maturity, a wisdom beyond the unlined face’s years.

Ish snapped to attention. “Lord,” he said. He saluted—as he would have saluted a superior officer. A murmur of outrage came from the Lion-Eagles on the floor.

The god ignored them. “You loved her,” he said again, and he reached out and lifted Ish’s seal-cylinder where it hung around his neck, turned it in his fingers to examine the dog figure, to read Ish’s name and number.

“No, Lord Ninurta,” Ish said.

The god looked from the seal to Ish’s face.

“No?” he said, and there was something dangerous in his voice. His fist closed around the seal.

Ish held the god’s gaze.

“I’ve never stopped loving her,” he said.

Ish had been prepared to hate the Lord of Lagash, consort of the Lady of Isin. When Ish thought of god and goddess together his mind slipped and twisted and turned away from the idea; when he’d read the god’s proclamation of intent to hunt down the nomads that had murdered ‘his’ lady, Ish’s mouth had curled in an involuntary sneer. If the Lord of Lagash had tried to take the seal then, Ish would have fought him, and died.

But the god’s fist opened. He glanced at the seal again and let it drop.

The god’s eyes met Ish’s eyes, and in them Ish saw a pain that was at least no less real and no less rightful than Ish’s own.

“Neither have I,” Ninurta said.

Then he turned to his soldiers.

“As you were,” he told them. And, when they had scrambled to their feet, he pointed to Ish. “Ishmenininsina Ninnadiïnshumi is a solder of the city of Isin,” he told them. “He remains a soldier of the city of Isin. He is your brother. All Lady Gula’s soldiers are your brothers. Treat them like brothers.”

To Ish he said, “We’ll hunt nomads together, dog soldier.”

“I’d like that,” Ish said. “Lord.”

Ninurta’s mouth crooked into a half-smile, and Ish saw what the Lady of Isin might have loved in the Lord of Lagash.

For the better part of a year the hunters built, they trained, they changed and were changed—modified, by the priest-engineers who served Ninagal of Akkad and the priest-doctors who had served Lady Gula, their hearts and bones strengthened to withstand accelerations that would kill any ordinary mortal, their nerves and chemistries changed to let them fight faster and harder and longer than anything living, short of a god.

The point mass where the priest-astronomers of Ur thought the hunters would find the nomad camp was far out into Apsu, the diffuse torus of ice and rock and wandering planetary masses that separated Babylon from the nearest stars. The detritus of Apsu was known, mapped long ago down to the smallest fragment by Sin and Shamash, and the nomads’ work had left a trail that the knowledgeable could read.

The object the nomads’ weapon orbited was one of the largest in the near reaches of Apsu, the superdense core of some giant star that had shed most of its mass long before the Flood, leaving only this degenerate, slowly cooling sphere, barely a league across. The gods had long since oriented it so the jets of radiation from its rapidly spinning magnetic poles pointed nowhere near the cities, moved it into an orbit where it would threaten the cities neither directly with its own gravity, nor by flinging comets and planetesimals down into Babylon.

It took the hunters two hundred days to reach it.

The great ship Sharur, the Mace of Ninurta, a god in its own right, was hauled along the surface of Lagash to the city’s equator, fueled, armed, loaded with the hunters and all their weapons and gear, and set loose.

It dropped away slowly at first, but when the ship was far enough from the city its sails opened, and in every city of Babylon it was as if a cloud moved between the land and the shining houses of the gods, as the power of Ninagal’s ring was bent to stopping Sharur in its orbit. Then the Mace of Ninurta folded its sails like the wings of a diving eagle and fell, gathering speed. The black circle that was Tiamat’s event horizon grew until it swallowed half the sky, until the soldiers packed tight around the ship’s core passed out in their thrust bags and even Sharur’s prodigiously strong bones creaked under the stress, until the hunters were so close that the space-time around them whirled around Tiamat like water. Ninagal’s ring flashed by in an instant, and only Lord Ninurta and Sharur itself were conscious to see it. Sharur shot forward, taking with it some tiny fraction of the black hole’s unimaginable angular momentum.

And then Tiamat was behind them, and they were headed outward.

BABYLON CITY 1:1 5" N:1 16" / 34822.7.18 7:15

“All cities’ prayers with Lord of Lagash”

“Police seek nomad agents in Babylon”

“Lord Shamash asks Lord Anshar to restore order”

—Headlines, temple newspaper Marduknaşir, Babylon City

BABYLON CITY 4:142 113" S:4 12" / 34822.7.16 1:3

“An eye for an eye”

“Nativist witch-hunt”

“Ashur to invade Sippar”

—Headlines, radical newspaper Iïnshushaqiï, Babylon City

5. Machines

At Lagash they had drilled a double dozen scenarios: city-sized habitats, ramship fleets, dwarf planets threaded with ice tunnels like termite tracks in old wood. When the cities fought among themselves the territory was known and the weapons were familiar. The vacuum armor Ish had worn as a Surface Tactical was not very different from what a soldier of Lagash or Ashur or Akkad would wear although the gear of those warlike cities was usually newer and there was more of it. The weapons the Surface Tacticals carried were deadly enough to ships or to other vacuum troops, and the soldiers of the interior had aircraft and artillery and even fusion bombs although no one had used fusion bombs within a city in millennia. But there had been nothing like the nomads’ weapon, nothing that could threaten the fabric of a city. No one could say with certainty what they might meet when they found the nomad encampment.

Ish had seen nomad ships in dock at Isin. There were ramships no larger than canal barges that could out-accelerate a troopship and push the speed of light, and ion-drive ships so dwarfed by their fuel supplies that they were like inhabited comets, and fragile light-sailers whose mirrors were next to useless at Babylon, and every one was unique. Ish supposed you had to be crazy to take it into your head to spend a lifetime in a pressurized can ten trillion leagues from whatever you called home. There wouldn’t be many people as crazy as that and also able enough to keep a ship in working order for all that time, even taking into account that you had to be crazy in the first place to live in the rubble around a star when you could be living in a city.

But that wasn’t right either. Because most of the people that in Babylon they called nomads had been born out there on their planets or wherever, where there were no cities and no gods, with as much choice about where they lived as a limpet on a rock. It was only the crazy ones that had a choice and only the crazy ones that made it all the way to Babylon.

The nomads Ish was hunting now, the assassins somewhere out there in the dark, he thought were almost simple by comparison. They had no gods and could build no cities and they knew it and it made them angry and so whatever they couldn’t have, they smashed. That was a feeling Ish could understand.

Gods and cities fought for primacy, they fought for influence or the settlement of debts. They didn’t fight wars of extermination. But extermination was what the nomads had raised the stakes to when they attacked the Corn Parade and extermination was what Ish was armed for now.

—There, said Sharur’s voice in his ear.—There is their weapon.

In the X-ray spectrum Sinkalamaïdi-541 was one of the brightest objects in the sky, but to human eyes, even augmented as Ish’s had been at Lagash, even here, less than half a million leagues from the target, what visible light it gave off as it cooled made it only an unusually bright star, flickering as it spun. Even under the magnification of Sharur’s sharp eyes it was barely a disc; but Ish could see that something marred it, a dark line across the sickly glowing face.

A display square opened, the dead star’s light masked by the black disc of a coronagraph, reflected light—from the dead star itself, from the living stars of the surrounding cluster, from the Old Galaxy—amplified and enhanced. Girdling Sinkalamaïdi-541 was a narrow, spinning band of dull carbon, no more than a thousand leagues across, oriented to draw energy from the dead star’s magnetic field; like a mockery of Ninagal’s ring.

—A loop accelerator, the ship said.—Crude but effective.

—They must be very sophisticated to aspire to such crudeness, said Ninurta.—We have found the sling, but where is the slinger?

When straight out of the temple orphanage he’d first enlisted, they’d trained Ish as a rifleman, and when he’d qualified for Surface Tactical School they’d trained him as a vacuum armor operator. What he was doing now, controlling this platform that had been shot down an electromagnetic rail like a corn can, was not very much like either of those jobs, although the platform’s calculus of fuel and velocity and power and heat was much the same as for the vacuum armor. But he was not a Surface Tactical anymore and there was no surface here, no city with its weak gravity and strong spin to complicate the equations, only speed and darkness and somewhere in the darkness the target.

There was no knowing what instruments the nomads had but Ish hoped to evade all of them. The platform’s outer shell was black in short wavelengths and would scatter or let pass long ones; the cold face it turned toward the nomad weapon was chilled to within a degree of the cosmic microwave background, and its drives were photonic, the exhaust a laser-tight collimated beam. Eventually some platform would occlude a star or its drive beam would touch some bit of ice or cross some nomad sensor’s mirror and they would be discovered, but not quickly and not all at once.

They would be on the nomads long before that.

—Third company, Ninurta said.—Fire on the ring. Flush them out.

The platforms had been fired from Sharur’s catapults in an angled pattern so that part of the energy of the launch went to slowing Sharur itself and part to dispersing the platforms in an irregular spreading cone that by this time was the better part of a thousand leagues across. Now the platforms’ own engines fired, still at angles oblique to the line joining Sharur’s course to the dead star.

Below Ish—subjectively—and to his left, a series of blinking icons indicated that the platforms of the third company were separating themselves still further, placing themselves more squarely in the track of the dead star’s orbit. When they were another thousand leagues distant from Sharur they cast their weapons loose and the weapons’ own engines fired, bright points Ish could see with his own eyes, pushing the weapons onward with a force beyond what even the hunters’ augmented and supported bodies could withstand.

Time passed. The flares marking the weapons of the third company went out one by one as their fuel was exhausted. When they were three hundred thousand leagues from the ring, the longest-ranged of the weapons—antiproton beams, muon accelerators, fission-pumped gamma-ray lasers—began to fire.

Before the bombardment could possibly have reached the ring—long before there had passed the thirty or forty grains required for the bombardment to reach the ring and the light of the bombardment’s success or failure to return to Sharur and the platforms—the space between the ring and the third company filled with fire. Explosions flared all across Ish’s field of view, pinpoints of brilliant white, shading to ultraviolet. Something hit the side of the platform with a terrific thump, and Ish’s hand squeezed convulsively on the weapon release as his diagnostic screens became a wash of red. There was a series of smaller thumps as the weapons came loose, and then a horrible grinding noise as at least one encountered some projecting tangle of bent metal and broken ceramic. The platform was tumbling. About half Ish’s reaction control thrusters claimed to be working; he fired them in pairs and worked the gyroscopes till the tumble was reduced to a slow roll, while the trapped weapon scraped and bumped its way across the hull and finally came free.

—Machines, machines! he heard Ninurta say.—Cowards! Where are the men?

Then the weapon, whichever it was, blew up.

34822.7.16 4:24:6:20 - 5:23:10:13

Moving image, recorded at 240 frames per second over a period of 117 minutes 15 seconds by spin-stabilized camera, installation “Cyrus,” transmitted via QT to COS Liberation, on Gaugamela station, and onward to Community Outreach archives, Urizen:

From the leading edge of the accelerator ring, it is as though the ring and the mass that powers it are rising through a tunnel of light.

For ten million kilometers along the track of the neutron star’s orbit, the darkness ahead sparkles with the light of antimatter bombs, fusion explosions, the kinetic flash of chaff thrown out by the accelerator ring impacting ships, missiles, remotely operated guns; impacting men. Through the minefield debris of the ring’s static defenses, robotic fighters dart and weave, looking to kill anything that accelerates. Outreach has millennia of experience to draw on, and back in the Community a population of hundreds of billions to produce its volunteer missionaries, its dedicated programmers, its hobbyist generals. Many of the Babylonian weapons are stopped; many of the Babylonian ships are destroyed. Others, already close to Babylon’s escape velocity and by the neutron star’s orbital motion close to escaping from it as well, are shunted aside, forced into hyperbolic orbits that banish them from the battlefield as surely as death.

But the ring’s defenders are fighting from the bottom of a deep gravity well, with limited resources, nearly all the mass they’ve assembled here incorporated into the ring itself; and the Babylonians have their own store of ancient cunning to draw on, their aggregate population a hundred times larger than the Community’s, more closely knit and more warlike. And they have Ninurta.

Ninurta, the hunter of the Annunaki, the god who slew the seven-headed serpent, who slew the bull-man in the sea and the six-headed wild ram in the mountain, who defeated the demon Ansu and retrieved the Tablet of Destinies.

Sharur, the Mace of Ninurta, plunges through the battle like a shark through minnows, shining like a sun, accelerating, adding the thrust of its mighty engines to the neutron star’s inexorable pull. Slender needles of laser prick out through the debris, and Sharur’s sun brightens still further, painful to look at, the ship’s active hull heated to tens of thousands of degrees. Something like a swarm of fireflies swirls out toward it, and the camera’s filters cut in, darkening the sky as the warheads explode around the ship, a constellation of new stars that flare, burn, and die in perfect silence: and Sharur keeps coming.

It fills the view.

Overhead, a blur, it flashes past the camera, and is gone.

The image goes white.

The transmission ends.

6. Surviving weapons

It was cold in the control capsule. The heat sink was still deployed and the motors that should have folded it in would not respond. Ish found he didn’t much care. There was a slow leak somewhere in the atmosphere cycler and Ish found he didn’t much care about that either.

The battle, such as it was, was well off to one side. Ish knew even before doing the math that he did not have enough fuel to bring himself back into it. The dead star was bending his course but not enough. He was headed into the dark.

Ish’s surviving weapons were still burning mindlessly toward the ring and had cut by half the velocity with which they were speeding away from it, but they too were nearly out of fuel and Ish saw that they would follow him into darkness.

He watched Sharur’s plunge through the battle. The dead star was between him and the impact when it happened, but he saw the effect it had: a flash across the entire spectrum from long-wave radio to hard X-ray, bright enough to illuminate the entire battlefield; bright enough, probably, to be seen from the cities.

Another god died.

There was a sparkle of secondary explosions scattered through the debris field, weapons and platforms and nomad fighters alike flashing to plasma in the light of Ninurta’s death. Then there was nothing. The ring began, slowly, to break up.

Ish wondered how many other platforms were still out here, set aside like his, falling into Apsu. Anyone who had been on the impact side was dead.

The weapons’ drive flares went out.

The mended icon was still where he had fixed it. Ish shut down the displays one by one until his helmet beam was the only light and adjusted the thrust bag around the helmet so that the beam shone full on the icon. The look in the Lady’s eyes no longer seemed accusatory, but appraising, as if she were waiting to see what Ish would do.

The beam wavered and went dark.

BABYLON CITY 2:78 233" S:2 54" / 34822.10.6 5:18:4

Record of police interrogation, Suspect 34822.10.6.502155, alias Ajabeli Huzalatum Taraämapsu, alias Liburnadisha Iliawilimrabi Apsuümasha, alias ‘Black’. Charges: subversion, terrorism, falsification of temple records, failure to register as a foreign agent. Interrogator is Detective (Second Degree) Nabûnaïd Babilisheïr Rabişila.

Rabişila: Your people are gone. Your weapon’s been destroyed. You might as well tell us everything.

Suspect: It accomplished its purpose.

Rabişila: Which was?

Suspect: To give you hope.

Rabişila: What do you mean, “hope”?

Suspect: Men are fighting gods now, in Gish and Sippar.

Rabişila: A few criminal lunatics. Lord Anshar will destroy them.

Suspect: Do you think they’ll be the last? Two of your gods are dead. Dead at the hands of mortals. Nothing Anshar’s soldiers do to Sippar will change that. Nothing you do to me.

Rabişila: You’re insane.

Suspect: I mean it. One day—not in my lifetime, certainly not in yours, but one day—one day you’ll all be free.

7. A soldier of the city

A ship found Ish a few months later: a ship called Upekkhâ, from a single-system nomad civilization based some seventeen light-years from Babylon and known to itself as the Congregation. The ship, the name of which meant ‘equanimity’, was an antimatter-fueled ion rocket, a quarter of a league long and twice that in diameter; it could reach two-tenths the speed of light, but only very, very slowly. It had spent fifteen years docked at Babylon-Borsippa, and, having been launched some four months before the attack on the Corn Parade, was now on its way back to the star the Congregation called Mettâ. The star’s name, in the ancient liturgical language of the monks and nuns of the Congregation, meant ‘kindness.’

Ish was very nearly dead when Upekkhâ’s monks brought him aboard. His heart had been stopped for some weeks, and it was the acceleration support system rather than Ish’s bloodstream that was supplying the last of the platform’s oxygen reserves to his brain, which itself had been pumped full of cryoprotectants and cooled to just above the boiling point of nitrogen. The rescue team had to move very quickly to extricate Ish from that system and get him onto their own life support. This task was not made any easier by the militarized physiology given to Ish at Lagash, but they managed it. He was some time in recovering.

Ish never quite understood what had brought Upekkhâ to Babylon. Most of the monks and nuns spoke good Babylonian—several of them had been born in the cities—but the concepts were too alien for Ish to make much sense of them, and Ish admitted to himself he didn’t really care to try. They had no gods, and prayed—as far as Ish could tell—to their ancestors, or their teachers’ teachers. They had been looking, they said, for someone they called Tathâgata, which the nun explaining this to Ish translated into Babylonian as ‘the one who has found the truth.’ This Tathâgata had died, many years ago on a planet circling the star called Mettâ, and why the monks and nuns were looking for him at Babylon was only one of the things Ish didn’t understand.

“But we didn’t find him,” the nun said. “We found you.”

They were in Upekkhâ’s central core, where Ish, who had grown up on a farm, was trying to learn how to garden in free fall. The monks and nuns had given him to understand that he was not required to work, but he found it embarrassing to lie idle—and it was better than being alone with his thoughts.

“And what are you going to do with me?” Ish asked.

The nun—whose own name, Arrakhasampada, she translated as ‘the one who has attained watchfulness’—gave him an odd look and said:

“Nothing.”

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll—do something? Damage something? Hurt someone?” Ish asked.

“Will you?” Arrakhasampada asked.

Ish had thought about it. Encountering the men and women of Upekkhâ on the battlefield he could have shot them without hesitation. In Apsu, he had not hesitated. He had looked forward to killing the nomads responsible for the Corn Parade with an anticipation that was two parts vengefulness and one part technical satisfaction. But these nomads were not those nomads, and it was hard now to see the point.

It must have been obvious, from where the monks and nuns found Ish, and in what condition, what he was, and what he had done. But they seemed not to care. They treated Ish kindly, but Ish suspected they would have done as much for a wounded dog.

The thought was humbling, but Ish also found it oddly liberating. The crew of Upekkhâ didn’t know who Ish was or what he had been trying to do, or why. His failure was not evident to them.

The doctor, an elderly monk who Ish called Dr. Sam—his name, which Ish couldn’t pronounce, meant something like ‘the one who leads a balanced life’— prounounced Ish fit to move out of the infirmary. Arrakhasampada and Dr. Sam helped Ish decorate his cabin, picking out plants from the garden and furnishings from Upekkhâ’s sparse catalog with a delicate attention to Ish’s taste and reactions that surprised him, so that the end result, while hardly Babylonian, was less foreign, more Ish’s own, than it might have been.

Arrakhasampada asked about the mended icon in its block of resin, and Ish tried to explain.

She and Dr. Sam grew very quiet and thoughtful.

Ish didn’t see either of them for eight or ten days. Then one afternoon as he was coming back from the garden, dusty and tired, he found the two of them waiting by his cabin. Arrakhasampada was carrying a bag of oranges, and Dr. Sam had with him a large box made to look like lacquered wood.

Ish let them in, and went into the back of the cabin to wash and change clothes. When he came out they had unpacked the box, and Ish saw that it was an iconostasis or shrine, of the sort the monks and nuns used to remember their predecessors. But where the name-scroll would go there was a niche just the size of Ish’s icon.

He didn’t know who he was. He was still—would always be—a soldier of the city, but what did that mean? He had wanted revenge, still did in some abstract way. There would be others, now, Lion-Eagles out to avenge the Lord of Lagash, children who had grown up with images of the Corn Parade. Maybe Mâra would be among them, though Ish hoped not. But Ish himself had had his measure of vengeance in Apsu and knew well enough that it had never been likely that he would have more.

He looked at the icon where it was propped against the wall. Who was he? Tara: “I don’t think I ever knew you.” But she had, hadn’t she? Ish was a man in love with a dead woman. He always would be. The Lady’s death hadn’t changed that, any more than Ish’s own death would have. The fact that the dead woman was a goddess hadn’t changed it.

Ish picked up the icon and placed it in the niche. He let Dr. Sam show him where to place the orange, how to set the sticks of incense in the cup and start the little induction heater. Then he sat back on his heels and they contemplated the face of the Lady of Isin together.

“Will you tell us about her?” Arrakhasampada asked.

Originally published in Engineering Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

About the Author

David Moles is a past finalist for the Hugo Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, as well as the winner of the 2008 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and various anthologies. He lives in California with his family.

The Most Famous Little Girl in the World

Nancy Kress

2002

The most famous little girl in the world stuck out her tongue at me. “These are all my Barbie dolls and you can’t use them!”

I ran to Mommy. “Kyra won’t share!”

“Kyra, dear,” Aunt Julie said in that funny tight voice she had ever since IT happened, “share your new dolls with Amy.”

“No, they’re mine!” Kyra said. “The news people gave them all to me!” She tried to hold all the Barbie dolls, nine or ten, in her arms all at once, and then she started to cry. She does that a lot now.

“Julie,” Mommy said, real quiet, “she doesn’t have to share.”

“Yes, she does. Just because she’s now some sort of . . . oh, God, I wish none of this had happened!” Then Aunt Julie was crying, too.

Grown ups aren’t supposed to cry. I looked at Aunt Julie, and then at stupid Kyra, still bawling, and then at Aunt Julie again. Nothing was right.

Mommy took me by the hand, led me into the kitchen, and sat me on her lap. The kitchen was all warm and there were chocolate-chip cookies baking, so that was good. “Amy,” Mommy said, “I want to talk to you.”

“I’m too big to sit on your lap,” I said.

“No, you’re not,” Mommy said, and held me closer, and I felt better. “But you are big enough to understand what happened to Kyra.”

“Kyra says she doesn’t understand it!”

“Well, in one sense that’s true,” Mommy said. “But you understand some of it, anyway. You know that Kyra and you were in the cow field, and a big spaceship came down.”

“Can I have a cookie?”

“They’re not done yet. Sit still and listen, Amy.”

I said, “I know all this! The ship came down, and the door opened, and Kyra went in and I was far away and I didn’t.” And then I called Mommy on the cell phone and she called 911 and people came running. Not Aunt Julie—Mommy was baby-sitting Kyra at Kyra’s house. But police cars and firemen and ambulances. The cars drove right into the cow field, right through cow poop. If the cows hadn’t been all bunched together way over by the fence, I bet the cars would have driven through the cows, too. That would have been kind of cool.

Kyra was in there a long time. The police shouted at the little spaceship, but it didn’t open up or anything. I was watching from an upstairs window, where Mommy made me go, through Uncle John’s binoculars. A helicopter came but before it could do anything, the spaceship door opened and Kyra walked out and policemen rushed forward and grabbed her. And then the spaceship just rose up and went away, passing the helicopter, and ever since everybody thinks Kyra is the coolest thing in the world. Well, I don’t.

“I hate her, Mommy.”

“No, you don’t. But Kyra is getting all the attention and—” She sighed and held me tighter. It was nice, even though I’m too big to be held tight like that.

“Is Kyra going to go on TV?”

“No. Aunt Julie and I agreed to keep both of you off TV and magazines and whatever.”

“Kyra’s been on lots of magazines.”

“Not by choice.”

“Mommy,” I said, because it was safe sitting there on her lap and the cookies smelled good, “what did Kyra do in the spaceship?”

Her chest got stiff. “We don’t know. Kyra can’t remember. Unless . . . unless she told you something, Amy?”

“She says she can’t remember.”

I twisted to look at Mommy’s face. “So how come they still send presents? It was last year!”

“I know.” Mommy put me on the floor and opened the oven to poke at the cookies. They smelled wonderful.

“And,” I demanded, “how come Uncle John doesn’t come home anymore?”

Mommy bit her lip. “Would you like a cookie, Amy?”

“Yes. How come?”

“Sometimes people just—”

“Are Aunt Julie and Uncle John getting a divorce? Because of Kyra?”

“No. Kyra is not responsible here, and you just remember that, young lady! I don’t want you making her feel more confused than she is!”

I ate my cookie. Kyra wasn’t confused. She was a cry-baby and a Barbie hog and I hated her. I didn’t want her to be my cousin anymore.

What was so great about going into some stupid spaceship, anyway? Nothing. She couldn’t even remember anything about it!

Mommy put her hands over her face.

2008

Whispers broke out all over the cafeteria. “That’s her . . . her . . . her!”

Oh, shit. I bent my head over my milk. Last year the cafeteria used to serve fizzies and Coke and there were vending machines with candy and chips, but the new principal took all that out. He’s a real bastard. Part of the “Clean Up America” campaign our new president is forcing down our throats, Dad said. Only he didn’t say “forcing” because he thinks it’s cool, like all the Carter Falls High parents do. Supervision for kids. School uniforms. Silent prayer. A mandatory class in citizenship. Getting expelled for everything short of breathing. It all sucks.

“It is her,” Jack said. “I saw her picture online.”

Hannah said, “What do you suppose they really did to her in that ship when she was a little kid?”

Angie giggled and licked her lips. She has a really dirty mind. Carter, who’s sort of a goody-goody even though he’s on the football team, said, “It’s none of our business. And she was just a little kid.”

“So?” Angie smirked. “You never heard of pedophiles?”

Hannah said, “Pedophile aliens? Grow up, Angie.”

Jack said, “She’s kind of cute.”

“I thought you wanted a virgin, Jack,” Angie said, still smirking.

Carter said, “Oh, give her a break. She just moved here, after all.”

I watched Kyra walk uncertainly toward the cafeteria tables. The monitors were keeping a close eye on everybody. We have monitors everywhere, just like the street has National Guard everywhere. Clean up America, my ass. Kyra squinted; she’s near-sighted and doesn’t like to wear her contacts because she says they itch. I ducked lower over my milk.

Angie said, “Somebody told me Kyra Lunden is your cousin.”

Everybody’s head jerked to look at me. Damn that bitch Angie! Where had she heard that? Mom had promised me that nobody in school would know and Kyra wouldn’t say anything! She and Aunt Julie had to move, Mom and Dad said, because Aunt Julie was having a rough time since the divorce and she needed to be close to her sister, and I should understand that. Well, I did, I guess, but not if Kyra blasted in and ruined everything for me. This was my school, not hers, I spent a lot of time getting into the good groups, the ones I was never part of in junior high, and no pathetic famous cousin was going to wreck that. She couldn’t even dance.

Jack said, “Kyra Lunden is your cousin, Amy? Really?”

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

Angie said, “That’s not what I heard.”

Carter said, “So it’s just gossip? You can hurt people that way, Angie.”

“God, Carter, don’t you ever let up? Holier-than-thou!”

Carter mottled red. Hannah, who likes him even though Carter doesn’t know it, said, “It’s nice that some people at least try to be kind to others.”

“Spit it in your soup, Hannah,” Angie said.

Jack and Hannah exchanged a look. They really make the decisions for the group, and for a bunch of other groups, too. Angie’s too stupid to realize that, or to realize that she’s going to be oozed out. I don’t feel sorry for her. She deserves it, even if being oozed is really horrible. You walk through the halls alone, and nobody looks directly at you, and people laugh at you behind your back because you can’t even keep your own friends. Still, Angie deserves it.

Hannah looked at me straight, with that look Jack calls her “police interrogation gaze.”

“Amy, is Kyra Lunden your cousin?”

Kyra sat alone at one end of a table. A bunch of kids, the really cobra ones that run the VR lab, sat at the other end, kind of laughing at her without laughing. I saw Eleanor Murphy, who was elected Queen of VR Gala even though she’s only a junior, give Kyra a long cool level look and then turn disdainfully away.

“No,” I said, “I already told you. She’s not my cousin. In fact, I’ve never even met her.”

2018

I stared at the villa with disbelief. Not at the guards—everywhere rich is guarded now, we’re a nation of paranoids, perhaps not without reason. There seems no containing the lunatic terrorists, home-grown patriotic militias, White Supremacists, and Black Equalizers, not to mention the run-of-the-mill gangs and petty drug lords and black-market smugglers. Plus, of course, the government’s response to these, which sometimes seems to involve putting every single nineteen-year-old in the country out on the streets in camouflage—except, of course, those nineteen-year-olds who are already bespoken as lunatic terrorists, home-grown militia, White Supremacists, et al. The rest of us get on with our normal lives.

So the guards didn’t surprise me—the villa did. It was a miniaturized replica of a Forbidden City palace—in Minnesota.

The chief guard caught me gaping at the swooping curved roof, the gilded archways, the octagonal pagoda. “Papers, please?”

I pulled myself together and looked professional, which is to say, not desperate. I was desperate, of course. But not even Kyra was going to know that.

“I am Madame Lunden’s cousin,” I said formally, “Amy Parker. Madame Lunden is expecting me.”

Forget inscrutable Chinese—the guard looked as suspicious as if I’d said I was a Muslim Turkic Uighur. He examined me, he examined my identity card, he ran the computer match on my retina scan. I walked through metal detectors, explosive residue detectors, detector detectors. I was patted down thoroughly but not obscenely. Finally he let me through the inner gate, watching me all the way through the arch carved with incongruous peacocks and dragons.

Kyra waited in the courtyard beyond the arch. She wore an aggressively fashionable blue jumpsuit with a double row of tiny mirrors sewn down the front. Her hair was dyed bright blonde and cut in the sharp asymmetrical cut popularized by that Dutch online model, Brigitte. In the traditional Chinese courtyard, set with flowering plum trees in porcelain pots and a pool with golden carp, she looked either ridiculous or exotic, depending on your point of view. Point of view was why I was here. We hadn’t seen each other in eight years.

“Hello, Amy,” Kyra said in her low, husky voice.

“Hello, Kyra. Thank you for seeing me.”

“My pleasure.”

Was there mockery in her tone? Probably. If so, I’d earned it. “How is Aunt Julie?”

“I have no idea. She refuses to have any contact with me.”

My eyes widened; I hadn’t known that. I should have known that. A good journalist does her homework. Kyra smiled at me, and this time there was no mistaking the mockery. I had stepped in it, and oh God, I couldn’t afford to ruin this interview. My job depended on it. Staff was being cut, and Paul had not axed me only because I said, with the desperation of fear, Kyra Lunden is my cousin. I know she’s refused all other interviews, but maybe . . .

Kyra said, “Sit down, Amy. Shall we start? Which service do you write for, again?”

“Times online.”

“Ah, yes. Well, what do you want to know?”

“I thought we’d start with some background. How did you and General Chou meet?”

“At a party.”

“Oh. Where was the party held?” She wasn’t going to help me at all.

Kyra crossed her legs. The expensive blue fabric of the jumpsuit draped becomingly. She looked fabulous; I wondered if she’d had any body work done. But, then, she’d always been pretty, even when she’d been ten and the most famous little girl in the world, blinking bewildered into the clunky TV equipment of sixteen years ago. My robocam drifted beside me, automatically recording us from the most flattering angles.

“The party was at Carol Perez’s,” Kyra said, naming a Washington hostess I’d only seen in the society programs. “I’d met Carol at Yale, of course. I met a lot of people at Yale.”

Yes, she did. By college, Kyra had lost her shyness about what had happened to her when we were ten. She’d developed what sounded like a superb act—we had mutual friends—composed of mystery combined with notoriety. Subtly she reminded people that she had had an experience unique to all of mankind, never duplicated since, and that although she was reluctant to talk about it, yes, it was true that she was undergoing deep hypnosis and it was possible she might remember what actually happened.

By her junior year, she’d “remembered.” Tastefully, shyly, nothing to make people label her a lunatic. The aliens were small and bipedal, they’d put a sort of helmet on her head and she’d watched holograms while, presumably, they recorded her reactions. No, she couldn’t remember any specifics. Not yet, anyway.

Yale ate it up. Intellectuals, especially political types, debated the aliens’ intentions in terms of future United States policy. Artsy preppies’ imaginations were stirred. Socialites decided that Kyra Lunden was an interesting addition to their parties. She was in.

“Carol’s party was at their Virginia home,” Kyra continued. “Diplomats, horse people, the usual. Ch’un-fu and I were introduced, and we both knew right away this could be something special.”

I peered at her. Could she really be that naive? Chou Ch’un-fu had already had two American mistresses. The Han Chinese, Chou’s party, and the United States were now allies, united in their actions against terrorists from the western part of China, the Muslim Turkic Uighurs, who were destabilizing China with their desperate war for independence. The Uighurs would lose. Everyone knew this, probably even the Uighurs. But until they did, they were blowing up things in Peking and Shanghai and San Francisco and London, sometimes in frantic negotiation for money, sometimes with arrogant political manifestos, sometimes, it seemed, out of sheer frustration. The carnage, even in a century used to it, could make a diplomat pale. General Chou was experienced in all this. Press drudges like me don’t get insider data, but rumor linked him with some brutal actions. He maintained a home in Minnesota because it was easy to reach on the rocket flights over the pole.

And Kyra believed they had a “special” romantic relationship?

Incredibly, it seemed she did. As she talked about their meeting, about her life with Chou, I saw no trace of irony, of doubt, of simple confusion. Certainly not of anything approaching shame. I did detect anger, and that was the most intriguing thing about her demeanor. Who was she angry with? Chou? Her mother, that straight-laced paragon who had rejected her? The aliens? Fate?

She deflected all political questions. “Kyra, do you approve of the way the Chinese-American alliance is developing?”

“I approve of the way my life is developing.” Tinkly laugh, undercut with anger.

We toured the villa, and she let me photograph everything, even their bedroom. Huge canopied bed, carved chests, jars of plum blossoms. Chou, or some PR spinner, had decided that a Chinese political partner should appear neither too austere nor too American. China’s past was honored in her present, even as she looked toward the future—that was clearly the message I was to get out. I recorded everything. Kyra said nothing as we toured, usually not even looking at me. She combed her hair in front of her ornate carved mirror, fiddled with objects, sat in deep reverie. It was as if she’d forgotten I was there.

Kyra’s silence broke only as she escorted me to the gate. Abruptly she said, “Amy, do you remember Carter Falls High? The VR Gala?”

“Yes,” I said cautiously.

“You and I and our dates were in the jungle room. There was a virtual coconut fight. I tossed a coconut at you, it hit, and you pretended you didn’t even see it.”

“Yes,” I said. Out of all the shunning I’d done to her in those horrible, terrified, cruel teenage years, she picked that to recall!

“But you did see it. You knew I was there.”

“Yes. I’m sorry, Kyra.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, with such a glittering smile that all at once I knew who her anger was directed at. She had given me this interview out of old family ties, or a desire to show off the superiority of our relative positions, or something, but she was angry at me. And always would be.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, with spectacular inadequacy. Kyra didn’t answer, merely turned and walked back toward her tiny Forbidden City.

My story was a great success. The Times ran it in flat-screen, 3D, and VR, and its access rate went off the charts. It was the first time anyone had been inside the Chou compound, had met the American girlfriend of an enigmatic general, had seen that particular lifestyle up close. Kyra’s mysterious encounter with aliens sixteen years ago gave it a unique edge. Even those who hated the story—and there were many, calling it exploitative, immoral, decadent, symptomatic of this or that—noticed it. My message system nearly collapsed under the weight of congratulations, condemnations, job offers.

The next day, Kyra Lunden called a press conference. She denied everything. I had been admitted to the Chou villa, yes, but only as a relative, for tea. Our agreement had been no recorders. I had violated that, had recorded secretly, and furthermore had endangered Chinese-American relations. Kyra had tears in her eyes. The Chinese Embassy issued an angry denunciation. The State Department was not pleased.

The Times fired me.

Standing in my apartment, still surrounded by the masses of flowers that had arrived yesterday, I stared at nothing. The sickeningly sweet fragrances made me queasy. Wild ideas, stupid ideas, rioted in my head. I could sue. I could kill myself. Kyra really had been altered by the aliens. She was no longer human, but a VR-thriller simulacrum of a human, and it was my duty to expose her.

All stupid. Only one idea was true.

Kyra had, after all these years, found a way to get even.

2027

In the second year of the war, the aliens came back.

David told me while I was bathing the baby in the kitchen sink. The twins, Lucy and Lem, were shrieking around the tiny apartment like a pair of banshees. It was a crummy apartment, but it wasn’t too far from David’s job, and we were lucky to get it. There was a war on.

“The Blanding telescope has picked up an alien ship heading for Earth.” David spoke the amazing sentence flatly, the way he speaks everything to me now. It was the first time he’d initiated conversation in two weeks.

I tightened my grip on Robin, a wriggler slippery with soap, and stared at him. “When . . . how . . . ”

“It would be good, Amy, if you could ever finish a sentence,” David said, with the dispassionate hypercriticism he brings these days to everything I say. It wasn’t always like this. David wasn’t always like this. Depression, his doctor told me, unfortunately not responding to available medications. Well, great, so David’s depressed. The whole country’s depressed. Also frightened and poor and gray-faced with anxiety about this unpredictable war’s bio-attacks and Q-bomb attacks and EMP attacks, all seemingly random. We’re all depressed, but not all of us take it out on the people we live with.

I said with great deliberation, “When did the Blanding pick up the aliens, and do the scientists believe they’re the same aliens that came here in July of 2002?”

“Yesterday. Yes. You should either bathe Robin or not bathe him, instead of suspending a vital parental job in the middle like that.” He left the room.

I rinsed Robin, wrapped him in a large, gray-from-age towel, and laid him on the floor. He smiled at me; such a sweet-natured child. I gave Lucy and Lem, too frenetic for sweetness, a hoarded cookie each, and turned on the Internet. The Trumpeter avatar, whom someone had designed to subtly remind viewers of Honest Abe Lincoln, was in the middle of the story, complete with what must have been hastily assembled archival footage from obsolete media.

There was the little pewter-colored spaceship in my Uncle John’s cow field twenty-five years ago, and Kyra walking out with a dazed look on her small face. God—she’d been only a few years older than Lucy and Lem. There was the ship lifting straight up, passing the Army helicopter. That time, no watching telescopes or satellites had detected a larger ship, coming or going . . . either our technology was better now, or the aliens had a different game plan. Now the screen showed pictures from the Blanding, which looked like nothing but a dot in space until computers enhanced it, surrounded it with graphics, and “artistically rendered” various imaginary appearances and routes and speculations. In the midst of the hype given somberly in Abraham Lincoln’s “voice,” I gathered that the ship’s trajectory would intersect with the same cow pasture as last time—unless, of course, it didn’t—and would arrive at Earth in thirteen hours and seven minutes.

A Chinese general appeared on screen, announcing in translation that China was prepared to shoot the intruder down.

“Mommy!” Lucy shrieked. “My cookie’s gone!”

“Not now, honey.”

“But Lem gots some of his cookie and he won’t share!”

“In a minute!”

“But Mommy—”

The Internet abruptly cut out. The Internet.

Into the shocking, eerie silence came Lem’s voice, marginally quieter than his sister’s. “Mommy. I hear some sirens.”

Three days of chaos. I had never believed panic—old-style Roman rioting in the streets, totally out of control, murderous panic—could happen in the United States, in gray cities like Rochester, New York. Yes, there were periodic race riots in Atlanta and looting spells in New York or war hysteria in San Francisco, but the National Guard quickly contained them in neighborhoods where violence was a way of life anyway. But this panic took over the whole city in a cold February and watching on the Internet, when a given site’s coverage was up anyway, was to know a surreal horror. This was supposed to be America.

People were publicly beheaded on the lawns of the art museum, their breath frozen on the winter air a second before the blood leapt from their severed heads toward the camera. No one could say why they were being executed, or even if there was a reason. Buildings that the National Guard had protected from being bombed by Chinese terrorists were bombed by crazed Americans. Anyone Chinese-American, or appearing Chinese-American, or rumored to be Chinese-American, was so savagely assaulted that the fourteenth century would have been disgusted. A dead, mangled baby was thrown onto our fourth-floor fire escape, where it lay for the entire three days, pecked at by crows.

I kept the children huddled in the bathroom, which had no windows to shatter. Or see out of. The electricity went off, then on, then off for good. The heat ceased. David stayed by the living room window in case the building caught fire and we had no choice but to evacuate. Even during this horror he belittled and criticized: “If you’d had more food stockpiled, Amy, maybe the kids wouldn’t have to have cereal again.” “You never were any good at keeping them soothed and quiet.”

Soothed and quiet. The crows on the fire escape had plucked out the dead infant’s eyes.

Whenever Lucy, Lem, and Robin were finally asleep, I turned on the radio. The riots were coming under control. No, they weren’t. The President was dead. No, he wasn’t. The President had declared martial law. Massive bio-weapons had been unleashed in New York. No, in London. No, in Peking. The Chinese were behind these attacks. No, the Chinese were having worse riots than we were, their present chaos merging with their previous chaos of civil war. It was that civil war that had broken the American-Chinese alliance three years ago. And then during their civil upheavals, the Chinese had attacked Alaska. Maybe. Not even the international intelligence network was completely sure who’d released the bubonic-plague-carrying rats in Anchorage. But, announced the White House, the excesses of China had become too much for the Western world to stomach.

I didn’t see how those excesses could be worse than this.

And then it was over. The Army prevailed. Or maybe the chaos, self-limiting as some plagues, just ran its course. Everyone left alive was immune. After another week, David and I—but not the kids—emerged from our building into the rubble to start rebuilding some sort of economic and communal existence. We never left the children alone, but even so David had found an isolated moment to say, resentment in every line of his body, “You’re the one who wanted to have children. I don’t know how much longer I can go on paying for your bad judgment.”

It was then that I got the email from Kyra.

“Why did you come?” Kyra asked me.

We faced each other in a federal prison in the Catskill Mountains northeast of New York City. The prison, built in 2022, was state-of-the-art. Nothing could break in or out, including bacteria, viruses, and some radiation. The Kyra sitting opposite me, this frightened woman, was actually two miles away, locked in some cell that probably looked nothing like the hologram of her I faced in the Visitors’ Center.

I said slowly, “I can’t say why I came.” This was the truth. Or, rather, I could say but only with so much mixed motive that she would never understand. Because I had to get away from David for these two days. Because the childhood she and I shared, no matter how embittered by events, nonetheless looked to me now like Arcadia. Because I wanted to see Kyra humbled, in pain, as she had once put me. Because I had some insane idea, as crazy as the chaos we had lived through two weeks ago, that she might hold a key to understanding the inexplicable. Because.

She said, “Did you come to gloat?”

“In part.”

“All right, you’re entitled. Just help me!”

“To tell the truth, Kyra, you don’t look like you need all that much help. You look well-fed, and bathed, and safe enough behind these walls.” All more than my children were. “When did you land in here, anyway?”

“They put me in the second the alien ship was spotted.” Her voice was bitter.

“On what charges?”

“No charges. I’m a detainee for the good of the state.”

I said levelly, “Because of the alien ship or because you slept with the Chinese enemy?”

“They weren’t the enemy then!” she said angrily, and I saw that my goading was pushing her to the point where she wanted to tell me to fuck off. But she didn’t dare.

She didn’t look bad. Well-fed, bathed, as I’d said. No longer pretty, however. Well, it had been nine hard years since I’d seen her. That delicate skin had coarsened and wrinkled much more than mine, as if she’d spent a lot of time in the sun. The hair, once blazingly blonde, was a dull brown streaked with gray. My Aunt Julie, her mother, had died five years ago in a traffic accident.

“Amy,” she said, visibly controlling herself, “I’m afraid they’ll just quietly keep me here forever. I don’t have any ties with the Chinese any more, and I don’t know anything about or from that alien ship. I was just living quietly, under an alias, and then they broke in to my apartment in the middle of the night and cuffed me and brought me here.”

“Why don’t you contact General Chou?” I said cruelly.

Kyra only looked at me with such despair that I despised her. She was, had always been, a sentimentalist. I remembered how she’d actually thought that military monster loved her.

“Tell me what happened since 2018,” I said, and watched her seize on this with desperate hope.

“After your news story came out and—I’m sorry, Amy, I . . . ”

“Don’t,” I said harshly, and she knew enough to stop.

“I left Chun’fu, or rather he threw me out. It hit me hard, although I guess I was pretty much a fool not to think he’d react that way, not to anticipate—” She looked away, old pain fresh on her face. I thought that “fool” didn’t begin to cover it.

“Anyway, I had some old friends who helped me. Most people wanted nothing to do with me, but a few loyal ones got me a new identity and a job on a lobster farm on Cape Cod. You know, I liked it. I’d forgotten how good it can feel to work outdoors. It was different from my father’s dairy farm, of course, but the wind and the rain and the sea . . . ” She trailed off, remembering things I’d never seen.

“I met a lobster farmer named Daniel and we lived together. I never told him my real name. We had a daughter, Jane.”

I thought I’d seen pain on her face before. I’d been wrong.

I said, and it came out gentle, “Where are Daniel and Jane now?”

“Dead. A bio-virus attack. I didn’t think I could go on after that, but of course I did. People do. Are you married, Amy?”

“Yes. I hate him.” I hadn’t planned on saying that. Something in her pain drew out my own. Kyra didn’t look shocked.

“Kids?”

“Three wonderful ones. Five-year-old twins and a six-month-old.”

She leaned forward, like a plant hungry for sun. “What are their names?”

“Lucy. Lem. Robin. Kyra . . . how do you think I can help you?”

“Write about me. You’re a journalist.”

“No, I’m not. You ended my career.” Did Kyra really not know that?

“Then call a press conference. Send data to the news outlets. Write letters to Congress. Just don’t let me rot here indefinitely because they don’t know what to do with me!”

She really had no idea how things worked. Still an innocent. I wasn’t ready yet to tell her that all her anguish was silly. Instead I said, “Did the aliens communicate with you from their ship in some way?”

“Of course not!”

“The ship left, you know.”

From her face, it was clear she didn’t know. “They left?”

“Two weeks ago. Came no closer than the moon. If we had any sort of decent space program left, if anyone did, we might have tried to contact them. But they just observed us, or whatever, from that distance, then took off again.”

“Fuck them to bloody hell! I wish we had shot them down!”

She had surprised me, with both the language—Kyra had always been a bit prissy, despite her sexual adventures—and the hatred. My surprise must have shown on my face.

“Amy,” Kyra said, “they ruined my life. Without that abduction—” the word didn’t really seem appropriate—“when I was ten, my parents would never have divorced. I wouldn’t have been an outcast in school. I never would have met Chou, or behaved like . . . and I certainly wouldn’t be in this fucking prison now! They came here to ruin my life and they succeeded!”

“You take no responsibility for anything,” I said evenly.

Kyra glared at me. “Don’t you dare judge me, Amy. You with your beautiful living children and your life free of any suspicion that you’re somehow deformed and dangerous because of a few childhood hours you can’t even remember—”

“‘Can’t remember’? What about the helmet and the flickering images and the observing aliens? Did you make those all up, Kyra?”

Enraged, she lunged forward to slap me. There was nothing there, of course. We were only virtually together. I stood to leave my half of the farce.

“Please, Amy . . . please! Say you’ll help me!”

“You’re a fool, Kyra. You learn nothing. Do you think the prison officials would be letting you have this ‘meeting’ with me if they were going to keep you here hidden away for good? Do you think you’d even have been permitted to send me email? You’re as good as out already. And when you are, try this time to behave as if you weren’t still ten years old.”

We parted in contempt and anger. I hoped to never see or hear from her again.

2047

The next time the aliens returned, they landed.

I was at JungleTime Playland with my granddaughter, Lehani. She loved JungleTime Playland. I was amused by it; in the long, long rebuilding after the war, VR had finally reached the commercial level that Robin and Lucy and Lem, Lehani’s father, had also played in. Of course, government applications of VR and holo and AI were another matter, but I had nothing to do with those. I led a very small, contented life.

“I go Yung Lan,” Lehani said, looking up at me with the shining, whole-hearted hope of the young on her small face. Every wish granted is paradise, every wish crushed is eternal disappointment.

“Yes, you can go into JungleLand, but we have to wait our turn, dear heart.”

So she stood in line beside me, hopping from foot to foot, holding my hand. Nobody ever told me grandmotherhood was going to be this sweet.

When we finally reached the head of the line, I registered her, put the tag on her neck that would keep me informed of her every move as well as the most minute changes in her skin conductivity. If she got scared or inattentive, I would know it. No adults are allowed in Jungle Playland; that would spoil the thrill. Lehani grinned and ran through the virtual curtain. I accepted the map tuned to her tag and sat at a table in the lobby, surrounded by lines of older children registering for the other VR playlands.

Sipping tea, I was checking my email when the big lobby screen abruptly came on.

“News! News! An alien ship has been sighted moving toward Earth. Government sources say it resembles the ship that landed in Minnesota in 2002 and traveled as far as lunar orbit in 2027 but so far no—”

People erupted all around me. Buzzing, signaling for their children, and, in the case of one stupid woman, pointless shrieking. Under cover of the noise I comlinked Central, before the site was hopelessly jammed.

“Library,” I keyed in. “Public Records, State of Maine. Data search.”

“Search ready,” the tiny screen said.

“Death certificate, first name Daniel, same date as death certificate, first name Jane, years 2020 through 2026.”

“Searching.”

Children began to pour out of the playlands, most resentful at having their VR time interrupted. Kyra had never told me Daniel’s last name. Nor did I have any idea what name she was using now. But if she simply wanted to pass unnoticed among ordinary people, his name would do, and Kyra had always been sentimental. The government, of course, would know exactly where she was, but they would know that no matter what name she used or what paper trails she falsified. Her DNA was on record. The press, too, could track her down if they decided to take the trouble. The alien landing meant they would take the trouble.

My handheld displayed, “Daniel Ethan Parmani, died June 16, 2025, age forty-two, and Jane Julia Parmani, died June 16, 2025, age three.”

“Second search. United States. Locate Kyra Parmani, ages—” What age might Kyra think she could pass for? In prison, twenty years ago, she had looked far older than she was. “Ages fifty through seventy.”

“Searching.”

Lehani appeared at the JungleLand door, looking furious. She spied me and ran over. “Lady sayed I can’t play!”

“I know, sweetie. Come sit on Grandma’s lap.”

She climbed onto me, buried her head in my shoulder, and burst into angry tears. I peered around her to see the handheld.

“Six matches.” It displayed them. Six? With a name like “Parmani” coupled with one like “Kyra”? I sighed and shifted Lehani’s weight.

“Call each of them in turn.”

Kyra was the second match. She answered the call herself, her voice unconcerned. She hadn’t heard. “Hello?”

“Kyra. It’s Amy, your cousin. Listen, they’ve just spotted an alien ship coming in. They’ll be looking for you again.” Silence on the other end. “Kyra?”

“How did you find me?”

“Lucky guesswork. But if you want to hide, from the feds or the press . . . ” They might put her in jail again, and who knew this time when she would get out? At the very least, the press would make her life, whatever it was now, a misery. I said, “Do you have somewhere to go? Some not-too-close-but-perfectly-trusted friend’s back bedroom or strange structure in a cowfield?”

She didn’t laugh. Kyra never had had much of a sense of humor. Not that this was an especially good time for joking.

“Yes, Amy. I do. Why are you warning me?”

“Oh, God, Kyra, how do I answer that?”

Maybe she understood. Maybe not. She merely said, “All right. And thanks. Amy . . . ”

“What?”

“I’m getting married again. I’m happy.”

That was certainly like her: blurting out the personal that no one had asked about. For a second I, too, was the old Amy, bitter and jealous. I had not remarried since my terrible divorce from David, had not even loved any one again. I suspected I never would. But the moment passed. I had Robin and Lem and Lehani and, intermittently when she was in the country, Lucy.

“Congratulations, Kyra. Now get going. They can find you in about forty seconds if they want to, you know.”

“I know. I’ll call you when this is all over, Amy. Where are you?”

“Prince George’s County, Maryland. Amy Suiter Parker. Bye, Kyra.” I broke the link.

“Who on link?” Lehani demanded, apparently having decided her tears were not accomplishing anything.

“Somebody Grandma knew a long time ago, dear heart. Come on, let’s go home, and you can play with Mr. Grindle’s cat.”

“Yes! Yes!”

It is always so easy to distract the uncorrupted.

The alien ship parked itself in lunar orbit for the better part of three days. Naturally we had no one up there; not a single nation on Earth had anything you could call a space program any more. But there were satellites. Maybe we communicated with the aliens, or they with us, or maybe we tried to destroy them, or entice them, or threaten them. Or all of the above, by different nations with different satellites. Ordinary citizens like me were not told. And of course the aliens could have been doing anything with their ship: sampling broadcasts, scrambling military signals, seeding clouds, sending messages to true believers’ back teeth. How would I know?

On the second day, three agents from People’s Safety Commission, the latest political reincarnation of that office, showed up to ask me about Kyra’s whereabouts. I said, truthfully, that I hadn’t seen her in twenty years and had no idea where she was now. They thanked me politely and left. News cams staked out her house, a modest foamcast building in a small Pennsylvania town, and they dissected her current life, but they never actually found her, so it made a pretty lackluster story.

After three days of lunar orbit, a small alien craft landed on the upland savanna of East Africa. Somehow it sneaked past whatever surveillance we had as if it didn’t exist. The ship set down just beyond sight of a Kikuyu village. Two small boys herding goats spotted it, and one of them went inside.

By the time the world learned of this, from a call made on the village’s only comlink, the child was already inside the alien ship. News people and government people raced to the scene. East Africa was in its usual state of confused civil war, incipient drought, and raging disease. The borders were theoretically sealed. This made no difference whatsoever. Gunfire erupted, disinformation spread, ultimata were issued. The robocams went on recording.

“Does it look the same as the ship you saw?” Lem said softly, watching the news beside me. His wife Amalie was in the kitchen with Lehani. I could hear them laughing.

“It looks the same.” Forty-five years fell away and I stood in Uncle John’s cow field, watching Kyra walk into the pewter-colored ship and walk out the most famous little girl in the world.

Lem said, “What do you think they want?”

I stared at him. “Don’t you think I’ve wondered that for four and a half decades? That everyone has wondered that?”

Lem was silent.

A helicopter appeared in the sky over the alien craft. That, too, was familiar—until it set down and I grasped its huge size. Troops began pouring out, guns were leveled, and orders barked. A newsman, maybe live but probably virtual, said, “We’re being ordered to shut down all reporting on this—” He disappeared.

A black cloud emanated from the helicopter, but not before a robocam had shown more equipment being off-loaded. Lem said, “My God, I think that’s a bombcase!” Through the black cloud ripped more gunfire.

Then no news came through at all.

The stories conflicted wildly, of course. At least six different agencies, in three different countries, were blamed. A hundred and three people died at the scene, and uncounted more in the senseless riots that followed. One of the dead was the second little boy that had witnessed the landing.

The first child went up with the ship. It was the only picture that emerged after the government erected visual and electronic blockage: the small craft rising unharmed above the black cloud, ascending into the sky and disappearing into the bright African sunlight.

The Kikuyu boy was released about a hundred miles away, near another village, but it was a long time before ordinary people learned that.

Kyra never called me after the furor had died down. I searched for her, but she was more savvy about choosing her aliases. If the government located her, and I assumed they did, no one informed me.

Why would they?

2075

Sometimes the world you want comes too late.

It was not really the world anyone wanted, of course. Third world countries, especially but not exclusively in Africa, were still essentially ungovernable. Fetid urban slums, disease, and terror from local warlords. Daily want, brutality, and suffering, all made orders of magnitude worse by the lunatic compulsion to genocide. Much of the globe lives like this, with little hope of foreseeable change.

But inside the United States’ tightly guarded, expensively defended borders, a miracle had occurred. Loaves from fishes, something for nothing, the free lunch there ain’t supposed to be one of. Nanotechnology.

It was still an embryonic industry. But it had brought burgeoning prosperity. And with prosperity came the things that aren’t supposed to cost money but always do: peace, generosity, civility. And one more thing: a space program, the cause of all the news agitation I was pointedly not watching.

“It’s not fair to say that nano brought civility,” Lucy protested. She was back from a journalism assignment in Sudan that had left her gaunt and limping, with half her hair fallen out. Lucy didn’t volunteer details and I didn’t ask. From the look in her haunted eyes, I didn’t think I could bear to hear her answers.

“Civility is a by-product of money,” I said. “Starving people are not civil to each other.”

“Sometimes they are,” she said, looking at some painful memory I could not imagine.

“Often?” I pressed.

“No. Not often.” Abruptly Lucy left the room.

I have learned to wait serenely until she’s ready to return to me, just as she has learned to wait, less serenely, until she is ready to return to those parts of the world where she makes her living. My daughter is too old for what she does, but she cannot, somehow, leave it alone. Injured, diseased, half bald, she always goes back.

But Lucy is partly right. It isn’t just America’s present riches that have led to her present civility. This decade’s culture—optimistic, tolerant, fairly formal—is also a simple backlash to what went before. Pendulums swing. They cannot not swing.

While I waited for Lucy, I returned to my needlepoint. Now that nano has begun to easily make us anything, things that are hard to make are back in fashion. My eyes are too old for embroidery or even petit point, but gros point I can do. Under my fingers, roses bloomed on a pair of slippers. A bird flew to the tree beside me, lit on a branch, and watched me solemnly.

I’m still not used to birds in the house. But, then, I’m not used to this house of my son’s, either. All the rooms open into an open central courtyard two stories high. Atop the courtyard is some sort of invisible shield that I don’t understand. It keeps out cold and insects, and it can be adjusted to let rain in or keep it out. The shield keeps in the birds who live here. What Lem has is a miniature, climate-controlled, carefully landscaped, indoor Eden. The bird watching me was bright red with an extravagant gold tail, undoubtedly genetically engineered for health and long life. Other birds glow in the dark. One has what looks like blue fur.

“Go away,” I told it. I like the fresh air; the genemod birds give me the creeps.

When Lucy returned, someone was with her. I put down my needlework, pasted on a smile, and prepared to be civil. The visitor used a walker, moving very slowly. She had sparse gray hair. I let out a little cry.

I hadn’t even known Kyra was still alive.

“Mom, guess who’s here! Your cousin Kyra!”

“Hello, Amy,” Kyra said, and her voice hadn’t changed, still low and husky.

“Where . . . how did you . . . ”

“Oh, you were always easy to find, remember? I was the difficult one to locate.”

Lucy said, “Are they looking for you now, Kyra?”

Kyra. Lucy was born too soon for the new civil formality. Lem’s and Robin’s children would have called her Ms. Lunden, or ma’am.

“Oh, probably,” Kyra said. “But if they show up, child, just tell them my hearing implant failed again.” She lowered herself into a chair, which obligingly curved itself around her. That still gives me the creeps, too, but Kyra didn’t seem to mind.

We stared at each other, two ancient ladies in comfortable baggy clothing, and I suddenly saw the twenty-six-year-old she had been, gaudily dressed mistress to an enemy general. Every detail was sharp as winter air: her blue jumpsuit with a double row of tiny mirrors sewn down the front, her asymmetrical hair the color of gold-leaf. That happens to me more and more. The past is so much clearer than the present.

Lucy said, “I’ll go make some tea, all right?”

“Yes, dear, please,” I said.

Kyra smiled. “She seems like a good person.”

“Too good,” I said, without explanation. “Kyra, why are you here? Do you need to hide again? This probably isn’t the best place.”

“No, I’m not hiding. They’re either looking for me or they’re not, but I think not. They’ve got their hands full, after all, up at Celadon.”

Celadon is the aggressively new international space station. When I first heard the name, I’d thought, why name a space station after a color? But it turns out that’s the name of some famous engineer who designed the nuclear devices that make it cheap to hoist things back and forth from Earth to orbit. They’ve hoisted a lot of things. The station is still growing, but it already houses one hundred seventy scientists, techies, and administrators. Plus, now, two aliens.

They appeared in the solar system three months ago. The usual alarms went off, but there was no rioting, at least not in the United States. People watched their children more closely. But we had the space station now, a place for the aliens to contact, without actually coming to Earth. And maybe the New Civility (that’s how journalists write about it, with capital letters) made a difference as well. I couldn’t say. But the aliens spent a month or so communicating with Celadon, and then they came aboard, and a few selected humans went aboard their mothership, and the whole thing began to resemble a tea party fortified with the security of a transnational bank vault.

Kyra was watching me. “You aren’t paying any attention to the aliens’ return, are you, Amy?”

“Not really.” I picked up my needlepoint and started to work.

“That’s a switch, isn’t it? It used to be you who were interested in the political and me who wasn’t.”

It seemed an odd thing to say, given her career, but I didn’t argue. “How are you, Kyra?”

“Old.”

“Ah, yes. I know that feeling.”

“And your children?”

I made myself go on stitching. “Robin is dead. Cross-fire victim. His ashes are buried there, under that lilac tree. Lucy you saw. Lem and his wife are fine, and their two kids, and my three great-grandchildren.”

Kyra nodded, unsurprised. “I have three step-children, two step-grandchildren. Wonderful kids.”

“You married again?”

“Late. I was sixty-five, Bill sixty-seven. A pair of sagging gray arthritic honeymooners. But we had ten good years, and I’m grateful for them.”

I knew what she meant. At the end, one was grateful for all the good years, no matter what their aftermath. I said, “Kyra, I still don’t know why you’re here. Not that you’re not welcome, of course, but why now?”

“I told you. I wanted to hear what you thought of the aliens’ coming to Celadon.”

“You could have comlinked.”

She didn’t say anything to that. I stitched on. Lucy brought tea, poured it, and left again.

“Amy, I really want to know what you think.”

She was serious. It mattered to her. I put down my teacup. “All right. On Mondays I think they’re not on Celadon at all and the government made the whole thing up. On Tuesdays I think that they’re here to do just what it looks like: make contact with humans, and this is the first time it looks safe to them. The other three times we met them with soldiers and bombs and anger because they landed on our planet. Now there’s a place to interact without coming too close, and we aren’t screeching at them in panic, and they were waiting for that in order to establish trade and/or diplomatic relations. On Wednesdays I think they’re worming their way into our confidence, gathering knowledge about our technology, in order to enslave us or destroy us. On Thursdays I think that they’re aliens, so how can we ever hope to understand their reasons? They’re not human. On Fridays I hope, and on Saturdays I despair, and on Sundays I take a day of rest.”

Kyra didn’t smile. I remembered that about her: she didn’t have much of a sense of humor. She said, “And why do you think they took me and that Kikuyu boy into their ships?”

“On Mondays—”

“I’m serious, Amy!”

“Always. All right, I guess they just wanted to learn about us in person, so they picked out two growing specimens and knocked them out so they could garner all the secrets of our physical bodies for future use. They might even have taken some of your DNA, you know. You’d never miss it. There could be small culture-grown Kyras running around some distant planet. Or not so small, by now.”

But Kyra wasn’t interested in the possibilities of genetic engineering. “I think I know why they came.”

“You do?” Once she had told me that the aliens came just to destroy her life. But that kind of hubris was for the young.

“Yes,” Kyra said. “I think they came without knowing the reason. They just came. After all, Amy, if I think about it, I can’t really say why I did half the things in my life. They just seemed the available course of action at the time, so I did them. Why should the aliens be any different? Can you say that you really know why you did all the things in your life?”

Could I? I thought about it. “Yes, Kyra. I think I can, pretty much. That’s not to say my reasons were good. But they were understandable.”

She shrugged. “Then you’re different from me. But I’ll tell you this: Any plan the government makes to deal with these aliens won’t work. You know why? Because it will be one plan, one set of attitudes and procedures, and pretty soon things will change on Earth or on Celadon or for the aliens, and then the plan won’t work anymore and still everybody will try desperately to make it work. They’ll try to stay in control, and nobody can control anything important.”

She said this last with such intensity that I looked up from my needlepoint. She meant it, this banal and obvious insight that she was offering as if it were cutting edge knowledge.

And yet, it was cutting edge, because each person had to acquire it painfully, in his or her own way, through loss and failure and births and plagues and war and victories and, sometimes, a life shaped by an hour in an alien spaceship. All fodder for the same trite, heart-breaking conclusion. Everything old is new again.

And yet—

Sudden tenderness washed over me for Kyra. We had spent most of our lives locked in pointless battle. I reached over to her, carefully so as not to aggravate my creaky joints, and took her hand.

“Kyra, if you believe you can’t control anything, then you won’t try for control, which of course guarantees that you end up not controlling anything.”

“Never in my whole life have I been able to make a difference to—what the fuck is that!”

The furry blue bird had landed on her head, its feet tangling briefly in her hair. “It’s one of Lem’s genemod birds,” I said. “It’s been engineered to have no fear of humans.”

“Well, that’s a stupid idea!” Kyra said, swatting at it with surprising vigor. The bird flew away. “If that thing lands on me again, I’ll strangle it!”

“Yes,” I said, and laughed, and didn’t bother to explain why.

Originally published in Sci Fiction, May 8, 2002.

About the Author

Nancy Kress is the author of twenty-seven novels, three books on writing, four short story collections, and over a hundred works of short fiction. Her fiction has won six Nebulas (for “Out of All Them Bright Stars,” “Beggars in Spain,” “The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” “Fountain of Age,” “After the Fall, Before the Fall, and During the Fall,” and “Yesterday’s Kin”), two Hugos (for “Beggars in Spain” and “The Erdmann Nexus”), a Sturgeon (for “The Flowers of Aulit Prison”), and a John W. Campbell Memorial Award (for Probability Space). Her work has been translated into Swedish, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Danish, Polish, Croatian, Korean, Lithuanian, Chinese, Romanian, Japanese, Russian, and Klingon, none of which she can read. Nancy lives in Seattle, Washington with her husband, writer Jack Skillingstead.

Bugs from Outer Space & Invasive Earth:
Planetary Protection

Julie Novakova

We have seen this scenario in science fiction a million times: Scientists uncover an alien organism previously buried under ice, or bring bugs from another celestial body to Earth. Before we know it, an apocalypse unveils: It was a deadly pathogen threatening to wipe out all life on Earth! This clichéd scenario is far removed from the probable reality, but the central questions stand: What would happen if we brought alien life to Earth? What should we do to prevent it, if anything, and how should we handle the possibility of contaminating another world with Earth life?

The question of planetary protection becomes especially timely when it comes to Mars. We want to discover whether it could have had life in the past, or even nowadays, and attempt that through missions like ESA/Roscosmos’ ExoMars 2020 rover and lander or NASA’s Mars 2020 rover. At the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, SpaceX’s Elon Musk recently announced his plans of Mars colonization. We might argue whether they’re realistic in terms of finance, proposed timeline, providing the crew with sufficient safety, et cetera, but it’s inarguable that we’re witnessing something like a race to Mars. The moment when the first humans step onto the surface of the Red Planet may be fifteen or forty years away, but it will eventually happen. It will also be the moment planetary protection of Mars has essentially ended. Should we care?

Do astrobiologists dream of false positives?

Planetary protection is basically a set of rules to prevent inadvertent cross-contamination, be it bringing alien organisms on Earth, or, more pressingly, seeding other objects with Earth organisms. Why should we worry about that? Let’s imagine for a moment that there’s extant life on Mars. Forward contamination of the Red Planet with Earth life could potentially lead to its extinction—not because our organisms would prove to be some deadly disease for Martians, but more realistically by simply outcompeting them. This worst-case scenario, disastrous from a scientific, as well as ethical point of view, would depend on how widespread and sensitive that extant Martian life would be. There is, however, a very likely scenario involving false positives in life detection. Imagine that we send a costly robotic spacecraft to search for life on Mars. It returns exciting results: It detected fragments of nucleic acids, strange combinations of lipids, many amino acids present in proteins, chiral amino acids or sugars . . .

Each, and any of those, would present a compelling argument for life. It could also test regolith samples for signs of metabolic activity—and wow, there are some! It looks like we found life on Mars! After the initial excitement, doubts are raised: It transpired that the spacecraft’s sterilization had been flawed. Had it truly found Martian life, or simply detected what it had brought from Earth? Sequencing the DNA could reveal which of these possibilities is true, but the spacecraft in question isn’t equipped to do that. Another expensive mission must be mounted and even then, we still can’t be sure. If the organisms didn’t survive, and all we have are radiation-damaged fragments, a reliable result might be impossible. Even if the analysis shows traces of organisms known from Earth, can we be sure we didn’t overlook something else because our techniques are suited to picking up life with which we’re already familiar?

This is stuff of nightmares for many astrobiologists. The first spacecraft to ever land on Mars (and work for more than a few seconds, unlike the earlier Mars 3), the Viking landers, have been thoroughly sterilized. They were cleaned to minimize the bioburden first, and then encased in a bioshield and baked at 125 °C to diminish the chance that anything could survive on them even further. These were the first, and so far, the only, spacecraft with search for life as their primary mission. Three of their four biological experiments returned negative results, but one initially returned positive. However, as was found later, it could have been caused by the presence of perchlorates in Martian regolith. (And ironically enough, perchlorates could also be responsible for a part of the negative results if there had been organics on the sample sites.) The landers also found Mars to be a much colder and drier place than expected. Its thin atmosphere doesn’t allow for any pure liquid water to exist on the surface. Additionally, its harsh radiation environment and freezing temperatures would be unfriendly to life as we know it.

Connected biospheres?

For subsequent missions, whose aim was not to look for life, less severe planetary protection measures were chosen (baked spacecraft were no longer on the menu), but some found it unnecessary altogether. An interesting exchange played out in 2013 on the pages of Nature Geoscience, where Alberto Fairén and Dirk Schulze-Makuch argued for dropping the measures for most missions. If Mars could support Earth life, it’s already there, they argued. They didn’t only mean the probably unsterilized crash-landed spacecraft such as Soviet Union’s Mars 2 and 6 probes. Or the possibility that NASA’s Phoenix lander’s not-fully-sterilized legs stood in ice exposed by the lander’s retrorockets and may have touched liquid brines melted in the landing. Fairén and Schulze-Makuch point out that there is a good likelihood that life had been transferred between Earth and Mars naturally throughout their history by meteorites.

There are over 130 known meteorites of Martian origin on Earth—and think about how many we had missed because they had been wiped out by erosion, buried underneath layers of soil, subducted or landed in the oceans in the preceding eons, or they are still here but simply haven’t been found by scientists yet. Estimates based on the probability of a planet taking a hit and trajectories of the escaping debris show that meteorite exchange between Earth and Mars was probably very frequent, and although there would be many more Martian meteorites here on Earth deeper in the gravity well, there would still be plenty of Earth material on Mars. But could anything survive so violent an event such an asteroid impact, then thousands of years in space, and as a bonus landing on another planet—going through the atmosphere, crashing on the surface?

It seems that something could. Many bacteria, and specifically their spores, can withstand shock events sending them through abrupt temperature changes and acceleration, irradiation, exposure to vacuum—all of the above. Some of the model species from these experiments, such as Bacillus subtilis, are commonly found in spacecraft assembly rooms and on spacecraft surfaces. The EXPOSE facility aboard the ISS hosted several experiments attempting to mimic the conditions of being hurled into space or on Mars. And while being directly exposed to cosmic radiation kills most spores, just a feeble protection like another layer of spores, a tiny crack in the surface or a little dust improves the odds of survival substantially. Inside larger rocks, they could probably wait out millennia quite comfortably. And while we can’t keep a test running for thousands of years, nature can do that for us: Viable bacteria and archea were extracted from Siberian permafrost, Antarctic glaciers, amber and salt crystals after not just many thousands, but sometimes even millions of years. The current record is held by a strain of Bacillus recovered from over 250-million-years-old salt crystals. And while it’s not the same as spending the time inside a rock in space, it’s a more than powerful testimonial of life’s resilience.

Any War of The Worlds might have played about hundreds of millions of years before humans came on the scene. And if it can’t survive there, there is no point in planetary protection of Mars.

With great risk comes great responsibility

With all this in mind, could the protective measures, which could add millions of dollars or euros to the required budget and years to the development of a life-searching mission, be obsolete? NASA planetary protection officer Catharine Conley with her colleague John Rummel were quick to respond to Fairén and Schulze-Makuch on the pages of the same journal. They emphasize that even after just millions of years’ isolation, any transplanted Earth life would be of great scientific significance, and any scenario playing out after introduction of the current species is impossible to predict—just look at the many surprising invasive species in our own ecosystems. (Also, if Martian life was related to Earth life, it would be even harder to discern spacecraft-bound contamination from pre-existent life, so it could be viewed as a reason for even more stringent sterilization.)

To protect Mars even further, so-called “special regions” had been proposed over ten years ago, and the definition is gradually revised—usually every two years. At first, we thought that only polar regions had enough water reservoirs in the ice caps and permafrost; but buried glaciers may be present near the equator, and newer discoveries such as the recurring slope lineae (RSLs) thought to contain some liquid water (although newest observations cast a shade upon that claim), show us essentially all of Mars might end up treated as a “special region.” The latest suggestion to update the definition, by Petra Rettberg and colleagues, succinctly points out that we need to address the “known unknowns”: Could water vapor instead of liquid water suffice for an organism to reproduce itself? Could only one terrestrial organism spread on Mars, even under good conditions? Do multi-species colonies have a better chance at surviving and reproducing? The questions certainly don’t end there.

Some answers might be brought by ESA’s ExoMars rover, currently scheduled to launch in early 2020. The rover will adhere to similar measures such as the Viking landers; in fact, some of its components are undergoing “baking” already. It will be, after all, the first mission after the Vikings aiming to search for possible extant life. But it won’t visit the special regions. This is where planetary protection could easily become something of a Catch 22. We want to search for life in places where it might be feasible and we need data from there to work on more informed planetary protection measures. But getting a spacecraft sterile enough to be allowed to go there would be difficult and especially for financial reasons, agencies might be wary.

Yet all planetary protection of Mars is essentially over when humans first step onto its surface. No matter how well we sterilize our equipment or spacesuits, we’re walking consorcia of countless species—beside our human cells, we carry some protozoans from different groups, and lots of bacteria and archea. Especially if we land somewhere with lots of sunlight for solar panels and ice for fuel manufacture, we’ll be on the best way to contaminate Mars (or possibly ourselves too?). Our window of opportunity to study the pristine Red Planet may be shortening.

Beyond Mars

As Fairén and Schulze-Makuch note, planetary protection of Mars might be unwarranted. But what about other celestial bodies where life may prevail? Take Venus, for example. Its hellish surface is a sterilization procedure of its own; nothing could possibly survive there. But up in the cloud layer around 50 km high, the conditions would be much more favorable to life as we know it. No planetary protection is required for Venus missions under the current rules. Yet seeding its cloud layer with photosynthetic microorganisms tolerant to high acidity and low water availability (which thrive in extreme conditions on Earth), would not be unthinkable. Some scientists, such as Dirk Schulze-Makuch or Charles Cockell, are considering the possibility of local life in the cloud layer.

Though Venus presents a potential abode of life, albeit perhaps unlikely due to its turbulent history, it’s not a place that draws astrobiologists’ hopes most. Inner oceans of several icy moons of our solar system, especially Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus, represent places of high interest. Covered by thick icy crusts, these environments could have been isolated from each other and any other potentially life-bearing places. Europa’s extreme radiation conditions on its surface are a sterilizing procedure in itself, but Enceladus’ surface is, if you don’t mind the cold and lack of atmosphere, quite balmy in comparison. Future missions to the icy moons will have to weigh the risk of getting contaminants under the surface. Besides, many more moons or dwarf planets might host subsurface oceans (most recent claims include Saturn’s moon Dione). Some, like Ganymede’s, will be locked between a thick ice crust above and a thick layer of high-pressure ice beneath. Is it really warranted to use planetary protection measures there?

And what about places very different from Earth, but considered as potential—if unlikely—abodes of life? One such place is Saturn’s moon Titan. ESA’s Huygens probe, which had landed there in 2005, was assembled in a clean room, but not specifically sterilized. Titan, the only moon in our system with a substantial atmosphere, has proven to be even more interesting than previously thought, and there are several hypotheses of potential biochemistries that could work in its methane lakes. Needless to say, if there was life, it would be very different from ours. Such “alien” alien life would actually be good news for planetary protection, because the risks of outcompeting would be much lower.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits harmful contamination of space. But what would happen if someone were to violate it? First of all, not all states have signed the treaty, though the vast majority have. Any violation would probably be handled by the United Nations, but legal skirmishes over what constitutes “harmful contamination” and political battles could render the law toothless. Handling actions not by state institutions but by private companies would be even more problematic, and space law experts continue writing theses on how we should include firms or individuals in space treaties. In the meantime, an invasion could begin.

We don’t know what bringing life to Mars would do. We cannot be sure how extensive and how successful (if at all) any natural exchange had been. With some luck, we might form some more accurate guesses after several more robotic missions, and then tighten, relax, or drop planetary protection measures on the Red Planet.

Maybe we’ll eventually find out that Earth is all alone in the solar system as a place hosting life. Maybe we’ll discover the opposite and find local life on Mars, the icy moons, or elsewhere. But we’ll have to go there to find out which is true. In doing that, we should bear in mind the risk of contaminating other worlds, and try to minimize it at least until we know reasonably well that they’re lifeless.

Further reading

NASA Planetary Protection Office’s website

When Biospheres Collide (by Michael Meltzer, free ebook detailing the history and working of planetary protection, 2015)

“The Planetary Police” (by Eric Hand, in Nature 459, 308-309; 2009)

“Microbial Stowaways to Mars Identified” (by Jyoti Madhusoodanan, in Nature News; 19 May 2014)

“Why Hunting for Life in Martian Water Will Be a Tricky Task” (by Lee Billings, in Nature News/Scientific American; 28 September 2015)

“Martians Might Be Real. That Makes Mars Exploration Way More Complicated” (by Kevin Carey, in Wired; 7 August 2016)

“Mars Contamination Fear Could Divert Curiosity Rover” (by Alexandra Witze, in Nature News; 7 September 2016)

About the Author

Julie Novakova is a Czech author and translator of science fiction, fantasy and detective stories. She has published short fiction in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Fantasy Scroll, Persistent Visions, and other magazines and anthologies. Her work in Czech includes seven novels, one anthology (Terra Nullius) and over thirty short stories and novelettes. Some of her works have been translated into Chinese, Romanian and Estonian. She received the Encouragement Award of the European science fiction and fantasy society in 2013. Julie is an evolutionary biologist by study, takes a keen interest in planetary science and engages in science outreach. She’s currently working on her first novel in English.

Magician Spies and Wacky Rubbish:
A Conversation with Bruce Sterling

Chris Urie

Authors are eclectic collectors. They gather various interests, knowledge of dubious use, and esoteric hobbies that they then synthesize into a mad scientist brew of characters and story. Sprinkle in a bit of history, lesser known facts, and a dash of fantastical engineering and you may have the newest novel by Bruce Sterling.

Pirate Utopia is a wild dieselpunk tale featuring famous historical faces in the time just after World War I. Lorenzo Secondary is a veteran, brilliant engineer, and leader of warrior-pirates from the Regency of Carnaro whose mission is to fight communists, capitalists, and even fascists. Featuring a poet, Milanese aristocrat, spymaster, and a torpedo manufacturer, Pirate Utopia is a witty adventure through an alternate Adriatic region.

Bruce Sterling is the Hugo, Clarke, Campbell, and Hayakawa award winning author of numerous novels and short stories. He’s notably the “Chairman” who helped to define cyberpunk. His newest novel, Pirate Utopia, is available now from Tachyon Publications.

Being the Chairman of Cyberpunk, what do you think of virtual reality tech becoming widely accessible to consumers?

I’ll be pretty impressed if consumers buy VR tech. I’ve seen thirty long years of VR techies assembling their headsets and then trying to get normal people to purchase and use those. Google Glass couldn’t manage that feat, and Glass was a light, unobtrusive device with a zillion Google bucks behind it.

Us science fiction writers do love Virtual Reality, but we tend to love lots of wacky rubbish with no market potential.

Besides VR, is there any new technology that you’re keenly interested in?

Yeah, I like 3D printers. I also like drones, cloud robots, and Internet-of-thing gizmos. But the technologies of real consequence are not the shiny new ones. They’re huge, old, well-financed, installed-base, planet-scale monsters that are no longer glamorous.

Pirate Utopia takes place in a past slightly different from our own. Why did you pick the time period after WWI to play with?

I like writing alternate history that’s set in authentic places. Rijeka, Croatia, for instance, and the period of 1919-1920 was one time when that small town was of world-scale consequence.

Here’s a video where I’m explaining some of this, in Rijeka, to people living in Rijeka. Of course, these modern people are surprised my odd historic interest. But Rijeka mattered a whole lot to world civilization, once. That obscure and sexy little beach town was the sandbox for Fascism.

Your new novel features an incredible cast of characters, including some real people from history. What made you choose to make Houdini a secret agent?

Well, Houdini really was a secret agent. You could read about that in the recent book The Secret Life of Houdini by William Kalush and Larry Sloman.

There wasn’t much of an American espionage community back in Houdini’s day, mostly just gentleman amateurs from Yale and Harvard. They were star-struck by Houdini. The spies enjoyed having Houdini around, briefing them about deception tricks and secret smuggling gadgets.

The modern American spy biz would probably enjoy Houdini just as much. Houdini was a great entertainer.

What does your writing process look like? Do you start with a concept or a character?

I tend to start with some dramatic human situation that I myself don’t understand. Like: What gives with that? What would happen if? What if the driving force that seems important isn’t the crucial element? It’s an analytical process.

But I’m not a sociologist or historian. I’m an entertainer. So, I’m looking for something that can catch a reader’s attention.

It’s speculation, it’s not a normal literary writing process, with characters, plot, denouement, theme, all that good stuff. Frankly, it’s rather like the antics of right-wing political analysts who riff to the public on talk radio. A whole lot of contemporary politics has a strong sci-fi tinge nowadays. That’s a theme of Pirate Utopia: the allure of visionary politics made from poetic rants.

You’ve often talked about how history has influenced your view of the future. Do you find history cyclical, repeating itself with various permutations?

History doesn’t mechanically coil around in spirals, corkscrewing into time ahead. Time is not a machine, but I struggle with my different intuitions about it. I know that Time and History are two different things. “History” means written records. Our authentic relation to time isn’t about our words. It’s about us as time-bound beings in a space-time continuum.

Lovecraft, who features in Pirate Utopia, liked to scare people with his “Great Old Ones” and their terrifying vistas of unthinkable eons. I admire Lovecraft and his artistry, but I don’t feel that time should intrinsically scare us.

We should enjoy thinking outside the narrow box of written history. We should have a healthier cultural sensibility about the vistas of past and future, and try to feel more at home in the scope of space-time. We should use our imagination to transcend the brevity of our lives.

It’s easy to use the standard rhetoric of science fiction to make something like the Andromeda Galaxy seem wondrous, fantastic, shocking, amazing—because it’s colossal in size, it’s two and a half million light-years away, it wheels around cyclically, and all that. I know how to write like that, but I’ve come to distrust that old-fashioned sci-fi attitude.

Our culture would probably improve if we were on better emotional terms with galaxies. Maybe if we admitted that galaxies were pretty, like snowflakes; that even though they’re bigger than us, older than us, and very far away, we have a deep commonality with them. There are millions of galaxies, and we live in one. There should be something brave and cheerful in knowing that.

How do you think your time in Europe has influenced your writing?

I suspect that the biggest change there is ahead of me. I arrived in Europe in my 50s, so I was already an older guy, pretty set in my ways. I was wandering among the Europeans, and interested in them and their doings, but I was never European, or aspiring to become like them.

Nowadays, though, I know some Europeans that I can understand. A few are writers, like me, but mostly they are European tech, design, and new-media people. They’re my cultural peer-group in Europe. I take people in the Euro tech-art scene with utter seriousness. I learn a lot from them.

You’ve been doing a lot of work in Italy. What have you been up to in Turin?

A lot of Maker culture, Arduino electronics gear, and technology art. Also, Italian housing.

My friends and I built a local “house of the future,” an experimental domestic technology space, in a half-empty Turinese factory. “Casa Jasmina,” they call it. (casajasmina.arduino.cc)

I’m the “Curator of Casa Jasmina.” I didn’t build that house with the crowbars and jackhammers and laser-cutters. Mostly my role there means that the library in Casa Jasmina is a rather special place. Casa Jasmina is an intellectual clubhouse for tech-culture activities that could probably only happen in Torino.

I think this is good for me. Back when I was a young, cyberpunk, American science fiction writer, I promised myself that I would never be some dull know-it-all who writes the same trilogy series over and over. I had to pull some freaky lateral moves to evade that common fate, but, well, I did that. So, I’m still an older guy, and even rather calm and stodgy in some ways, but man, living in Turin among artsy hackers, that really breaks up the tedium. I learn something new every day around here.

You have a fascination with various dead technologies like phenakistoscopes and stereopticons. What is it about forgotten tech that interests you?

Well, that’s what our own tech is. It’s the same basic material as stereopticons, just a matter of time.

What is your favorite Bollywood film?

Bollywood is a huge cinema industry. It’s over a hundred years old. It’s not reasonable to pick just one favorite out of all those cinema genres and regions. That industry’s best days are ahead of it.

With that necessarily said, though: Jodhaa Akbar. No question it’s my favorite. Indians never liked that movie much. It’s a gaudy, lopsided historical epic that’s a real mess as cinema entertainment. But what a seething ode to the scope and variety of life.

I won’t claim that I have “watched” Jodhaa Akbar fifty times. But I’m sure there’s been fifty times when I just left that thing running, in all its gorgeous, magic-carpet epic-ness, in some screen in the corner of the room. No movie in the world ever made me happier. It’s more than a marvel; really, it’s a comfort.

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:
The Joy of Helping

Ken Liu

Recently, Tor Books published Invisible Planets, the first English-language anthology of contemporary Chinese SF (by “contemporary,” I mean roughly something like “written during the 21st century”). I was both the anthology’s editor and translator.

As I started to do publicity for the book, one question came up again and again: What motivated me to do translations in the first place?

I’ve given various answers to this question over the years: diversifying my own writing career, contributing to the variety of voices in English-language SF, practicing a different set of skills related to writing but aren’t writing (translation, after all, is a performance art), and so on.

But the answers all feel slightly unsatisfying.

I got started in translation almost purely by accident. My friend, Chen Qiufan, an amazing writer who began publishing tales of dazzling technical brilliance and profound social insight in college, had one of his stories translated into English and asked me to take a look. I read the translation and found it competent, but I also thought it failed to capture his voice, perhaps the most important quality in a translation. I offered to redo the translation from scratch and to submit the English version to various markets on his behalf.

At that moment, I wasn’t thinking about how doing a translation would teach me a new skill; I wasn’t thinking about the ethical duties owed an author by a translator; I wasn’t thinking about how my small decision would play into the larger conversation about diversity in SF; I wasn’t thinking about the opportunity costs of doing translation instead of my original work; I wasn’t thinking about the publicity benefits of attaching my name to another piece of text by a different author; I wasn’t thinking about favors bestowed or owed; I wasn’t thinking about how this affected my career goals, long-term or short-term.

I just wanted to help a friend reach more readers. That, in the end, is the only motivation that really mattered, that really brought me joy.

That story, “The Fish of Lijiang,” ended up as the first translation bought by Clarkesworld. And from that accidental beginning, I’ve built up a sizable body of work as a translator and editor alongside my existing career as a short fiction writer and novelist.

Now, to be sure, I was inspired in my initial decision by what Qiufan had done for me. He had, after all, reached out to me several years earlier and connected me with my Chinese publishers. That was how we got to know each other, read each other’s stories, and became friends. But I didn’t think of it as repaying a debt. We did not keep a running tally of favors we had done for each other. Such a thing would have felt out of character for both of us, alien.

The truth is: It feels good to help people. Even today, much of my motivation in editing and translating stories from China is still tied up with this satisfaction of helping writers reach readers. Surely I would have written more original works and made more money without these translations—but I think I wouldn’t have been as happy.

And we don’t acknowledge and celebrate the joy of helping enough.

It’s also important to acknowledge that we like to be helped. I have been helped countless times in my career by friends, editors, readers, fellow authors—even Invisible Planets wouldn’t have been possible without the help of all the authors and many others along the way. All of us have probably had experiences where a friend’s insightful comments improved our stories while the friend remained unacknowledged, or a reprint sales opportunity came up because someone recommended our story without us ever finding out who it was, or we got onto a panel because someone more famous and accomplished thought it helpful to boost our voices. The sun feels brighter on those days, and even the writing seems to come out of the word-mines more easily.

It’s nice to be able to make someone feel that, isn’t it?

As freelancers in the uncertain publishing industry, writers are bombarded with advice on how to develop our careers and to think strategically. Sometimes it almost seems as if we’re supposed to feel foolish if our motivation for doing something is simply to help someone with no expectation of any advantage whatsoever. And if we do receive help, we are conditioned to think of it as part of some implied exchange, a favor owed that might be called in someday. Neither reaction, I submit, is necessary. Helping someone truly is its own reward.

I don’t want to imply that the desire to help needs to reach some pure Platonic ideal. We are complex creatures with complicated problems and tangled motivations. The desire to help is often tied up with other motivations as well—that’s okay. I’m not advocating that you become saints. I just think it’s good for us to recognize the vital role played by basic kindness in work, in play, in everything we do. It’s good to want to be kind and to want others to be kind.

I also don’t want to leave you with the impression that thinking about your career strategically or negotiating hard for every advantage is somehow not a good thing. Indeed, writers can all learn to negotiate better in their business and to value their own time and services more. But it’s worth keeping in mind the importance of the essential freedom we have of opting out of that framework from time to time. Despite the perpetual refrain that we live in a capitalist society, we’re not rational optimization machines constantly calculating the best allocation of our limited resources for economic well-being. It’s part of our nature to want to help others, and we need not feel foolish for wanting to step outside the exchange economy from time to time, to simply feel human by offering a helping hand.

As we grow more confident in our own abilities, acquire more skills, and are offered more opportunities, we do derive satisfaction from helping others in the way that we have been helped. It’s neither necessary nor helpful to think of such acts as part of some implied exchange. The metaphor of “paying it forward” can be useful, but fundamentally, extending a helping hand is just a part of living a satisfying life.

The next time you decide that you want to beta-read someone’s manuscript without reciprocal expectation, give away reprint rights to a story for a magazine that you think might grow into a viable market someday, yield your spot on a panel to a writer who has had less exposure, recommend another author for an opportunity that you think they can benefit from more, or simply do something nice to help a fellow SFF fan, you need not agonize over whether you’re doing the best for your career or if you’ve given as much as you’ve taken. You need not even examine your own motivations to see if they’re sufficiently pure to be worth celebrating. Life is too short to tally up all the opportunity costs. Be grateful when you’re helped, but feel no sense of obligation. You’re allowed to feel good about having been kind, however great or small the gesture.

About the Author

Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places.

Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings (2015), is the first volume in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, The Dandelion Dynasty. It won the Locus Best First Novel Award and was a Nebula finalist. He subsequently published the second volume in the series, The Wall of Storms (2016) as well as a collection of short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016).

In addition to his original fiction, Ken is also the translator of numerous literary and genre works from Chinese to English. His translation of The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015, the first translated novel ever to receive that honor. He also translated the third volume in Liu Cixin’s series, Death’s End (2016) and edited the first English-language anthology of contemporary Chinese science fiction, Invisible Planets (2016).

He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

Editor’s Desk:
Happy Holiday’s

Neil Clarke

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Forever Magazine, and Upgraded; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a four-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). In addition to the next volume in his Best Science Fiction of the Year series, his anthology Galactic Empires will be published in early 2017. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Cover Art:
Cosmonaut

Maciej Rebisz

About the Artist

Maciej Rebisz is a concept artist and illustrator. He first started making digital art in 2005 and he has been working professionally in the field since 2010. As a freelancer he illustrated many books, card and board games, created concepts and illustrations for various projects and games, mostly science fiction-themed.

Maciej loves space and spaceflight technology, which he depicts as realistic as possible in his works. He is currently working as an artist in a VFX and animation studio “Platige Image” in Warsaw. He also recently collaborated with space institutes, agencies (such as NASA and Arizona State University), and space industry companies.