Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 128

Table of Contents

Streams and Mountains

by Nick Wolven

We Who Live in the Heart

by Kelly Robson

Baroness

by E. Catherine Tobler

The Person Who Saw Cetus

by Tang Fei

Running the Snake

by Kage Baker

The Man Who Walked Home

by James Tiptree Jr.

Cut, Fold, and Conquer the Universe: The Best Models in the Galaxy

by Mark Cole

Fallen Angels and Water Dragons: A Conversation with Aliette de Bodard

by Chris Urie

Another Word: The Elizabeth Effect

by A.M. Dellamonica

Editor's Desk: Trying on an Old Shoe

by Neil Clarke

Darkness

Art by Julie Dillon

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2017
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

Streams and Mountains

Nick Wolven

Man discovers fire. Man discovers philosophy. Man discovers boredom.

What is it about the squatting position, Mary Ellund wondered, looking down at Paul’s bent back, that calls to mind contemplative pursuits?

The breeze picked up, the forest shivered. A thatch of red cedar boughs, two hundred feet above, shook down droplets on her head. Mary pulled up her field hat and tugged the drawstrings tight under her chin. Staggering down the uneven trail, she had to catch at nearby tree trunks to keep from falling in the mud. The Cascade Mountains were wet this time of year, as they were most times of year, with the exception of the punishing summer droughts. A dewy coolness hung in the air. The earth was plush with moss. Both Mary and the young scientist below her were black to the shins with mud.

“Yup,” said Paul, squatting in the muck. And then, in what Mary had noticed was a tic for him, “Yuh-up.” His finger traced an oblong impression in the ground. “Very cool.”

Paul was a nice kid, a brilliant kid. But he had the maddening daftness of a brainy boy. Mary stood above him, trying to see what he saw. Paul shifted on his haunches, poking at the turf. Like a caveman on the verge of a prehistoric eureka, she thought. Wheels and fire. Language and religion.

“Are we close?” Mary wiped her neck, wondering how it was possible to sweat so much in such chill weather.

Paul squinted, blinked three times, and traced the oblong shape again.

“Here’s where the heel went in. See the pressure ridge? That’s what we call a mid-tarsal break. Means the foot flexes more than a human foot. And the toe. You can see how it curled, gripped.” He blinked again. “That’s a really wonderful big toe.”

Paul Yu, he’d told her, smiling at the rhyme, was from Wisconsin U. He was a top biologist from what had become the country’s top biology school. But he wasn’t a terribly good explainer.

Mary squatted to study the footprint. She saw a single cuplike depression, filled with brown water, a few floating, spinning blades of grass. If not for Paul, she’d never have known it was a footprint, much less the notorious footprint they were seeking.

“Can you date it? I mean, can you tell when it was made?”

“Oh, yuh-up.” Paul, as usual, answered a slightly different question than the one she’d asked. “They’re around here. Definitely. Somewhere nearby.”

It was then Mary felt it. Like an intake of breath, a gathering of attention.

Paul squatted on his heels below her, very still, looking down the trail to the far side of the valley. When Mary moved to stand, he twitched a finger. She crouched in the moss, half obscured by a spray of ferns.

And saw them.

Four creatures stood on the far side of the gully. One male, three females. Even at a distance, Mary identified the sexes, though at this remove the animals made no sound. They browsed a stand of huckleberries high up the northern slope, in a shadowed band where firs grew thick and the hush of the rain seemed to gather like a shroud. The male—oh, but he was a beautiful specimen, wonderfully tall, furred with brown across his massive chest. Mary reflected with a girlish joy that his movements, though slow, even ponderous, had a dignity in life they would not have had on film.

“They’re so—” she began, and wondered what to say next. Strange? Solid? Real? But she noticed Paul staring.

Right. Mary reached for her belt. She felt terribly exposed, squatting on the trail, but it would be dangerously conspicuous to dart for cover. She forced herself to move with a hunter’s patience as she touched the device that hung at her hip.

Her thumb fumbled plastic and steel. The creatures continued their foraging, eating with the loose-lipped gusto of gorillas, stuffing whole branches into their mouths and pulling out denuded sticks. Even as Mary’s mind overflowed with adjectives—so stately! so exotic! so sad!—she felt the button under her thumb and pushed it down.

The click of the shutter seemed to crack through the forest, loud as a falling stone. The little band across the valley never noticed. They went on with their meal as Mary’s recorder whirred. Mary could hear the shutter working, the device zooming in and out. Tiny lenses ticked like an optometrist’s phoropter.

There was no need for her to move, to take aim, to disrupt in any way the sublime unreality of the moment. Once activated, the recorder was automatic.

Mary let her soul settle into a state of rich receptivity. Neolithic men must have felt this way, she thought, as they stalked their game through archaic forests. Now only scientists were quite so observant.

She felt as if a book had closed, a curtain fallen, when Paul whispered, “Do you have enough?”

“Yes.” Mary straightened, knees cracking. At her movement, the creatures turned. By the time she stood erect, they had disappeared, vanishing over the ridgetop into the wild.

In camp, Ken and Malia were setting out lunch, stuffing packets of soup into the porto-heater, propping up camping chairs amid rain-sodden ferns. They paused in their work, waiting, as Mary and Paul came down the trail, Mary cradling the recorder like a relic at her chest.

“Well?” Ken had the look he’d been wearing all morning, the tightlipped pout of a man who expected to be enraged.

Mary brought the recorder to her tablet, propped on a cooler by the tent. Within three feet, the devices synched, began a transfer. “We saw them.”

“You did. And?”

Mary turned to Ken. In spite of herself, she liked what she saw: lean hiker’s body, clad in denim and plaid, sacks of miso soup clutched in each strong fist. Whatever else you might say of him, Ken Takamura was a striking man.

“And,” she said with a sigh, “the reports are true. Actually, it’s worse than we feared.”

Ken cursed. He was twenty years Mary’s junior, unknown to her till this week, but he turned his back like a father disappointed in his child. At a motion of his hand, a sack of soup slopped into a bowl. Ken smacked the porto-heater shut. With a thrust of his chin he indicated Mary’s recorder.

“You have pictures?”

Mary lowered her eyes. All the fantasy and joy of the morning, the delight of their discovery on the trail, drizzled away into the muck underfoot.

“Follow me.”

With their instant meals warmed and devoured, the soda cans drained, trash carefully cached, coffee perked and the creamer supplied, Mary led everyone into the tent.

The drizzle of the mountains had built to a squall, one of those rattling gusts that swept the valleys, shaking reservoirs of rain from the cedars, setting the ferns to frenzied kowtowing.

Most of the tent was taken up with a table, lightweight and collapsible, scattered with papers. Mary set up her equipment, plugged the recorder into the tablet, the tablet into the printer, the printer into the power source. She slipped in a gravure. The system puffed as it went to work.

“I took a look at the digitals back on the trail. I think we should all take some time to talk this over. Going by what Paul and I saw, we need to be absolutely sure we get this right.”

Their faces, gray in the rainy light, were grim. Like hospital visitors, Mary thought, wishing away bad news. She shifted behind her equipment, defensive.

“You really think this is necessary?” Ken crossed his arms. “This little dog and pony show? You don’t want to get back to D.C.?”

Ken, Mary thought, Ken is the difficult one. On every field investigation, she’d dealt with a person like this. People—especially people who worked for the government—bristled at the presence of D.C. bureaucrats nosing around their turf. Plenty of folks disapproved of her very line of work.

Mary took the first gravure from the printer, held it up for all to see. “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’ll review this as a group. We’ll discuss it as a group. I want to hear what everyone has to say.”

The picture made its way around the table. Mary knew the research on human attention: people spend more time with printed media. She always marveled when she saw the effect in person. How people linger on a physical printout, turn it over, even stroke it—all quite different from the skimming and skipping with which humans greet digital documents. Hence Mary’s use of gravures in her work. They felt important, weighty, real.

“That’s a picture of the youngest female,” Mary said. “I don’t think you’ll need a medical degree to see what’s happening.”

Even Paul spent time with the gravure, blinking as he held it at arm’s length. He’d been at Mary’s side, living the moment, inhaling its strangeness, its truth. But he needed this picture, in some primitive way, to convince him it was credible.

“We’re sure this is verifiable? Not a hoax?” Malia frowned as she passed the picture to Ken. Malia worked with Mary at the Executive Bioethics Agency, in offices formerly part of the EPA. A law school whiz who’d switched to regulation, she’d made a wise choice. Biotech was booming. And with it, biohazards.

Size brought bureaucracy. Malia’s title at the agency was Acting Relations Manager. What that meant, Mary had no idea. Some unholy hybrid, she gathered, of a DC lawyer and a PR flack.

“What kind of hoax do you think it would be, Malia?”

“A prosthesis? A publicity stunt? A group of protesters who snuck into the park? So far, we only have photodocumentation. We could be dealing with nothing but a woman in a suit.”

“I spent ten years as an OB/GYN.” Mary cocked an eyebrow. “I’ve seen fake pregnancies. That’s no prosthesis.”

“It’s definitely not a woman in a suit.” Paul tapped the gravure. “Not with this gait.”

“Maybe it’s an outside specimen,” Malia persisted. “Something introduced from outside the park.”

Mary spread her hands. “Ken? Thoughts?”

“I can tell you this.” The forest ranger reached for a pocket. “Whatever happened, it happened inside the boundary.” Ken pulled out an image of his own, what the foresters called a snap-map. A cube the size of his fist, it unfolded to show data-rich views of the North Cascades National Park.

“We maintain seven perimeters, automatically patrolled.” Ken traced ragged lines on the map. “One along the boundary, including the national border. Five areas within that. This one has everything west of Ross Lake. There’s a special zone, just for the range of the—” He hesitated. “The creatures. Anything crossing those borders gets noticed, logged, reported. I mean anything. These are microcams. Pollen-sized. We don’t install them, we dump them. Like, from planes. We’re talking millions of eyes. Comprehensive surveillance.”

“Artificial eyes,” Malia said.

Ken’s jaw jutted. “We have seventy-two federal rangers working for the protection of these animals. If you’re implying that they aren’t doing their jobs—”

Malia showed her palms.

“Look.” Ken hit the snap-map, zooming in on their current location, a CGI icon of their base camp. “The Parks Service didn’t want to take these critters in. It was your report, ten years ago, that got the president’s ear, set up this preserve. I was opposed to it then. I’m opposed to it now. But I’ve done my job. All my people have done their jobs. We’ve kept a watch on these things. We’ve kept them safe.” He folded his arms. “No protesters in our woods. No pranksters, no hoaxers. Whatever happened here, it’s not our fault.”

Mary could see this man was going to try her patience. But there were plenty of people out there like him. They couldn’t be ignored.

“All right, Ken. No one’s laying blame. We’re trying to figure out how this could have happened.”

“You’d better get rolling.” Ken slapped the picture to the table, scooted it back. “From the look of things, the situation’s about to undergo”—he raised his eyebrows—“a rather drastic change.”

Mary caught the gravure with a slapping hand. Face down, it showed nothing, white plastic, a blank. She sighed.

Here they sat, park ranger, state biologist, two suits from the Federal Triangle. Four pros, four bureaucratic boffins, doing their jobs.

But what they concluded, in this little tent, would ramify through news shows, tabloids, journals, would bleed, click by click, into the gossip of the globe. Would become one of those key events, shocking, historic, never fully understood, that shift the trendlines of biology, politics, ethics.

She flipped the picture. A hairy figure, six-and-a-half feet tall, half concealed by berry bushes, peeped from the print. So stately in life, it looked humped, ungainly, here, caught midstep—and grossly unbalanced by the pale-furred swell below its dark-tipped breasts.

The face. It was wrong, Mary thought, it was a monstrous. Like a joke played on the last million years of evolution.

“Let’s start with the obvious.” Mary loaded the gravure back into the printer, wiped it, lifted her eyes, confronted those three solemn faces. “We have a pregnant sasquatch on our hands.”

2

Weather is destiny, Mary thought. Weather is history, weather is psychology, weather is the past and the future.

Then: Stop it, she chided herself. Don’t get mystical. Clear head, clear sight. That’s the way to get through this.

Mary ducked under the overhang, outside the tent where they’d been at it for hours, hunched over the plastic table. Checking pictures, checking possibilities. Despite all this effort, they’d made little progress. They’d reached nothing remotely close to an agreement.

Mary blinked in a blast of rain. Running her OB/GYN practice, years ago, she’d learned to deal with people in denial. Some denied they were pregnant. Some denied they were infertile. She knew the loopy feelings that the subject of reproduction stimulates, how arguments go in circles, how people get stuck. Even scientists.

They were in danger of that now, badgering each other over side issues, shying clear of the key, deep questions. Mary needed a break. So she stood out here, with her coffee and thoughts, waxing mystical in the rain.

Forested slopes rose above, culminating the bluish peak of Liumchen Mountain. Beyond was the Canadian border. Not much to see from here, only green and mist drifting up, the valley receding into a conquering grayness.

It was a somber country. Drizzled, dim, and softly, sadly charming. Mary saw why so many poets had prowled for inspiration in these valleys, summered as firewatches on the stony heights. One hundred years ago, Jack Kerouac, zany Quebecois quester, had tramped the stark snows of Desolation Peak, dreaming of Dharma bums.

They’d all believed in going back to the land, back then. They’d believed in mind-busting drugs and clear spring water and the cleansing effects of public nudity. What to call it, really, but a high-minded retreat into primitivism?

Mary sipped coffee. Farther up, further north, lay the Fraser River Valley, the deep strange country of Harrison Lake. That was where it had started: the Bigfoot myth. In British Columbia, the Indian Agent J.W. Burns had collected tales from Native Americans. Salish inhabitants had told him of hairy wild folk prowling the Port Douglas hills. Sásq’ets, in the native tongue, meant “benign-faced one.” Or, according to a different source: “clam-eater.”

Mary had loved it all as a kid. Not Bigfoot, exactly, not the beast itself. She loved the woods, the mystery, the vision of dark northern forests full of secrets. It had all seemed credible when she was a girl, with life a steady succession of discoveries. Even the land on which she stood hadn’t been mapped until 1989, a mere eleven years before she was born.

“Mary.”

She jumped, slopping coffee. Ken must have tiptoed out of the tent. A big man, well over six feet, he glared with a kind of possessiveness at the woods. The rain had increased, bringing on an early evening. Soon darkness, not mist, would hide these hills from sight.

“You just about done out here?”

Mary mopped spilled coffee. “Sorry. Needed to catch my breath. This is getting exhausting.”

“You can’t waste time,” Ken said. “You need to decide what to do.”

Mary let the moment lengthen, watching rain shimmer down the hills.

“It must be nice,” she said after a moment. “Living here.” She considered Ken’s casual attire, lumberjack shirt and pants. For the assignment, he’d shucked his ranger’s uniform, adopted this everyman outfit. Rather like a plainclothes cop, she thought, working undercover on a delicate case. “Are you from this area?”

“Nope.” Ken’s mouth was a line. “From Kyoto. Family came over when I was ten. To the States, I mean. We settled in San Francisco.” He held out a hand, caught a palmful of rain. “I didn’t come to Washington till after college. Always wanted to be a forest ranger.”

“For the solitude,” Mary guessed.

Ken glanced at her with narrowed eyes. “For the work.” He sniffed. “I’m not a nature buff. You know, we have slugs up here ten inches long? If it’s not snowing, it’s raining. If it’s not raining, something’s burning. But someone’s got to stand guard—over the forests.” He laid a hand on a nearby cedar. “Do you know why Japan is one of the world’s great powers? It’s a small island country. It’s remote. Little mineral wealth, scant fossil fuels. It’s got a unique culture, but that’s not the main reason.” He looked at Mary silently, enjoying her suspense. “Our forests. That’s why we’re still going strong. We always looked after our forests. You protect your forests, you protect everything. Soil, freshwater, flora, and fauna.”

“I bet Gary Snyder would agree with you, there.”

“Who?”

Mary dumped out the last few drops of coffee, rinsed her travel mug in the rain. “A poet. American. He came to this place when he was young—to these mountains. Fell in love with the countryside. Wrote a lot of poems about it, dragged other writers out here. Later, he moved to Japan to become a Buddhist monk. He was one of those counterculture types, believed in getting back to our roots, returning to the wilderness. He believed it was a way to find transcendence.” She swished out her mug and slapped on the cap. “Ken, why do you think they did it?”

The ranger scowled in puzzlement before realizing whom she meant. “Huh!” He shook his head. “Well, we know why they did it, don’t we?”

“Do we? Do we understand them? Is there a way for us to really understand?”

“You want to, what, read their minds? They’re sasquatches, Mary. Apes. Dumb brutes. They don’t have minds. Isn’t that the whole point?”

“I suppose you’re right.” She turned back to the tent. “It just seems . . . ”

Ken raised his eyebrows as she trailed off, holding up the tent flap for her to duck inside.

“It seems,” Mary said, “like such a shame.”

Inside the tent, the air had gone dark green. It was five PM, coming on sunset. They’d already wasted most of the day.

“Well,” said Mary, going to the head of the table, “we’ve been at this long enough. What have we learned?”

Malia had covered her workspace with gravures, printed versions of federal documents. “We’re making progress.” She licked a thumb, rubbed at a stain. “Ken IDed the sasquatches we saw, all four of them. I talked to folks in Archives. They pulled some records for us. We’ve got a bio on your subject, Mary.”

“Great.” Mary cleared a space for her coffee mug. “Who is she?”

“I think you mean,” Ken said, “who was she.”

Malia sniffed at the correction, hunched over her keyboard. “Our pregnant sasquatch is Miranda Watson. Caucasian, female at birth, thirty-three years old. That’s her total age, including the human part of her lifespan. It’s been seven years, now, since she devolved. She was born in Madison, Wisconsin. A fellow cheesehead, Paul.”

“I only went to school in Wisconsin.” Paul didn’t look up from his tablet. “I’m not from there.”

“Looks like a typical suburban childhood,” Malia read on. “You know the story.” She looked around the table, shrugging. “Restless. Discontent. Miranda started showing interest in devolution in her teens. Her parents took her when she was seventeen to see the last living gorilla. A kind of pilgrimage. A life-changing event. The gorilla died shortly after. Miranda was hysterical. Aggressive therapy, behind in school.”

Malia flicked a finger, scrolling through text. “Then Miranda hits twenty. A critical period. It was at this time her fascination became—well, I guess you’d call it a full-blown obsession.”

“Silly term.” Paul sniffed at his tablet. “Devolution. So inaccurate.”

Mary poured her fourth cup of coffee. “What kind of psychological profile are we looking at?”

Paul frowned. “Shouldn’t we be focusing on physiology?”

“We’ll get to the physiology.” Mary gestured with her mug. “Malia?”

“Psychology? Well, it’s about what you’d expect.” Malia picked up a gravure on which she’d made pink highlights. “Here’s Miranda Watson, as profiled by the experts. IQ of eighty-seven, tested at eight years old. Strong inclinations toward introversion and intuitive thinking.” Malia scanned with a finger. “She rejected the customs of modern life. Became rabidly anti-industry. We see frequent attempts to run away from home. As a kid, she had a fascination with so-called feral children. As a teen, she joined the Anti-Learning movement. You know, ‘education is indoctrination,’ all that stuff. Her favorite game is BC-Simple. Her favorite book is Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn.”

“So a hippie, basically,” Ken said. “One hundred years too late.”

“Yes, but why.” Mary drew a circle with her mug over the table. “Why all this fascination with primitivism?”

Malia’s mouth tightened. “Primitivism. That’s kind of a loaded word, don’t you think?”

Here we go. Mary pursed her lips. “The trouble is, there’s no word for this kind of thing that isn’t loaded. This girl chose to become something . . . something different, something other, something less than human. We need to know why.”

The subsequent silence told Mary she’d misstepped. Malia was pouting at her gravure. “I’m not entirely comfortable with those words. Less than.”

“Every animal is different,” Paul said.

“These aren’t animals.” Ken, at the far end of the table, went rigid as wood. “These are human beings—silly, entitled human beings—who made a choice—”

Mary held up a hand. Another minute of this, and they’d spend another three hours arguing.

“Maybe it’s time for the physiology. Paul?”

Paul, not a fan of gravures, set his tablet on his knees. “Well, it’s typical stuff. At nineteen, Miranda Watson joined the Neo-Paleos. That name’s a bit of a joke. It’s an international group. A few hundred thousand people, headquartered in Denver—”

Mary milled her hand while sipping coffee. “I know who they are.”

“OK. So you know they pool their donations. Only certain members qualify for the treatments. Watson got approved at twenty-two. She was flown to Malaysia to undergo—again, hate this word—her devolution.”

“Do we know who did it? Doctor? Clinic? Company?”

Paul shook his head. Mary had expected that. Devolution was illegal worldwide. But some governments turned a blind eye, didn’t keep records. Looking to balance good business with international approval.

“It could have happened in Malaysia,” said Paul. “It could have happened in Thailand. It could have happened in Vietnam. Once you go to the Tiger states, all bets are off.”

Mary nodded, disappointed but not surprised. Her work at the Bioethics Agency mostly focused on Americans flying east for surgery. Thousands of botched cosmetic cases came flooding back from South Asia every year. The Indian Ocean suffered from a scourge of black-market butchers. Tasked with untangling indemnities, the Executive Bioethics Agency had ballooned to rival the NIH.

“What we can do,” Paul said, “is reconstruct the process.” He pulled out an image of a sasquatch, an anatomical diagram. “So far, seventeen people have gotten this so-called Bigfoot treatment. Voluntary devolution. All Americans. There are three phases.”

Paul tapped his shoulder. “First, musculoskeletal. Stature is increased. That’s done with bone implants. The muscles are built up with stimulated growth—electric, hormonal. They have a microsurgery unit go in and strengthen the anchorage points, ligaments, attachments. Hips and feet get altered, to create what’s called a compliant gait. And so on.”

Paul flicked at the image, accessing a second layer of the file. This showed an internal view, guts and bones.

“Second, visceral. Digestive tract has to be tweaked, to handle the rough diet. The heart gets a boost from a modulator—like a pacemaker, but smarter. That’s standard treatment for athletes, too. Then skin. It’s not difficult to stimulate this condition, hirsuteness. You know: the hairiness. It amounts to a simple genetic treatment.”

“That’s not the issue,” Mary said.

“The issue . . . ” Paul put all ten fingers to his scalp, as if to pluck his brain from his skull and set it aside. “The issue is this. The brain. What do you do about the brain? If you want to be a sasquatch, you have to think like a sasquatch. You have to live like one.”

The others nodded, mulling over the implications.

Paul put aside his tablet. “So. The science here gets a little hairy—er, so to speak. There are a lot of different ways to alter the mind, as anyone who takes antidepressants can tell you. But most of these treatments use the same technique. Engineered bacteria.” He tapped his scalp. “Inject them into the cerebral tissue. A few key segments are targeted. Wernicke’s area, Broca’s area, regions of the prefrontal cortex. Transcranial pulses guide the bacteria along pathways mapped in advance. They eat the synaptic connections. Almost literally, they rot the brain. That’s a rough description, of course, but you get the idea. When the damage is done, antibiotics eliminate the infection. NGF treatments build up compensatory areas—olfactory, sensorimotor, lower-order functions. To a limited extent—a very limited extent—you can mold the brain, eliminating advanced faculties in favor of—here’s another silly word—instincts. No more speech. No more abstract reasoning.”

“Self-mutilation,” Ken said.

Malia drummed pink nails on the table. “I think it’s sort of beautiful, actually.”

“We’re not here to debate aesthetics,” Mary said.

“How can you not admire them, though. Just a little bit?” Malia’s eyes grew dreamy. “The bravery to do that, to change your mind, to purify your soul? It’s heroic, in a way.”

“These are kids,” Ken frowned. “Kids who made a terrible mistake. Who have done a terrible thing to themselves. Who, even before they did that thing, had obvious mental problems.”

“But it’s not hard to understand.” Malia’s eyes, under her hair extensions, lifted to one of the tent’s small windows. “Who hasn’t dreamed of being . . . well . . . innocent again?”

Ken’s fingers twitched. Tendons stood out in his wrists. “They decided to inflict brain damage on themselves. That’s not innocent. That’s crazy.”

“I wouldn’t call it brain damage.” Malia stared into the forest, where the light had faded from green to blue. “It’s not a handicap, really. They’re out there, living in the wild. Surviving. How many ordinary people can do that?”

Ken’s neck pulsed. He looks like a wildman himself, Mary thought. A beast on the verge of losing control.

“The reason these . . . these things are surviving out here,” Ken pressed with his fists until the table bent, “is because we protect them. We set aside the park. There used to be grizzlies in these mountains. No more. Now, instead of bears, we have these so-called sasquatches, living in the same ecological niche. They’re not a wild population. They’re kept alive by—” Emotion choked him. “By legal fictions, popular delusions, federal regulations. It’s not even a breeding population.”

Mary coughed into her hand. “Isn’t it?”

Malia stood, eyes on the window. She pushed back her chair, went around the table, rose onto her toes, and looked out at the forest, lifting a finger to the mosquito netting.

Mary was perturbed by the young woman’s manner. “Malia?” she asked.

“It’s not fair to call it self-mutilation.” Malia ignored Mary’s question, speaking softly as she stared into the woods. Her long extensions whispered like rain on her nylon shirt. “There’s no higher or lower in nature. Only tradeoffs. Right, Paul? Back me up.”

Paul, sitting with his back to her, wrinkled his nose. “I don’t like these big-picture debates. I prefer to talk specifics.”

“Malia,” Mary sighed, “will you sit down, please?”

Malia lingered at the window, stroking the screen. “I keep thinking I see them. Walking through the trees.” Her eyes hovered over the dripping filigrees of the forest. “You can worry about specifics, Paul. You’re the biologist. I have to think big picture. Mary and I both do. When we go back and make our report, we’re going to face thousands of questions, probably a meeting with the president, maybe a Congressional hearing. And when news gets out, we’re going to have several billion people weighing in on what we decide.”

Don’t I know it. Mary stretched over the table, reaching for Paul’s anatomical image. “That’s why we need to know exactly what we’re doing. Paul, thanks, but . . . when it comes to this devolution process, I was under the impression that a standard part . . . ”

“Yes.” Paul cut her short. “I was getting to that. I know what you’re going to say.” He tapped his anatomical image, jabbing the diagram’s belly. “Sterilization is the final step. Chemical castration. A hysterectomy. Maybe ovarian and testicular replacements.” His nose twitched. “This is done for obvious reasons.”

“And it’s done for males and females, right?”

“Correct.”

“So what’s going on?” Mary held up her hands. “These are easy procedures. Compared to cerebral modification, sterilization is absolutely trivial. One fertile sasquatch might be an oversight. But two? Out of a population of seventeen? One male, one female? This has to be deliberate. An agenda. And agendas leave traces.” She slid the printouts around with her palms. “We know who the mother is. I think we can make a good guess about the father.”

“Yuh-up.” Paul bent to his tablet. “That male we saw, on the trail. Most likely subject.”

“And with two subjects . . . ” Mary frowned, finger curled under her mouth, thinking. “Malia, get in touch with Archives again. Have them do a report on that male. Bio, psych, everything they have. I’m willing to bet, if we compare these two case studies, we’ll turn up something that—”

A crack made them all look up. Ken was on his feet, hunched, fists jammed into the table. The plastic had split under the pressure of his hands.

“Ken, what the hell?”

“What are you doing, Mary?” The ranger’s voice was low. His neck had swelled like a wrestler’s. The carotid arteries throbbed against his collar. “I mean, really, what the hell are you doing here?”

Mary ran her eyes down the buttons of Ken’s shirt. How would an animal perceive him, she wondered, this big male creature, puffed up with rage? How would the sasquatches see him, with their modified brains, their surgically adjusted senses? Would they be alarmed? Intrigued? Afraid?

“Malia. Paul.” Mary snapped her fingers, pointing at the gadgets that littered the table. “Get in touch with Archives, track down that male. Ken?” She snapped again, pointing at the tent flap. “Outside.”

In the evening, the rain had dwindled to a latent freshness in the air. The sky above the mountains was murky blue, thick as a cerulean liqueur. But night had already filled the black hollows between the trees.

Mary touched the automatic zipper. With a robotic whirr, the tent’s square door sealed them out in the chill.

“Ken, if there’s something you want to say to me—”

He was already talking. “Let’s get this over with, Mary.”

“Excuse me?”

“Look, I’m sure it’s fun to play detective.” Ken paced the dry clearing under the overhang, a restless animal hemmed in by dripping water. “I know it’s great fun for you D.C. types to come out here and strut and pose. Very exciting. Very Hollywood. But we all know where this has to end up.”

“I’m not sure I do, Ken. That’s why we need to discuss it.”

“There’s only one way this can end.”

Mary sipped from her travel mug, realized it was empty, and searched for a place to set it down. Finding no free surfaces, she dangled it at her side. Ken held out his palms.

“Why did you even come here?”

“You know why.” Mary sighed. “We received a report—several reports, actually, from local hikers. There were multiple sightings. We opened a file—”

“And? We could have confirmed the sighting for you. The rangers. We could have done what had to be done. All this could have been over by now, neat and clean. Without this—this—” His fists shook. “This rigmarole.”

Mary dropped her voice. “That’s not how it works, Ken. You know it. These are tricky issues. The ethics agency—”

“Tricky issues? You’ve confirmed your sighting. And you’re still here, wasting my time. Still looking for ways to cover your ass.”

Mary longed for a place to sit. She wished she could have this conversation in an office, an environment to lend her a little authority. Not out here, bickering, in the woods, like teenagers squabbling on a bad camping trip.

“There’s more to a site visit, more to a confirmation of a sighting, than a few minutes of film, Ken. When I file my report—”

“To hell with your report!” Ken’s finger indicated the tent. “There’s one thing that matters here. You insisted on protecting these creatures. Your people, your agency. You set up this preserve. You wanted to pander to the delusions of the American public. Oh, poor sasquatches, what charming creatures. And now you’re paying the price.” He pointed at Mary’s hip, where the recorder still hung clipped to her belt. “When that film gets out . . . you’ll see. You know where this is heading. There’s only one morally responsible action you can take. And you’re dreading it.”

Mary hated to play bureaucrat. But she knew there was a definite power in the schoolmarmish air with which she drew back her shoulders, stiffened her spine, pursed her lips, like a strict teacher. “It’s a delicate situation, I agree. That’s why we’re taking this slowly. That’s why I want your input. Every comma I put in my report, every comment I make to my director, every bit of information we can uncover—”

“Bullshit.” Ken turned away, swatting at the triangular tips of ferns that extended into the lamplight. “You know the truth. There’s no way, no way on Earth, those things can be allowed to give birth to a human child.”

Mary settled back against the wall of the tent, almost resting her weight on the flimsy plastic, so tired, so eager to be done with this assignment, that she came quite near to giving in.

Because Ken was right. Dreadfully right. Wasn’t he? The Bigfoot treatment, as it was commonly called, affected only the subject who received it. It was a skin-deep, muscle-deep, bone-deep, brain-deep treatment.

But it was not germ-line deep.

The treatment consisted of dozens of procedures. But none of those procedures affected a patient’s gametes. None touched the egg cells or sperm cells. Only a few affected a patient’s DNA.

Meaning any child born to such a creature . . .

The cruelty of it hit Mary like slap. Her cheeks warmed, her skin tingled. Nature could be so ruthless, so indifferent. And the same was true, in many ways, of modern science.

From the body of that towering beast would emerge, in mere weeks, a naked infant, a human child. It would have a human body, human bones, human organs. It would shiver with a human’s hairless skin.

It would have a human’s needs: for society, companionship, nurture, care, nutrition.

And it would have a sasquatch for a mother.

What would that mother try to do? Suckle the infant? Feed it leaves?

Smack its brains out? Crush it by mistake? Leave it under a tree to die?

Or worse?

Mary shivered with a childish frustration. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t ethical to steal away a mother’s child. Yet how cruel, how careless it would be to leave a naked infant to suffer and starve in the woods.

Either way, it would amount to an infringement of human rights.

But were they human, the sasquatches? They had been human, once. They had now chosen to be otherwise. Weren’t their former, human selves responsible for the consequences of that choice? And as for their current forms—were they animals, really? Were they subject to the treatment that animals receive? Or were they something other, something unclassifiable, something in-between? And if so, would that make it easier, what Mary had to do? Or harder?

Had she been ignoring the obvious? Had all this discussion, this argument, this investigation, been nothing but a way to put off a cruel choice?

“They brought this on themselves, Mary.” Ken spoke quietly, looking into the forest. “The kids who got the treatment. This is their fault. Not ours.”

Mary stared into the deepening shadows where only a few sparkling raindrops caught the light. The afternoon’s downpour, sifting from the canopy, masked all movement and muffled all sound. Almost anything might be hiding out there, crouched in the bushes just outside their lamp. A bear, a wolverine, five meters away. With her human senses, dulled and abused by urban environments, Mary would never know.

“You know what frustrates me?” Ken spoke into his collar. “The shifting standards. These people decided to rot their brains. They claimed it was their human right. Self-determination. Ownership of their bodies. Now that they’ve done it, the rest of society insists on granting them animal rights. You say they’re a protected species, rare, vulnerable, unique. You give them a nice forest to live in, plenty of berries to eat, a whole lot of prime real estate all to themselves. But it can’t work both ways, can it?”

His face, when he turned, was full of childish frustration, a boyish insistence on having clear answers.

“You can’t be both innocent and responsible.”

Mary didn’t answer. Her mind was on the forest, the steady patter and shiver of the trees, the haunting noises that floated from the hills. It was like something out of folklore, the quivering secrecy of this place. A branch snapped like a tiny firecracker, and Mary’s brain filled with primitive fear. She trembled to visions of monsters, wild predators, stealthy shapes emerging from the shadows . . .

Ken ignored the sound. “I said before that I’m not a nature buff. That’s not entirely true. I used to love nature. I used to love gorillas. I thought we’d be able to keep them alive. I used to love mammoths, Tasmanian tigers. I thought we’d be able to bring them back to life. I used to love abominable snowmen. Yes, and Bigfoot. I used to believe such things existed.” He shook his head. “I thought there was more out here than banana slugs and garden spiders. But we grow up, don’t we? We all have to grow up.”

“Mary?”

They both gasped at once. Paul’s head was sticking through the tent flap. The robotic zipper, sealed to his throat, gave him the appearance of a grotesque mounted trophy. “We’ve got a profile on that male you wanted.”

“Thanks, Paul.”

“I thought you’d want to know, we already compared the two bios. The male’s name is Andrew Jones. Turns out he devolved five years before Watson. A different era, in biotech time.”

Mary was still trying to shake it off, the sense of responsibility that clung to her like mud. She backed toward the edge of the clearing, forcing herself to concentrate. “Were you able to pin down the clinic?”

“Aha. Right. That’s the thing.” Paul squinted, adjusting his glasses by crinkling his nose. “See, it wasn’t a clinic. Malia’s been looking at the group’s financials. There’s a pattern. It works like this: they save up money for a year or so, then pay for a member to get the treatment. After each treatment, they do a big funding drive. And here’s the interesting part. After these two particular treatments, the ones for Watson and Jones—after these, the organization did huge funding drives. Massive. Really milking their supporters. Malia thinks they must have spent nine, ten times as much as usual. There’s only one nation that can suck that kind of money into secret biotech. China. And there’s only one service—”

It was like a ghost story, suddenly coming true. It was like a Native American myth.

Mary had been backing away across the clearing, putting space between herself and Paul’s face. She stepped, now, from beneath the tent’s overhang, out into the chilly trickle of the rain. Water pricked her scalp. Wet ferns slid against her hand.

And, quite suddenly, Mary sensed it behind her, a heaviness, a presence, like a condensation of the forest into flesh.

No hairy hand fell on Mary’s shoulder. No feral fangs sank into her neck. But she might have been approached by a predator, so swift was her reaction.

Mary spun, throwing up her hands. And choked back what could easily have been a humiliating scream.

The face looking down at her, lit to savage effect by the lamplight, was dark and hollow-cheeked, thickly whiskered, fringed in long, wispy hair that resembled the silky mane of an Afghan hound. Thin lips parted over large square teeth. The eyes, chocolate-dark, held two glaring reflections of the white lamp behind Mary’s head.

It was the male. And as Mary turned to face him, he dipped his head in a bow. She may have been mistaken, she may have been overwhelmed. But it seemed to Mary there was real human dignity in the gesture—human poise, as well as animal grace.

The male stepped aside. With a swing of his arm, a tilt of his shoulders, he introduced another sasquatch: the female, his mate. Miranda Watson, or the being that had been Miranda Watson, stepped into the clearing. Mary saw the shine of sweat on her skin. Her incisors glinted in a grimace of strain. The symptoms were unmistakable. Hands curled under her belly, fingers knitted in tawny fur.

“Ken.” Mary stumbled backward, embarrassed to find herself succumbing to a primitive instinct, retreating to the side of the nearest human male. Looking up, she was surprised to see the park ranger calm, even resigned, his mouth relaxed into a frown of acceptance. It was as if he’d known these creatures were here all along, nearby, waiting for the right moment to approach.

“Whoa.” Paul blinked. Bowing under the tent’s overhang, the sasquatches exhibited all the grandeur of their surgically modified muscles, their enhanced bones. Early news reports had mocked them as “living gorilla suits,” “real-life Chewbaccas,” and various other glib conceits. Mary saw, now, how unfair those stereotypes were. The sasquatches put to shame every shaggy Halloween costume. They exposed the falseness of the classic hoaxes—the famous Patterson film of the sixties, the later CGI stunts. They moved with the adroitness of unselfconscious creatures.

“I had no idea.” Paul’s head, still thrust through the tent flap, bobbed boyishly as he took the creatures in. “Even this morning, I didn’t really . . . It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? It really is hard to believe.”

But the sasquatches, standing before them, smelling of the forest, were entirely credible and defiantly real. The only thing that strained belief was the thought that they had once been human.

“What do you think they want?” Paul squinted. Looking into his creased face, Mary almost laughed. A smart kid, yes, but so very young.

“I think that’s obvious, Paul.” With a confidence and composure that made Mary marvel, Ken stepped past her and unzipped the tent.

While Ken held up the flap, the sasquatches shambled in like obedient dogs. Every movement they made was its own uncanny event. They gestured like humans, but carried their shoulders like apes; they rocked and swayed and bent their knees. As someone with a background in biology, Mary had always scorned talk of “missing links,” knowing evolution to be more incremental than epochal. These animals embodied such outmoded assumptions. They met Mary’s eyes with the frankness of children. They perched between conceptual categories: half-human, half-intelligent, half-innocent, half-wild.

“Let’s not waste time, here.” Ken collapsed the table, folding the legs under the plastic top. From his pack he unclipped a thin sleeping bag.

The female was already into the late stage of labor. Her attention turned inward. Her breaths came in puffs. Hunched over and cramped by her intensifying contractions, she let the male guide her down to the unrolled sleeping bag. Mary had ceased to think now of these beings as Miranda Watson and Andrew Jones. But she believed she saw a lingering humanity, shaped by habit and history and time, in their smallest gestures—especially in their consideration for each other, the way they attended to mutual needs. Who knew what memories—of suburban driveways, of franchise restaurants, of screen doors and swingsets and summer-lawn sprinklers—were stored up in those shaggy heads?

Memories of doctors. Memories of trust. Memories of medical men and women.

The male pawed gently at Mary’s hand. His fingers were unnervingly human, the nails brown and bitten short.

Mary rocked on her heels. “I don’t know. It’s been a long time since I did this. Frankly, it’s been years.”

The female shrieked. Mary winced. This was a feral creature, with modified, inhuman hips; what chance did it have of birthing a human child? Yet, kneeling on the tent floor, Mary saw that the time for such doubts had passed. A dark shape bulged amid the brown fur. The baby’s head was already emerging.

From here, Mary knew, routine would be her guide. She wiped at the condensation clinging to her brow. Habits from her years in Baltimore came back, the sweaty, profoundly absorbing, athletic skill of midwifery. Mary’s hands knew where to press, what to hold, when to yield. She saw at one point that she’d unconsciously rolled up her sleeves, unbuttoned her collar, tied back her hair; even these minor preparations were hardwired by years of busy labor. Rags and fire, knife and water: necessary tools found their way to her hands, offered by Ken and Malia and Paul—even by the male sasquatch, who had discovered, of all things, a quart of whiskey in Ken’s luggage. Mary smiled at the deftness of the creature’s dark hands, the care with which he cradled the bottle. Old habits, she supposed, old addictions, and old memories die hard.

She washed her hands in bottled springwater, cleansed and sterilized the knife. She covered the ground with towels. In the end, after all her instinctive preparations, Mary found that she had little to do. With the pleasure of deeply remembered experience, she relived the euphoria of her residency years, the exhaustion and invigoration that blur into a trance of expertise, the giddy, driven seasons of her youth when she had watched her fingers stitch incisions, palpate abdomens, lift wriggling infants through Caesarean slits. The joy of work, of using her body, of instinctual response, of service and care. Pausing to wipe her face, she noticed with a kind of distant surprise the bureaucratic detritus of their daylong meeting—the tablets, the gravures, the printers and recorders—piled haphazardly in the corners of the tent, like garbage from a party that had never been thrown.

Their deliberations, their differences, were now thrust aside. They worked, together, with cloth and steel, with water and flesh, with hands and tools. A spray of blood spilled into the towels. Mary’s hands were steady. Her nerves leapt to the task with quickfire readiness. The best of life is habit, she thought, watching herself, her expert movements, with a detached and speculative pleasure. The best of us is instinct, unselfconscious—and the wet furry body came squirming into her hands.

Furry?

Paul and Ken crowded forward. The men stooped, rapt with a queasy curiosity. The women settled back into fatigued relief. Mary knelt on one knee, massaging the last blood through the pale, blue-veined umbilical cord. The male sasquatch stretched out a finger, tentative as a toddler. Mary shared his surprise.

“Ken, do you have that knife?”

With the cord cut and knotted, Mary hunted for unsullied towels. Only when the little bundle of fussing limbs and hungry lips had been laid on the mother’s breast did the surprise of the birth settle in.

Furry. Yes, furry!

Mary pulled aside the towel. They would have to run tests. They would verify the conclusion with exams and assays. But eyes and skin, fingers and palms, the breath in her chest and the pulse in her throat, all insisted on one evident truth.

“Paul?” She looked up, helpless and wondering. The young biologist was smiling. This is it, Mary thought, even as she felt her cheeks tighten in an answering smile—this is what we live for, doctors and scientists, midwifes and naturalists—the vertigo, the shock of facing something indescribably ancient, yet dizzyingly new.

“This is what I was trying to tell you, Mary!” Paul blinked furiously, crinkling his nose. “How we found the male. The expenditures. The Chinese.”

“Slow down, Paul.” She laughed, enjoying his boyish excitement.

“But listen. This is what we realized. There’s only one kind of treatment that can absorb a big outlay like that. And there’s only one country where you can get it done. Of course it’s still illegal. But we know who the groups are, we know what they’ve been doing. Who would have thought? It started with state research. A national eugenics program.”

Eugenics. Mary sniffed. Dysgenics. Advance, decline, progression, regression. Such terms all seemed beyond silly, in this hot tent, with the strain of birth still heavy in the air, a furry prodigy wriggling in her hands. Improvement, alteration, death, life, birth—and yet it was all just evolution, in the end.

She touched the curl of the chimplike ear, the snuffling, almost ursine snout. Years ago, hearing about these humans who became sasquatches, Mary had taken a wry delight in the irony. Wonders of science, fruits of rationalism, eons of reason and progress and technology, and this, this was what people chose to do. Now the early wonder came back as a flush in her throat—as she considered the steady groping of life toward ever-growing variety.

“It’s a germ line change,” Paul babbled. “They got their gametes modified. Phenotype in one generation, genotype in the next. No wonder it cost them so much to have it done. Imagine the effort.”

Mary couldn’t imagine it. A human being amounts to more than four billion years of accumulated mutations. And this little creature, she believed, bright-eyed and bawling, represented more than however many black-market dollars lay behind its creation. Mary cupped a hand around the infant’s head, guiding its searching lips to the nipple. What did one call a baby sasquatch? Infant? The immediacy of the question made her tremble.

“This is going to be hell to explain to the public,” Malia said.

Mary laughed. Yes, drafting her report would be difficult. And the infant, poor thing, would get a battery of tests. Her excitement faltered at thoughts of bureaucratic battles, Congressional inquiries, tabloid scandals, and public outcry ahead. People still hadn’t gotten used to genetic engineering. Now, humanity’s oldest notions would be overturned again.

The father sasquatch squatted on the earth. Mary started as a hand dropped to her shoulder. She looked up to see Ken’s downturned face. His expression was solemn. He leaned over, reaching out to touch the infant’s cheek, drawing its bulbous, dark eyes to his face.

“I guess this’ll be a big hassle for you,” Mary said to him. “You’ll have a new species to look after, now, Ken. A genuine new species. Assuming, of course, Paul’s explanation is correct.” 

Ken nodded. He’d have plenty of work ahead of him, Mary knew. New patrols, drone cameras, new onerous regulations. New battles to be fought over turf and official territory. The work of guarding the wilderness had always been thankless, but noble. Now here was a new wilderness, a new frontier, contained within one tiny, furry head.

Assuming Ken didn’t find all this monstrous. Assuming he was willing to accept the burden.

Burden, Mary thought. But that’s what life is. Always a burden, a heavy endowment, passing from bearer to bearer, breast to breast.

“Streams and mountains,” she muttered, touching Ken’s hand.

“What’s that Mary?” He knelt at her side, pushing aside the towel. They bent forward, together, marveling at the small perplexed eyes, the pink mouth, the details of the two tiny, kicking feet.

“Gary Snyder. The poet I was telling you about. I was just remembering something he wrote.”

And Mary quoted for them all, as the young cries went out, echoing through the dripping trees—

Walking on walking,

      under foot      earth turns.

Streams and mountains never stay the same.

About the Author

Nick Wolven lives in the Bronx. His science fiction has appeared in a wide range of publications, and is forthcoming in Asimov’s, F&SF, Analog, and various anthologies. He sometimes contributes reviews to the Washington Independent Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickwolven.

We Who Live in the Heart

Kelly Robson

Ricci slipped in and out of consciousness as we carried her to the anterior sinus and strapped her into her hammock. Her eyelids drooped but she kept forcing them wide. After we finished tucking her in, she pulled a handheld media appliance out of her pocket and called her friend Jane.

“You’re late,” Jane said. The speakers flattened her voice slightly. “Are you okay?”

Ricci was too groggy to speak. She poked her hand through the hammock’s electrostatic membrane and panned the appliance around the sinus. Eddy and Chara both waved as the lens passed over them, but Jane was only interested in one thing.

“Show me your face, Ricci. Talk to me. What’s it like in there?”

Ricci coughed, clearing her throat. “I dunno. It’s weird. I can’t really think.” Her voice slurred from the anesthetic.

I could have answered Jane, if she’d asked me. The first thing newbies notice is how strange it smells. Human olfaction is primal; scents color our perceptions even when they’re too faint to describe. Down belowground, the population crush makes it impossible to get away from human funk. Out here, it’s the opposite, with no scents our brains recognize. That’s why most of us fill our habs with stinky things—pheromone misters, scented fabrics, ablative aromatic gels.

Eventually, Ricci would get around to customizing the scentscape in her big new hab, but right then she was too busy trying to stay awake. Apparently she’d promised Jane she’d check in as soon as she arrived, and not just a quick ping. She was definitely hurting but the call was duty.

“There’s people. They’re taking care of me.” Ricci gazed blearily at our orang. “I was carried in by a porter bot. It’s orange and furry. Long arms.”

“I don’t care about the bot. Tell me about you.”

“I’m fine, but my ears aren’t working right. It’s too noisy.”

We live with a constant circulatory thrum, gassy gurgles and fizzes, whumps, snaps, pops, and booms. Sound waves pulse through every surface, a deep hum you feel in your bones.

Jane took a deep breath, let it out with a whoosh. “Okay. Go to sleep. Call me when you wake up, okay?”

Ricci’s head lolled back, then she jerked herself awake.

“You should have come with me.”

Jane laughed. “I can’t leave my clients. And anyway, I’d be bored.”

Ricci squeezed her eyes shut, blinked a few times, then forced them wide.

“No you wouldn’t. There’s seven other people here, and they’re all nuts. You’d already be trying to fix them.”

Vula snorted and stalked out of the sinus, her long black braids slapping her back. The rest of us just smiled and shook our heads. You can’t hold people responsible for what they say when they’re half-unconscious. And anyway, it’s true—we’re not your standard moles. We don’t want to be.

Only a mole would think we’d be bored out here. We have to take care of every necessity of life personally—nobody’s going to do it for us. Tapping water is one example. Equipment testing and maintenance is another. Someone has to manage the hygiene and maintenance bots. And we all share responsibility for health and safety. Making sure we can breathe is high on everyone’s our priority list, so we don’t leave it up to chance. Finally, there’s atmospheric and geographical data gathering. Mama’s got to pay the bills. We’re a sovereign sociopolitical entity, population: eight, and we negotiate our own service contracts for everything.

But other that, sure, we have all the free time in the world. Otherwise what’s the point? We came out here to get some breathing room—mental and physical. Unlike the moles, we’ve got plenty of both.

Have you ever seen a tulip? It’s a flowering plant. No nutritional value, short bloom. Down belowground, they’re grown in decorative troughs for special occasions—ambassadorial visits, arts festivals, sporting events, that sort of thing.

Anyway. Take a tulip flower and stick an ovoid bladder where the stem was and you’ve got the idea. Except big. Really big. And the petals move. Some of us call it Mama. I just call it home.

The outer skin is a transparent, flexible organic membrane. You can see right through to the central organ systems. The surrounding bladders and sinuses provide structure and protection. Balloons inside a bigger balloon, filled with helium and hydrogen. The whole organism ripples with iridescence.

We live in the helium-filled sinuses. If you get close enough, you can see us moving around inside. We’re the dark spots.

While Ricci slept, I called everyone to the rumpus room for a quick status check. All seven of us lounged in the netting, enjoying the free flowing oxygen/hydrogen mix, goggles and breathers dangling around our necks.

I led the discussion, as usual. Nobody else can ever be bothered.

“Thoughts?” I asked.

“Ricci seems okay,” said Eddy. “And I like what’s-her-name. The mole on the comm.”

“Jane. Yeah, pretty smile,” said Bouche. “Ricci’s fine. Right Vula?”

Vula frowned and crossed her arms. She’d hooked into the netting right next to the hatch and looked about ready to stomp out.

“I guess,” she said. “Rude, though.”

“She was just trying to be funny,” said Treasure. “I can never predict who’ll stick and who’ll bounce. I thought Chara would claw her way back down belowground. Right through the skin and nosedive home.”

Chara grinned. “I still might.”

We laughed, but the camaraderie felt forced. Vula had everyone on edge.

“We’ll all keep an eye on Ricci until she settles in,” Eleanora said. “Are we good here? I need to get back to training. I got a chess tournament, you know.”

“You always have a tournament.” I surveyed the faces around me, but it didn’t look like anyone wanted to chat.

“As long as nobody hogs the uplink, I never have any problems,” said Bouche. “Who’s training Ricci?”

“Who do you think?” I said. We have a rule. Whoever scared off the last one has to train the replacement.

We all looked at Vula.

“Shit,” she said. “I hate training newbies.”

“Stop running them off then,” said Chara. “Be nice.”

Vula scowled, fierce frown lines scoring her forehead. “I’ve got important work to do.”

No use arguing with Vula. She was deep in a creative tangle, and had been for a while.

“I’ll do it,” I said. “We better train Ricci right if we want her to stick.”

When Ricci woke up, I helped her out of the hammock and showed her how to operate the hygiene station. As soon as she’d hosed off the funk, she called Jane on her appliance.

“Take off your breather for a moment,” Jane said. “Goggles too. I need to see your face.”

Ricci wedged her fingernails under the seal and pried off her breather. She lifted her goggles. When she grinned, deep dimples appeared on each cheek.

Jane squinted at her through the screen. She nodded, and Ricci replaced the breather. It attached to her skin with a slurp.

“How do I look?” Ricci asked. “Normal enough for you?”

“What’s the failure rate on that thing?”

“Low,” Ricci said.

Point two three percent. Which is low unless you’re talking about death. Then it’s high. But we have spares galore. Safety nests here, there, and everywhere. I could have chimed in with the info but Jane didn’t want to hear from me. I stayed well back and let Ricci handle her friend.

“Has anyone ever studied the long-term effects of living in a helium atmosphere?” Jane asked. “It can’t be healthy.”

“Eyes are a problem.” Ricci tapped a finger on a goggle lens. “Corneas need oxygen so that’s why we wear these. The hammocks are filled with air, so we basically bathe in oxygen while we’re sleeping. But you’re right. Without that the skin begins to slough.”

Jane made a face. “Ugh.”

“There’s air in the common area, too—they call it the rumpus room. That’s where they keep the fab and extruder. I’m supposed to be there now. I have to eat and then do an orientation session. Health, safety, all that good stuff.”

“Don’t forget to take some time to get to know your hab-mates, okay?”

“I met them when I got here.”

“One of them is Vula, the artist, right? The sculptor. She’s got to be interesting.”

Ricci shrugged. “She looked grumpy.”

I was impressed. Pretty perceptive for someone who’d been half-drowned in anesthetic.

“What’s scheduled after training?”

“Nothing. That’s the whole point of coming here, right?”

“I wondered if you remembered.” A smile broke over Jane’s face, star-bright even when glimpsed on a small screen at a distance. “You need rest and recreation.”

“Relaxation and reading,” Ricci added.

“Maybe you’ll take up a hobby.”

“Oh, I will,” said Ricci. “Count on it.”

Yes, I was spying on Ricci. We all were. She seemed like a good egg, but with no recourse to on-the-spot conflict intervention, we play it safe with newbies until they settle in. Anyone who doesn’t like it can pull down a temporary privacy veil to shield themselves from the bugs, but most don’t bother. Ricci didn’t.

Plus we needed a distraction.

Whether it’s half a million moles in a hole down belowground or eight of us floating around in the atmosphere, every hab goes through ups and downs. We’d been down for a while. Some of it was due to Vula’s growly mood, the worst one we’d seen for a while, but really, we just needed a shake-up. Whether we realized it or not, we were all looking to Ricci to deliver us from ourselves.

During orientation, Ricci and I had company. Bouche and Eddy claimed they needed a refresher and tagged along for the whole thing. Chara, Treasure, and Eleanora joined us halfway through. Even Vula popped out of her hab for a few moments, and actually made an effort to look friendly.

With all the all the chatter and distraction, I wasn’t confident Ricci’s orientation had stuck, so I shadowed her on her first maintenance rotation. The workflow is fully documented, every detail supported by nested step-by-steps and supervised by dedicated project management bugs that help take human error out of the equation. But I figured she deserved a little extra attention.

Life support is our first priority, always. We clear the air printers, run live tests on the carbon dioxide digesters, and ground-truth the readings on every single sensor. It’s a tedious process, but not even Vula complains. She likes to breathe as much as any of us.

Ricci was sharp. Interested. Not just in the systems that keep us alive, but in the whole organism, its biology, behavior, and habitat. She was even interested in the clouds around and the icy, slushy landscape below. She wanted to know about the weather patterns, wind, atmospheric layers—everything. I answered as best I could, but I was out of the conversational habit.

That, and something about the line of her jaw had me tongue-tied.

“Am I asking too many questions, Doc?” she asked as we stumped back to the rumpus room after checking the last hammock.

“Let’s keep to the life-and-death stuff for now,” I said.

Water harvesting is the next priority. To get it, we have to rise to the aquapause. There bright sunlight condenses moisture on the skin and collects in the dorsal runnels, where we tap it for storage.

Access to the main inflation gland is just under the rumpus room. Ricci squeezed through the elasticized access valve. The electrostatic membrane pulled her hair into spikes that waved at the PM bots circling her head. I stayed outside and watched her smear hormone ointment on the marbled surface of the gland. Sinuses creaked as bladders began to expand. As we walked through the maze of branching sinuses, I showed her how to brace against the roll and use the momentum to pull herself through the narrow access slots. Once we got to the ring-shaped fore cavity, we hooked our limbs into the netting and waited.

Rainbows rippled across the expanded bladder surfaces. We were nearly spherical, petals furled, and the wind rolled us like a untethered balloon. The motion makes some newbies sick, and they have to dial up anti-nauseant. Not Ricci. She looked around with anticipation, as if she were expecting to see something amazing to rise over the vast horizon.

“Do you ever run into other whales?” she asked.

“I don’t much care for that term,” I said. It came out gruffer than I intended.

A dimple appeared at the edge of her breather. “Have you been out here long, Doc?”

“Yes. Ask me an important question.”

“Okay.” She waved her hand at the water kegs nested at the bottom of the netting, collapsed into a pile of honeycomb folds. “Why don’t you carry more water?”

“That’s a good question. You don’t need me to tell you though. You can figure it out. Flip through your dash.”

The dimple got deeper. Behind her darkened goggles, her eyelids flickered as she reviewed her dashboards. Naturally it took a little while; our setup was new to her. I rested my chin on my forearms and waited.

She surfaced quicker than I expected.

“Mass budget, right? Water is heavy.”

“Yes. The mass dashboard also tracks our inertia. If we get too heavy, we can’t maneuver. And heavy things are dangerous. Everything’s tethered and braced, and we have safety nets. But if something got loose, it could punch through a bladder wall. Even through the skin, easy.”

Ricci looked impressed. “I won’t tell Jane about that.”

We popped into the aquapause. The sun was about twenty degrees above the horizon. Its clear orange light glanced across the thick violet carpet of helium clouds below. Overhead, the indigo sky rippled with stars.

Bit of a shock for a mole. I let Ricci ogle the stars for a while. Water ran off the skin, a rushing, cascading sound like one of the big fountains down belowground. I cleared my throat. Ricci startled, eyes wide behind her goggles, then she climbed out of the netting and flipped the valve on the overhead tap. Silver water dribbled through the hose and into the battery of kegs, slowing expanding the pleated walls.

Ricci didn’t always fill the quiet spaces with needless chatter. I liked that. We worked in silence until the kegs were nearly full, and when she began to question me again, I welcomed it.

“Eddy said you were one of the first out here,” Ricci said. “You figured out how to make this all work.”

I answered with a grunt, and then cursed myself. If I scared her away Vula would never let me forget it.

“That’s right. Me and a few others.”

“You took a big risk.”

“Moving into the atmosphere was inevitable,” I said. “Humans are opportunistic organisms. If there’s a viable habitat, we’ll colonize it.”

“Takes a lot of imagination to see this as viable.”

“Maybe. Or maybe desperation. It’s not perfect but it’s better than down belowground. Down there, you can’t move without stepping on someone. Every breath is measured and every minute is optimized for resource resilience. That might be viable, but it’s not human.”

“I’m not arguing.” Ricci’s voice pitched low, thick with emotion as she gazed at the stars in that deep sky. “I love it here.”

Yeah, she wasn’t a mole anymore. She was one of us already.

One by one, the kegs filled and began flexing through their purification routine. We called in the crablike water bots and ran them through a sterilization cycle.

Water work done, the next task was spot-checking the equipment nests. I let Ricci take the lead, stayed well back as she jounced through the cavities and sinuses. She was enthusiastic, confident. Motivated, even. Most newbies stay hunkered in their hammocks for a lot longer than her.

We circled back to the rumpus room, inventoried the nutritional feedstock, and began running tests on the hygiene bots. I settled into the netting and watched Ricci pull a crispy snack out of the extruder.

“You must know all the other crews. The ones who live in the . . . ” Ricci struggled to frame the concept without offending me.

“You can call them whales if you want. I don’t like it, but I’ve never managed to find a better word.”

She passed me a bulb of cold caffeine.

“How often do you talk to the people who live in the other whales, Doc?”

“We don’t have anything to do with them. Not anymore.”

“How come?”

“The whole reason we came out here is so we don’t have to put up with anyone else’s crap.”

“You never see the other whales at all? Not even at a distance?”

I drained the bulb. “These organisms don’t have any social behavior.”

“But you must have to talk to them sometimes, don’t you? Share info or troubleshoot?”

I collapsed the bulb in my fist and threw it to a hygiene bot.

“You lonely already?”

Ricci tossed her head back and laughed, a full belly guffaw. “Come on, Doc. You have to admit that’s weird.”

She was relentless. “Go ahead and make friends with the others if you want,” I growled. “Just don’t believe everything they say. They’ve got their own ways of doing things, and so do we.”

We checked the internal data repeaters and then spent the rest of the shift calibrating and testing the sensor array—all the infrastructure that traps the data we sell to the atmospheric monitoring firms. I kept my mouth shut. Ricci maintained an aggressive cheerfulness even though I was about as responsive as a bot. But my glacier-like chilliness—more than ten years in the making—couldn’t resist her. My hermit heart was already starting to thaw.

If I’d been the one calling Jane every day, I would have told her the light is weird out here. We stay within the optimal thermal range, near the equator where the winds are comparatively warm and the solar radiation helps keep the temperature in our habitat relatively viable. That means we’re always in daylight, running a race against nightfall, which is good for Mama but not so good for us. Humans evolved to exist in a day-night cycle and something goes haywire in our brains when we mess with that. So our goggles simulate our chosen ratio of light and dark.

Me, I like to alternate fifty-fifty but I’ll fool with the mix every so often just to shake things up. Vula likes the night so she keeps things dimmer than most. Everyone’s different. That’s what the moles don’t realize, how different some of us are.

“I did a little digging, and what I found out scared me,” Jane said the next time Ricci checked in. “Turns out there’s huge gaps in atmospheric research. The only area that’s really well monitored is the equator, and only around the beanstalk. Everywhere else, analysis is done by hobbyists who donate a few billable hours here and there.”

Ricci nodded. “That’s what Doc said.”

Hearing my name perked me right up. I slapped down two of my open streams and gave their feed my whole attention.

“Nobody really knows that much about the organism you’re living inside. Even less about the climate out there, and nearly nothing about the geography, not in detail. I never would have supported this decision if I’d realized how . . . ” Jane’s pretty face contorted as she searched for the word. “How willy-nilly the whole situation is. It’s not safe. I can’t believe it’s even allowed.”

“Allowed? Who can stop us? People go where they want.”

“Not if it’s dangerous. You can’t just walk into a sewage treatment facility or air purification plant. It’s unethical to allow people to endanger themselves.”

Ricci snorted, fouling the valves on her breather and forcing her to take a big gulp of helium through her mouth.

“Not all of us want to be safe, Jane.” The helium made her voice squeaky.

Jane’s expression darkened. “Don’t mock me. I’m worried about you.”

“I know. I’m sorry,” Ricci squeaked. She exhaled to clear her lungs and took a deep slow breath through her nose. Her voice dropped to its normal register. “Listen, I’ve only been here a few days.”

“Six,” Jane said.

“If I see anything dangerous, you’ll be the first to know. Until then, don’t worry. I’m fine. Better than fine. I’m even sleeping. A lot.”

That was a lie. The air budget showed Ricci hadn’t seen much of the inside of her hammock. But I wasn’t worried. Exhaustion would catch up with her eventually.

“There’s something else,” Jane said. “I’ve been asking around about your hab-mates.”

“Vula’s okay. It’s just that lately none of her work has turned out the way she wants. You know artists. Their professional standards are always unreachable. Set themselves up to fail.”

“It’s not about Vula, it’s Doc.”

Ricci bounced in her netting. “Oh yeah? Tell me. Because I can’t get a wink out of that one. Totally impervious.”

I maximized the feed to fill my entire visual field. In the tiny screen in Ricci’s hand, Jane’s dark hair trailed strands across her face and into her mouth. She pushed them back with an impatient flick of her fingers. She was in an atrium, somewhere with stiff air circulation. I could just make out seven decks of catwalk arching behind her, swarming with pedestrians.

“Pull down a veil,” Jane said. “You might have lurkers.”

“I do,” Ricci answered. “Four at least. I’m the most entertaining thing inside Mama for quite a while. It doesn’t bother me. Let them lurk.”

But Jane insisted, so Ricci pulled down a privacy veil and the bug feed winked out.

I told myself whatever Jane had found out didn’t matter. It would bear no relation to reality. That’s how gossip works—especially gossip about ancient history. But even so, a little hole opened up under my breastbone, and it ached.

Only six days and I already cared what Ricci thought. I wanted her to like me. So I set about trying to give her a reason.

A few days later, we drifted into a massive storm system. Ricci’s first big one. I didn’t want her to miss it, so I bounced aft and hallooed to her at a polite distance from her hab. She was lounging in her netting, deep in multiple streams, twisting a lock of her short brown hair around her finger.

She looked happy enough to see me. No wariness behind her gaze, no chill.

We settled in to watch the light show. It was an eye-catcher. Bolts zagged to the peaks of the ice towers below, setting the fog alight with expanding patches of emerald green and acid magenta.

Two big bolts forked overhead with a mighty whump. Ricci didn’t even jump.

“What was that?” she asked.

I was going to stay silently mysterious, but then remembered I was trying to be friendly.

“That,” I said, “was lunch.”

A dark splotch began to coalesce at the spot where the two bolts had caressed each other, a green and violet pastel haze in the thin milky fog. We banked slowly, bladders groaning, massive sinus walls clicking as we changed shape to ride the wind currents up, up, and then the massive body flexed just enough to reveal two petals reaching into the coalescing bacteria bloom.

Ricci launched herself out of the netting and clung to the side of her hab, trying to get a better view of the feeding behavior. When the bloom dissipated, she turned to me.

“That’s all it does, this whale? Just search for food?”

“Eat, drink, and see the sights,” I said. “What else does anyone need from life?”

Good company, I thought, but I didn’t say it.

The light show went on for hours. Ricci was fascinated from start to finish. Me, I didn’t see it. I spent the whole storm watching the light illuminate her face.

What else does anyone need from life? That was me trying to be romantic. Clumsy. Also inaccurate.

When we first moved out here, my old friends and I thought our habs would eventually become self-contained. Experience killed that illusion pretty quick. We’re almost as dependent on the planetary civil apparatus as anyone.

Without feedstock, for example, we’d either starve or suffocate—not sure which would happen first. It has a lot of mass, so we can’t stockpile much.

Then there’s power. Funding it is a challenge when you’re supplying eight people as opposed to eight million. No economy of scale in a hab this size. It’s not the power feed itself that’s the problem, but the infrastructure. We’re always on the move, so the feed has to follow us around and provide multiple points of redundancy. Our ambient power supply costs base market value plus a massive buy-back on the research and development.

Data has to follow us around too, but we don’t bother with redundancy. It’s not critical. You’d think it was more important than air, though, if you saw us when the data goes down. Shrieking. Curses. Bouche just about catatonic (she’s a total media junkie). Eleanora wall-eyed with panic especially if she’s in the middle of a tournament (chess is her drug of choice). Vula, Eddy, and me in any state from suave to suicidal depending on what we’re doing when the metaphorical umbilical gets yanked out of our guts.

Treasure and Chara are the only ones who don’t freak out. Usually they’re too busy boning each other.

Without data, we couldn’t stay here, either. If we only had each other to talk to, it’d be a constant drama cycle, but we’re all plugged into the hab cultures down belowground. We’ve got hobbies to groom, projects to tend, performances to cheer, games to play, friends to visit.

Finally, as an independent political entity, we need brokers and bankers to handle our economic transactions and lawyers to vet our contracts. We all need the occasional look-in from medtechs and physical therapists. And when we need a new crew member, we contract a recruiter.

“You look tired,” Jane said the next time Ricci called. “I thought you said you were sleeping.”

Ricci hung upside down in her netting. She’d made friends with the orang. It squatted in front of her, holding the appliance while she chatted with Jane.

“I’ve been digging through some old work.” She dangled her arms, hooked her fingers in the floor grid, and stretched. “I came up with a new approach to my first dissertation.”

Jane gaped. Her mouth worked like she was blowing bubbles.

“I know,” Ricci added. “I’ll never change, right?”

“Don’t you try that with me.” Jane’s eyes narrowed. “You have a choice—”

Ricci raised her hands in mock surrender. “Okay. Take it easy.”

“—you can keep working on getting better, or you can go back to your old habits.”

“It’s not your fault, Jane. You’re a great therapist.”

“This isn’t about me, you idiot,” Jane yelled. “It’s about you.”

“I tried, Jane.” Ricci’s voice was soft, ardent. “I really tried. So hard.”

“I know you did.” Jane sucked in a deep breath. “Don’t throw away all your progress.”

They went on and on like that. I didn’t listen, just checked in now and then to see if they were still at it. I knew Ricci’s story. I’d read the report from the recruiter. The privacy seal had timed out but I remembered the details.

Right out of the crèche she’d dived into an elite chemical engineering program, the kind every over-fond crèche manager wants for their favorite little geniuses. Sound good, doesn’t it? Isn’t that where you’d want to put your little Omi or Occam, little Carey or Karim? But what crèche managers don’t realize—because their world is full of guided discovery opportunities and subconscious learning stimuli—is that high-prestige programs are grinders. Go ahead, dump a crèche-full of young brilliants inside. Some of them won’t come out whole.

I know; I went through one myself.

When Ricci crashed out of the chem program within spitting distance of an advanced degree, she bounced to protein engineering. She did a lot of good work there before she cracked. Then she moved into pharmaceutical modeling. A few more years of impressive productivity before it all went up in smoke. By that time she wasn’t young anymore. The damage had accumulated. Her endocrinologist suggested intensive peer counseling might stop the carnage, so in stepped Jane, who applied her pretty smile, her patience, and all her active listening skills to try to gently guide Ricci along a course of life that didn’t include cooking her brain until it scrambled.

At the end of that long conversation through the appliance, Ricci agreed to put her old work under lockdown so she could concentrate on the here-and-now. Which meant all her attention was focused on us.

Ricci got into my notes. I don’t keep them locked down; anyone can access them. Free and open distribution of data is a primary force behind the success of the human species, after all. Don’t we all learn that in the crèche?

Making data available doesn’t guarantee anyone will look at it, and if they do, chances are they won’t understand it. Ricci tried. She didn’t just skim through, she really studied. Shift after shift, she played with the numbers and gamed my simulation models. Maybe she slept. Maybe not.

I figured Ricci would come looking for me if she got stumped, so I de-hermited, banged around in the rumpus room, put myself to work on random little maintenance tasks.

When Ricci found me, I was in the caudal stump dealing with the accumulated waste pellets. Yes, that’s exactly what it sounds like: half-kilogram plugs of dry solid waste covered in wax and transferred from the lavs by the hygiene bots. Liquid waste is easy. We vaporize it, shunt it into the gas exchange bladder, and flush it through gill-like permeable membranes. Solid waste, well, just like anyone we’d rather forget about it as long as possible. We rack the pellets until there’s about two hundred, then we jettison them.

Ricci pushed up her goggles and scrubbed knuckles over her red-rimmed eyes.

“Why don’t you automate this process like you do for liquids?” Ricci asked as she helped me position the rack over the valve.

“No room for non-essential equipment in the mass budget,” I said.

I dilated the interior shutter and the first pellet clicked through. A faint pink blush formed around the valve’s perimeter, only visible because I’d dialed up the contrast on my goggles to watch for signs of stress. A little hormone ointment took care of it—not too much or we’d get a band of inflexible scar tissue, and then I’d have to cut out the valve and move it to another location. That’s a long, tricky process and it’s not fun.

“There’s only two bands of tissue strong enough to support a valve.” I bent down and stroked the creamy striated tissue at my feet. “This is number two, and really, it barely holds. We have to treat it gently.”

“Why risk it, then? Take it out and just use the main valve.”

A sarcastic comment bubbled up—have you never heard of a safety exit?—but I gazed into her big brown eyes and it faded into the clouds.

“We need two valves in case of emergencies,” I mumbled.

Ricci and I watched the pellets plunge through the sky. When they hit the ice slush, the concussive wave kicked up a trail of vapor blooms, concentric rings lit with pinpoints of electricity, so far below each flash just a spark in a violet sea.

A flock of jellies fled from concussion, flat shells strobing with reflected light, trains of ribbon-like tentacles flapping behind.

Ricci looked worried. “Did we hit any of them?”

I shook my head. “No, they can move fast.”

After we’d finished dumping waste, Ricci said, “Say, Doc, why don’t you show me the main valve again?”

I puffed up a little at that. I’m proud of the valves. Always tinkering, always innovating, always making them a little better. Without the valves, we wouldn’t be here.

Far forward, just before the peduncle isthmus, a wide band of filaments connects the petals to the bladder superstructure. The isthmus skin is thick with connective tissue, and provides enough structural integrity to support a valve big enough to accommodate a cargo pod.

“We pulled you in here.” I patted the collar of the shutter housing. “Whoever prepared the pod had put you in a pink body bag. Don’t know why it was such a ridiculous color. When Vula saw it, she said, ‘It’s a girl!’.”

I laughed. Ricci winced.

“That joke makes sense, old style,” I explained.

“No, I get it. Birth metaphor. I’m not a crechie, Doc.”

“I know. We wouldn’t have picked you if you were.”

“Why did you pick me?”

I grumbled something. Truth is, when I ask our recruiter to find us a new hab-mate, the percentage of viable applications approaches zero. We look for a specific psychological profile. The two most important success factors are low self-censoring and high focus. People who say what they think are never going to ambush you with long-fermented resentments, and obsessive people don’t get bored. They know how to make their own fun.

Ricci tapped her fingernail on a shutter blade.

“Your notes aren’t complete, Doc.” She stared up at me, unblinking. No hint of a dimple. “Why are you hoarding information?”

“I’m not.”

“Yes, you are. There’s nothing about reproduction.”

“That’s because I don’t know very much about it.”

“The other whale crews do. And they’re worried about it. You must know something, but you’re not sharing. Why?”

I glared at her. “I’m an amateur independent researcher. My methods aren’t rigorous. It would be wrong to share shaky theories.”

“The whale crews had a collective research agreement once. You wrote it.”

She fired the document at me with a flick of her finger. I slapped it down and flushed it from my buffer.

“That agreement expired. We didn’t renew.”

“That’s a lie. You dissolved it and left to find your own whale.”

I aimed my finger at the bridge of her goggles and jabbed the air. “Yes, I ran away. So did you.”

She smiled. “I left a network of habs with a quarter billion people who can all do just fine without me. You ran from a few hundred who need you.”

Running away is something I’m good at. I bounced out of there double-time. Ricci didn’t call after me. I wouldn’t have answered if she had.

The next time she talked to Jane, Ricci didn’t mention me. I guess I didn’t rate high enough on her list of problems. I didn’t really listen to the details as they chatted. I just liked having their voices in my head while I tinkered with my biosynthesis simulations.

Halfway through their session, Vula pinged me.

You can quit spying, she said. None of us are worried about Ricci anymore.

I agreed, and shut down the feed.

Ricci’s been asking about you, by the way, Vula added. Your history with the other whales.

Tell her everything.

You sure?

I’ve been spying on her for days. It’s only fair.

Better she heard the story from Vula than me. I still can’t talk about it without overheating, and they tell me I’m scary when I’m angry.

Down belowground the air is thick with rules written and unwritten, the slowly decaying husks of thirty thousand years of human history dragged behind us from Earth, and the most important of these is cooperation for mutual benefit. Humans being human, that’s only possible in conditions of resource abundance—not just actual numerical abundance, but more importantly, the perception of abundance. When humans are confident there’s enough to go around, life is easy and we all get along, right?

Ha.

Cooperation makes life possible, but never easy. Humans are hard to wrangle. Tell them to do one thing and they’ll do the opposite more often than not. One thing we all agree on is that everyone wants a better life. Only problem is, nobody can agree what that means.

So we have an array of habs offering a wide variety of socio-cultural options. If you don’t like what your hab offers, you can leave and find one that does. If there isn’t one, you can try to find others who want the same things as you and start your own. Often, just knowing options are available keeps people happy.

Not everyone, though.

Down belowground, I simply hated knowing my every breath was counted, every kilojoule measured, every moment of service consumption or contribution accounted for in the transparent economy, every move modeled by human capital managers and adjusted by resource optimization analysts. I got obsessed with the numbers in my debt dashboard; even though it was well into the black all I wanted to do was drive it up as high and as fast as I could, so nobody would ever be able to say I hadn’t done my part.

Most people never think about their debt. They drop a veil over the dash and live long, happy, ignorant lives, never caring about their billable rate and never knowing whether or not they siphoned off the efforts of others. But for some of us, that debt counter becomes an obsession.

An obsession and ultimately an albatross, chained around our necks.

I dreamed about an independent habitat with abundant space and unlimited horizons. And I wasn’t the only one. When we looked, there it was, floating around the atmosphere.

Was it dangerous? Sure. But a few firms provide services to risk takers and they’re always eager for new clients. The crews that shuttle ice climbers to the poles delivered us to the skin of a very large whale. I made the first cut myself.

Solving the problems of life was exhilarating—air, food, water, warmth. We were explorers, just like the mountain climbers of old, ascending the highest peaks wearing nothing but animal hides. Like the first humans. Revolutionary.

Our success attracted others, and our population grew. We colonized new whales and once we got settled, our problems became more mundane. I have a little patience for administrative details, but the burden soon became agonizing. Unending meetings to chew over our collective agreements, measuring and accounting and debits and credits and assigning value to everyone’s time. This was exactly what we’d escaped. Little more than one year in the clouds, and we were reinventing all the old problems from scratch.

Nobody needs that.

I stood right in the middle of the rumpus room inside the creature I’d cut into with my own hands and gave an impassioned speech about the nature of freedom and independence, and reminded them all of the reasons we’d left. If they wanted their value micro-accounted, they could go right back down belowground.

I thought it was a good speech, but apparently not. When it came to a vote, I was the only ones blocking consensus.

I believe—hand-to-heart—if they’d only listened to me and did what I said everything would have been fine and everyone would have been happy. But some people can never really be happy unless they’re making other people miserable. They claimed I was trying to use my seniority, skills, and experience as a lever to exert political force. I’d become a menace. And when they told me I had to submit to psychological management, I left.

Turned out we’d brought the albatross along with us, after all.

When Jane pinged me a few days later, I was doing the same thing as millions down belowground—watching a newly-arrived arts delegation process down the beanstalk and marveling at their dramatic clothing and prosthetics.

I pinged her back right away. Even though I knew she would probably needle me about my past, I didn’t hesitate. I missed having Ricci and Jane in my head, and life was a bit lonely without them. Also, I was eager to meet her. I wasn’t the only one; the whole crew was burning with curiosity about Ricci’s pretty friend.

When Jane’s fake melted into reality, she was dressed in a shiny black party gown. Long dark hair pouffed over her shoulders, held off her face with little spider clips that gathered the locks into tufts. Her chair was a spider model too, with eight delicate ruby and onyx legs that cradled her torso.

“Hi, Doc,” she said. “It’s nice to meet you, finally. I’m a friend of Ricci’s. I think you know that, though.”

A friend. Not a therapist, peer counselor, or emotional health consultant. That was odd. And then it dawned on me: Jane had been donating her time ever since Ricci joined us. She probably wanted to formalize her contract, start racking up the billable hours.

When I glanced through her metadata, and my heart began to hammer. Jane’s rate was sky high.

“We can’t float your rate,” I blurted. “Not now. Maybe eventually. But we’d have to find another revenue stream.”

Jane’s head jerked back and her gaze narrowed.

“That’s not why I pinged you,” she said. “I don’t care about staying billable—I never did. All I want to do is help people.”

I released a silent sigh of relief. “What can I do for you?”

“Nothing. I just wanted to say hi and ask how Ricci’s getting along.”

“Ricci’s fine. Nothing to worry about.” I always get gruff around beautiful women.

She brightened. “She’s fitting in with you all?”

“Yeah. One of the crew. She’s great. I love her.” I bit my lip and quickly added, “I mean we all like her. Even Vula, and she’s picky.”

I blushed. Badly. Jane noticed, and a gentle smile touched the corners of her mouth. But she was a kind soul and changed the subject.

“I’ve been wondering something, Doc. Do you mind if I ask a personal question?”

I scrubbed my hands over my face in embarrassment and nodded.

She wheeled her chair a bit closer and tilted toward me. “Do you know what gave you the idea to move to the surface? I mean originally, before you’d ever started looking into the possibility.”

“Have you read Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage?” I asked. “You must have.”

“No.” She looked confused, like I was changing the subject.

“You should. Here.”

I tossed her a multi-bookmark compilation. Back down belowground, I’d given them out like candy at a crèche party. She could puzzle through the diction of the ancient original or read it in any number of translations, listen to a variety of audio versions and dramatic readings, or watch any of the hundreds of entertainment docs it had inspired. I’d seen them all.

“This is really old. Why did you think I’d know it?” She flipped to the summary. “Oh, I see. One of the characters is named is Jane.”

“Read it. It explains everything.”

“I will. But maybe you could tell me what to look for?” Her smile made me forget all about my embarrassment.

“It’s about what humans need to be happy. Sure, we evolved to live in complex interdependent social groups, but before that, we were nomads, pursuing resource opportunities in an open, sparsely populated landscape. That means for some people, solitude and independence are primary values.”

She nodded, and I could see she was trying hard to understand.

“Down belowground, when I was figuring all this out, I tried working with a therapist. When I told him this, he said, ‘We also evolved to suffer and die from violence, disease, and famine. Do you miss that, too?’”

Jane laughed. “I hope you fired him. So one book inspired all this?”

“It’s not just a book. It’s a way of life. The freedom to explore wide open spaces, to come together with like-minded others and form loose knit communities based on mutual aid, and to know that every morning you’ll wake up looking at an endless horizon.”

“These horizons aren’t big enough?” She waved at the surrounding virtual space, a default grid with dappled patterns, as if a directional light source were shining through gently fluttering leaves.

“For some, maybe. For me, pretending isn’t enough.”

“I’ll read it. It sounds very . . . ” She pursed her lips, looking for the right word. “Romantic.”

I started to blush again, so I made an excuse and dropped the connection before I made a fool of myself. Then I drifted down to the rumpus room and stripped off my goggles and breather.

“Whoa,” Bouche said. “Doc, what’s wrong?”

Eleanora turned from the extruder to look at me, then fumbled her caffeine bulb and squirted liquid across her cheek.

“Wow.” She wiped the liquid up with her sleeve. “I’ve never seen you look dreamy before. What happened?”

I’m in love, I thought.

“Jane pinged me,” I said instead.

Bouche called the whole crew. They came at a run. Even Vula.

In a small hab, any crumb of gossip can become legendary. I made them beg for the story, then drew it out as long as I could.

“Can you ask her to ping me?” Eddy asked Ricci when I was done.

“I would chat with her for more than a couple minutes, unlike Doc,” said Treasure.

Chara grinned lasciviously. “Can I lurk?”

The whole crew in one room, awake and actually talking to each other was something Ricci hadn’t seen before, much less all of us howling with laughter and gossiping about her friend. She looked profoundly unsettled. Vula bounced over to the extruder, filled a bulb with her favorite social lubricant, and tossed it to Ricci.

“Tell us everything about Jane,” Chara said. Treasure waggled her tongue.

“It’s not like that.” Ricci frowned. “She’s a friend.”

“Good,” they chorused, and collapsed back onto the netting, giggling.

“I’ve been meaning to ask—why do you use that hand-held thing to talk to her, anyway?” Chara said. “I’ve never even seen one of those before.”

Ricci shook her head.

“Come on, Ricci. There’s no privacy here,” Vula said. “You know that. Don’t go stiff on us.”

Ricci joined us in the netting before answering. When she picked a spot beside me, my pulse fluttered in my throat.

“Jane’s a peer counselor.” She squeezed a sip from the bulb and grimaced at the taste. “The hand-held screen is one of her strategies. Having it around reminds me to keep working on my goals.”

“Why do you need peer counseling?” asked Chara.

“Because I . . . ” Ricci looked from face to face, big brown eyes serious. Everyone quieted down. “I was unhappy. Listen, I’ve been talking with some people from the other whale crews. They’ve been having problems for a while now, and it’s getting worse.”

She fired a stack of bookmarks into the middle of the room. Everyone began riffling through them, except me.

“That’s too bad,” I said.

“Don’t you want to know what’s going on, Doc?” asked Chara.

I folded my arms and scowled in the general direction of the extruder.

“No,” I said flatly. “I don’t give a shit about them.”

“Well, you better,” Vula said. “Because if it’s happening to them, it could happen to us. Look.”

She fired a feed from a remote sensing drone into the middle of the room. A group of whales had gathered a hundred meters above a slushy depression between a pair of high ridges. They weren’t feeding, just drifting around aimlessly, dangerously close to each other. When they got close to each other, they unfurled their petals and brushed them along each other’s skin.

As we watched, two whales collided. Their bladders bubbled out like a crechie’s squeeze toy until it looked like they would burst. Seeing the two massive creatures collide like that was so upsetting, I actually reached into the feed and tried to push them apart. Embarrassing.

“Come on Doc, tell us what’s happening,” said Vula.

“I don’t know.” I tucked my hands into my armpits as if I was cold.

“We should go help,” said Eddy. “At least we could assist with the evac if they need to bail.”

I shook my head. “It could be dangerous.”

Everyone laughed at that. People who aren’t comfortable with risk don’t roam the atmosphere.

“It might be a disease,” I added, “We should stay as far away as we can. We don’t want to catch it.”

Treasure pulled a face at me. “You’re getting old.”

I grabbed my breather and goggles and bounded toward the hatch.

“Come on Doc, take a guess,” Ricci said.

“More observation would be required before I’d be comfortable advancing a theory,” I said stiffly. “I can only offer conjecture.”

“Go ahead, conjecture away,” said Vula.

I took a moment to collect myself, and then turned and addressed the crew with professorial gravity.

“It’s possible the other crews haven’t been maintaining the interventions that ensure their whales don’t move into reproductive maturity.”

“You’re saying the whales are horny?” said Bouche.

“They look horny,” said Treasure.

“They’re fascinated with each other,” said Vula.

Vula had put her finger on exactly the thing that was bothering me. Whales don’t congregate. They don’t interact socially. They certainly don’t mate.

“I’d guess the applicable pseudoneural tissue has regenerated, perhaps incompletely, and their behavior is confused.”

Ricci gestured at the feed, where three whales collided, dragging their petals across each other’s bulging skin. “This isn’t going to happen to us?”

“No, I said. “Definitely not. Don’t worry. Unlike the others, I’ve been keeping on top of the situation.”

“But how can you be sure?” And then realization dawned over Ricci’s face. “You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you?”

“Not exactly.”

She launched herself from the netting and bounced toward me. “Why didn’t you share the information? Keeping it secret is just cruel.”

I backed toward the hatch. “It’s not my responsibility to save the others from their stupid mistakes.”

“We need to tell them how to fix it. Maybe they can save themselves.”

“Tell them whatever you want.” I excavated my private notes from lockdown, and fired them into the middle of the room. “I think their best option would be to abandon their whales and find new ones.”

“That would take months,” Vula said. “Nineteen whales. More than two hundred people.”

“Then they should start now.” I turned to leave.

“Wait.” Ricci looked around at the crew. “We have to go help. Right?”

I gripped the edge of the hatch. The electrostatic membrane licked at my fingertips.

“Yeah, I want to go,” Bouche said. “I’d be surprised if you didn’t, Doc.”

“I want to go,” said Treasure.

“Me too,” Chara chimed in. Eddy and Eleanora both nodded.

Vula pulled down her goggles and launched herself out of the netting. “Whales fucking? What are we waiting for? I’ll start fabbing some media drones.”

With all seven of them eager for adventure, our quiet, comfortable little world didn’t stand a chance.

We’re not the only humans on the surface. Not quite. Near the south pole a gang of religious hermits live in a deep ice cave, making alcohol the old way using yeast-based fermentation. It’s no better than the extruded version, but some of the habs take pity on them so the hermits can fund their power and feedstock.

Every so often one of the hermits gives up and calls for evac. When that happens, the bored crew of a cargo ship zips down to rescue them. Those same ships bring us supplies and new crew. They also shuttle adventurers and researchers around the planet, but mostly they sit idle, tethered halfway up the beanstalk.

The ships are beautiful—sleek, fast, and elegant. As for us, when we need to change our position, it’s not quite so efficient. Or fast.

When Ricci found me in the rumpus room, I’d already fabbed my gloves and face mask, and I was watching the last few centimeters of a thick pair of protective coveralls chug through the output.

“I told the other crews you’d be happy to take a look at the regenerated tissue and recommend a solution, but they refused,” she said. “They don’t like you, do they?”

I yanked the coveralls out of the extruder.

“No, and I don’t like them either.” I stalked to the hatch.

“Can I tag along, Doc?” she asked.

“You’re lucky I don’t pack you into a body bag and tag you for evac.”

“I’m really sorry, Doc. I should have asked you before offering your help. When I get an idea in my head, tend to just run with it.”

She was all smiles and dimples, with her goggles on her forehead pushing her hair up in spikes and her breather swinging around her neck. A person who looks like that can get away with anything.

“This is your idea,” I said. “Only fair you get your hands dirty.”

I fabbed her a set of protective clothing and we helped each other suit up. We took a quick detour to slather appetite suppressant gel on the appropriate hormonal bundle, and then waddled up the long dorsal sinus, arms out for balance. The sinus walls clicked and the long cavity bent around us, but soon the appetite suppressant took hold and we were nearly stationary, dozing gently in the clouds.

On either side towered the main float bladders—clear multi-chambered organs rippling with rainbows across their honeycomb-patterned surfaces. Feeder organs pulsed between the bladder walls. The feeders are dark pink at the base, but the color fades as they branch into sprawling networks of tubules reaching through the skin, grasping hydrogen and channeling it into the bladders.

At the head of the dorsal sinus, a tall, slot-shaped orifice give us access to the neuronal cavity. I shrugged my equipment bag off my shoulder, and showed Ricci how to secure her face mask over her breather, and climbed in.

With the masks on, to talk we had to ping each other. I was still a bit angry so no chit-chat, business only. I handed her the laser scalpel.

Cut right here. I sliced the blade of my gloved hand vertically down the milky surface of the protective tissue. See these scars? I pointed at the gray metallic stripes on either side of the imaginary line I’d drawn. Stay away from them. Just cut straight in between.

Ricci backed away a few steps. I don’t think I’m qualified to do this.

You’ve been qualified to draw a line since you were a crechie. When she began to protest again, I cut her off. This was your idea, remember?

Her hands shook, but the line was straight enough. The pouch deflated, draping over the skeleton of the carbon fiber struts I’d installed way back in the beginning. I pulled Ricci inside and closed the incision behind us with squirts of temporary adhesive. The wound wept drops of fluid that rapidly boiled off, leaving a sticky pink sap-like crust across the iridescent interior surface.

Is this the whale’s brain? Ricci asked.

I ignored the question. Ricci knew it was the brain—she’d been studying my notes, after all. She was just trying to smooth my feathers by giving me a chance to show my expertise.

Not every brain looks like a brain. Yours and mine look like they should be floating in the primordial ocean depths—that’s where we came from, after all. The organ in front of us came from the clouds—a tower of spun glass floss threaded through and through with wispy, feather-like strands that branched and re-branched into iridescent fractals. My mobility control leads were made of copper nanofiber embedded in color-coded silicon filaments: red, green, blue, yellow, purple, orange, and black—a ragged, dull rainbow piercing the delicate depths of an alien brain.

Ricci repeated her question.

Don’t ask dumb questions, Ricci.

She put her hands up in a gesture of surrender and backed away. Not far—no room inside the pouch to shuffle back more than one step.

The best I can say is it’s brain-like. I snapped the leads into my fist-sized control interface. The neurons are neuron-like. Is it the whole brain? Is the entire seat of cognition here? I can’t tell because there’s not much cognition to measure. Maybe more than a bacterium, but far less than an insect.

How do you measure cognition? Ricci asked.

Controlled experiments, but how do you run experiments on animals this large? All I can tell you is that most people who study these creatures lose interest fast. But here’s a better measure: After more than ten years, a whale has never surprised me.

Before today, you mean.

Maneuvering takes a little practice. We use a thumb-operated clicker to fire tiny electrical impulses through the leads and achieve a vague form of directional control. Yes, it’s a basic system. We could replace it with something more elegant but it operates even if we lose power. The control it provides isn’t exactly roll, pitch, and yaw, but it’s effective enough. The margin for error is large. There’s not much to hit.

Navigation is easy, too. Satellites ping our position a thousand times a second and the data can be accessed in several different navigational aids, all available in our dashboards.

But though it’s all fairly easy, it’s not quick. My anger didn’t last long. Not in such close quarters, especially just a few hours after realizing I was in love with her. It was hardly a romantic scene, both of us swathed head-to-toe in protective clothing, passing a navigation controller back and forth as we waggled slowly toward our destination.

In between bouts of navigation, I began telling Ricci everything I knew about the organ in front of us: A brain dump about brains, inside a brain. Ha.

She was interested; I was flattered by her interest. Age-old story. I treated her to all my theories, prejudices, and opinions, not just about regenerating pseudoneuronal tissue and my methods for culling it, but the entire scientific research apparatus down belowground, the social dynamics of hab I grew up in, and the philosophical underpinnings of the research exploration proposal we used to float our first forays out here.

Thank goodness Ricci was wearing a mask. She was probably yawning so wide I could have checked her tonsils.

Here. I handed her the control box. You drive the rest of the way.

We were aiming for the equator, where the strong, steady winds have carved a smooth canyon bisecting the ice right down to the planet’s iron core. When we need to travel a long distance, riding that wind is the fastest route.

Ricci clicked a directional adjustment, and our heading swung a few degrees back toward the equator.

What does the whale perceive when we do this? Ricci waggled the thumb of her glove above the joystick. When it changes direction, are we luring it or scaring it away?

Served me right for telling her not to ask simple questions.

I don’t really know, I admitted.

Maybe it makes them think other whales are around. What if they want to be together, just like people, but before now they didn’t know how. Maybe you’ve been teaching them.

My eyebrows climbed. I’d never considered how we might be influencing whale behavior, aside from the changes we make for our own benefit.

That’s an interesting theory, Ricci. Definitely worth looking into.

Wouldn’t it be terrible to be always alone?

I’d always considered myself a loner. But in that moment, I honestly couldn’t remember why.

Once we’re in the equatorial stream, we ride the wind until we get into the right general area. Then we wipe off the appetite suppressant, and hunger sends us straight into the arms of the nearest electrical storm.

The urge to feed is a powerful motivator for most organisms. Mama chases all the algae she can find, and gobbles it double-time. For us on the inside, it’s like an old-style history doc. Everyone stays strapped in their hammocks and rides out the weather as we pitch around on the high seas.

I always enjoy the feeding frenzy; it gets the blood flowing.

I’d just settled to enjoy the wild ride when Ricci pinged me.

Two crews tried surgical interventions on the regenerated tissue. Let me know what you think, okay? Maybe now we can convince them to let you help.

The message was accompanied by bookmarks to live feeds from the supply ships.The first feed showed a whale wedging itself backward into a crevasse, its petals waving back and forth as it wiggled deeper into the canyon-like crack in the ice.

The other feed showed a whale scraping its main valve along a serrated ridge of ice. Its oval body stretched and flexed, its bladders bulged. Its petals curled inward then snapped into rigid extension as the force of its body crashed down on the ice’s knife edge.

Inside both whales, tiny specks bounced through the sinuses. I could only imagine what the crew was doing—what I would do in that situation. If they wanted to live, they had to leave. Fast.

A chill slipped under my skin. My fault. If those whales died, if those crews died, I was to blame. Me alone. Not the two crews. They were obviously desperate enough to try anything. I should have contacted them myself, and offered whatever false apologies would get them to accept my help.

But chances are it wouldn’t have changed the outcome, except they would have had me to blame. Another entry in my list of crimes.

Frost spread across my flesh and raised goosebumps. I tugged on my hammock’s buckles to make sure they were secure against the constant pitching and heaving, dialed up the temperature, and snuggled deeper into my quilt. I fired up my simulation model and wandered through towering mountains of pseudoneural tissue, pondering the problem, delving deeper and deeper through chains of crystallized tissue until they danced behind my eyelids. Swirling, stacking, combining, and recombining . . .

I was nearly asleep when I heard Ricci’s voice.

“Hey, Doc, can we talk?”

I thought I was dreaming. But no, she was right outside my hammock, gripping the tethers and getting knocked off her feet with every jolt and flex. Her goggled and masked face was lit by a mad flurry of light from the bolts coruscating in every direction just beyond the skin.

“Are you nuts?” I yanked open the hammock seal. “Get in here.”

She plunged through the electrostatic barrier and rolled to the far side of my bed. When she came up, her hair stood on end with static electricity.

“Whoa.” She swiped off her goggles and breather, stuffed them in one of the hammock pouches, then flattened the dark nimbus of her hair with her palms and grinned. “It’s wild out there.”

I pulled my quilt up to my chin and scowled. “That was stupid.”

“Yeah, I know but you didn’t ping me back. This is an important situation, right? Life or death.”

I sighed. “If you want to rescue people, there are vocations for that.”

“Don’t we have a duty to help people when we can?”

“Some people don’t want to be helped. They just want to be left alone.”

“Like you?”

“Nothing you’re doing is helping me, Ricci.”

“Okay, okay. But if we can figure out a way to help, that’s good too. Better than good. Everyone wins.”

Lying there in my hammock, facing Ricci sprawled at the opposite end and taking up more than half of the space, I finally figured out what kind of person she was.

“You’re a meddler, Ricci. A busybody. You were wasted in the sciences. You should have studied social dynamics and targeted a career in one-on-one social work.”

She laughed.

“Listen.” I held out my hand, palm up. She took it right away, didn’t hesitate. Her hand was warm. Almost feverish. “If you want to stay in the crew, you have to relax. Okay? We can’t have emergencies every week. None of us are here for that.”

She squeezed my hand and nodded.

“A little excitement is fine, once in a while,” I continued. “Obviously this is an extraordinary situation. But if you keep looking for adventure, we’ll shunt you back to Jane without a second thought.”

She twisted the grip into a handshake and gave me two formal pumps. Then she reached for the hammock seal. She would have climbed out into the maelstrom if I hadn’t stopped her.

“You can’t do that,” I yelled. “No wandering around when we’re in a feeding frenzy. You’ll get killed. Kill us too, if you go through the wrong bladder wall.”

She smiled then, like she didn’t believe me, like it was just some excuse to keep her in my hammock. And when she settled back down, it wasn’t at the opposite end. She snuggled in right beside me, companionable as anything, or even more.

“Don’t you get lonely, Doc?” she asked.

“Sometimes,” I admitted. “Not much.”

Our hammocks are roomy, but Ricci didn’t give me much space, and though the tethers absorb movement, we were still jostling against each other.

“Because you don’t need anybody or anything.” Her voice in my ear, soft as a caress.

“Something like that.”

“Maybe, eventually, you’ll change your mind about that.”

What happened next wasn’t my idea. I was long out of practice, but Ricci had my full and enthusiastic cooperation.

Down belowground, I was a surgeon, and a good one. My specialty was splicing neurons in the lateral geniculate nucleus. My skills were in high demand. So high, in fact, that I had a massive support team.

I’m not talking about a part-time admin or social facilitator. Anyone can have those. I had an entire cadre of people fully dedicated to making sure that if I spent most of my time working and sleeping, what little time remained would be optimized to support physical, emotional, and intellectual health. All my needs were plotted and graphed. People had meetings to argue, for example, over what type of sex best maintained my healthiest emotional state, and once that was decided, they’d argue over the best way to offer that opportunity to me.

That’s just an example. I’m only guessing. They kept the administrative muddle under veil. Day-to-day, I only had contact with a few of my staff, and usually I was too busy with my own work to think about theirs. But for a lot of people, I was a billable-hours bonanza.

But despite all their hard work, despite the hedonics modeling, best-practice scenarios, and time-tested decision trees, I burned out.

It wasn’t their fault. It was mine. I was, and remain, only human.

I could have just reduced my surgery time. I could have switched to teaching or coaching other surgeons. But no. Some people approach life like it’s an all-or-nothing game. That’s me. I couldn’t be all, so I decided to become nothing.

Until Ricci came along, that is.

When the storm ended, the two of us had to face a gauntlet of salacious grins and saucy comments. I didn’t blush, or at least not much. Ricci had put the spark of life in a part of me that had been dark for far too long. I was proud to have her in my crew, in my hammock, in my life.

The whole hab gave us a hard time. The joke that gave them the biggest fits, and made even Vula cling helplessly to the rumpus room netting as she convulsed with laughter, involved the two of us calling for evac and setting up a crèche in the most socially conservative hab down belowground. Something about imagining us in swathed in religious habits and swarming with crechies tweaked everyone’s funny bones.

Ricci weathered the ridicule better than me. I left to fill the water kegs, and by the time I returned, the hilarity had worn itself out.

The eight of us lounged in the rumpus room, the netting gently swaying to and fro as we drifted in the bright directional light of the aquapause. Water spilled off the skin and threw dappled shadows across the room. Vula had launched the media drones and we’d all settled down to watch the feeds.

More than once I caught myself brainlessly staring at Ricci, but I kept my goggles on so nobody noticed. I hope.

Two hundred kilometers to the northwest and far below us, the seventeen remaining whales congregated in the swirling winds above a dome-shaped mesa that calved monstrous sheets of ice down its massive flanks. A dark electrical storm massed on the horizon, with all its promise of rich concentrations of algae, but the whales didn’t move toward it, just kept circulating and converging, plucking at each other’s skin.

Three hundred kilometers west lay the abandoned corpses of two whales, their deflated bladders draped over warped sinus skeletons half-buried in slush.

Our media drones got there too late to trap the whales’ death throes, and I was glad. But Vula and Bouche trapped great visuals of the rescue, showing the valiant supply ship crews swooping in to pluck brightly colored body bags out of the air. Maybe the crews put a little more of a spin on their maneuvering than they needed to, but who could blame them? They rarely got a job worth bragging about.

One of Bouche’s media broker friends put the rescue feeds out to market. They started getting good play right away. Bouche fired the media licensing statement into the middle of the room. The numbers glowed green and flickered as they climbed.

“Look at these fees,” she said. “This will underwrite our power consumption for a couple years.”

“That’s great, Bouchie,” I murmured, and flicked the statement out of my visual field.

Night was coming, and it presented a hard deadline. If the whales didn’t move before dark, they’d all die.

Ricci moved closer to me in the netting and rested her cheek on my shoulder. I turned my head and touched my lips to her temple, just for a moment. I was deep in my brain simulation, working on the problem. But I kept an eye on the feeds. When the whales collided, I held my breath. As the bladders stretched and budged, I cringed, certain they’d reach their elastic limit and we would see a whale pop, its massive sinuses rupture, its skin tear away and its body plunge to splatter on the icy surface below. But they didn’t. They bounced off each other in slow motion and resumed their aimless circulation.

Hours passed. Eddy got up, extruded a meal, and passed the containers around the netting. Chara and Treasure slipped out of the room. Vula was only half-present—she was working in her studio, sculpting maquettes of popped bladders and painfully twisted corpses.

Eddy yawned. “How long can these whales live without feeding?”

I forced a stream of breath through my lips, fluttering the fringe of my bangs. “I don’t know. Indefinitely, maybe, if the crews can figure out a way to provide nutrition internally.”

“If they keep their whales fed, maybe they’ll just keep stumbling around, crashing into each other.” Vula’s voice was slurred, her eyes unfocused as she juggled multiple streams.

“I’m more worried about nightfall, actually,” I said.

Ever since we’d dragged ourselves out of my hammock, Ricci had been trying to pry information from emergency response up the beanstalk, from the supply ship crews who were circling the site, and from the whale crews. They were getting increasingly frantic as time clicked by, and keeping us informed wasn’t high on their list of priorities.

I rested my palm on the inside of Ricci’s knee. “Are the other crews talking to you yet?”

She sat up straight and gave me a pained smile. “A little. I wasn’t getting anywhere, but Jane’s been giving me some tips.”

That woke everyone up. Even Vula snapped right out of her creative fugue.

“Is Jane helping us?” Chara asked, and when Ricci nodded she demanded, “Why are you keeping her to yourself?”

Ricci shrugged. “Jane doesn’t know anything about whales.”

“If she’s been helping you maybe she can help us too,” said Eddy.

“Yeah, come on Ricci, stop hogging Jane.” Bouche raked her fingers through her hair, sculpting it into artful tufts. “I want to know what she thinks of all this.”

“All right,” Ricci said. “I’ll ask her.”

A few moments later she fired Jane’s feed into the room and adjusted the perspective so her friend seemed to be sitting in the middle of the room. She wore a baggy black tunic and trousers, and her hair was gathered into a ponytail that draped over the back of her chair. The pinnas of her ears were perforated in a delicate lace pattern.

Treasure and Chara came barreling down the access sinus and plunged through the hatch. They hopped over to their usual spot in the netting and settled in. Jane waved at them.

“We’re making you an honorary crew member,” Eddy told Jane. “Ricci has to share you with us. We all get equal Jane time.”

“I didn’t agree to that,” said Ricci.

“Fight over me later, when everyone’s safe.” Jane said. “I don’t understand why the other crews are delaying evacuation. Who would risk dying when they can just leave?”

Everyone laughed.

“This cadre self-selects for extremists.” Eddy rotated her finger over her head, encompassing all of us in the gesture. “People like us would rather die than back down.”

“I guess you’re not alone in that,” said Jane. “Every hab has plenty of stubborn people.”

“But unlike them, we built everything we have,” I said. “That makes it much harder to give up.”

“Looks like someone finally made a decision, though.” Ricci maximized the main feed. Jane wheeled around to join us at the netting.

Glowing dots tracked tiny specks across the wide mesa, pursued by flashing trails of locational data. Vula’s media drones zoomed in, showing a succession of brightly colored, hard-shell body bags shunting though the main valves. Sleet built up along their edges, quickly hardening to a solid coating of ice.

“Quitters,” Treasure murmured under her breath.

Jane looked shocked.

“If you think you know what you’d do in their place, you’re wrong,” I said. “Nobody knows.”

“I’d stay,” Treasure said. “I’ll never leave Mama.”

Chara grinned. “Me too. We’ll die together if we had to.”

Bouche pointed at the two of them. “If we ever have to evac, you two are going last.”

Jane’s expression of shock widened, then she gathered herself into a detached and professional calm.

Ricci squeezed my hand. “The supply ships want to shuttle some of the evacuees to us instead of taking them all the way to the beanstalk. How many can we carry?”

I checked the mass budget and made a few quick calculations. “About twenty. More if we dump mass.” I raised my voice. “Let’s pitch and ditch everything we can. If it’s not enough we can think about culling a little water and feedstock. Is everyone okay with that?”

To my surprise, nobody argued. I’d rarely seen the crew move so fast, but with Jane around everyone wanted to look like a hero.

Life has rarely felt as sunny as it did that day.

Watching the others abandon their whales was deeply satisfying. It’s not often in life you can count your victories, but each of those candy-colored, human-sized pods was a score for me and a big, glaring zero for my old, unlamented colleagues. I’d outlasted them.

Not only that, but I had a new lover, a mostly-harmonious crew of friends, and the freedom to go anywhere and do anything I liked, as long as it could be done from within the creature I called home.

But mostly, I loved having an important job to do.

I checked our location to make sure we were far enough away that if the other whales began to drift, they wouldn’t wander into the debris stream. Then we paired into work teams, pulled redundant equipment, ferried it to the main valve, and jettisoned it.

I kept a tight eye on the mass budget, watched for tissue stress around the valve, and made strict calls on what to chuck and what to keep.

Hygiene and maintenance bots were sacrosanct. Toilets and hygiene stations, too. Safety equipment, netting, hammocks—all essential. But each of us had fifty kilos of personal effects. I ditched mine first. Clothes, jewelry, mementos, a few pieces of art—some of it real artisan work but not worth a human life. Vula tossed a dozen little sculptures, all gifts from friends and admirers. Eddy was glad to have an excuse to throw out the guitar she’d never learned to learn to play. Treasure had a box of ancient hand-painted dinnerware inherited from her crèche; absolutely irreplaceable, but they went too. Chara threw out her devotional shrine. It was gold and took up most of her mass allowance, but we could fab another.

We even tossed the orang bot. We all liked the furry thing, but it was heavy. Bouche stripped out its proprietary motor modules and tossed the shell. We’d fab another, eventually.

If we’d had time for second thoughts, maybe the decisions would have been more difficult. Or maybe not. People were watching, and we knew it. Having an audience helped us cooperate.

It wasn’t just Jane we were trying to impress. Bouche’s media output was gathering a lot of followers. We weren’t just trapping the drama anymore, we were part of the story.

Bouche monitored our followship, both the raw access stats and the digested analysis from the PR firm she’d engaged to boost the feed’s profile. When the first supply ship backed up to our valve and we began pulling body bags inside, Bouche whooped. Our numbers had just gone atmospheric.

We were a clown show, though. Eight of us crowded in the isthmus sinus, shuttling body bags, everyone bouncing around madly and getting in each other’s way. Jane helped sort us out by monitoring the overhead cameras and doing crowd control. Me, I tried not to be an obstruction while making load-balancing decisions. Though we’d never taken on so much weight at once, I didn’t anticipate any problems. But I only looked at strict mathematical tolerances. I’m not an engineer; I didn’t consider the knock-on effects of the sudden mass shift.

In the end, we took on thirty-eight body bags. We were still distributing them throughout the sinuses when Ricci reported the rescue was over.

That’s it. The cargo ships have forty-five body bags. They’re making the run to the beanstalk now.

Is that all? If the ships are full, we could prune some feedstock.

Everyone else is staying. They’re still betting their whales will move.

When the last body bag was secured so it wouldn’t pitch through a bladder, I might have noticed we were drifting toward the mesa. But I was too busy making sure the new cargo was secure and accounted for.

I pinged each unit, loaded their signatures into the maintenance dashboard, mapped their locations, checked the data in the mass budget, created a new dashboard for monitoring the new cargo’s power consumption, consumables, and useful life. Finally, I cross-checked our manifest against the records the supply ships had given us.

That was when I realized we carrying two members of my original crew.

When Ricci found me, I was pacing the dorsal sinus, up and down, arguing with myself. Mostly silently.

“If you’re having some kind of emotional crisis, I’m sure Jane would love to help,” she said.

I spun on my heel and stomped away, bouncing off the walls.

She yelled after me. “Not me though. I don’t actually care about your emotional problems.”

I bounced off a wall once more and stopped, both hands gripping its clear ridged surface.

“No?” I asked. “Why don’t you care?”

“Because I’m too self-involved.”

I laughed. Ricci reached out and ruffled her fingers through the short hair on the back of my neck. Her touch sent an electric jolt through my nerves.

“Maybe that’s why we get along so well,” she said softly. “We’re a lot alike.”

Kissing while wearing goggles and a breather is awkward and unsatisfying. I pulled her close and pressed my palms to the soft pad of flesh at the base of her spine. I held her until she got restless, then she took my hand and led me to the rumpus room.

Bouche lounged in the netting, eyes closed.

“Bouchie is giving a media interview,” Ricci whispered. “An agent is booking her appearances and negotiating fees. If we get enough, we can upgrade the extruder and subscribe to a new recipe bank.”

I pulled a bulb out of the extruder. “She’ll be hero of the hab.”

“You could wake them up, you know.”

“Wake up who?” I asked, and took a deep swig of sweet caffeine.

“Your old buddies. In the body bags. Wake them up. Have it out.”

I managed to swallow without choking. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Maybe they’ll apologize.”

I laughed, a little too hard, a little too long, and only stopped when Ricci began to look offended.

“We can’t wake them,” I said. “Where would they sleep until we got to the beanstalk?”

“They can have my hammock.” She sidled close. “I’ll bunk with you.”

We kissed then, and properly. Thoroughly. Until I met Ricci, I’d been a shrunken bladder; nobody knew my possible dimensions. Ricci filled me up. I expanded, large enough to contain whole universes.

“No. They’re old news.” I kissed her again and ran my finger along the edge of her jaw. “It was another life. They don’t matter anymore.”

Strange thing was, saying those words made it true. All I cared about was Ricci, and all I could see was the glowing possibility of a future together, rising over a broad horizon.

Twilight began to move over us. We only had a little time to spare before we recalled the media drones, wiped off the appetite suppressant, and left the other crews to freeze in the dark.

We gathered in the rumpus room, all watching the same feed. Whales circulated above the mesa. Slanting sunlight cast deep orange reflections across their skins, their windward surfaces creamy with blowing snow. Inside, dark spots bounced around the sinuses. If I held my breath, I could almost hear their words, follow their arguments. When I bit my lip, I tasted their tears. 

“More than a hundred people,” Jane said. “I still don’t understand why they’d decide to commit suicide. A few maybe, but not so many.”

“Some will evac before it’s too late.” Vula shrugged. “And as for the rest, it’s their own decision. I can’t say I would do anything different. And I hope I never find out.”

I shivered. “Agreed.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Jane said. “Someone must be exercising duress.”

“Nobody forces anyone to do anything out here, any more than they do down belowground,” said Treasure.

“Yeah,” said Chara. “We’re not crechies, Jane. We do what we want.”

Jane sputtered, trying to apologize.

“It’s okay,” Eddy told her. “We’re all upset. None of us really understand.”

“The whales still might move,” said Bouche. “They can spend a little time in the dark, right Doc?”

I set a timer with a generous margin for error and fired it into the middle of the room. “Eight minutes, then we have to leave. The other whales will have a little more than thirty minutes before they freeze at full dark. Then their bladders burst.”

Chara and Treasure pulled themselves out of the netting.

“We’re not watching this,” Chara said. “If you want to hang overhead and root for them to evac, go ahead.”

We all waved goodnight. The two of them stumped away to their hammock, and silence settled over the rumpus room. Just the whoosh and murmur of the bladders, and the faint skiff of wind over the skin. A few early stars winked through the clouds. They seemed compassionate, somehow. Understanding. Looking at those bright pinpoints, I understood how on ancient Earth, people might use the stars to conjure gods.

I put my arm around Ricci’s shoulders and drew her close. She let me hold her for two minutes, no more, and then she pulled away.

“I can’t watch this either,” she said. “I have to do something.”

“I know.” I drew her hand back just for a moment and planted a kiss on the palm. “It’s hard.”

Vula nodded, and Jane, too. Eddy and Bouche both got up and hugged her. Eleanora kept her head down, hiding her tears. The electrostatic membrane crackled as Ricci left.

“Do you know some of the people down there, Doc?” asked Jane.

“Not anymore,” I said. “Not for a long time.”

We fell quiet again, watching the numbers on the countdown. Ricci had left her shadow beside me. I felt her cold absence; something missing that should be whole. I could have spied on her, see where she’d gone, but no. She deserved her privacy.

The first little quake shuddering through the sinuses told me exactly where she was.

I checked our location, blinked, and then checked it again. We were right over the mesa, above the other whales, all seventeen of them. Wind, bad luck, or instinct had had brought us there—but did it matter? Ricci—her location mattered. She was in the caudal stump, with the waste pellets, and the secondary valve.

No. Ricci, no. I slapped my breather on and launched myself out of the rumpus room, running aft as fast as I could. Don’t do that. Stop.

I lost my footing and bounced hard. You might hit them. You might . . .

Kill them.

When I got to the caudal stump, Ricci was just clicking the last pellet through the valve. If we’d dumped them during the pitch and ditch, none of it would have happened. But dry waste is light. We’d accumulated ten pellets, only five kilograms, so I hadn’t bothered with them.

But a half-kilo pellet falling from a height can do a lot of damage.

I fired the feed into the middle of the sinus. One whale was thrashing on the slushy mesa surface, half-obscured by the concussive debris. Two more were falling, twisting in agony, their bladders tattered and flapping. Another three would have escaped damage, but they circulated into the path of the oncoming pellets, each one burst in turn, as if a giant hand had reached down and squeezed the life out of them.

Ricci was in my arms, then. Both of us quaking, falling to our knees. Holding each other and squeezing hard, as if we could break each other’s bones with the force of our own mistakes.

Six whales. Twenty-two people. All dead.

The other eleven whales scattered. One fled east and plunged through the twilight band into night. Its skin and bladders froze and burst, and its sinus skeleton shattered on the jagged ice. Its crew had been one of the most stubborn—none had evacuated. They all died. Ten people.

In total, thirty-two died because Ricci made an unwise decision.

The remaining ten whales re-congregated over a slushy depression near the beanstalk. Ricci had bought the surviving crews a few more hours, so they tried a solution along the lines Ricci had discovered. Ice climbers use drones with controlled explosive capabilities to stabilize their climbing routes. They tried a test; it worked—the whales fled again, but in the wrong direction and re-congregated close to the leading edge of night.

In the end, the others evacuated. All seventy got in their body bags and called for evac.

By strict accounting, Ricci’s actions led to a positive outcome. I remind her of that whenever I can. She says it doesn’t matter—we don’t play math games with human lives. Dead is dead, and nothing will change that.

And she’s right, because the moment she dumped those pellets, Ricci became the most notorious murderer our planet has ever known.

The other habs insist we hand her over to a conflict resolution panel. They’ve sent negotiators, diplomats—they’ve even sent Jane—but we won’t give her up. To them, that proves we’re dangerous. Criminals. Outlaws.

But we live in the heart of the matter, and we see it a little differently.

Ricci did nothing wrong. It was a desperate situation and she made a desperate call. Any one of us might have done the same thing, if we’d been smart enough to think of it.

We’re a solid band of outlaws, now. Vula, Treasure, Chara, Eddy, Bouche, Eleanora, Ricci, and me. We refuse to play nice with the other habs. They could cut off our feedstock, power, and data, but we’re betting they won’t. If they did, our blood would be on their hands.

So none of us are going anywhere. Why would we leave? The whole planet is ours, with unlimited horizons.

About the Author

Kelly Robson is currently a finalist for this year’s John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her novella “Waters of Versailles” won the 2016 Aurora Award and was a finalist for both the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She has also been a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and Sunburst Award. Kelly’s time travel novella “Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach” will be published by Tor.com imprint in 2018. She lives in Toronto with her wife, fellow SF writer A.M. Dellamonica.

Baroness

E. Catherine Tobler

In the Tank, they show Bishop the spider.

It’s the worst thing she’s ever seen; she thought spiders were bad enough when they were an inch long, but this is five inches, orange, triangular, and glossy-wet under the lights. It has pincers like a scorpion, legs like pistons. The spider launches itself at Bishop without hesitating. She hesitates and the spider is at her throat, in her throat, eating her from the inside out.

It feels as real as breathing, as real as sky.

This is why she’s in the Tank. It’s not real and Bishop tells herself that for the thousandth time. The Company means to condition her to what it’ll be like out there, in the trenches. In the Tank, Bishop can hesitate and not get herself dead; the Tank is supposed to train the hesitation out, supposed to make Bishop a goddamn man against the monsters of the galaxy. Get her phobia out in the Tank, then off to the trenches.

The trenches make the Tank look good. The trenches make the Tank look like home.

“Fuck this.”

Drake tongued the corner of his mouth, his pencil-thin fingers bringing up the display on his exo. His face, bony and sharp, ran with colored readouts: green, pink, yellow. All the colors were positive in their nature, nothing screaming red, so Bishop paced away from him, waiting.

“Five trophs in a can, five trophs in a can. Knock one down, slam it around . . . four trophs in a can.”

In the submersible’s close quarters, Golic’s voice rang hollow. It was on Bishop’s tongue to tell him to stop, but she let him be. They were oligotrophs and trophs, were made for this. Every day, trophs went where no other person could, and if they’d started to get a little on edge, so what. This was the job. They each had five years under their belts prior to Titan and that was saying something. Titan was year six and seven; when they left Titan, they’d be—Well, not heroes. Bishop didn’t hold with fairy tales.

“Anything?” Frost asked, queuing up her own exo to see what Drake saw.

“Ain’t nothing.”

The submersible, Elgyn, plunged over the ridge marking the farthest explored edge of the Kraken Mare, and there, everyone’s exo shrieked with new data.

“Now there’s something, you shit troph,” Drake bit out at Frost, “but what the—”

Bishop tuned them out, narrowing her focus to her own exo. Trophs didn’t need suits, not the way they’d been built. They could breathe methane, their formerly soft human bodies scaffolded in iron and steel exos, genetically transformed to be more metal than flesh. They didn’t eat much, didn’t shit much; they were nothing if not efficient. After their unlawful arrival in countries that did not want them, they’d been given a choice: go back or go to the Company. Having given up everything to come so far, they couldn’t go back, so had joined the Company. Had been made into the ideal machines, given a shot at a life few would know at the expense of everything they’d actually wanted.

All Bishop had to do was flex her fingers and a display coursed across the air in front of her. It showed their approach through the trench beneath liquid-methane-filled Kraken Mare. In the distance sat the submersible Three, piloted by Jones who’d been two days late getting back to station. They didn’t know why, though maybe now they did, Three pinned under a vessel Bishop couldn’t identify.

“Well, that’d be a UFO,” Morse said from his pilot’s chair, angling the Elgyn ever closer.

“Unidentified floating object,” Golic suggested on the edge of a laugh.

Bishop drew her fingers together, which narrowed the display before her, and a singular blink allowed her to zoom in on the unknown craft. The way it had come down, the ovoid ship was wedged between two cliff walls, trapping Three beneath it. The unfamiliar ship had no markings but for deep scratches likely left in the course of its descent. Its hull was silvery, like a blob of liquid mercury; solid at the edges and yet not. Moving in the flow of the methane, alive, but wedged firm.

“It’s not exactly floating,” Bishop said.

“Wedgie, then.”

“Drake?” Bishop asked, and the methane miner grunted again. From her position, she watched him manipulate the data on his own display, transforming the ship into three dimensions, spinning the angle of view until he plunged down the ship’s wound.

“Look at the belly.” His fingers skimmed his display, then threw the images against the wall so they could all see. “Three has pierced it. It’s not leaking air—no bubbles, no movement. Seal looks hard—maybe melted? I don’t fucking know. Unknown vessel is thirty-five meters stem to stern. Not getting anything from Jones. No life signs, no comms. Nothing on the unknown, either.”

“Drone?” Frost asked.

“Could be.” Drake pulled the images from the wall, and refreshed his display with a ten-finger flick. He zoomed into Three again, the ship showing dents and scratches as the Elgyn lights skimmed closer. “Hatch is clear on Three. Should be able to sync. Morse?”

“Yeah, yeah, five minutes out.”

In the Tank, they show Bishop the emptiness.

The emptiness is never quite empty. The bleak room makes Bishop remember the crossing, when the Bishop steamed across gray oceans, toward a distant, freer land. The emptiness makes Bishop remember the name her parents gave her (mo chroi, her father whispered, kissing her bare brown feet before wrapping her in an impossibly soft blanket knit by her nana’s own hands), makes her remember the officials who later named her and every other refugee for the ship they arrived on. How many Bishops? How many Frosts?

Bishop thought spiders were bad enough, but the emptiness harbors a different kind of pain and out of it come shadows. The room darkens with them until she cannot see anything, not even a spider were there to be one. She breathes and waits and an echoing breath greets her in the shadowed dark. Who is it? She never knows; she understands that’s part of the point, to push her past the fear of assault. Having slept in a ship, packed against twelve bodies huddled against the same wall through the endless journey, breath doesn’t unnerve her. The light that slants down when they crack Bishop’s cargo door—that is what unnerves her, so when the Tank reverts to its bright walls, to its stark void, that’s when Bishop flinches.

Three was a ghost ship, hollow and creaking. Bishop stood in the access corridor and found it was not unlike the Tank with its darknesses, its impending antagonists. They’d trained for this too; without her having to say a word, the group fanned out, assuming their positions, taking their readings. Bishop stayed on Drake, his scans penetrating the gloom.

“Nothing,” he said.

But there was something. Small and distant maybe, but Bishop could feel her arms prickling with it. Troph skin was strangely sensitive, attuned to the hostility of space, of strange, airless moons. The sun shone on Titan, but provided no warmth; Bishop and other trophs didn’t need the sun, not for warmth and certainly not to see, but she wondered about it all the same. She could remember what it looked like on the ocean when her mother lifted her to look out the Bishop’s grimy porthole. A thousand hands before hers had printed the window, but she added hers to the mess, pushing herself up, to look at the sunset at the edge of the world. Now, her eyes were made for darkness, and she saw nothing out of the ordinary, nothing amiss or approaching them.

No spiders. No emptiness. Could troph eyes lie?

“Let’s walk,” Bishop said and they went down the corridor, two leading, two trailing, Morse remaining with Elgyn.

Three was small, but not so small as all that; she had space for passengers, because once upon a time administrations took the time to dream of pleasure cruises beneath the methane lakes. Gaze Upon the Glories of Titan’s Infrared Rainbows! Such dreams had fallen to the wayside when future administrations decided Titan’s methane could be mined for greater profits. What did tourists matter, when there were ships to fuel, when there were unconquered stretches of space yet to dominate?

Bishop supposed they were lucky to have Three at all; most moon-base crews had unmanned submersibles they could only pilot remotely. They couldn’t walk the halls of their ships, let alone explore the more distant features of their base. In this, Bishop supposed trophs were blessed. Being confined within a wholly human body would be—Prison or freedom, she didn’t know, placing a hand against the wall, to feel the ship vibrate with some distant disturbance.

“Drake?”

Drake had come to a standstill in the middle of the corridor, sensors humming. Bishop didn’t press, only looked into the spreading darkness and waited. Within those breaths, she felt it, the warm press of spider feet against the back of her neck. It was so like being in the Tank, she didn’t flinch. But this was the Trench, not the Tank, and she was still all right. She was smiling before she knew it, proud of herself because they’d trained her for this. This very moment. Bishop breathed through it, took a deep breath and—

The feeling fled.

Bishop turned to survey the wall behind her, ordinary and smooth; there was nothing there, nor any trace that anything ever was. A small sign listed the rooms on the deck, labeled with numbers, arrows. A hotel, Bishop thought, but she’d never been inside anything so posh.

“This way.”

Drake moved again and Bishop fell in line, Three groaning around them. She expected to feel the ship settle in the sea, but she couldn’t feel anything moving except her. Bishop pinged Golic and Frost to follow them and sent Morse an update; they moved down a deck, toward the infirmary.

In the Tank, they show Bishop the Fear Moat.

They tell Bishop every creature fears something; this is what she fears, they say. But it’s just the Bishop, the ship she came over on. She walks its corridors as if she knows them all, though some part of her understands that she never left the cargo hold. She dreamed these corridors, then, perhaps imagining them better than they were ever meant to be.

The corridors lead to rooms that look like houses, with kitchens that smell like nana’s black beer bread. Windows looking on to meadows that stretch green, dotted with white flowers heavy with droning bees. She finds her own room, for her name is painted on the door, and inside there stands a bed, and a desk piled with books, and a line of shoes in front of the closet door. It is the shoes that captivate her; she kneels down and pulls one pair onto her dirty and cut feet, and her next step does not hurt at all.

She walks to the window and presses her hand to the clean pane, and stares at the meadow until her eyes begin to water from the bright sunshine. She spies a figure in the meadow, a thin young man she knows is her brother. (In the ship, he was so slight she could hold him between her knees and her breasts, fully enclosed within her arms.) Fergal, she wants to call out, but the window is shut and he’s running. Laughing as he high-steps through the meadow grass, as he plucks a flower and gently shakes the bees into the sky.

The window opens easily under her hands, and she’s up and over the sill before she can consider how ma and da may yell at her. Windows are not doors, how many times had they said. Oh, but they could be, she thinks, and her shod feet sink into the soft meadow grass and she’s running after Fergal, who is little but a speck of red amid the green grasses. Wait, she calls out. C’mon, he calls back.

At the edge of the meadow, she finds a pair of shoes, blood-flecked and dirty. Beyond the shoes, the world falls away, a black ravine filled with tangled, thorned vines separating her from Fergal. Where has he gone? Beyond the black gash of the ravine, a city rises against a gray sky. The meadow grasses are burned and bent beneath buildings, and Fergal’s body is flung among them, unmoving. Beyond his body, the world does not exist.

Three’s infirmary stood silent, but the reason Drake led them there became instantly apparent: the floor was flooded with liquid methane. The trophs walked through it as if it were water; it felt cool against Bishop’s modified feet, but she couldn’t tell if it was because it actually is, or if that’s just how her body perceived it. She wondered if walking through fire would feel similarly cool, uninspiring of fear.

Beneath the clear liquid, Bishop could see the shadowed outline of a body. She moved toward it, knowing the methane wasn’t deep enough to conceal a body, but the hesitation had been trained out of her, so she moved, always moved. Drake and the others fanned out, Frost covering the single entry so whatever they find inside cannot leave. (And, Bishop thought, whatever was yet without could not enter.) Bishop kneeled in the wetness, reaching a hand for the shadow.

“Fergal,” she says, even as she knew it would be Jones, their missing miner.

Golic was confused. “Who the—”

Bishop distilled her focus to the shadow, to the body. Her hand didn’t touch anything but floor; on the floor, she pulsed her fingers once, scanning the liquid, the shadow, the entire room. Close up, the shadow looked like ink floating in water, tendrils of black stretching into the colorless flood. When the shadow moved toward Bishop, it was like the spider in the Tank: sudden, vicious. She hesitated and the spider was on her, in her mouth, eating her from the inside out.

As real as sky and—

Baroness breathes.

In the depths of the Vinsin, Baroness draws fresh air into the part of their gilled body that is not the ship, though what is ship and what is body is blurred, indistinct at this juncture of the union. It has been too long since either was apart; Baroness cannot tell the ship’s belly from their own.

Still, Vinsin remains perfectly tight against the liquid methane that courses in riot across its hull. Even with the intrusion of the secondary ship, Vinsin remains sealed against breach, yet they can sense something approaching in the dark wetness. It is small and inconsequential, but still coming closer. Baroness cannot lift either ship out of the sea, cannot summon the energy to pilot away from what traps them. Baroness tries once and again, but Vinsin is unresponsive, a ship that will never fly again, and they are sealed within.

Within the ship that has pierced them, there is a humming, a heartbeat. There is a warmth in the depth of this chilled sea, and it calls to Baroness like nothing has in a very long time. Baroness takes another deep breath, they exhale a wash of solar wind across a barren moon. Breath ripples the air and draws this heartbeat closer, until Baroness can hold it within their own grip. The heartbeat tastes like iron. It is foul upon their tongue, rejected almost as soon as tasted.

The heartbeat hovers in the air before Baroness, spreading and silent. The blood is black at this depth, the blood is thin, the blood is gone as quickly as it came, and Baroness cannot bond. They sag against Vinsin, trying to call the ship to wakefulness once more, but the ship does not answer. Some part of Baroness does not answer, and this is abhorrent to them, the idea that half of them is gone, silent.

Baroness reaches again, screaming at Vinsin, but again there is no reply. Baroness can taste the methane and beyond it, water ice and rock, and beyond that—Oh, the stars have been lost to them, and Baroness howls a hollow cry that ripples through the methane sea. Vinsin still does not move and Baroness hangs in the unexpected casket of the ship, reaching, calling, searching.

The second heartbeat Baroness finds is utterly alien. It is close, as close as the first was, but tastes not of iron. This heart tastes like nothing they have known. It is a heart that has been changed, withered to its core until very little can dominate it. It does not need air or light or water to keep beating. It simply goes on.

Explain, Baroness whispers against the withered heart. Explain yourself.

In the Tank, they show Bishop the worst case scenario.

The ship drowns much as a body would, water filling every empty pocket until the air is simply gone, pressed out. Bishop can feel the air pressing from her lungs, too. Decompression. The world goes dark at the edges, perhaps because the ship is falling into the depths of some black sea, but also perhaps because she is losing the ability to see anything ever again.

Bishop thinks it’s some distant ship she’s never set foot on, until she finds Fergal in her arms, not quite drowned. The ship, then, is the Bishop, and everyone they have crossed over with is drowning or dead. No one matters but for her brother; his brown eyes are open, but they can’t focus on her. He fits as he ever did, into the hollow that her arms and legs have made, but he cannot see her. She can see him and only him. They would have called him Bishop, too, named for this drowning ship. Every Bishop a brother, a sister, the Company building a family even as they tore them apart.

She tries to remind herself she’s in the Tank; it’s not real. This isn’t water and this isn’t Fergal, but it is and it is. Seeing him blink his last blink is too much. His eyes never close, his mouth parted in an eternal gasp for air as the last bubbles of breath from his lungs escape into the void above them. She alone has a choice; she can remain with the dead, or she can flee, and live to see another day.

Bishop hauls Fergal by his sodden collar, swimming upward through the dead that clutter the compartment. Everyone floats, arms and hair and clothes streaming as she kicks past, and up always up, toward a surface she cannot see.

There is no surface to see.

Bishop realizes this with a shriek that takes the last of her own breath. She does not release her hold on Fergal, does not stop trying to haul him from the wreck even as the weight of it presses down on her. Everything goes dark and uncomfortably warm; she thinks death ought to be cold, surely. Death should be ice, not warmth and motion. When she opens her eyes, she is wet and dripping in the center of the Tank.

Across from her sits a spider.

“Bish. Here.”

Golic pried Bishop’s hand off of the floor. She dripped methane as Golic led her away from the spilled ink—not ink, but not anything she completely understood, either. Although, she did. In her withered heart, she knew it was Jones, or what was left of Jones. Where was the rest of her? Bishop stared at the blur in the water, and it faded until it was gone, only a half remembered thing in the wreck of Three.

“Anything?” Frost asked from her post at the door.

“Ain’t nothing,” Drake answered, pacing back.

Explain, the voice whispered inside Bishop. Explain yourself.

The voice felt like the weight of the drowning ship in the Tank, felt like the spider crawling down her throat. Bishop cleared her own throat now, though there was nothing there, her body too efficient to malfunction in any such way.

“Jones sent a message to the station at 0300,” Drake said, “and then nothing. Fuck this—you clear to move on, Bishop?”

Bishop nodded and pushed up to her feet without a thought. “Yes,” she said, because she was always ready, never not ready, so the four walked out of the infirmary and sealed it behind them.

“—happened on Europa, didn’t it.”

Bishop listened as they climbed through the ship, to Frost and Golic talking in low tones behind she and Drake.

“People just vanishing.”

“People don’t just vanish.”

“We ain’t still people, so how’d we know anyhow.”

Bishop considered that—not the people vanishing, but if they were still people or not. Was she the same girl huddled in the hold of the Bishop? The little girl—six? Now we are six—who had parents and a brother and a name that was a confusing jumble of sounds on foreign tongues that didn’t take the time to learn how to properly say a thing. They had all been disposable, easily remade when they were found lacking in what the Company needed.

Explain yourself.

Bishop considered the voice, too, its warm weight settling uncomfortably at the base of her throat. It made her feel as though she needed to clear her throat again, but she didn’t. She pressed her modified fingers to her chest to find there was nothing that would hinder her normal operation.

As if to explain herself, she thought of the ship Bishop, of the warmth of the hold, and her small brother. Of her parents. Of the way they had all been parted. Her father cried and her mother—The voice didn’t want to hear the last; it dragged her back to her brother, to the neat way he folded up to fit within the cage of her arms and legs. Like the voice, he’d had a warm weight, and she had not minded bearing it, because he hated sleeping on the floor of the ship. The floor left marks on his skin, until it was worn through. Bishop took a breath—

—and saw a cage within a spherical room. The cage was not metal; if anything, it was liquid, quicksilver bars streaming down and around a vast, ovoid creature. The creature was blacker than anything Bishop had seen before, as black as the spaces between stars, though when it unfurled (and it unfurled with all the grace of a thousand blooming flowers, bursting with fragrance and sound both), it was violently purple. The deeper Bishop fell into the unfurling creature, the more purple everything became, until the purple was black once again. Bishop felt as though she were emerging from the other side of the beast, as though she had been run through the cage and shat back out.

Bishop dripped mercury to the floor and didn’t know where it had come from, only that the other ship looked that way, silver and fluid. It ran in silver streams behind her, causing Golic and Frost to sidestep. They didn’t have to think about it, they simply did, bodies attuned to the environment around them, avoiding any hazard.

“Bish, is your suit malfunc—”

Bishop was aware of the duality, of the fact that she walked the corridor with her crew and that she also stood within a sphere, staring at the quicksilver cage, which held the blackness. Not the blackness—

Baroness.

The name swelled within Bishop, causing breath to stutter in her throat. She dragged in a fresh breath and felt Baroness breathe in turn, and around them, the methane sea quaked. Bishop stumbled against the wall in the corridor, and stared at the faces that swam around her: Drake and Frost and Baroness and Golic. Baroness had no eyes that Bishop could discern, but saw everything nonetheless, its sleek head rippling back into its ovoid body.

“Where is Jones?” Bishop asked Baroness, receiving three frowns from her crew in return.

“Something ain’t right,” Drake said as he turned his scans from Three and onto Bishop.

“Trophs don’t malfunction,” Golic said.

People don’t just vanish.

“Then where the fuck is Jones?” Frost bit the words out, her face swimming into darkness before Bishop as Baroness answered.

Jones malfunctioned. Its heart was not . . . ideal.

Bishop could sense that “ideal” wasn’t the word Baroness was looking for, but that it struggled to find the proper one.

Explain yourself.

Drake’s scans illuminated the air between Bishop and the crew, but did not reflect in the black void that was Baroness. The scans were red and flickering. Bishop reached for Baroness, fingers skittering with something akin to lightning when she made contact. Bishop’s breath stuttered in her throat again.

“Bipedal life form,” Bishop said of herself, to Drake’s frowning face, “augmented for . . . ” She tried to find the right words. “Harsh conditions of . . . ” What had they called it—“Adventures on the outer—”

Bishop closed her eyes and tried to show Baroness, because remembering was easier than talking. She thought of Titan Station, of its heptagon corridors, windows that gazed upon Saturn and the system beyond. The sun looked impossibly small, wasn’t warm, but that was okay, they didn’t need warmth, though once they had, once they had rolled in green meadows, until they had left them behind, behind because their world was crumbling, falling to pieces and no longer held a place for them. Drake and his wife, their newborn dead on the shore; Frost hauling herself from icy waters she should not have survived; Golic and Morse both stowaways, hidden until hauled into view. In the bottom of the ship, bundled together against the cold nights, Bishop and her brother—

That isn’t your name—

Though she tried to think of the name, Bishop could no longer find it. Mo chroi is what came to mind, it having fallen from her father’s mouth so often, and Baroness seemed content with this explanation. When Bishop remembered being turned away at the entry, the island and the gates and the people—Baroness rippled with disgust.

“Your life will change,” Bishop whispered. “They tell you. And they aren’t wrong. But they also aren’t . . . specific.”

“The hell is wrong with you,” Drake whispered, his face looming in Bishop’s view, Baroness liquid and black behind him. “Scans are clean now, but showed a spike in—”

“Explain yourself,” Bishop said to Baroness, and Drake went back to his work even as Baroness’s voice filled Bishop’s body like a flood, like a drowning.

The ship was alive, Bishop saw, and into it they poured Baroness, sleek and wet and the heart of the ship even as they became the brain, too. One was nothing without the other; together, they made a perfect whole, a unit that could fly across the vast heavens, through solar winds and into the depths where none had ventured before. Baroness went everywhere, until the call from a frozen, whiplashed moon sent them off course, until greedy Saturn pulled Baroness first, throwing them into Titan.

Happened on Europa, didn’t it?

People just vanishing.

“Did you take Jones?” Bishop asked.

Baroness roared and rushed as the water would, down Bishop’s throat to swallow her heart.

In the Tank, they show Bishop the emptiness.

This emptiness is all-consuming. There are no shadows, there is no sunlight, only a perpetual gray twilight. Nothing grows in this place, for even the dirt is rough with salt. If someone once lived here, they can live here no longer.

Bishop does not fear this emptiness, because she has always known it. Her homeland, turned over by mines, by soldiers, the ground thick with blood. Her escape, jostled by waves, by storms, the compartment thick with sweat. Her arrival, denied and detoured, for this land was not for her, they said; she belonged somewhere else.

Anywhere but here.

No matter where Bishop walks, the emptiness comes. There is no place for her. Cast out of her homeland, refused by every refuge. There is a way, a voice tells her, but it is also empty. You can go back, or you can allow us to make you as empty as every place you have touched. You will be turned over, you will be jostled, you will be detoured.

And so she is, because it is the only path forward. The path into the dark.

She opens herself to the emptiness so that she never fears it. It will come—all will be lost—but she will carry on. As she has always done.

In the Tank, they show her the emptiness.

In the Tank, they show her the spider.

In the Tank, she sees that both are the same, eating her from the inside out.

As real as sky.

In the Tank, Bishop opens her mouth. She knows that sometimes it’s about swallowing the spider to survive, to become something more.

Bishop takes a breath and Baroness breathes. Bishop feels as though she is flying and when she opens her eyes, discovers it is so. It is not the murky depths of Kraken Mare that surround her, but the glory of the universe outside Saturn’s orbit. Bishop cannot feel a ship, can only feel Baroness encompassing her, filling her to overflowing. In return, Bishop cages Baroness the way she once did Fergal; a small body held within her own, protected no matter what comes, cherished. When she moves as she would within a cockpit, pressing feet to floor and hands to controls, the sky moves. They move, in concert.

She thinks of herself as the ship, for so they named her, Baroness the humming engine beneath. She moves them out of Titan’s reach, through the long-reaching and icy shadows of Saturn’s rings. She turns them head over heel and stem over stern, and Baroness does not ask her to explain herself. Baroness knows, as Bishop knows, the things that have been lost, the things that may still be discovered.

Bishop, now Baroness.

They sent you out here, they think as one, and you lost all you had, but there is more.

She plummets through the system, past Jupiter and Europa, through asteroids that appear to cascade around them in a blizzard they move in such a flurry. She pushes past ruddy Mars and closer to fragile Earth, where the waters are still largely blue, and where she does not pause to look down on all she lost, for she’s flying past it, into the depths, into the black, into every trench they would deny her.

About the Author

E. Catherine Tobler is a Sturgeon Award finalist and editor at Shimmer Magazine.

The Person Who Saw Cetus

Tang Fei, translated by S. Qiouyi Lu

“What should I do? Turn gray with the pitch-black night?”

She would always remember that summer day. Father’s enormous shadow settled upon her; she looked up from her workbook.

“Lilian.” Father squatted before her desk, the crimson clouds outside draped across his shoulders. Father said her name again, then once more. Funny; never had there been a man like him who delighted so much in his daughter’s name.

She laughed. “What?”

“What are you doing?” He knew that she was doing her homework, of course, but he longed for a father-daughter conversation.

Mother said that Father didn’t have a way with words, that he was quiet. She couldn’t imagine her father like that. But he definitely didn’t quite know how to communicate. He’d leave for work and half a month would fly by; when he returned, he’d only speak nonsense to his family.

Father stood beside her, looking at her homework. The computer had already gone into screensaver mode; bright green, heart-shaped clouds darted across the black interface. Father swept his hand over the screen. A depth view of the interior of a railway car burst onto the gallium nitride screen. The scenery outside sped by the windows; inside, fourteen pink goldfish sat stiffly on the same bench, their bodies swaying with the forward motion of the train, their eyes spinning as they watched the clouds whirling throughout the cabin. This was the screensaver that Father had programmed just for her.

The only one in the whole universe. He always took great pains to make strange and unique gifts for her.

Father picked up the computer and tapped the goldfishes’ heads in a particular order, unlocking the computer.

“Summer homework? Hasn’t school started already?” he asked.

Of course he knew that this was summer homework. Mother had sent him to check up on her, after all.

“It’s due tomorrow.”

Father took a closer look. Although Lilian was only ten years old, she could still sense her father’s awkwardness. He really wasn’t good at this.

“Why did you leave this question blank?” Father asked. And only he would ask such a question; the answer was obvious, embarrassing. Embarrassing to the point where Lilian couldn’t even respond.

“Write about an unforgettable trip to outer space that you took this summer.” He read the question aloud, and then he understood.

The sky had darkened. Cars whistled past on the nearby highway, the sound sharp and penetrating.

It was as if they were sinking, sinking from the abundance of the Earth to this tiny apartment. Compared to the peeling outer walls, the dilapidated furniture inside wasn’t such an eyesore.

Regardless of whether they’re rich or poor, people can always find a way to live with dignity, with beauty. Mother had said that. Lilian’s parents lived like that, too. They did their best to make their home comfortable and fitting; they tried their hardest to create the same learning environment for her as her classmates had. Even if they didn’t have the money for a microcomputer implant, Father still found a way to make her old graphene tablet retro and stylish, so that even her classmates were envious of her.

She thought they’d always be able to deal with poverty.

Until she saw that question.

An unforgettable trip to outer space? Her family couldn’t afford such an expense, not even one trip to summer camp on the Moon. She’d never mentioned this to her parents; they couldn’t do anything about it. Her classmates flashed their photos in their group chats: tender moments from within flight cabins, the first footprint on the moon, things drifting in the currents of Europa’s surface oceans—and, of course, no end to the commemorative sites on the planets of the Phoenix Belt. And she, stuck at home, would keep refreshing her classmates’ feeds like an addict; she paid the most attention to these posts and photos, each the same as the last. On the first day of school, she skipped class.

Her teacher had let Mother know that she’d skipped class; Mother had sent Father, who’d just returned home. Lilian would rather have been scolded by her teacher in front of her entire class than face her father like this.

“I’ve already done the research; I can put something together in half an hour,” she said.

“I think we can tweak that screensaver of yours.” Father’s eyes gleamed; as he spoke, his fingers flew over the keyboard.

“How about when the clouds touch the goldfish, the goldfish spit out bubbles? What do you think—pretty cool, right?”

Many years later, she’d remember his face, glowing with enthusiasm. Father was like those children in old movies setting off fireworks, all his attention on the strange new thing he was creating. He wasn’t avoiding embarrassment—he had already forgotten it.

She kept her graphene tablet. She’d rolled it into a bundle, carrying it with countless other possessions in her suitcase as she went from place to place. Although the tablet was old, it functioned solidly and was still in good condition. Even after being flung out by a few angry landlords, it was still fine.

When she was 22, she turned on the tablet before someone, showing him the screensaver that Father had made for her. He’d been astounded. He didn’t know that she hadn’t turned on the tablet in ten years, just as she didn’t know then that she’d fallen in love with him. They sat in a little nook in her dorm. It was raining outside, pitter-patter. He listened to her talk about her childhood, the silly things her father would do, that question on her summer homework. She actually remembered it.

“I received full marks on that question. The first time.”

“Awesome.”

“How about you?”

She stroked the screen. Those dead-serious goldfish. Delicate rainfall and no other sounds. The wind seeped into her skin; she curled up. “Father spent three days answering that question for me.” And it wasn’t exactly convincing. Her teacher thought the planet she described violated the laws of physics and couldn’t exist; Lilian had earned a zero on that assignment. Father was more furious than she was; he argued with her teacher, even succeeded in getting her teacher to change the grade to a passing one.

“But actually, my teacher wasn’t wrong. There was never such a thing as ‘my visit to outer space.’ My father must’ve made the planet up. I don’t know why he was so angry; he argued with every teacher about this question, defending his invention 24/7. My teacher must’ve been scared of him in the end, thought he was too much of a hassle to deal with, and just changed the grade. Despite being terrible at conversation, he ended up winning the argument after all.”

But everything has its price. Not long after that incident, Lilian was suspended.

“Suspended? Why?”

“No reason. One day, I received the notice, and that was that.”

“What did your father say?”

“He wasn’t there.” She laughed. Once he’d dealt with her summer homework, he’d gone to another city; his work required him to travel a lot. Besides, even if he were at home, there was still nothing he could have done. He must have known that she’d been suspended, but all he could do was call on the long-distance communiscope and mumble her name; he didn’t know how to express condolences or regret. Such an awkward person, arguing with people over what he deemed important and never giving an inch. Like insisting that the landscape in her homework really did come from an actual planet. No matter what, he had to convince her teacher that the planet was real, that the essay was real. Like all other things that he thought needed to be protected, it didn’t matter what price he had to pay; he’d defend them until death.

So, that question—or, the fact that “such a planet does exist”—was actually far more important than she was: for the first time after so many years, this thought emerged clearly in Lilian’s mind.

Before this, she’d never considered why she felt sad.

Not a recollection, nor a thought.

As long as she didn’t know the reason, she wouldn’t feel sadder.

Lilian let out a long sigh, counted her heartbeats, and waited for her nose to clear. She felt as if a wave had passed over her, as if she were now floating up from the gloomy, icy depths to the surface of the ocean. His voice was like sunlight piercing down from above.

He asked, “Your father often wasn’t home?”

“Do you know about performance art? That’s what he did.”

“Are those what they call body artists?”

“I guess so. Through physical performance and installations combined with dramatic elements, these artists convey experiences and ideas. They’re not the same as actors either, oh no.”

“So serious.” His eyes widened.

“Nah.” She laughed and changed the topic. But he returned to the previous one.

“I remember performance artists were really popular for a few years. If you had a party and didn’t invite a performance artist, it wasn’t a real party.”

It wasn’t just a commercial pursuit—early performance artists were also employed to advocate and influence government policy. But she didn’t correct him.

“Yeah. It’s too bad that my father was just an ordinary performance artist; he wasn’t particularly outstanding, and the money he made was barely enough to support our family. But he did genuinely enjoy his work.”

“And then?”

“Nothing. In the end he still wasn’t very successful.” She glanced at the small box on the table. The top danced with green light. “I downloaded some old movies. Let’s watch them.”

They put on the VR headsets together. The induction cord connected to a designated spot on the cerebrum. As the movie played, microcurrents flowed through the probes on the induction cord, stimulating corresponding areas in the brain to create the illusion of being in the same time and place.

Real illusions.

People fell into it. Even if reason continuously asserted that this was fake, the body and all its senses had already been transported to virtual reality, experiencing uncanny adventure stories, secreting the pheromones of hate, terror, love, and joy. It might as well have been real.

You could have it so long as you could pay the cash. No wonder people flocked to it. Who knew how many people the VR movie supply chain supported, including former performance artists.

But Father surely wouldn’t have agreed with this thought.

He also wouldn’t change professions.

That is, if he were still alive.

They watched Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. At the twenty-minute mark, he fell asleep. So she didn’t tell him that she’d seen this movie dozens of times, even once on film; so she didn’t tell him that she always thought Marcelli looked a little like her father; so she didn’t tell him that her Marcelli-resembling father had later gone insane and killed someone and had never been caught.

The rain kept falling that night. He left after they finished watching the movie. The raincoat he borrowed never returned.

Over the next ten years, one after another, her other possessions were borrowed away. She also accumulated a couple things that she’d borrowed and never returned. That became less frequent as the years passed. She was alone in the world; she threw herself into her work. She made only the barest of connections with people, carried no burdensome debts, and was never greeted by acquaintances on the street.

So, at first, she didn’t process that the old man sitting on the sofa across from her was calling her name.

“Lilian, long time no see.”

She recognized that cheerful voice. “Hello.”

Every performance artist needs an agent to manage their career. Father especially. The old man before her was perhaps the only person on Earth who could work with Father. After Father went missing, he continued to manage Father’s business, selling his installations, images, and souvenirs; every month, he’d send money to Lilian and her mother.

“So chill. I read that news report about you. It’s next week, right? Humanity’s first voyage through a wormhole.”

“I probably don’t really look like an astronaut.”

“Not when you were little, at least. Amazing.”

People always talked about her like this. Especially people who knew her when she was little. She’d grown up in poverty in a single-parent household; she was always climbing upward, finally becoming a top astronaut—she must’ve faced many hardships.

They thought they knew. But they didn’t know.

Suffering isn’t something you can understand simply by thinking about it.

“Did something come up?”

The old man glanced at the time, then stood. “You’re leaving next week, right? I want to give you something before you go. Are you free in a little bit? My office is just upstairs. I’m about to see a client; we should be done in about 40 minutes. Come see me then.”

She was still trying to figure out how to decline the invitation, but the moment had already passed.

The old man had already walked over to the door of the tea room. “Oh right, how’s your mother doing?”

“She passed away seven years ago.”

The old man looked back. “I’m so sorry.”

She laughed. “No, you don’t care at all.”

She was telling the truth. But putting it that way was probably unfair to the old man. He’d already done his duty as an agent. Father was the old man’s least profitable performance artist; on top of that, there was that notorious performance accident, after which he’d completely vanished. The old man absolutely had reason to dissolve the lifetime contract with Father, but he hadn’t. The good news was that, after the accident, Father’s work gained a novelty factor and was suddenly marketable again. Without much effort, the old man could send Lilian and her mother some money. They weathered many hardships that way.

Mother was grateful for the old man. Even though, from a businessperson’s perspective, he was just fulfilling the terms of a contract. Lilian didn’t understand Mother, but she admired her; admired that, after experiencing so much, she still saw hope in the world; admired that she left this world with her heart full of warmth and thankfulness. She wanted to be like her mother, but she couldn’t.

However, she could still sit in the tea room for a while before going upstairs to say hi, for old times’ sake.

Lilian took a tiny sip of tea—there was no need to drink two cups at a place like this.

“His understanding of this world was frank, fearless. You could see within brutal and bloody acts the possibility of love.” She didn’t know which patron had turned on the cable TV. The holographic image of a handsome man projected onto the empty floor in the middle of the tea room. His facial features, deportment, voice; there was nothing that couldn’t be called perfect. And that beautiful body beneath the close-fitting glass-fiber material could make anyone’s imagination roam. He was so confident; he knew that people would buy his act.

Lilian knew that face: the most powerful art critic on Earth.

Even if she weren’t watching the TV, there was no way she could miss that face. He was everywhere. Bored, Lilian started to estimate how much it would cost to insure that well-crafted body. It was a good way to pass the time; after completing the computation, it was about time for her to get up and see the old man. The critic had just mentioned Boyce; he talked on and on, his words an unceasing flow like gems splashing onto a jade plate.

Before his words could get her feet wet, Lilian strode out of the tea room.

The man’s office was as old-fashioned as he was: 20th century neoclassical style, with real leather sofas, abstract art, and, of course, a mahogany desk.

“Well?” the old man asked, spreading both arms.

She smiled and didn’t make a sound.

“You know, you’re really quite like your father. Whenever I called to him on the street, I’d have to call until my throat was hoarse for him to hear.”

Never really came across acquaintances on the street. She didn’t explain it as such. “Did you want to talk about something?”

“You know, recently your father’s work has been doing well; collectors often pay high prices for his installations and performance images. The masses are jumping onto this bandwagon and buying anything that has to do with him; even a postcard with his portrait printed on it will sell several hundred thousand in a day.”

“I don’t understand. Who would buy his things?” She was astounded. Father’s work was never particularly welcomed.

“It’s true. That man always minded his own business as he did things, never understanding others’ feelings. So many employers only accepted his work reluctantly. He also always liked to ramble and say odd things.”

“Using pure aesthetics as a cure to rescue this world of its hysteria.” She mimicked Father’s tone as she spoke.

The old man fell back in his chair and guffawed.

She didn’t laugh.

In the end, the person who went insane was Father.

The one who tried to rescue the world from hysteria ended up being hysteria’s ultimate outcome.

Mother always forbade her from watching that particular performance, even exhorting her on her deathbed to vow that she’d never view it. But she’d still seen it, and not just once. In her darkest moments, she’d watched that recording on repeat with a morbid fascination. Although she wouldn’t admit it, it was as if she could feel the same hysteria, to the point where she was shivering—perhaps within that shivering she could get infinitely close to the answer to a question that she didn’t know.

Father’s last performance. He’d enclosed himself with a young elephant in a glass room the size of a shipping container. Every wall flashed with simulated images of the universe’s birth and evolution: supernovae dilating; nebulae forming; unmeasurable amounts of interplanetary dust; the second generation of stars forming; gas giants coalescing; planets coming together to orbit binary stars; a dying star, its revolution stopped, half tundra, half inferno; all the lakes on a planet boiling under a thin atmosphere. Fast-forwarding, on endless loop. Time and space beyond human comprehension, all condensed in that moment into that shipping-container-sized glass room.

One elephant and one human’s universe.

The simulation played without intermission, accompanied by an indescribable, terrible roar.

Seven hours later, the young elephant went mad in its own excrement and urine. It howled and ran into the wall, and then into Father, crushing with all its weight his already badly mangled body; then, it rolled about. Blood, organs, shards of broken bone, and eyeballs splattered everywhere, landing on distant stars.

The performance was over.

An unsalvageable corpse and an insane elephant were the coda.

In the initial shock, people believed that the performance artist couldn’t have actually died. He’d used a brazen trick, replacing himself with a clone to complete this deathly performance. “This ruthless murder not only tramples on the law, but also defiles aesthetics and ethics; it has violated humanity’s basic decency.” The person who took the lead in pointing this out was that art critic, condemning as he spoke.

The police immediately set out to arrest him; hackers searched for every bit of information about Father and doxed him; bounty hunters organized and moved to bring this murderer to justice—no cost was spared, but he escaped them all.

With such an enormous net cast, he fled under cover of the hubbub that he himself had raised and was never seen again.

Could the art collecting world suddenly admit such a notorious murderer ten years later?

“They forgave him?” she asked the old man.

The old man shrugged. No comment.

It was about time to leave. She rose and prepared to say farewell. The old man stopped her and took a large box out of a drawer.

She opened the lid and found herself stupefied.

“I’m sure someone would pay a fortune for this, but I think you should have it,” the old man said.

A stereoscope made of pearwood.

The cover and separator on the photo viewing box were both lightproof, the lens was in good condition, the support slid on the track normally, and the copper knob shone like new. The stereoscopic mirror had been preserved well; it was as pristine as the day twenty years ago when Father had shown it to her.

Of course, that photo was also in the box.

She didn’t touch it.

Twenty years had passed, and it was only faintly yellow.

“My summer homework,” she murmured to herself.

“So it’s true; I thought he was kidding. How reckless, using this as source material.” The old man stared at her, surprised. “Is this a real photo, or was it manipulated?”

“He said it was real.” She didn’t make another sound and carefully put the lid back on the box.

Another person’s voice filled the room; the TV had turned on at its programmed time. A familiar silhouette appeared before them.

“Now, this person has high praise for your father. The world’s foremost art critic,” the old man said to her.

This was the second time in an hour that Lilian had seen that face. She turned away.

“Don’t be like that, Lily,” the old man said, looking into her eyes. “It’s already over.”

“He looks younger, doesn’t he?”

“You can’t blame him for what happened to your father. He’s an art critic; that’s his job. It’s all in the distant past now.”

Twelve years ago wasn’t that far in the past.

At that time, that great art critic was still just a second-tier critic, fifty years old and struggling to make a name for himself among his colleagues. Serendipitously, he met Father.

The critic had been led to a pitch-black seat in the theater beside the municipal square; he held a telescope-like object that had been given to every spectator—the usher had told him that it was called a stereoscope. When a beam of blue light fell on a front-row seat, he raised the stereoscope according to the instructions. He saw a guy wearing a spacesuit leap onto the stage; the spotlight followed him as he made his way into the dark depths. The light went out; the astronaut had entered the darkness.

Suddenly, a bright light came on. The entire theater was like a gleaming tin roof on a summer’s day. When he opened his eyes, he was in another world.

Were those trees? Trees that looked like storm clouds.

The tree trunks were made up of fine, golden piping. The piping followed a regular pattern, intertwining to form a complex, braided shape; hundreds of millions of strands pleated together to form an even more dazzling shape. Above, the trunks fanned out into countless delicate branches, and the branches fanned out into even finer divisions; the iterations continued to spread until they were all over the egg-white sky, until the naked eye could no longer see them. Below the tree trunks, like a mirror of the branches above, the trees’ enormous roots also grew in an awe-inspiring manner, spreading, expanding, and fanning out until roots as fine as a single strand of hair clung onto the surface of the silver rock below.

At first glance, this unbelievable organism looked more like a tree trunk suspended in mid-air.

Why would one think that this resembled a tree? Many parts were obviously wrong. He was, as far as the eye could see, in a completely uninhabited wilderness. Other than the white sky and the earth, it was just one giant-like tree after another.

When the critic emerged from his initial shock, he found that he wasn’t the only one in the theater.

He and the astronaut wearing a cumbersome spacesuit were both immobile before this colossus.

The critic put down his stereoscope.

Everything went black; he had returned to his seat. Two photos of the same size were on the stage. The image on both photos was almost the same—a tree suspended in a silver-white world.

The astronaut was still there. He took off his helmet and turned toward the seats.

“Dedicated to my daughter. This was her homework assignment.”

Scattered applause sounded from the seats. The few people in the audience made their way to the exit.

“What does this piece represent?” The critic had come to Father’s side.

Performance artists never explain the meaning of their work. Father only smiled and said, “There’ll be another performance in half an hour. You can stay and watch again.”

“This is called a stereoscope?” He changed the topic.

“Yes, it’s made up of a set of optical reflectors. It can shift lines of sight. You probably know that the images seen by the left and right eye aren’t exactly the same; there’s parallax—it’s as if two camera lenses a set distance apart from each other are taking a photo of the same object at the same time. The stereoscope can shift lines of sight, combine the images seen by the left and right eye, and create a 3D effect.”

“Photo?”

“It’s a real photo. I used a 3D printer to make a space telescope, took the photo with a film camera, then enlarged the photo. Initially, it was for my daughter’s summer homework. I first made a small 3D stereoscope with those two photos. Then I enlarged the photos and used them here.”

“This image was never manipulated—it’s a view from a real star? Which star?”

“Cetus δ3.”

The critic didn’t believe the performance artist. His research confirmed his hunch; with humanity’s current level of technology, it was impossible to observe Cetus δ3. Especially considering that the second star next to it was currently bursting into a planetary nebula. The dust and gases that it flung out would seriously impede any observation of Cetus δ3. It would be even more impossible to take such a clear picture.

The photo that was so vivid he felt as if he were there turned out to be nothing more than a cheap manipulated image.

In fact, the entire performance was just a cheap façade. The great critic thought it was funny; he noted his impression of the performance and wrote a half-ridiculing, half-joking review. “An Innocent Counterfeit”—the title the critic picked at the last minute before publication.

The critic wasn’t aware that these nameless people were a gift that fate bestowed on him. The review that he’d written without much effort received unprecedented attention and recognition; his style of unrestrained mockery left a deep impression on people, and his complete rebuffing of the performance was seen as honest and courageous. Several people became performance art enthusiasts after reading his review.

For a moment, he became the object of the masses’ attention, the darling of the art world; his likes and dislikes became everyone’s likes and dislikes, and his viewpoint became everyone’s viewpoint. The great art critic had finally become a real great art critic.

At such a time, no one would be so foolish as to oppose him in public.

Especially any affected parties.

But Father did just that. He published a statement, doing the most to prove that the photo was real, upholding the value of his work. These were the two things he was least adept at—arguing and defending himself. The few times that he and the critic crossed swords, he’d been made a fool of relentlessly, falling countless times into presuppositional traps, many of which seemed to be of his own doing. Countless people joined this bout of grand mockery. His every word and every microexpression were captured and enlarged, becoming fodder for the art world, the entertainment world, comedians, and Internet commenters. People called him “The Person Who Saw Cetus.”

So Father became everyone’s subconscious target. Back then, the more people loved the critic, the more they hated Father.

From then on, he didn’t have a single client.

Was it then that he started to go mad?

Though he didn’t have clients, Father didn’t give up on performance art. Out of some sense of significance, he also didn’t give up arguing with the critic. Every new piece was a declaration of war against the great critic, a way for him to be good at something. The great critic would strike back with his most skilled hand. To outsiders, Father’s losses grew more and more miserable, and the great critic attracted more and more attention. Regardless of whether they meant to, regardless of whether they’d admit it, their meeting was an important point in each other’s destinies.

The more the winner wins, the more the loser loses.

The war between the two started with a fake photograph and ended with a fake suicide.

Perhaps he hoped that he’d really died that way.

That person, always unable to express anything clearly, always doing things that people didn’t understand; why did he think he could wish for the naïveté that others didn’t have?

Even if there weren’t the great critic, there still wouldn’t have been any difference in the way his life dropped off into the abyss.

That person who saw Cetus.

The old man was right. This had nothing to do with the critic; plus, so many years had already passed.

She just couldn’t understand why the critic had reversed his position on Father today, praising his work, even overturning his review from that time. Of course, the masses wouldn’t remember all that.

But she remembered—she’d seen all of Father’s performance images and read all of the critic’s reviews.

Hugging the box as she left the old man’s office, Lilian went straight home. Because the box was there, her normally comfortable home became a source of anxiety. In the end, she opened the box again. A lens, a photo, and also a slip of paper.

This was absolutely the old man’s style. Before, if he had anything to say to Father that he found difficult to express, he’d leave a note like this.

“Lilian, there’s something you must know. Actually, if you paid more attention to the outside world, you should already know—according to the latest DNA analyses, the blood left at the performance scene that year had fragments with variations; it couldn’t have been from a just-cloned person. So, that performance really was your father.”

She stared at the slip of paper, chewing on the meaning of the two lines of text. Her eyes grew teeth; her heart grew teeth; the language center of her brain grew teeth. She chewed on these few lines of text that were harder even than pig iron. Teeth ground against pig iron; the sound was enough to make one itch.

Her father was dead.

The person her father killed twelve years ago in that performance had been himself.

It was a real death performance.

Once she understood this, she couldn’t hold it in any longer and laughed.

“You seem well,” the astronaut beside her said.

Just now, humanity had successfully crossed through a wormhole for the first time. Lilian didn’t say anything; she was still a bit dizzy, and her muscles felt tight. The reality of going through a wormhole was as enormous as the universe to her. With humanity’s current understanding of wormholes, it was still impossible to simulate a wormhole environment, impossible to do practice flights. Although they had theoretically mastered the crossing technology, there had been no way to experiment to confirm it. For the officials at the space agency, this flight was the verification. As long as it succeeded, they could use nuclear fusion spaceships to reach the before-unreachable stars that were a few hundred light-years away. Humanity couldn’t resist this kind of attraction.

She didn’t mind being used as a test subject, even suggested that they had just her in control, with a GU-model AI replacing the other pilot. She thought they’d agree, but in the end they sent the person beside her.

Just as the calculations predicted, when they crossed through the wormhole, Cetus δ was in a bright phase. Soon they’d discover the cool blue dot by the δ star. That was their destination—Cetus δ3. The spaceship started to slow down.

Everything was going as planned.

The moment her toes touched the frozen rock of the surface, it was as if an electric current had charged forth. She felt pain, pain to where her helmet’s visor fogged up, pain to where her tears turned conical—the gravity here was one-fourth that of Earth’s.

She thought of that summer day, a silhouette crouching beside her. His shoulders cloaked with colorful clouds.

“Are you all right?” her partner asked from the control room.

“Do you see that forest up ahead, golden, made up of enormous trees?”

“Are they trees? So big?”

Lilian stooped, choked with sobs.

“Are you all right?” her partner asked.

“It’s nothing; I just remembered why I wanted to come here.”

Originally published in Chinese in
Cosmos Is Calling: Gogo, edited by Chen Kun, December 2015.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Tang Fei is a speculative fiction writer whose fiction has been featured (under various pen names) in magazines in China such as Science Fiction World, Jiuzhou Fantasy, and Fantasy Old and New. She has written fantasy, science fiction, fairy tales, and wuxia (martial arts fantasy), but prefers to write in a way that straddles or stretches genre boundaries. She is also a genre critic, and her critical essays have been published in The Economic Observer. 

 She lives in Beijing (though she tries to escape it as often as she can), and considers herself a foodie with a particular appreciation for dark chocolate, blue cheese, and good wine.

Running the Snake

Kage Baker

Will Shaxpur stood before the queen, trying not to look at her breasts. This was difficult, as they were bare, painted bright blue, and court custom dictated he raise his eyes no higher than her knees, where (she being a lady of advanced years) they happened to be resting, like a pair of elderly robins.

He twisted his hat in his hands. “I can’t imagine how it happened, ma’am.”

“Can’t you?” The Living Boudicca, Andraste Twdwr, high queen of Greater Brithan, leaned back. “We find that hard to believe. You were defrocked for imagining, as we have heard.” She nodded at her chief druid, Volsinghome.

Volsinghome smiled balefully. “Expelled, madam. For having the temerity to imagine he could improve the sacred texts.”

“It was only the hymns,” said Will. “I made them scan. And, er, adjusted the imagery a little.”

“And, having blasphemed, you were sent from the sacred island in disgrace, and now you damn your soul by persuading weak-minded fools to abandon our ancient gods—” Volsinghome’s tirade was cut short as the queen raised her hand.

“We will thank you to remember, little druid, that it has pleased us to welcome strangers and their faiths. And if it pleases us, it pleases our gods.” She fixed her gimlet stare on Will once more. “Now, boy. Tell me how it was my son-in-law was found dead in the temple of Glycon.”

He had been working Temple Street, minding the horses of wealthy worshippers. Will found that a smile and a bow as he handed back the reins might earn him a thrown copper. However, a smile, a bow, and an apt quotation from Homer—or Catullus, or the Mahabharata, or the Avesta, depending on the place from which the patron had emigrated—got him silver at least, and the patrons remembered him. Now and again patrons gathered around and challenged him to other tricks of memory, and of course he could recite as much as they wanted of anything he knew.

Busker economies being precarious at best, his fellows on the street had suffered from the competition. One afternoon, after holding a crowd spellbound with the Thebaid, Will was gleefully scooping coins from the pavement into his hat when he encountered four pairs of feet planted across the remainder of his earnings. He looked up, and his heart sank.

There stood Wat the Fire-eater, and Bran the Juggler, and Empidocles who did sleight-of-hand tricks, and most notably there stood Soumaoro the African Balladeer, who was seven feet tall and wore a model of Cleopatra’s barge in his wild hair. When singing, he would sway his head in such a manner that the barge rocked to and fro, exactly as though it sailed black foaming seas, to such striking effect that until lately he had been the top earner in the street.

“You. Shaxpur,” he said. “We hear there are lots of people who appreciate poetry on the other side of the river. We think you should go there.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of Southwark. Will blinked up at him.

“Why, certainly, gentlemen,” he said, knowing better than to argue. “If you’ll just step to one side so I can collect the rest of the take, I’ll be on my way.”

“Take what you have and go,” said Bran, smacking one of his juggling clubs against his thigh with a meaningful look. He picked up a silver drachma with his toes, flipped it into the air, and caught it with his free hand. “We’ll collect the rest.”

“Look, I earned that—” said Will, and broke off as he saw the dagger in Wat’s hand.

“You know, I don’t think you’ve ever paid dues to the Guild of Street Entertainers,” said Soumaoro. “Druid. How many weeks has he been peddling his act on our street, boys?”

Will was calculating his chances of escape when the Fates threw him a crust. A pair of arms encircled him from behind and a voice, heavily accented, screamed next to his ear: “Beware! This man is touched by all the gods! He has been chosen for a momentous destiny!”

Will turned his head and looked into the shawl-draped face of a fat man. He had wild bulging eyes and an immense mustache. The man screamed again. “Momentous destiny, I said! Leave the money, my friend!”

“Fortunate mortal!” chimed in a second voice. Will swiveled his eyes and saw another man to his left, young, tall, and handsome, with a mane of fair hair. “Beloved of the gods!”

“And who might you be?” said Soumaoro, scowling.

“Why, friend, this is Scorilo, the famed Dacian soothsayer,” said the tall youth. Will meanwhile felt himself being dragged backward by the fat man, and the youth stepped in front of them. “Look! Riches!” He held up a fistful of coins and opened his hand. As the members of the Guild of Street Entertainers scrambled for the money, Will’s rescuers hurried him away.

In a sad-looking Roman taverna, over bowls of wine, they had made him their offer.

“We are victims of religious persecution,” explained Alazon, the youth.

“We fled the crushing grip of Caesarion-imposed Mithraic monotheism to the pantheistic sanctuary of your green and pleasant land, so graciously offered by your beautiful Queen of Queens,” said Scorilo.

“We’ve been watching you for days now,” said Alazon. “Look, we said to each other, here’s an educated Brithon! Knows the classics by heart, speaks eight languages fluently, lovely speaking voice.”

“Yet, incredibly, he seems to be down on his luck!” said Scorilo. “How, we asked ourselves, can this possibly be?”

Briefly, Will related the series of misunderstandings that had gotten him booted out of the druid seminary at Mona, which did, in fact, amount to more than a few rewritten hymns. When he had finished, his new friends looked at each other and smiled.

“Mocking the bards, faking divine possession, and poaching! Can it be you haven’t a great deal of respect for the gods?” said Scorilo.

“That might be the case,” said Will sourly. “Yet see, gentlemen, the wages of impiety. I’m as talented a man as you’ll find in a long summer’s day; I can pull your tooth, cure your fever, paint your likeness, sit in judgment on your small claims, sing you all the lays of old Rome, foretell the hour of your death, and recite a solemn prayer over your ashy bones. And, thanks to that unwise moment of levity at High Bard Amaethon’s expense, I now scramble to earn my bread in the gutter.”

“What if impiety could be made to pay?” inquired Scorilo, with a coy leer.

“What if, indeed? I’m listening.”

“Well then!” Scorilo leaned across the table. “My colleague and I operated a profitable concern in Pergamum, before Caesarion XXIII sent in his priests. Given the nature of our business, it seemed like a good time to relocate.”

“And the nature of your business was—?”

“Soothsaying, what else?” said Alazon. “Divinations, relaying messages from the dead, that sort of thing. Scorilo’s a true prophet! Runs in the family. His great-great-several-times-great-grandfather was the one who persuaded Julius Caesar to stay home, the day Mark Antony was assassinated.”

“We like to think of ourselves as purveyors of consolation,” said Scorilo. “Now, your cosmopolitan London seems a perfect place to set up shop. Unfortunately, we are strangers. We would benefit by having a native-born partner in our enterprise to advise us concerning local laws, customs, and so forth. You might be that partner.”

“Could you be a little more explicit about the enterprise?”

“A time-honored dodge known in the trade as running the snake,” said Scorilo. “Introducing to an unenlightened populace the profitable worship of the great god Glycon.”

“And who would Glycon be?” inquired Will.

Alazon smiled. From under his cloak he drew a small basket with a lid, and opening it he drew forth a tiny snake. He set it on the table. “Say hello, Glycon.”

“Hello,” said Glycon.

Will gaped at it, until he remembered Enoch the Ventriloquist, who used to ply Temple Street with his talking dog. He grinned. “Tell me more,” he said.

There were a few former residences of Roman gods down at the eastern end of Temple Street. Of late years, with the increasing turmoil on the continent, the Roman immigrant population had increased; but they tended to worship at a pantheon over in Knightsbridge nowadays. Therefore the owner of the old shrine to Apollo was happy to sell it at any price, given that the roof leaked and the foundation had cracked. He pocketed the money Will paid him and went his way chuckling. Will and his associates moved in and made their preparations.

The busy hour of the morning had just come to Watling Street when, seemingly from midair, a naked youth appeared in the middle of the street. He frothed at the mouth, he pranced and tossed his wild hair, he cried out in an unknown language. Ordinarily no Londoner would have looked twice at him—there were plenty of naked madmen in Brithan—but this madman was so extraordinarily well endowed, and his wild hair so abundant, that not a few matrons forgot about shopping and stared, rapt. Tradesmen and idlers followed suit, and soon there was a crowd.

As crowds will, they followed him down Watling to Temple Street, where he mounted the steps of the old shrine to Apollo and stood straight. Raising his arms above his head, he began to speak coherently. Will, who had discreetly joined the crowd, prepared to translate for him; but a Greek oil merchant beat him to it.

“He’s telling us a new god is born!” he said. “He says, uh, we’re three-times-blessed. He says the great god  . . . Glycon, son of Asklepios, grandson of Apollo, has come to live among us. In this very temple. And  . . . he himself is the god’s priest.”

“He does look like Apollo,” said an elderly wine merchant.

Alazon, for it was he, sprang down from the steps and scrabbled in the mud at the base of the temple’s foundation. With a triumphant cry, he held aloft a goose egg. Running back up the steps with it, he broke it open and stared a moment into the shell; then held up the little snake that had been hidden inside, coiling and twisting on his fingers as the morning sunlight warmed it.

The crowd murmured. Will shouted, “It’s a miracle!”

“Yes!” cried Scorilo, from the other side of the crowd. “A miracle!”

The crowd took up the cry and repeated it. Scorilo began to froth at the mouth and shriek, babbling; Will slipped a piece of soapwort root into his mouth and, chewing briskly, produced a fine lather; then he ran to the steps, where he proceeded to fall as in a frenzy and deliver the same message in eight languages, one after another:

“The god speaks! He bids you return here tomorrow at the same hour! He will have an important message for you then, but now he is weary from his journey into this world and would rest!”

This impressed the crowd to no end, for Will was clearly a native-born Brithon. Alazon turned and, with a graceful flash of his buttocks, bore the snake godling into the depths of the old shrine.

It was a much bigger crowd the next day, and accordingly a much bigger snake was produced for them—a python purchased from a Bharati sailor, so docile and well-trained, it would submit to wearing a false head made of painted canvas, with a human face and flowing wig. Alazon, whose body had been colored gold with a liberal application of turmeric rubbed into his skin, sat on the high dais in the shadowed rear of the temple, with the snake twined about his body.

Will and Scorilo, divinely chosen acolytes, admitted the curious throng. When the temple was full they closed the street doors, which threw the place into stygian gloom; one dim oil lamp flickered above the dais, so it was almost impossible to see the snake clearly. Yet it was plain he was a living creature, as the flamelight winked now and then on a slowly moving coil.

“Good people!” Will raised his hands. “Behold how Great Glycon has grown, in one day! Soon he will be able to speak to you directly. Until that time he has appointed us to make his intentions known. True son of Asklepios, he comes to heal and to advise you with gifts of prophecy. Pleasing to him are votive offerings of gold and silver. Great Glycon accepts all currencies in any denomination.”

“And I, his prophet, carry messages!” Scorilo sprang up beside the dais. He had circled his eyes with soot, so as to make their stare even more startling, and he swept the crowd with his wide gaze. His voice echoed like rolling thunder. “Hear me! Great Glycon says there is a man here who has committed infidelities! If he is to avoid detection, he must purify himself in the sacred waters of Glycon’s pool and make an offering of gold! Yes! You! Great Glycon knows your name!

“Great Glycon says further that there is a woman here who wishes to conceive a child! If she will come in private to the sanctuary at nightfall, with an offering of silver, Great Glycon will ease her sorrows. Yes! You, dear lady! And the man who has received a troublesome letter recently  . . . and the man whose son is not sufficiently respectful  . . . and you, the woman whose daughter loves an unsuitable young man!

“Great Glycon has counsel for each of you. Do not wait, but come soon to make offerings!”

The golden stream began to flow that very night, and in a matter of six months Will was richer than he’d ever been in his life.

Scorilo had improvised suitably general prophecies to keep people coming in until they had enough cash to remodel the temple. The back wall had been knocked out and a sanctum sanctorum built beyond, even more dimly lit. There Great Glycon was installed, or rather the articulated puppet-head Will built for him, wonderfully realistic if seen in the dim light of the temple and from a respectful distance. There were besides yards and yards of snake body, painted canvas stuffed out with bombast, which could be made to move by various means.

Several steam-operated devices were installed, old stage tricks to miraculously open the inner sanctum’s doors or provide a battery of awe-inspiring sound effects. The scummed-over reflecting pool at the rear of the temple precinct was cleaned out and stocked with water lilies and Cathay carp.

“And we ought to build a dormitory back there,” said Will, one night as they sat around a table, opening sealed prayers to Glycon.

“Dormitory? What for?” Alazon held the blade of his knife in the lamp flame, then slid it under the wax seal and popped it off intact. Will looked at him in surprise.

“So that supplicants can sleep back there and have their dreams interpreted next morning,” he said. “That’s how it was done in the temples of Asklepios. You’re a Greek! Surely you knew that.”

Alazon shrugged. “He was obliged to leave his native land at an early age, to escape the tyranny of the One True Faith,” Scorilo explained. “So his knowledge of the old Olympians is necessarily imperfect. It’s not a bad idea, though, my learned colleague. ‘Dream interpretation available with a slightly higher donation! Enjoy a spiritually refreshing night as Glycon’s guest!’”

Alazon, reading the prayer he had opened, snickered. “Listen to this one. ‘O Great Glycon, I am subjected to ridicule by my wife and business associates because of my baldness. Please grant that my hair grows again and I will offer you a golden ring set with a perfect amethyst.’”

“Poor bastard,” said Will ruefully. He took the scroll without reading it—indeed he could not read, but had memorized its request—and re-affixed the seal. “What’s the name on this one?”

“Geoffrix Thorkettle.”

“We’re getting a lot of Brithons as converts now,” said Scorilo. “Your druids aren’t going to be happy about that, eh? Do we need to offer them a bribe?”

Will shrugged. “We might. They’ll hate us anyway, but there’s nothing they can do. Not as long as Andraste’s on the throne.”

“Gods save the queen!” said Scorilo.

Will, standing before Glycon’s sanctuary, swayed slightly and put his hand to his forehead.

“The god speaks to me . . . he has a message for . . . for Geoffrix Thorkettle!”

“Oi!” A man wearing a hood raised his head and pushed his way to the front of the crowd. Will put out his hand and Scorilo gave him the appropriate scroll.

“Here is your still-sealed petition, its contents known only to yourself and divine Glycon,” Will intoned. He gave the scroll to Master Thorkettle. “Divine Glycon says: ‘Mortal, bear patiently what the gods have seen fit to inflict. Caesar himself suffered your state without complaint, and him the gods favored to father pharaohs.’ Praise Glycon!”

“Thanks be to Great Glycon,” said the man, looking dejected.

“And now . . . ” Will summoned the next name from his memory. “The Divine One informs me—” He broke off, hearing the shouts and seeing the crowd surge to avoid the oncoming chariot. Four milk-white mares drew it, led by a man in the royal livery who shouted:

“Way there! Way for the most puissant Princess Arnemetia Dudasmede! Her consort, Anextiomarus, earl of Gloucester! Her son, Vellocatus!”

“What the hell?” said Scorilo out of the side of his mouth, and in Greek.

“It’s the queen’s second daughter,” replied Will in the same wise. “Quick! Go tell Alazon. She’ll want to talk to the god himself.”

The chariot pulled up before the temple steps. Glycon’s supplicants cleared a path for the princess, falling to their knees as she ascended; Will himself dropped to his knees, fists clenched until he heard the faint thump that meant that Alazon had scrambled into the compartment under Glycon’s sanctuary and thrust his arm up the god’s neck.

“Welcome, gracious Princess! Welcome, noble princes to the sanctuary of Divine Glycon!” Will prostrated himself.

“You may rise,” said Princess Arnemetia, with a wave of her hand. Being only a princess, she was not obliged to go naked or paint herself blue, nor had she her mother’s flaming hair; she was a sallow brunette. Her son, a sullen-looking teenager, had inherited her looks and a clubfoot besides. The prince consort was a florid man in early middle age, puffing slightly from climbing the stairs. Heart disease, Will thought, studying him with a druidic eye. Aloud he said:

“How may we priests of Glycon serve, madam?”

“We would consult the god on the matter of our husband’s health,” said the princess. “And some few matters concerning our own interest.”

“Please step within,” said Will, bowing them into the temple. He shut the doors behind them and presented them to Scorilo. “This humble servant of the god will lead you in prayers first. Complimentary holy water, brother Scorilo, of course.”

“Of course,” said Scorilo, rummaging in his purse for coins to feed the vending machines. Will backed out of the royal presences and then ran like a hare behind the drapes concealing the inner sanctum. He paused long enough to make certain Alazon had lit the boilers under the mechanisms, and then scrambled under Glycon’s lair. Spotting Alazon’s feet, he crawled close enough to whisper:

“It’s Princess Arnemetia. The husband’s the earl of Gloucester. He’s got progressive heart failure, or I miss my guess. Tell him to drink willow-bark tea for breakfast, hawthorn leaf tea before bed. Got it? And the son’s with them, and he’s got a clubfoot and is known to have seizures, so—”

“Tell them it’s a gift of the gods because Caesar and Alexander had them,” said Alazon, ducking his head to wink at Will. “Got it. Do I tell her she’s going to inherit the throne?”

“No! We could hang for that. Stay away from anything to do with the succession. Just, you know, imply great things will happen and her name will live forever and so on.”

“And she’s . . . ”

“Arnemetia!”

“Right.”

Will backed out of the crawlspace, got to his feet, and ran back just as the unearthly note sounded that signified the show was about to start. He stepped from behind the curtain into the outer sanctum, where Scorilo was praying with his hands raised and the royal family lip-syncing in an attempt to follow. The sanctuary curtains parted, as if drawn by unseen hands.

“Our prayers have been heard!” yelled Scorilo, falling to his knees.

The great doors swung open of themselves, and there, within a sort of booth, rose Great Glycon. He blinked his startlingly lifelike eyes. He opened his mouth.

“Welcome, royal Arnemetia, beloved of the gods!”

“We are made,” said Alazon smugly, counting out the day’s take. “A royal patron. It’s all nectar from here.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Will. “It all depends on whether or not the princess outlives her sister. Berecyntia, the older one.”

“Which one’s going to get the throne when the old lady dies, eh?” said Scorilo.

“The older one, of course,” said Alazon, but Will shook his head.

“We don’t always follow primogeniture here. The princesses may engage in single combat to decide who gets the throne. More likely they’ll make their consorts fight.”

“But the throne will pass to the nasty boy in any case, eh?” said Scorilo.

“No,” said Will. “There’s Damara, the third sister. She’s still at school. And anyway the boy’s damaged goods; he can’t sit on the throne. It’s our law.”

“Groups of threes!” Scorilo drew his shawl over his head. “That’s bad, women in threes. Three Fates. Three Hecates. I feel a foreboding in the cosmic ether.”

“That’s the fish you had for lunch,” said Alazon, and bit a gold piece.

With royal favor, Glycon had become more than just another new god; he became fashionable. Courtiers, at least those of Princess Arnemetia’s party, had flocked to the temple in droves. Alazon had found himself with a dozen or so very young admirers of both genders, who were eager to jump into bed with Glycon’s high priest. His attention to their needs spiritual and temporal had left Will and Scorilo to see to running the temple, and unfortunately Scorilo had developed a taste for Brithish cider.

So it was primarily Will who had overseen the miracle cures, sitting up at night as supplicants slept in the rear of the temple around the new statue of the god. It was Will who had bowed in the earl of Gloucester, arriving for a private slumber session with the god; it was Will who had made up a sumptuous pallet for Anextiomarus, and dimmed the sanctuary lights, and bid him pleasant dreams. It was Will who sat in the rear chamber, going over the earl’s symptoms (indigestion, toothache, generalized joint pain) in his mind, composing a prescription that could be plausibly worked into the interpretation of whatever dreams the earl would have reported in the morning.

Though of course he hadn’t reported any, because when Will crept out into the sanctuary at first light, the earl had been lying there stone dead, grinning, with a stonily erect penis and two immense fang marks in his arm.

“Were you aware,” said Volsinghome, “that when we autopsied him, we found the distance between the wounds was exactly the distance between the canine teeth of a man? And has not your god a man’s head?”

“But Great Glycon is a nice god,” said Will desperately. “Why would he kill one of his worshippers? Especially a royal one?”

“Fool! How can you pretend to know what foreign gods will do? They cannot be trusted! They have overrun this island with their filthy foreign ways—” Volsinghome’s spittle began to fly. The Living Boudicca looked sidelong at him, and sighed.

“Volsinghome, you may retire. We would speak with this man alone.”

Glaring, the high druid stalked from the room. The queen turned back to Will. “Listen carefully, priest. We know well our son-in-law was murdered, and by no gods. But you must prove it. You say you were awake in the anteroom by the sanctuary the night long. Did you hear nothing suspicious? Did you leave the antechamber at any time?”

Will drew on every memory trick the druids had beaten into him on Mona. The night replayed itself for him, at high speed and in perfect detail. “Only once, ma’am. And that was only to see that all was well with the earl.”

“Why?”

“Because I heard . . . ” Will’s eyes widened. “Because he cried out. And there was a splash; I thought he might have gone sleepwalking and stepped in the fish pool.”

“Had he?”

“No. He was sitting up in his bed, rubbing his arm. He lay down again without speaking to me. Then he began to laugh. I thought he’d had a funny dream. I went back into the antechamber. A little later I heard him coughing. I would have gone out again, but it stopped.”

“Which arm was he rubbing?”

“The right one,” said Will.

“Which was the arm that was wounded, my druids tell me.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Will hung his head, imagining the noose already around his neck. “That must have been when he was bitten. But I saw nothing when I looked out, I swear.”

“He laughed, you say.” The queen looked opaque, unsmiling. Her hand clenched a moment on her spear. “And you use the word bitten. Do you truly think something bit him?”

“Well—no, ma’am.” Will dared to look up. “At least, not Glycon, because—”

“Because Glycon is a clever puppet,” said the Living Boudicca. “Tush, man, did you think we hadn’t already found out as much?”

Will fell to his knees. “Oh, great Queen, be merciful. We never meant to mock the gods! Only to make money.”

She waved him to rise, impatiently. “Which is an honest desire, compared to what some men lust after. Little man, you have our protection, as far as we may give it. Volsinghome and his party will make political capital of this death, if they can; they will incite the people to fear foreign gods. They cannot see that it is in our interest to shelter fellow polytheists.”

“Your Majesty is indeed a loving and merciful great mother,” said Will, heart pounding.

“No; Volsinghome is a fool,” said the queen. “Caesarion converts with the sword, and his one-God priests are ruthless in suppressing any thought they do not approve. What happens then? The best minds of the east flee his empire in droves. Because we offer them refuge, they bring us their skills, their inventions. If rogues like your accomplices come with them, it makes no odds; our nation grows rich all the same.

“Perhaps Volsinghome fears that foreign gods are stronger than our own, in which case we don’t think much of his faith,” she added, with a fearsome sneer. “Perhaps he simply dislikes seeing brown faces in the marketplace, or smelling strange spices in the air. Ha! We will not shape our state to suit his delicate nerves. We absorbed his Saxon race and remained Brithan; these hordes too we shall gather in.

“And therefore we have made our decision. We shall announce that it was a man, and no god, who killed the earl.” She pointed her spear at Will. “But you must furnish us with some plausible proof of murder. What made the splash you heard, little Master Shaxpur?”

Scorilo and Alazon were packing frantically when he returned.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Down to the river at midnight,” said Alazon. “We steal a boat, we go over to Gaul. Coming with us?”

“No,” said Will. “I had an audience with the queen.” He looked around the sanctuary, thinking hard. “Has anybody been out to feed the fish this morning?”

“What?” Alazon turned to stare at him.

“It’s all this rain,” said Scorilo, with a groan. “Makes their brains mildew. Where are you going?” For Will had turned and run out to the pool in the rear of the temple precinct. They followed him.

“Oh! Look at that!” cried Scorilo, falling to his knees in dismay. “It’s an omen! A terrible omen!”

“Damn!” said Alazon. “Those fish cost a fortune!”

For all the red carp in the pool were now floating belly up, quite dead. Will was pacing along the edge of the pool, peering down into the water. He went into the antechamber long enough to fetch a pair of tongs from its fireplace; coming back he knelt on the pool’s coping and, using the tongs, carefully pushed aside the lily pads to look beneath. “Ah,” he said.

“What have you found?” Alazon ran to his side.

“The murder weapon, I think,” said Will. Using the tongs, he drew out a long slender object. It was a tin novelty backscratcher in the shape of an arm and flexed hand, the sort that tourists brought back in hundreds from Cornwall every summer. This one had a twist of thick wire wrapped around the hand, the two sharp ends bent downward. Will pulled his sleeve down to cover his hand and picked it up, swinging it experimentally. It punched two neat holes in the surface of a lily pad, just like fang marks.

Will peered at the wire points again. They were discolored.

The murderer had clearly scaled the rear precinct wall, which was not especially high, and left in the same manner. The following day a body was found floating in the Thames, a thin and ragged man with a cut throat. Oddly, he had not been robbed; he had a golden guinea in his purse.

The verdict on both the beggar and the earl was murder by persons unknown.

Standing at the late earl’s pyre, as Scorilo chanted hastily improvised funeral rites, Will watched the royal family and wondered just how much was known. Princess Arnemetia and her son looked daggers across the flames at Princess Berecyntia and her husband, the earl of Kent, where they stood by Volsinghome. All three were smirking, making no effort to conceal their glee. The queen looked on, impassive, her eyes hooded.

Oddly enough, the temple of Glycon grew more crowded than before. Princess Arnemetia was loud in her unshaken faith. Young Vellocatus let it be known he had spent all his pocket money on most puissant curses, and such a touching act of filial piety was sure to bring his father’s murderers to justice. Before a packed audience of courtiers and celebrity chasers, they knelt together without Glycon’s sanctum and prayed for justice. The great god, stammering a little, was heard to promise that death would swiftly find the wretched sinners who had dared to defame him.

“You have an awful lot of murderers in this country, do you know that?” complained Scorilo. Will, who had been composing a new prayer to Glycon as Guardian of Innocent Lambs, looked up, startled.

“What?”

“And your cider gives a man a damnable headache too,” said Scorilo, dropping down on the bench beside him and fanning himself. It was two days to Lammas, hot sticky weather. “All I wanted were some anodyne powders for this hangover. Hermes the Egyptian had a nice little apothecary shop in Silver Street. Had, notice I said. Somebody laid him out beside his mummies last night. The place is all closed off and the street wardens won’t let anybody in. What am I to do about my headache, eh?”

“Willow-bark tea,” said Will, leaning back again. “You can get it anywhere.” He was about to close his eyes so he could concentrate on composition when his attention was drawn by the royal messenger, ascending the steps of the temple. “Oh, shite—”

“Priests of Glycon!” The royal messenger brandished his spear. “The Living Boudicca commands the presence of Master Shaxpur!”

Volsinghome was just emerging from the audience chamber as Will was ushered in. He wasn’t smiling now; in fact he looked at Will with something like fear as he hurried past him.

Nor was the queen smiling as she received Will. Andraste Twdwr seemed to have aged twenty years in the month since he’d seen her. She looked at him bleakly and said: “You are a clever little man. I wonder if you are clever enough to solve another murder?”

The royal messenger and a brace of royal guards escorted him to the mansion of Princess Berecyntia. Grim-faced street wardens blocked the door, but as they stood aside to let Will enter, there was fear in their eyes too. He was marched in through the house and out to the back garden, which sloped down to the Thames. There was a big pavilion there, its screened windows standing open. In the pavilion was a bed, lately slept in but empty now.

“The princess and her lord took their rest here last night, as was their custom in summer’s heat,” said the royal messenger. “The servants slept in the house. None of them heard anything untoward. At daybreak the earl’s valet came out to wake his master, and found him gone, nor was the princess to be seen.”

Will was opening his mouth to suggest they had simply gone swimming when he saw the track on the floor of the pavilion, clear in a layer of summer dust. It circled the bed, a strange looping sprawl of a print full of smaller marks . . . scales? It looked something like the track a snake would leave, but a snake of monstrous size.

“Was it your god devoured them, priest of Glycon?” demanded the valet, who had followed the guards out to the garden.

“No,” said Will steadily. “But we were meant to think so.” He squatted to look more closely at the curious print. Here and there beside its length was a little parallel track, not continuous, a thin dragging mark such as might be made by a twig. In some places it paralleled the left side of the main print; in some places it was on the right. Will tugged at his beard, studying the print a moment longer.

He rose and looked at the bed itself. Not a drop of blood, but the bed-clothes were in wild disarray: sheets flung aside, pillows here and there, the blanket wadded up on one side of the bed. But nothing on the floor. Nothing to obscure the scuffed print. Will bent down and looked again at the print’s pattern. It reminded him of something . . . he crouched farther and peered under the bed. Gingerly he reached under and pulled close what he saw there, and stared at it a moment.

It was a scaled and stubby thing, like a mummified hand with black claws. A brown bone protruded from one end.

Will stood up abruptly. “You have been charged to help me solve this murder, haven’t you?” he said to the royal messenger.

“I have. You agree it’s murder, then?”

“Most foul,” said Will. “Take me to Silver Street, if you please.”

It was early afternoon when he was once again admitted to the presence of the Living Boudicca. He bowed low. She regarded him with a flinty stare.

“We see we were not mistaken in our judgment of you,” she said, in a hoarse voice.

“You have been told, then, ma’am.”

“We have. Both of them in a fresh-dug grave in Hampstead. Not a mark on the bodies to show how they died, but the strangest thing: they shared their grave with a stuffed crocodile. A three-legged one, no less.”

Will nodded. “And now I must grieve you further.”

She shrugged. “We may sorrow, but we doubt we will be surprised. What have you to tell us?”

Will wondered how best to break the news. “You may have heard, ma’am, that the crocodile was stolen from an apothecary’s in Silver Street.”

“We had. They murdered the poor devil for it, it seems.”

“So it seems. He did not die quietly; there would appear to have been a fight. His jars of mummy-dust and his curative powders were knocked over and broken. His murderers left tracks in the dust. There were three of them; two men, both barefoot, and a boy, shod. And the boy’s shoes—”

“Showed that he had a clubbed foot,” said the queen.

“Yes,” said Will. “And the crocodile was taken to drag along the floor of the pavilion, to make it look as though a great snake had been there.”

A long silence followed. “We expect his mother put him up to it,” said the queen at last. “Though he’s poisonous enough to have had the idea on his own.”

Will cleared his throat. “There was also evidence, in the shop, that one of the men cut his foot on a broken jar. If the servants’ feet are examined—”

“Yes. We take your meaning. You have done well, Master Shaxpur.”

“I am sorry, ma’am.”

“We don’t know that we are,” said the Living Boudicca, tapping her fingers on the haft of her spear. “Berecyntia was a murderess. Just as well she was stopped before she made a habit of it.”

“Ma’am?”

“Shall we tell you how we became queen, little man?” Andraste Twdwr looked him in the eye. The unaccustomed familiarity unnerved Will, for her gaze was like a spear, but he met it steadily. “I was young, and in those days fair; my sister Genupa was much older, and not so fair. As the years drew on and she bore no children to her husband, she came to envy me my state. Our aunt Magaidh was queen then, growing old.

“Genupa’s husband lusted after me. The gods know I didn’t want the man; but Genupa caught him trying to kiss me, at a drunken banquet, and she went mad. She challenged me.

“Aunt Magaidh gave us weapons and bid us fight it out. Poor Genupa was no fighter; she rushed at me, screaming, and fending her off I wounded her in the shoulder with my spear’s point. She came at me and I blocked again, and again, and so we circled each other, as Aunt Magaidh looked on in silence.

“Genupa began to laugh. She laughed, and staggered as though she was drunk. She shouted at me, hateful things, but happily, as though I were crawling in the dust at her feet. At last she tripped on the haft of her own spear and fell sprawling. I stood back and waited for her to rise, but she never rose. I heard her choking and ran to turn her over. She was past rising; she died then and there, grinning like a skull.

“I stood, weeping. I looked at the point of my spear and saw the poison smeared there, and my aunt said: ‘She was old and barren, and not so clever as you. This granted her an honorable death. And now there will be no dispute over the succession.’

“My aunt died not long after. I inherited her throne and the secret of the poison. It’s rare potent stuff, brewed in the east, reserved for kings. It kills quickly and painlessly. The victim experiences euphoria. You will remember how Arnemetia’s husband laughed, that night, after he’d been wounded. To say nothing of his other symptoms.” The queen smiled bitterly. “I have never kept it; I detest poisoners. But Berecyntia obtained some easily enough, from Caesarion’s ambassador. I made her confess as much.

“Well, well. What to do now, Master Shaxpur? We have no doubt it will be proved that Arnemetia had her sister killed. And there is the matter of the poor little Egyptian apothecary. Who answers for his blood?”

“That is not for me to say, Majesty,” said Will, bowing his head.

“Quite so.” The queen stared into space. “We must bear it alone. It’s one thing to kill off a mere consort; another thing entirely to kill your own sister. We will hand her over to the druids, she and the boy. It is good for the people to see that no one is above our justice.” She looked down at Will. “But we fear Great Glycon has been the cause of too much trouble. We think it were best your friends pack up their puppet and seek their fortunes over in Gaul. You, however, must remain here.”

“I, Majesty?” Will began to sweat.

“Even you.” The queen looked at him critically. “You are not a fool; your wit pleases us. You must not end your days telling fortunes in Gaul. We have another fate in mind for you.”

A veiled girl entered the room then, and drew back when she saw Will.

“Come in, girl,” said the Living Boudicca. “We sent for you an hour since.”

“I was reading,” said the girl, a little sullenly. “And may speak to no man.”

“The case is altered, child,” said the queen. “Holy Modron can do with one less nun in Her service. You will be queen after us, now, and this man will be your consort. Look upon him.”

Affronted, the girl raised her veil and glared at Will. He was already breathless from shock, and now he gasped. Princess Damara was young and fair as her mother had been once, with the same coppery hair. Her eyes, however, were green as the sea. She regarded him steadily a moment, before shrugging.

“He’s handsome enough. I don’t mind about his hair. Still, you can’t mean to marry me to a commoner?”

“Of course not,” said her mother. “That’s easily fixed. What say you, Master Shaxpur, to an earldom? Oxford, we think. Yes. Ought to suit you nicely.”

Originally published in Sideways In Crime, edited by Lou Anders.

About the Author

One of the most prolific new writers to appear in the late ’90s, the late Kage Baker made her first sale in 1997, with “Noble Mold,” the first of her long sequence of sly and compelling stories of the adventures and misadventures of the time-traveling agents of the Company. Her Company novels include, In the Garden of Iden, Sky Coyote, Mendoza in Hollywood, The Graveyard Game, The Life of the World to Come, The Machine’s Child, Sons of Heaven, and Not Less Than Gods. Her other books include fantasy novels The Anvil of the World, The House of the Stag, and The Bird on the River, science fiction novel The Empress of Mars, YA novel The Hotel Under the Sand, and Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key, about some of the real pirates of the Caribbean. Her many stories were collected in Black Projects, White Knights, Mother Aegypt and Other Stories, The Children of the Company, Dark Mondays, and Gods and Pawns. Her posthumously published books include Neil Gwynne’s Scarlet Spy, Neil Gwynne’s On Land and Sea (with Kathleen Barholomew), and a collection, In the Company of Thieves. Baker died, tragically young, in 2010.

The Man Who Walked Home

James Tiptree Jr.

Transgression! Terror! And he thrust and lost there—punched into impossibility, abandoned never to be known how, the wrong man in the most wrong of all wrong places in that unimaginable collapse of never-to-be-reimagined mechanism—he stranded, undone, his lifeline severed, he in that nanosecond knowing his only tether parting, going away, the longest line to life withdrawing, winking out, disappearing forever beyond his grasp—telescoping away from him into the closing vortex beyond which lay his home, his life, his only possibility of being; seeing it sucked back into the deepest maw, melting, leaving him orphaned on what never-to-be-known shore of total wrongness—of beauty beyond joy, perhaps? Of horror? Of nothingness? Of profound otherness only, certainly—whatever it was, that place into which he transgressed, it could not support his life there, his violent and violating aberrance; and he, fierce, brave, crazy—clenched into total protest, one body-fist of utter repudiation of himself there in that place, forsaken there—what did he do? Rejected, exiled, hungering homeward more desperate than any lost beast driving for its unreachable home, his home, his HOME—and no way, no transport, no vehicle, means, machinery, no force but his intolerable resolve aimed homeward along that vanishing vector, that last and only lifeline—he did, what?

He walked.

Home.

Precisely what hashed up in the work of the major industrial lessee of the Bonneville Particle Acceleration Facility in Idaho was never known. Or rather, all those who might have been able to diagnose the original malfunction were themselves obliterated almost at once in the greater catastrophe which followed.

The nature of this second cataclysm was not at first understood either. All that was ever certain was that at 1153.6 of May 2, 1989 Old Style, the Bonneville laboratories and all their personnel were transformed into an intimately disrupted form of matter resembling a high-energy plasma, which became rapidly airborne to the accompaniment of radiating seismic and atmospheric events.

The disturbed area unfortunately included an operational MIRV Watchdog bomb.

In the confusion of the next hours the Earth’s population was substantially reduced, the biosphere was altered, and the Earth itself was marked with numbers of more conventional craters. For some years thereafter, the survivors were existentially preoccupied and the peculiar dust bowl at Bonneville was left to weather by itself in the changing climatic cycles.

It was not a large crater; just over a kilometer in width and lacking the usual displacement lip. Its surface was covered with a finely divided substance which dried into dust. Before the rains began it was almost perfectly flat. Only in certain lights, had anyone been there to inspect it, a small surface-marking or abraded place could be detected almost exactly at the center.

Two decades after the disaster a party of short brown people appeared from the south, together with a flock of somewhat atypical sheep. The crater at this time appeared as a wide shallow basin in which the grass did not grow well, doubtless from the almost complete lack of soil microorganisms. Neither this nor the surrounding vigorous grass was found to harm the sheep. A few crude hogans went up at the southern edge and a faint path began to be traced across the crater itself, passing by the central bare spot.

One spring morning two children who had been driving sheep cross the crater came screaming back to camp. A monster had burst out of the ground before them, a huge flat animal making dreadful roar. It vanished in a flash and a shaking of the earth, leaving an evil smell. The sheep had run away.

Since this last was visibly true, some elders investigated. Finding no sign of the monster and no place in which it could hide, they settled for beating the children, who settled for making a detour around the monster-spot, and nothing more occurred for a while.

The following spring the episode was repeated. This time an older girl was present, but she could add only that the monster seemed to be rushing flat out along the ground without moving at all. And there was a scraped place in the dirt. Again nothing was found; an evil-ward in a cleft stick was placed at the spot.

When the same thing happened for the third time a year later, the detour was extended and other charm-wands were added. But since no harm seemed to come of it and the brown people had seen far worse, sheep-tending resumed as before. A few more instantaneous apparitions of the monster were noted, each time in the spring.

At the end of the third decade of the new era a tall old man limped down the hills from the south, pushing his pack upon a bicycle wheel. He camped on the far side of the crater, and soon found the monster-site. He attempted to question people about it, but no one understood him, so he traded a knife for some meat. Although he was obviously feeble, something about him dissuaded them from killing him, and this proved wise because he later assisted the women in treating several sick children.

He spent much time around the place of the apparition and was nearby when it made its next appearance. This excited him very much and he did several inexplicable but apparently harmless things, including moving his camp into the crater by the trail. He stayed on for a full year watching the site and was close by for its next manifestation. After this he spent a few days making a charm-stone for the spot and left northward, hobbling as he had come.

More decades passed. The crater eroded, and a rain-gully became an intermittent streamlet across the edge of the basin. The brown people and their sheep were attacked by a band of grizzled men, after which the survivors went away eastward. The winters of what had been Idaho were now frost-free; aspen and eucalyptus sprouted in the moist plain. Still the crater remained treeless, visible as a flat bowl of grass; and the bare place at the center remained. The skies cleared somewhat.

After another three decades a larger band of black people with ox-drawn carts appeared and stayed for a time, but left again when they too saw the thunderclap-monster. A few other vagrants straggled by.

Five decades later a small permanent settlement had grown up on the nearest range of hills, from which men riding on small ponies with dark stripes down their spines herded humped cattle near the crater. A herdsman’s hut was built by the streamlet, which in time became the habitation of an olive-skinned, red-haired family. In due course one of this clan again observed the monster-flash, but these people did not depart. The stone the tall man had placed was noted and left undisturbed.

The homestead at the crater’s edge grew into a group of three and was joined by others, and the trail across it became a cart road with a log bridge over the stream. At the center of the still faintly discernible crater the cart road made a bend, leaving a grassy place which bore in its center about a square meter of curiously impacted bare earth and a deeply etched sandstone rock.

The apparition of the monster was now known to occur regularly each spring on a certain morning in this place, and the children of the community dared each other to approach the spot. It was referred to in a phrase that could be translated as “the Old Dragon.” The Old Dragon’s appearance was always the same: a brief violent thunder-burst which began and cut off abruptly, in the midst of which a dragonlike creature was seen apparently in furious motion on the earth, although it never actually moved. Afterward there was a bad smell and the earth smoked. People who saw it from close by spoke of a shivering sensation.

Early in the second century two young men rode into town from the north. Their ponies were shaggier than the local breed, and the equipment they carried included two boxlike objects, which the young men set up at the monster-site. They stayed in the area a full year, observing two materializations of the Old Dragon, and they provided much news and maps of roads and trading towns in the cooler regions to the north. They built a windmill, which was accepted by the community, and offered to build a lighting machine, which was refused. Then they departed with their boxes after unsuccessfully attempting to persuade a local boy to learn to operate one.

In the course of the next decades other travelers stopped by and marveled at the monster, and there was sporadic fighting over the mountains to the south. One of the armed bands made a cattle raid into the crater hamlet. It was repulsed, but the raiders left a spotted sickness, which killed many. For all this time the bare place at the crater’s center remained, and the monster made his regular appearances, observed or not.

The hill-town grew and changed, and the crater hamlet grew to be a town. Roads widened and linked into networks. There were gray-green conifers in the hills now, spreading down into the plain, and chirruping lizards lived in their branches.

At century’s end a shabby band of skin-clad squatters with stunted milk-beasts erupted out of the west and were eventually killed or driven away, but not before the local herds had contracted a vicious parasite. Veterinaries were fetched from the market city up north, but little could be done. The families near the crater left, and for some decades the area was empty. Finally cattle of a new strain reappeared in the plain and the crater hamlet was reoccupied. Still the bare center continued annually to manifest the monster, and he became an accepted phenomenon of the area. On several occasions parties came from the distant Northwest Authority to observe it.

The crater hamlet flourished and grew into the fields where cattle had grazed, and part of the old crater became the town park. A small seasonal tourist industry based on the monster-site developed. The townspeople rented rooms for the appearances, and many more-or-less authentic monster-relics were on display in the local taverns.

Several cults now grew up around the monster. One persistent belief held that it was a devil or damned soul forced to appear on Earth in torment to expiate the catastrophe of three centuries back. Others believed that it, or he, was some kind of messenger whose roar portended either doom or hope according to the believer. One very vocal sect taught that the apparition registered the moral conduct of the townspeople over the past year, and scrutinized the annual apparition for changes which could be interpreted for good or ill. It was considered lucky, or dangerous, to be touched by some of the dust raised by the monster. In every generation at least one small boy would try to hit the monster with a stick, usually acquiring a broken arm and a lifelong tavern tale. Pelting the monster with stones or other objects was a popular sport, and for some years people systematically flung prayers and flowers at it. Once a party tried to net it and were left with strings and vapor. The area itself had long since been fenced off at the center of the park.

Through all this the monster made his violently enigmatic annual appearance, sprawled furiously motionless, unreachably roaring.

Only as the fourth century of the new era went by was it apparent that the monster had been changing slightly. He was now no longer on the earth but had an arm and a leg thrust upward in a kicking or flailing gesture. As the years passed he began to change more quickly until at the end of the century he had risen to a contorted crouching pose, arms outflung as if frozen in gyration. His roar, too, seemed somewhat differently pitched, and the earth after him smoked more and more.

It was then widely felt that the man-monster was about to do something, to make some definitive manifestation, and a series of natural disasters and marvels gave support to a vigorous cult teaching this doctrine. Several religious leaders journeyed to the town to observe the apparitions.

However, the decades passed and the man-monster did nothing more than turn slowly in place, so that he now appeared to be in the act of sliding or staggering while pushing himself backward like a creature blown before a gale. No wind, of course, could be felt, and presently the general climate quieted and nothing came of it all.

Early in the fifth century New Calendar three survey parties from the North Central Authority came through the area and stopped to observe the monster. A permanent recording device was set up at the site, after assurances to the townsfolk that no hardscience was involved. A local boy was trained to operate it; he quit when his girl left him but another volunteered. At this time nearly everyone believed that the apparition was a man, or the ghost of one. The record-machine boy and a few others including the school mechanics teacher referred to him as The Man John. In the next decades the roads were greatly improved; all forms of travel increased, and there was talk of building a canal to what had been the Snake River.

One May morning at the end of Century Five a young couple in a smart green mule-trap came jogging up the highroad from the Sandreas Rift Range to the southwest. The girl was golden-skinned and chatted with her young husband in a language unlike that ever heard by The Man John either at the end or the beginning of his life. What she said to him has, however, been heard in every age and tongue.

“Oh, Serli, I’m so glad we’re taking this trip now! Next summer I’ll be busy with baby.”

To which Serli replied as young husbands often have, and so they trotted up to the town’s inn. Here they left trap and bags and went in search of her uncle, who was expecting them there. The morrow was the day of The Man John’s annual appearance, and her Uncle Laban had come from the MacKenzie History Museum to observe it and to make certain arrangements.

They found him with the town school instructor of mechanics, who was also the recorder at the monster-site. Presently Uncle Laban took them all with him to the town mayor’s office to meet with various religious personages. The mayor was not unaware of tourist values, but he took Uncle Laban’s part in securing the cultists’ grudging assent to the MacKenzie authorities’ secular interpretation of the monster, which was made easier by the fact that the cults disagreed among themselves. Then, seeing how pretty the niece was, the mayor took them all home to dinner.

When they returned to the inn for the night it was abrawl with holidaymakers.

“Whew,” said Uncle Laban. “I’ve talked myself dry, sister’s daughter. What a weight of holy nonsense is that Moksha female! Serli, my lad, I know you have questions. Let me hand you this to read, it’s the guidebook we’re giving them to sell. Tomorrow I’ll answer for it all.” And he disappeared into the crowded tavern.

So Serli and his bride took the pamphlet upstairs to bed with them, but it was not until the next morning at breakfast that they found time to read it.

“‘All that is known of John Delgano,’” read Serli with his mouth full, “‘comes from two documents left by his brother Carl Delgano in the archives of the MacKenzie Group in the early years after the holocaust.’ Put some honey on this cake, Mira my dove. Verbatim transcript follows, this is Carl Delgano speaking:

“‘I’m not an engineer or an astronaut like John, I ran an electronics repair shop in Salt Lake City. John was only trained as a spaceman, he never got to space; the slump wiped all that out. So he tied up with this commercial group who were leasing part of Bonneville. They wanted a man for some kind of hard vacuum tests, that’s all I knew about it. John and his wife moved to Bonneville, but we all got together several times a year, our wives were like sisters. John had two kids, Clara and Paul.

“‘The tests were supposed to be secret, but John told me confidentially they were trying for an antigravity chamber. I don’t know if it ever worked. That was the year before.

“‘Then that winter they came down for Christmas and John said they had something far out. He was excited. A temporal displacement, he called it; some kind of time effect. He said their chief honcho was like a real mad scientist. Big ideas. He kept adding more angles every time some other project would quit and leave equipment he could lease. No, I don’t know who the top company was—maybe an insurance conglomerate, they had all the cash, didn’t they? I guess they’d pay to catch a look at the future, that figures. Anyway, John was go, go, go. Katharine was scared, that’s natural. She pictured him like, you know, H. G. Wells—walking around in some future world. John told her it wasn’t like that at all. All they’d get would be this flicker, like a second or two. All kinds of complications.’—Yes, yes, my greedy piglet, some brew for me too. This is thirsty work!

“So. ‘I remember I asked him, what about Earth moving? I mean, you could come back in a different place, right? He said they had that all figured. A spatial trajectory. Katharine was so scared we dropped it. John told her, don’t worry. I’ll come home. But he didn’t. Not that it makes any difference, of course, everything was wiped out. Salt Lake too. The only reason I’m here is that I went up by Calgary to see Mom, April twenty-ninth. May second it all blew. I didn’t find you folks at MacKenzie until July. I guess I may as well stay. That’s all I know about John, except that he was a solid guy. If that accident started all this it wasn’t his fault.

“‘The second document’—in the name of love, little mother, do I have to read all this? Oh, very well, but you will kiss me first, madam. Must you look so delicious? ‘The second document. Dated in the year eighteen, New Style, written by Carl’—see the old handwriting, my plump plump pigeon? Oh, very well, very well.

“‘Written at Bonneville Crater: I have seen my brother John Delgano. When I knew I had the rad sickness I came down here to look around. Salt Lake’s still hot. So I hiked up here by Bonneville. You can see the crater where the labs were, it’s grassed over. It’s different, not radioactive; my film’s okay. There’s a bare place in the middle. Some Indios here told me a monster shows up here every year in the spring. I saw it myself a couple of days after I got here, but I was too far away to see much, except I was sure it’s a man. In a vacuum suit. There was a lot of noise and dust, took me by surprise. It was all over in a second. I figured it’s pretty close to the day, I mean, May second, old.

“‘So I hung around a year and he showed up again yesterday. I was on the face side, and I could see his face through the visor. It’s John, all right. He’s hurt. I saw blood on his mouth and his suit is frayed some. He’s lying on the ground. He didn’t move while I could see him but the dust boiled up, like a man sliding onto base without moving. His eyes are open like he was looking. I don’t understand it anyway, but I know it’s John, not a ghost. He was in exactly the same position each time and there’s a loud crack like thunder and another sound like a siren, very fast. And an ozone smell, and smoke. I felt a kind of shudder.

“‘I know it’s John there and I think he’s alive. I have to leave here now to take this back while I can still walk. I think somebody should come here and see. Maybe you can help John. Signed, Carl Delgano.

“‘These records were kept by the MacKenzie Group, but it was not for several years’—etcetera, first light-print, etcetera, archives, analysts, etcetera—very good! Now it is time to meet your uncle, my edible one, after we go upstairs for just a moment.”

“No, Serli, I will wait for you downstairs,” said Mira prudently.

When they came into the town park Uncle Laban was directing the installation of a large durite slab in front of the enclosure around The Man John’s appearance-spot. The slab was wrapped in a curtain to await the official unveiling. Townspeople and tourists and children thronged the walks, and a Ride-for-God choir was singing in the band shell. The morning was warming up fast. Vendors hawked ices and straw toys of the monster and flowers and good-luck confetti to throw at him. Another religious group stood by in dark robes; they belonged to the Repentance church beyond the park. Their pastor was directing somber glares at the crowd in general and Mira’s uncle in particular.

Three official-looking strangers who had been at the inn came up and introduced themselves to Uncle Laban as observers from Alberta Central. They went on into the tent, which had been erected over the closure, carrying with them several pieces of equipment which the townsfolk eyed suspiciously.

The mechanics teacher finished organizing a squad of students to protect the slab’s curtain, and Mira and Serli and Laban went on into the tent. It was much hotter inside. Benches were set in rings around a railed enclosure about twenty feet in diameter. Inside the railing the earth was bare and scuffed. Several bunches of flowers and blooming poinciana branches leaned against the rail. The only thing inside the rail was a rough sandstone rock with markings etched on it.

Just as they came in, a small girl raced across the open center and was yelled at by everybody. The officials from Alberta were busy at one side of the rail, where the light-print box was mounted.

“Oh, no,” muttered Mira’s uncle, as one of the officials leaned over to set up a tripod stand inside the rails. He adjusted it, and a huge horsetail of fine feathery filaments blossomed out and eddied through the center of the space.

“Oh, no,” Laban said again. “Why can’t they let it be?”

“They’re trying to pick up dust from his suit, is that right?” Serli asked.

“Yes, insane. Did you get time to read?”

“Oh, yes,” said Serli.

“Sort of,” added Mira.

“Then you know. He’s falling. Trying to check his—well, call it velocity. Trying to slow down. He must have slipped or stumbled. We’re getting pretty close to when he lost his footing and started to fall. What did it? Did somebody trip him?” Laban looked from Mira to Serli, dead serious now. “How would you like to be the one who made John Delgano fall?”

“Ooh,” said Mira in quick sympathy. Then she said, “Oh.”

“You mean,” asked Serli, “whoever made him fall caused all the, caused—”

“Possible,” said Laban.

“Wait a minute.” Serli frowned. “He did fall. So somebody had to do it—I mean, he has to trip or whatever. If he doesn’t fall the past would all be changed, wouldn’t it? No war, no—”

“Possible,” Laban repeated. “God knows. All I know is that John Delgano and the space around him is the most unstable, improbable, highly charged area ever known on Earth, and I’m damned if I think anybody should go poking sticks in it.”

“Oh, come now, Laban!” One of the Alberta men joined them, smiling. “Our dust mop couldn’t trip a gnat. It’s just vitreous monofilaments.”

“Dust from the future,” grumbled Laban. “What’s it going to tell you? That the future has dust in it?”

“If we could only get a trace from that thing in his hand.”

“In his hand?” asked Mira. Serli started leafing hurriedly through the pamphlet.

“We’ve had a recording analyzer aimed at it,” the Albertan lowered his voice, glancing around. “A spectroscope. We know there’s something there, or was. Can’t get a decent reading. It’s severely deteriorated.”

“People poking at him, grabbing at him,” Laban muttered. “You—”

“TEN MINUTES!” shouted a man with a megaphone. “Take your places, friends and strangers.”

The Repentance people were filing in at one side, intoning an ancient incantation, “Mi-seri-cordia, Ora pro nobis!”

The atmosphere suddenly became tense. It was now very close and hot in the big tent. A boy from the mayor’s office wiggled through the crowd, beckoning Laban’s party to come and sit in the guest chairs on the second level on the “face” side. In front of them at the rail one of the Repentance ministers was arguing with an Albertan official over his right to occupy the space taken by a recorder, it being his special duty to look into The Man John’s eyes.

“Can he really see us?” Mira asked her uncle.

“Blink your eyes,” Laban told her. “A new scene every blink, that’s what he sees. Phantasmagoria. Blink-blink-blink—for god knows how long.”

“Mi-sere-re, pec-cavi,” chanted the penitentials. A soprano neighed. “May the red of sin pa-aa-ass from us!”

“They believe his oxygen tab went red because of the state of their souls,” Laban chuckled. “Their souls are going to have to stay damned awhile; John Delgano has been on oxygen reserve for five centuries—or rather, he will be low for five centuries more. At a half-second per year his time, that’s fifteen minutes. We know from the audio trace he’s still breathing more or less normally, and the reserve was good for twenty minutes. So they should have their salvation about the year seven hundred, if they last that long.”

“FIVE MINUTES! Take your seats, folks. Please sit down so everyone can see. Sit down, folks.”

“It says we’ll hear his voice through his suit speaker,” Serli whispered. “Do you know what he’s saying?”

“You get mostly a twenty-cycle howl,” Laban whispered back. “The recorders have spliced up something like ayt, part of an old word. Take centuries to get enough to translate.”

“Is it a message?”

“Who knows? Could be his word for ‘date’ or ‘hate.’ ‘Too late,’ maybe. Anything.”

The tent was quieting. A fat child by the railing started to cry and was pulled back onto a lap. There was a subdued mumble of praying. The Holy Joy faction on the far side rustled their flowers.

“Why don’t we set our clocks by him?”

“It’s changing. He’s on sidereal time.”

“ONE MINUTE.”

In the hush the praying voices rose slightly. From outside a chicken cackled. The bare center space looked absolutely ordinary. Over it the recorder’s silvery filaments eddied gently in the breath from a hundred lungs. Another recorder could be heard ticking faintly.

For long seconds nothing happened.

The air developed a tiny hum. At the same moment Mira caught a movement at the railing on her left.

The hum developed a beat and vanished into a peculiar silence and suddenly everything happened at once.

Sound burst on them, raced shockingly up the audible scale. The air cracked as something rolled and tumbled in the space. There was a grinding, wailing roar and—

He was there.

Solid, huge—a huge man in a monster-suit, his head was a dull bronze transparent globe, holding a human face, a dark smear of open mouth. His position was impossible, legs strained forward thrusting himself back, his arms frozen in a whirlwind swing. Although he seemed to be in frantic forward motion nothing moved, only one of his legs buckled or sagged slightly—

—And then he was gone, utterly and completely gone in a thunderclap, leaving only the incredible afterimage in their staring eyes. Air boomed, shuddering; dust rolled out mixed with smoke.

“Oh! Oh, my god,” gasped Mira, unheard, clinging to Serli. Voices were crying out, choking. “He saw me, he saw me!” a woman shrieked. A few people dazedly threw their confetti into the empty dust-cloud, most had failed to throw at all. Children began to howl. “He saw me!” the woman screamed hysterically. “Red, oh, Lord have mercy!” a deep male voice intoned.

Mira heard Laban swearing furiously and looked again into the space. As the dust settled she could see that the recorder’s tripod had tipped over into the center. There was a dusty mound lying against it—flowers. Most of the end of the stand seemed to have disappeared or been melted. Of the filaments nothing could be seen.

“Some damn fool pitched flowers into it. Come on, let’s get out.”

“Was it under, did it trip him?” asked Mira, squeezed in the crowd.

“It was still red, his oxygen thing,” Serli said over her head. “No mercy this trip, eh, Laban?”

“Shsh!” Mira caught the Repentance pastor’s dark glance. They jostled through the enclosure gate and were out in the sunlit park, voices exclaiming, chattering loudly in excitement and relief.

“It was terrible,” Mira cried softly. “Oh, I never thought it was a real live man. There he is, he’s there. Why can’t we help him? Did we trip him?”

“I don’t know, I don’t think so,” her uncle grunted. They sat down near the new monument, fanning themselves. The curtain was still in place.

“Did we change the past?” Serli laughed, looked lovingly at his little wife. For a moment he wondered why she was wearing such odd earrings; then he remembered he had given them to her at that Indian pueblo they’d passed.

“But it wasn’t just those Alberta people,” said Mira. She seemed obsessed with the idea. “It was the flowers really.” She wiped at her forehead.

“Mechanics or superstition,” chuckled Serli. “Which is the culprit, love or science?”

“Shsh.” Mira looked about nervously. “The flowers were love, I guess . . . . I feel so strange. It’s hot. Oh, thank you.” Uncle Laban had succeeded in attracting the attention of the iced-drink vendor.

People were chatting normally now, and the choir struck into a cheerful song. At one side of the park a line of people were waiting to sign their names in the visitors’ book. The mayor appeared at the park gate, leading a party up the bougainvillea alley for the unveiling of the monument.

“What did it say on that stone by his foot?” Mira asked. Serli showed her the guidebook picture of Carl’s rock with the inscription translated below: WELCOME HOME JOHN.

“I wonder if he can see it.”

The mayor was about to begin his speech.

Much later when the crowd had gone away the monument stood alone in the dark, displaying to the moon the inscription in the language of that time and place:

On this spot there appears annually the form of Major John Delgano, the first and only man to travel in time.

Major Delgano was sent into the future some hours before the holocaust of Day Zero. All knowledge of the means by which he was sent is lost, perhaps forever. It is believed that an accident occurred which sent him much farther than was intended. Some analysts speculate that he may have gone as far as fifty thousand years ahead. Having reached this unknown point Major Delgano apparently was recalled, or attempted to return, along the course in space and time through which he was sent. His trajectory is thought to start at the point which our solar system will occupy at a future time and is tangent to the complex helix which our earth describes around the sun.

He appears on this spot in the annual instants in which his course intersects our planet’s orbit, and he is apparently able to touch the ground in those instants. Since no trace of his passage into the future has been manifested, it is believed that he is returning by a different means than he went forward. He is alive in our present. Our past is his future and our future is his past. The time of his appearances is shifting gradually in solar time to converge on the moment of 1153.6, on may 2, 1989 old style, or Day Zero.

The explosion which accompanied his return to his own time and place may have occurred when some elements of the past instants of his course were carried with him into their own prior existence. It is certain that this explosion precipitated the worldwide holocaust which ended forever the Age of Hardscience.

—He was falling, losing control, failing in his fight against the terrible momentum he had gained, fighting with his human legs shaking in the inhuman stiffness of his armor, his soles charred, not gripping well now, not enough traction to break, battling, thrusting as the flashes came, the punishing alternation of light, dark, light, dark, which he had borne so long, the claps of air thickening and thinning against his armor as he skidded through space which was time, desperately braking as the flickers of Earth hammered against his feet—only his feet mattered now, only to slow and stay on course—and the pull, the beacon was getting slacker; as he came near home it was fanning out, hard to stay centered; he was becoming, he supposed, more probable; the wound he had punched in time was healing itself. In the beginning it had been so tight—a single ray of light in a closing tunnel—he had hurled himself after it like an electron flying to the anode, aimed surely along that exquisitely complex single vector of possibility of life, shot and been shot like a squeezed pip into the last chink in that rejecting and rejected nowhere through which he, John Delgano, could conceivably continue to exist, the hole leading to home—had pounded down it across time, across space, pumping with desperate legs as the real Earth of that unreal time came under him, his course as certain as the twisting dash of an animal down its burrow, he a cosmic mouse on an interstellar, intertemporal race for his nest with the wrongness of everything closing round the rightness of that one course, the atoms of his heart, his blood, his every cell crying Home—HOME!—as he drove himself after that fading breath-hole, each step faster, surer, stronger, until he raced with invincible momentum upon the rolling flickers of Earth as a man might race a rolling log in a torrent. Only the stars stayed constant around him from flash to flash, he looking down past his feet at a million strobes of Crux, of Triangulum; once at the height of his stride he had risked, a century’s glance upward and seen the Bears weirdly strung out from Polaris—but a Polaris not the Pole Star now, he realized, jerking his eyes back to his racing feet, thinking, I am walking home to Polaris, home! to the strobing beat. He had ceased to remember where he had been, the beings, people or aliens or things, he had glimpsed in the impossible moment of being where he could not be; had ceased to see the flashes of worlds around him, each flash different, the jumble of bodies, shapes, walls, colors, landscapes—some lasting a breath, some changing pell-mell—the faces, limbs, things poking at him; the nights he had pounded through, dark or lit by strange lamps, roofed or unroofed, the days flashing sunlight, gales, dust, snow, interiors innumerable, strobe after strobe into night again; he was in daylight now, a hall of some kind; I am getting closer at last, he thought, the feel is changing—but he had to slow down, to check; and that stone near his feet, it had stayed there some time now, he wanted to risk a look but he did not dare, he was so tired, and he was sliding, was going out of control, fighting to kill the merciless velocity that would not let him slow down; he was hurt, too, something had hit him back there, they had done something, he didn’t know what, back somewhere in the kaleidoscope of faces, arms, hooks, beams, centuries of creatures grabbing at him—and his oxygen was going, never mind, it would last—it had to last, he was going home, home! And he had forgotten now the message he had tried to shout, hoping it could be picked up somehow, the important thing he had repeated; and the thing he had carried, it was gone now, his camera was gone too, something had torn it away—but he was coming home! Home! If only he could kill this momentum, could stay on the failing course, could slip, scramble, slide, somehow ride this avalanche down to home, to home—and his throat said Home!—called Kate, Kate! And his heart shouted, his lungs almost gone now, as his legs fought, fought and failed, as his feet gripped and skidded and held and slid, as he pitched, flailed, pushed, strove in the gale of timerush across space, across time, at the end of the longest path ever: the path of John Delgano, coming home.

Originally published in Amazing Science Fiction, May 1972.

About the Author

Multiple Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author James Tiptree, Jr. was the pseudonym of the late Dr. Alice Sheldon, a semi-retired experimental psychologist and former member of the American intelligence community who also wrote occasionally under the name of Raccoona Sheldon. Dr. Sheldon’s tragic death in 1987 put an end to “both” careers, but not before she had won two Nebula and two Hugo Awards as Tiptree, won another Nebula Award as Raccoona Sheldon, and established herself, under whatever name, as one of the very best science fiction writers of our times. As Tiptree, Dr. Sheldon published two novels, Up the Walls of the World and Brightness Falls From the Air, and nine short-story collections: Ten Thousand Light Years From Home, Warm Worlds and Otherwise, Starsongs of an Old Primate, Out of the Everywhere, Tales of the Quintana Roo, Byte Beautiful, The Starry Rift, the posthumously published Crown of Stars, and the definitive posthumous retrospective collection, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.

Cut, Fold, and Conquer the Universe:
The Best Models in the Galaxy

Mark Cole

It wasn’t unbelievable.

It was something more than that, something you could hardly wrap your mind around.

If you’ve seen the Matrix sequels, you would recognize it instantly: the APU (Armored Personnel Unit), a huge, heavily-armed and intensely detailed battle exoskeleton.

It wasn’t so much that someone had created a model of this complex machine: after all, McFarlane Toys, among others, had offered one. Nor was it that most of the incredible number of joints and linkages worked: the other versions all had moving parts. Nor was it that you could get it for free, although that made it far more attractive.

No, the truly remarkable thing about this model was that it was entirely made of paper.

Perhaps to fully understand this you have to go back to the Eighties and take a quick look in the hobby shops.

For those of us who flocked to see Star Wars, the films didn’t just spark our love of science fiction: they also created the desire to build all that cool hardware.

Unfortunately, that didn’t quite work out. True, AMT, Revell and MPC offered Star Wars, and Star Trek kits, as well as a scattered handful from Battlestar Galactica, The Black Hole and others. But when it came to adult science fiction—whether Blade Runner 2001, or The Road Warrior—there was little to be found.

Even when they did exist, the kits might not have made it to local stores—and sometimes not even the specialty catalogs. Fan magazines advertised exotic Resin or vacuformed models, but these were ridiculously expensive, often of poor quality, and required a tremendous amount of skill to build. At one point, the only available Babylon 5 Shadow Battlecrab was a five hundred dollar model the size of a kitchen table “manufactured” in the designer’s garage!

Worse, creating the molds was expensive and time consuming. The big companies rarely took a risk on an upcoming film that didn’t look like a huge success, nor were there any guarantees that they would release models afterwards. Who knew, after all, whether anyone would still be interested come Christmas? Often, as with Back to the Future and Ghostbusters, they waited until the sequels came out.

Nor has the situation really improved since then. Yes, far more is out there and it’s easier to find, thanks to online stores. Companies like Polar Lights have re-released (and often improved) the old kits. And a surge of pre-assembled figures and vehicles have flooded the market. But it still can be a challenge to find your favorites.

Which is where cardmodeling has filled many of the gaps.

The basic idea is quite old.

While simple commercial cardmodels had been available since the fifteenth century, the invention of lithography transformed the hobby and led to a nineteenth century boom in detailed scale paper models. John Merrick—better known as the Elephant Man—was one of the many building them; he often sent them as gifts to people he wanted to meet.

However, when kits in balsa wood, metal, and plastic arrived, interest in cardmodels waned, only to be revived during World War II when paper was one of the few materials not rationed. For example, Lionel offered an O scale paper train, although it proved too difficult for most people to build.

Here in the U.S., they disappeared almost completely and are best remembered as premiums given away by cereal companies.

In Europe, however, a number of publishers still sell them. Ironically, cardmodeling did best under the chronic shortages of Communist Eastern Europe, where plastic models were ridiculously poor (and expensive) and you could subscribe to what amounted to a magazine and regularly receive new kits.

While we might expect simple, toy-like productions, some (particularly ship models) are incredibly detailed. A few publishers actually offer laser die-cut metal detailing parts like those in high-end plastic models. Or there’s one of the all-time bestsellers, the working paper clock, made entirely from paper except for the weights and axles.

Unfortunately, for those few of us building in paper, the only way to find them was from specialty dealers like John Hathaway and later PMI (both long defunct), which sold the best European models and a few of their own.

But, with a few rare exceptions—like JF Schreiber’s huge, fantasy spaceship, “Blue Star”—you couldn’t find any science fiction models.

And certainly, not that Buckaroo Banzai Jet Car I couldn’t find anywhere in any medium.

The situation was a little different in Japan. There, cardmodeling is part of what’s known as “papercraft,” which includes origami, kirigami and other related crafts. While it still goes mostly unnoticed, a loyal band of hobbyists have created just enough demand that you can find a few, impressive book-format models, such as the Thunderbirds’ secret base, complete with all five vehicles. Kodansha released an intricately detailed Terminator Endoskeleton, the massive Wani Magazine Space Battleship Yamato is still much sought after, and Mainabi’s new tech manual for the Macross SDF-1 includes a 400 piece model. Sankei’s Studio Ghibli line ranges from dioramas and miniature buildings to vehicles and robots.

But most of these models went unseen in the West.

Everything changed with the introduction of two new technologies: file sharing over the Internet and affordable color inkjet printers.

Businesses in Europe used to give away free promotional models, so it’s no real surprise that printer manufacturers like Canon and Epson got into the game. Their websites offer downloads not of simple one page models, but large, complex, well-designed efforts that take lots of paper, like Epson’s forty-seven-page model of Godzilla’s nemesis, King Ghidorah.

But, while it was challenging and required a few drafting skills, hobbyists had been creating and distributing their own models right from the start: the old catalogs were full of “companies” with only one or two kits on the market. While the technical demands and cost of even a modest printing run had posed serious limits in the past, a designer could now create a file which could be shared with friends and beta testers—or posted on the Internet.

And those friends could repaint or redraw parts of that basic model. They could create obscure variants, or add interiors, landing gear, and other extras. Some of these are almost a team effort, with several designers on board; each tackling what he does best.

Then there are the online forums, like papermodelers.com, where this small group of dedicated hobbyists exchange tips, share their work, and just hang out.

The end result was incredible. Almost overnight, a stunning number of models became available, many of them for free. From reproductions of some of those toy-like premiums to scans of classic models; from promotional offerings from major corporations to free models from gifted amateurs; from simple children’s models to insanely complex scale models, there are literally thousands of models available, representing almost every imaginable subject.

Even the process of creating models changed, thanks to CAD programs. Now a designer can download one of the many pre-existing 3D meshes, unfold it and translate its surfaces into paper parts. This is trickier than it sounds as paper only wants to bend in one direction at a time, but there are actually programs specifically engineered to do this, of which Pepakura is the best known (although serious designers sneer at it because it tends to reduce models to lots of little strips).

And naturally, many of this small technically gifted group of people creating models for their own enjoyment loved science fiction.

As you would expect, there are a lot of Star Wars and Star Trek models out there. A lot of them.

You can easily find most of the major vehicles from the Star Wars universe, as well as figures, props, and, yes, the Lars family homestead on Tatooine. You can even find a model of the U-Wing transport from Rogue One.

And, of course, all the Star Trek series are well-represented, with multiple versions of the most familiar Trek ships, lots of obscure and minor vessels, the Deep Space Nine Station, and even several models of the 2009 reboot Enterprise.

But, curiously, the Warhammer 40K models might outnumber either of them, as many war gamers (particularly in Russia) would rather spend a few bucks on printing than the thirty or forty they might pay for a miniature vehicle. Perhaps the best come from the incredibly prolific Ukrainian designer, Eli Patoroch, although the vk.com forum has many more.

There are almost as many Doctor Who models, with a vast assortment of Tardises, including uncloaked, “siege” mode, and “steampunk” variants. It is hard to find a good Dalek, although there is an impressive mutant.

Kits abound from both versions of Battlestar Galactica, and from the Aliens movies, as well as such familiar franchises as Stargate Firefly Back to the Future (with lots of Deloreans and even the Time Train), and Mad Max (including Fury Road and the first film’s Interceptor and MFP cars). Gerry Anderson’s many shows are well-represented as are Irwin Allen’s.

However, one finds models not only from major works, but from whatever inspires a dedicated designer, whether Warrior bugs from Starship Troopers, the Raiders of the Lost Ark, Flying Wing, the Eagle 5 from Spaceballs, a S.H.I.E.L.D Helicarrier, the titular jet from Firefox, or even Spaceman Spiff’s iconic little red saucer.

Cult favorites like Cowboy Bebop Blake’s 7, and the animated series Futurama; classic films; great fantasy and SF art ; Album covers; and popular video games are all represented, as are Galaxy Quest The Last Starfighter, and even an obscure German TV series. Fans of classic SF literature will find models based on period Jules Verne and H.G. Wells illustrations and a bust of Verne.

It is almost harder to explain the gaps. There are only a few scattered models for cult favorite Red Dwarf, even fewer for Dune (although the 1984 film spawned a cut-out activity book for children, as strange as that may sound), and apparently nothing at all from the much loved Farscape (perhaps because of the difficult organic curves of many of the ships). Another curious absence is Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, although it would be tricky to build the skinny booms of the series’ star, the Andromeda Ascendant.

However, the sheer volume of science fiction models is almost overwhelming. Some of the most visible designers seemed to have churned out dozens. Anyone searching the web will soon find model after model by these dedicated few:

There’s Mike Hungerford, who’s turned out a lot of simple, easy to build models, including classic movie spacecraft and Marvin the Martian’s rocket.

Then there’s Dave Winfield, whose deceptively simple Koolwheelz models produce incredible, Hot-Wheels-sized cars. His StarCarz collection features vehicles from Bladerunner The Fifth Element The Prisoner, and many others (including that Buckaroo Banzai Jet Car I’ve wanted for years). He even has the Juggernaut from the 1936 serial, Undersea Kingdom—and an assortment of spacecraft on his Specialz page.

Brian “Rocketman” Tan’s models frequently show up all over the web, and include the Dark Star and ships from Ender’s Game Halo 4, and the obscure Bavarian film, Weltraumschiff 1 Startet.

While Jan Rükr has claimed that he isn’t a particularly good designer, his models prove him wrong: he has an impressive collection on his Aliens Papercraft site. Most are from the Alien movies, although he’s tackled everything from Tron to Czech comics.

At Ninjatoes’ website, you’ll find his Star Trek Star Wars, and Battlestar Galactica models, revised versions by other designers, and even a Lego Luke Skywalker.

Bill “Armorman” Perry deserves a special mention, not just because of his own models, but because of his efforts to find, publicize, and preserve the work of other modelers. He’s posted links and downloads on most of the papermodeler forums, created interesting upgrades of others’ models, and even reconstructed this “lost” Nausicaa gunship.

If you want 1/25 scale models of automobiles from SF movies, the best place to find them is Cláudio Dias’ PaperInside.com. Martin Sänger’s Paper Aviation site offers many impressive efforts, including his stunning Lunar Rover from Moon. And Marcell von dem Berge (“Revell-Fan”)’s excellent BSG and Buck Roger’s models seem to be everywhere.

Perhaps the best SF cardmodeling site out there is Julius Perdana’s Paper-Replika.com, which features both links to others’ work and his dizzying collection of detailed and well-designed models, from a giant mecha from Pacific Rim, to a shipload of Wall-E models and far more—more than most of us could build in a lifetime.

But you’ll also find a lot of dead links to great models.

Which leads us to the serpent in this particular Eden: bandwidth.

Yes, it can be frustrating that the best sites are in Czech or Japanese. But then, that’s why we have Google. And it is a lot harder to sign up for the swmodel.ru forum when they expect you to do so in Cyrillic characters.

The real problem, however, is that the best models come in formats that support vector graphics.

While these make it easy to scale the models up and down, they also require far more data, particularly for models with a lot of detail. This isn’t necessarily a problem for someone who only has one or two simple models to post, but those who have more soon run out of space.

Which means that an incredible model can vanish overnight. Or even a designer’s entire output. That happened when Rick “Webdude” Lytle’s much loved website went dark, although he has since posted it on Google Drive.

Most of Gary Pillsworth’s excellent models disappeared when the “DiPileggi’s Picks” website closed down, as did Diego Cortez Pardoe’s Babylon 5 kits. Many of these are now hosted at Papermodelers.com but can only be accessed by members.

The only other B5 models that seem to be available (including the Battlecrab) are on a Russian site, but downloading them pops up pornographic video ads. It does seem that many of the most popular filesharing services either bury you under ads or try to sell you “premium” subscriptions.

The difficulties of dealing with downloads have led some designers to set so many hoops for modelers to jump through that they are almost unavailable (like “Jepi 12”s hako-style models from The Black Hole ) ordriven many models onto private forums.

Far worse are those tantalizing links where the webpage still remains but the download links have long since ceased functioning.

Most of these models are free. Getting them officially licensed is quite difficult, but they’re usually treated as fan art if you give them away (a few—like the moon rocket from the Tintin books—have been taken down for copyright reasons).

So, keeping a model alive often depends on tips, or obnoxious ads, or selling other non-copyrighted models.

Few creators actually make any money: most do it for the sheer love of modeling.

Perhaps Cardmodeling’s greatest advantage is that it gives the designer the freedom to create almost any project he’d like, whether an absurd bit of fun or something truly epic.

And some of the projects out there required such an unimaginable amount of skill and hard work that they seem almost impossible.

True, a full-sized Star Wars battle droid or R2 D2 is impressive, but then one finds something like this huge version of Howl’s Moving Castle, with lots of moving parts, or the insanely detailed Matrix APU.

Far more impressive, however, is Jan Rukr’s masterpiece, a nearly six-foot long version of the USS Sulaco from Aliens. He designed the ship over several years, using a modular system that allowed him to create one section at a time while making the whole model quite strong.

But by far the most totally insane models out there—and the best, with a seemingly impossible level of detail and scale accuracy—are those of “Uhu02”, whose site features an incredible assortment of models, which rival plastic models in quality. He is the sort of modeler who thinks nothing of building the Tokyo tower—girders and all—and routinely adds interiors, cutaway displays and internal details.

Unfortunately, you can’t download most of them. He gives new models away for a short time, and only occasionally makes the older ones available. One can only hope that he’ll offer his USSC Discovery again.

While the new technologies have changed the hobby, the basics still remain the same.

True, many computer-aided models look like someone dumped the parts all over the page, and only a few designers still produce model pages which are themselves works of art. True, there are now laser cutting machines that can pre-cut the parts, and Cosplay enthusiasts (who are heavily into Pepakura) frequently print theirs on foam board or cover the paper with layers of other materials. And, true, you often can go online and find build tutorials for the model you just downloaded.

Yet the fact remains that with a few simple tools, and a few basic skills, you can build models of hundreds of different science fictional subjects, without having to spend a lot of money to do it.

It’s enough to leave any discerning fan in a permanent state of “Nerdvana.”

About the Author

Mark Cole hates writing bios. Despite many efforts he has never written one he likes, perhaps because there are many other things he’d rather be writing. He writes from Warren, Pennsylvania, where he has managed to avoid writing about himself for both newspaper and magazine articles. His musings on Science Fiction have appeared in Clarkesworld and at IROSF.com, while his most recent story, “Let’s Start from the Top…” appeared in Daily Science Fiction.

Fallen Angels and Water Dragons:
A Conversation with Aliette de Bodard

Chris Urie

When the apocalypse inevitably happens and the end times come, what will be left? Will nature retake the cities? Will there be mutants roaming the subways? Will humans turn on each other? We’ve all seen the familiar trappings of what happens after the end of days. But one author has imagined something a little different, a post-apocalypse where gangs struggle for power and angels fall from the heavens into a Paris shot through with magic.

The House of Shattered Wings introduced readers to an early 1900’s Paris after a magical catastrophe. Gangs wander the streets while great Houses have carved out their own territories within the city. The House of Binding Thorns is a stand-alone sequel that dives right back into the heart of the dark and lush world Aliette de Bodard has created. Philippe is an immortal searching for redemption and the key to resurrection. Madeline, a former angel essence addict, is sent on a mission to an underwater Dragon Kingdom. The Dominion of the Fallen series weaves eastern and western mythology together into a post-apocalyptic brew of mystery and intrigue.

Aliette de Bodard is the author of numerous novels and short stories. Her work has appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, Interzone, Black Static, Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, and Apex Magazine, among others. She is the winner of the Nebula, Locus, and British Science Fiction Awards, and has been nominated for many other accolades. Her latest novel is The House of Binding Thorns, out from Ace May 10th.

What inspired your short story “The Shipmaker” that was reprinted in a recent issue of Clarkesworld?

Weirdly enough, Star Wars Episode III! I should probably unpack a bit: I was rather indignant that Amidala essentially died in childbirth at the end of Star Wars III—I thought a culture that had awesome spaceships and cool lightsabers, and which still didn’t manage to solve the maternal mortality issue, had some serious priority issues.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I wanted to write a story about pregnancies that were commonly dangerous—except that I didn’t believe (for the aforementioned reasons) that a future society would still have these. At this point I thought, “oh, but what if it was a spaceship pregnancy?” And then, we, er . . . sort of went on from there.

The House of Binding Thorns is a stand-alone sequel. What were some of the challenges you faced while writing a sequel while keeping it still accessible to new readers?

I chose to focus The House of Binding Thorns on a different place than its predecessor, and on a mixed group of characters. There are four point-of-view characters, with only half of them from the previous novel. A lot of the issues I faced were making sure that new readers were caught up to speed, since the events from The House of Shattered Wings still resonated, especially for the characters who had been caught in it. I have an entire opening from the point of view of Philippe (the Vietnamese ex-Immortal anarchist who now works as a doctor in the poor areas of my post-magical-war Paris) that I ditched for a number of reasons, but the foremost one was that it was almost all exposition on how he’d got there. It’s a fine line to walk between making sure new readers can catch up, but without boring readers of book one!

Sacrifice seems to be a common theme tackled in a number of your books and stories. What is it about sacrifice, in its many forms, that interests you?

Sacrifice really covers a lot of things. To me it’s the idea that you often have to pay a price for getting something—I was always suspicious of stories where things were too easily earned—or the idea that you might end up paying and not getting much, as sacrifice isn’t necessarily a trade.

The setting for The Dominion of the Fallen has some familiar trappings of the post-apocalypse, but there is a surprising infusion into the mix: La Belle Epoque. What was it about this era in Paris that inspired you to include it as part of your setting?

I’ve long had a fascination for the 19th century, which is the time period of my favorite French novels (Alexandre Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables): it’s actually not that farfetched to think of it as an apocalypse, as it was a time of unprecedented social and political upheaval.

Even as technological advances were transforming everyday life, France was convulsing under two empires, a republic, two monarchies, and numerous coups and revolutions that ranged from successful to bloodily crushed. It was also a time of immense inequalities: the contrast between the glittering salons of the July Monarchy and the misery of workers who lived hand to mouth is just staggering. So, really, it’s not that far from that society and the one of Dominion of the Fallen—and the creeping horror and dread mostly come from my research into the time period.

In both novels, the effects of colonialism are felt in subtle ways and add a layer of realism to the world you’ve built. Do you hope to see more SF/F novels include honest depictions of colonialism and its effects?

Definitely! It’s an important theme to tackle. I’m especially hoping for novels that come from places and descendants of people that had colonialism inflicted on them—because they’ve been given the short end of the stick, and because we need to hear more voices from those backgrounds (and also because—without wanting to be all essentialist or prescriptivist—the stories they tell about colonialism tend to be different because they come from different places). I’m really happy we have people like Zen Cho, Tade Thompson, JY Yang, and Cassandra Khaw (and in poetry and art, Likhain) working in the field and am hoping to see more.

The magical systems you’ve built for theses novels are complex and a little bit mysterious, but they still have structure to them. How important are limitations on magical systems?

I actually like my magical systems to be fairly loosely structured: to me, magic should be a little numinous and a little scary, and that can’t really happen if you know exactly what’s going to happen when you cast a spell—if magic is like chemistry, and putting the right ingredients together yields a measurable, repeatable result. At the same time, giving no strictures whatsoever to magic is a problem for the reader, because they never quite know where to stand: there’s always the expectation the author might pull out a magic, ex machina to get characters out of trouble, which makes trouble meaningless. So, I try to strike a balance somewhere in the middle, hopefully getting the best of both approaches, at least from my point of view.

Contrast is something I’ve noticed in your work. There are scenes of tenderness and some wrenching scenes of brutality. Do you think the juxtaposition heightens the impact of both?

I love contrast. I think it’s a really effective tool: heart wrenching scenes are much more effective if they’ve been preceded by happy ones, and violence is all the more shocking if it happens out of the blue. And it does work both ways: the scenes of quiet are much more appreciated if they follow a violent scene, etc. I think it’s also quite hard to continuously raise the stakes in a novel.

I try to go for a zigzag approach where the stakes are getting larger, or at any rate things are getting more out of control and the tension is getting higher, but which are interspersed with quieter moments where the characters take stock of what’s happening, get some rest, and try to figure out what they’re doing next. That way, when I remove the quieter moments in the lead-up to the climax, the pace quickens all on its own (if I just go for the high-tension scenes continuously, I’ve found this leaves the reader feeling breathless, in not a good way, like they’re unhappy because they’ve never been given space to work things out and get attached to the characters).

Madeline stands out in The House of Binding Thorns and quickly became one of my favorite characters. Her addiction is tackled quite honestly in the book. What sort of research did you do in order to portray addiction accurately?

I read a bunch of medical texts on drugs, addiction, and how addiction was currently treated. I was mostly looking for inspiration rather than straight science, as the addiction in question is to a magical drug, and medicine isn’t quite the same in my universe as in ours.

The main thing I researched, was narratives of addiction: I was trying to avoid addiction being portrayed as a sign that the character is inherently weak and should be discarded (I have characters in the book who do think that way, but equally others who don’t). I was also trying to avoid magical cures narratives, both of the addiction and its consequences, which was a little harder to navigate (I wanted Madeleine to climb out, to some extent, of the pit she’d dug herself in, but I didn’t want this to be with a magic hand-wave. I hope that worked out!).

What is the most fascinating piece of history you learned about while researching French colonial rule over Vietnam?

There were so many things, but possibly the most bizarre one was the alcohol monopoly: basically, the French were pressuring their colony for money, and some bright soul hit upon the idea of the state having a monopoly on alcohol (which is always a pretty big thing, because celebrations, etc.). But they were cheap, so the alcohol they sold was made through a special chemical process that made it very affordable (affordable for the state: they sold it back at extortionate rate to villages and towns), with a higher alcohol content but mostly tasteless.

Not surprisingly, the Vietnamese didn’t really like that: not only did they not like the new (supposedly scientifically improved) taste, but you couldn’t even get properly drunk because the alcohol was too concentrated! As a result, you had hundreds and thousands of little bootleg operations springing up, that the French valiantly tried to stamp down—discovering, in the process, what they should have known all along: that it’s really really hard to control a population that outnumbers you and is really determined to brew its own alcohol! It ended after a decade or so when they finally got the alcohol to be better quality, and to be mixed with traditionally brewed rice alcohol in order to taste better.

What are some hidden secrets in the books? You’ve mentioned that the name Silverspires arose from its location in an area of Paris that had a large number of churches.

Ha. Those books are full of terrible bilingual puns and references to areas of Paris. House Lazarus, of course, is named after the nearby train station of Paris (from which it copied the architecture of its lower floors), but also refers to the saint, who rose again after he died (the House almost died out during the war and kept itself alive through miracles and some very shrewd diplomacy).

House Hawthorn is a twisted version of “Auteuil,” the area of Paris that it controls, but it’s also (of course) a thorn tree and a terribly invasive one at that, which is an apt description of its policies. House Aiguillon, one of the three that disappeared during the war (and which held the Latin Quarter), is named after the Aiguillon family, who renovated the Sorbonne—its most famous member being Cardinal de Richeulieu.

There’s a lot of character stuff that didn’t make its way into the books, either: Iaris, Hawthorn’s head doctor, is older than she seems because she’s very friendly with Asmodeus (they worked together in the Court of Birth, and she was one of his first supporters when he decided to take the House), who’s been keeping her alive with an infusion of Fallen magic.

How did Alexander Dumas, Victor Hugo, and Fullmetal Alchemist influence The House of Shattered Wings and The House of Binding Thorns?

Well, I’ve already mentioned Dumas and Hugo; though one other thing Dumas does very well, especially in The Count of Monte Cristo, is the intrigue and backstabbing. He has this glittering high society where it becomes quickly clear that friendship is all relative, and that everyone has their own plans for getting to the top—and where fallen friends are never given more than a heartbeat’s consideration—a very particular highlighting of how fragile those people’s positions really are. I tried to channel some of this in The House of Shattered Wings and The House of Binding Thorns: they’re books about political and magical intrigues, and how people try to backstab each other, often with multiple schemes (that have a tendency to blow up in their faces, but that’s only normal!).

Fullmetal Alchemist does, I think, so many things well that it’s hard to know where to start: the most obvious influence was that, like my books, it portrays a sort of indeterminate 19th century society rather than a medieval or Renaissance one. And it also does political and magical intrigue very well. But the one thing I love about it is the characters.

There’s a huge cast, and they’re all memorable and never really fall into easy cliché: even the villains have their own stories and their own reasons for what they’re doing. I particularly glommed onto Greed, the homunculus who likes collecting people and things—it sounds like it’d be horrific, but he’s actually quite fascinating in that he genuinely cares for them, wants to see who he owns as happy, and gets really angry when they’re harmed or killed. It’s partly jealousy and partly caring, in a mixture I found really interesting; and I tried to recreate a similar character with Asmodeus, the Fallen leader of House Hawthorn, who has this same predator/protector dynamic to him (except he’s more sarcastic, partly because someone needed to be sarcastic in those novels, lest everyone sound too earnest and gloomy).

Was there a particular piece of mythology that inspired the dragons that appear in the Dominion of the Fallen novels?

They’re pretty standard Vietnamese dragons actually! (Well, for values of “standard” that include living in grand and decaying mansions). They’re serpentine, legless water creatures with antlers because they’re the ones I grew up with, and of course they live under the river, and of course time passes differently when you go into their kingdom, because that’s what happens in fairytales. The politics of the dragon kingdom I took from a mix of the politics of the Nguyen court in the 19th century, in the years of decline before Vietnam became a colony of France, and the opium wars (because it’s hard to avoid the opium wars if your book includes a traffic of magical drugs that is making ravages in a Confucian kingdom).

I know you’re under contract for only two books, but can we expect more stories from this world?

I have some short fiction set in this world: there’s a complete list at aliettedebodard.com/bibliography/novels/dominion-of-the-fallen. I also have a few stories that aren’t on the list and that I’m currently deciding what to do with: one is a Samariel/Asmodeus courtship story from before The House of Shattered Wings, which is basically “rescue mission with sarcastic, tall dark and ruthless stranger.” The other one is the novella Of Birthdays, Fungus and Kindness, which has House Silverspires’ archivist Emmanuelle throw a surprise party for her lover Selene’s birthday in the wake of the events of The House of Shattered Wings, and things subsequently snowballing out of hand.

What are you working on next?

A lot of short fiction, mostly! A lot of things got left behind with book promotion and the plague house (aka that moment when both your kids spent all their time being sick, thank you kindergarten), so I’m writing short fiction, mostly SF. I’m also laying preparatory groundwork for a novel set in my Xuya universe (aka “the Vietnamese galactic empire with mixed families of artificial intelligences and people”): shooting for a “Nirvana on Fire, in space!” vibe.

How important is it that you give your characters “lunch breaks”?

Well, personally I don’t mind, but my husband grouches a lot that the characters should be fainting by now because they haven’t had any food or sleep for the last 48 hours, and apparently, my characters get irritable too, so they get time off to eat now!

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 Elizabeth Effect

A.M. Dellamonica

Story creates alternate realities.

The laws of our universe, as we imperfectly understand them, are where these realities begin, yet the results are not always bound by those rules. This is especially true in the literature of the fantastic, of course, and it’s something I don’t really need to tell Clarkesworld readers. 

So, why am I? Because I want to talk about feedback loops, about how story comes back on us. Allegedly fictional realities change our timeline, if you will, on a regular basis, in ways both expected and unexpected.

Once upon a time, remember, humans figured out what stars are, and then how the planets moved. Thanks in no small part to dreamers like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, we then envisioned a future where our species was no longer solely bound to Earth. Engineers and scientists came up with useful ideas like orbital velocity and useful constructions like rocket fuel. They measured the speed of light and fired American men at the moon.

Even as this tale, an artifact of the historical record, gained currency, storytellers had already zoomed ahead, leaving NASA in the dust. Some envisioned and named the warp drive, building a ship around it, and broadcasted stories about a glorious future where, instead of setting on each other like hyenas, our descendants agreed to set aside international differences—those pesky real-world fictions about how we differ, even if we don’t. They packed up an interstellar wagon train, and decide to boldly go.

Put this way, it perhaps seems like a fairly linear and logical process. Reality inspires fiction: fiction inspires innovation. Voila, space race. But other things spun off, too, remember? Fannish passion, that energy more volatile and powerful than dilithium, exploded everywhere. It powered, among other things, a Klingon translation of Hamlet.

I think one can safely argue that that is pretty bleepin’ random. Wonder at it for a second! The Tragedy of Khamlet is a concrete script, one you can purchase, read, and assign to your students, and even perform. It’s a story written by some Elizabethan guy, rendered into the tongue of a star-faring warrior race whose entire empire lives and breathes within the gray matter of Star Trek aficionados.

Alternately, consider the bifurcating timeline of Queen Elizabeth II.

Start with the Elizabeth we think of as the original, patient zero. A flesh and blood human woman, as far as anyone knows, with a sky-high media profile and a thoroughly bizarre job. What you think of that job, and how she does it, is your business. Maybe you feel strongly about it; maybe she’s just part of the background noise. Is what she does vital? Does it make a difference? Or is it a fiction, too? You decide.

Then there’s an Elizabeth newly on offer from Netflix, in the form of a show called The Crown. This Liz is married to Doctor Who XI, television royalty in other words, and that feels pretty damned significant within the context of this particular essay. In the real world, she’s descended from Mary Boleyn; in this particular strip of the fiction-verse, she’s played by an actress who made a terrific showing as Anne Boleyn in Wolf Hall . . . another fictionalized version of another historical narrative.

But wait! There’s more! Soooo much more. Stay tuned and you could win a set of steak knives. An interested consumer of story who wasn’t keen on The Crown, for example, could also get the Helen Mirren film, The Queen. They could read, perform, or otherwise absorb a Peter Morgan play called The Audience, scope out the BBC’s, The Queen at Ninety documentary, cast about for just the right drag show, or—my personal favorite—read Alan Bennett’s utterly fantastic alternate history novella, The Uncommon Reader.

If you want a little speculation about her future, the Guardian’s, “London Bridge is Down” has had people talking about her funeral ever since it came out in March.

Like any woman, the Queen contains multitudes: she is not only head of ye crumbling empire but a mother, grandmother, and wife. Simultaneously and not at all separately, she has become a fictional construct. Her timeline has literally diverged.

This is bread and butter stuff for science fiction writers, and yet even we assume we’re making up intangibles.

Elizabeth’s transformation may seem a frippery or an insignificance. However, consider that the tidal effect of story has so much power that billions of people watched the real deal, Elizabeth Prime if you will, as she traveled to the opening ceremonies of her country’s 2012 Summer Olympiad, with another great British figment, James Bond.

How can we not boggle at fiction’s power to warp reality when someone so high up the economic and political food chain deems it worthwhile—even necessary—to cosplay publicly with and as a fiction? To publicly bridge the meta-boundary between our universe and one created by Ian Fleming? Is the Queen thereby assuming or reassuming rights over that extradimensional real estate? Is she colonizing our imaginations? You tell me.

Meanwhile, here in North America, a competition show known as the 2016 U.S. Presidential Race recently awarded its grand prize and some really posh digs to a so-called reality TV star, at a time when journalism, allegedly a transmitter of truth, has become notoriously, horrifically, laughably unreliable. Writers and fans alike talk and tweet about living in the worst possible timeline. People routinely use analogies from The Hunger Games to describe the present-day predation of the world’s wealthy 1% upon . . . well, upon everyone else. When you hear someone invoke Lord Voldemort these days, you have to parse out whether they’re talking about Tom Riddle or some other dude who shall not be named.

When the going gets tough in my particular house, the tough turn to costume drama. While avoiding the news cycle, lately, I’ve been getting a lot of vitamin Queen in my media diet. I’ve seen and read all those stories I’ve already mentioned, and am about to start watching Victoria. There was a time when I was nigh-indifferent to the various Elizabeths, their progenitors, and their spawn, but somewhere along the line that changed. She’s been in so many shows I like, after all. She’s at least as real to me as Buffy.

So, when that Guardian article came along, I was primed for it. The real-world mechanics of the Queen’s future funeral are fascinating. That article, non-fiction to the core, describes multiple possible futures without batting an eye: if she dies this way, this’ll happen. If it happens another way, here’s the plan. If something goes wrong, the contingencies are . . . and so on.

This is fascinating stuff, particularly to a science fiction writer. It’s a portrait of a world every bit as alien, to most of us, as Arrakis.

Anyway. There I am, reading, fireworks going off in my writer-brain. Without a moment’s pause I hit FORWARD, so my wife, Kelly Robson, can lose a comparable amount of work on her current writing project. Later, when we are back together, we will squee, and OMG, and come up with Elizabeth ideas of our own. There’s a timeline in which one of us makes Elizabeth immortal, throwing all that solemn British funeral preparation to the winds. There’s a timeline where we both write a story like that. The possibilities branch from there.

In chaos theory, the butterfly effect suggests that a small perturbation of air, caused by an insect, can affect the later path of a tornado. The Elizabeth effect suggests to me that we storytellers fire narratives at our most powerful figures and institutions, and thereby alter their very nature, and perhaps—now and then—the course of the present timeline.

This is a process which transcends the laws of physics, a mystery buried deep within the murk and swirl of human nature. Perhaps it’s every bit as worthy of investigation as the nature of quantum particles. What might we learn, if we poured a particle accelerator’s worth of resources into understanding the process?

At a time when we desperately need to quintuple down on our efforts to terraform the Earth so it will remain a suitable habitat for humankind, this is a question we would do well to unlock. How we create alternate realities and invite the real world to participate in—even embrace—them could matter terribly.

Whatever you read, whatever you watch, and especially whatever you write, it changes you. Story has altered how you feel about Elizabeth Prime. Story has altered who she is. Now imagine that effect, multiplied, feeding back elsewhere, and possibly changing our outcomes now, just when we may need it most.

About the Author

A.M. Dellamonica’s first novel, Indigo Springs, won the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Her fourth, A Daughter of No Nation, has won the 2016 Prix Aurora. She is the author of over forty short stories, appearing in Tor.com, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and numerous print magazines and anthologies. She was the co-editor of Heiresses of Russ (2016). She teaches at UTSC and through the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.

Alyx is married to fellow Aurora winner Kelly Robson; the two made their outlaw wedding of 1989 legal, in 2003, when the Canadian Supreme Court conferred equality on same sex couples.

Editor’s Desk:
Trying on an Old Shoe

Neil Clarke

One of the things I’ve enjoyed about being self-employed is the flexibility to say “yes” to opportunities that would have previously been made complicated by the presence of the day job. As I write this, I’ve just returned from a day trip to Chicago where I had the chance to speak at an event hosted by Myth-Ink, the SFFH Writers of Columbia College. A major part of what I enjoyed about my career in academia was working with students, so it was very nice to be able to step into those shoes again.

Entering this field as a writer or an editor can be a fairly intimidating process. It’s incredibly easy to look at things from a numbers-only perspective and lose hope. As I’m fond of pointing out though, success in this field is not a matter of beating the quantitative odds. All stories are not equal. For example, I will always reject a zombie story. That means the odds of selling one to me are 0%. It doesn’t stop people from submitting them, but the ever-increasing pile of those stories does nothing to change the odds that I’ll buy one.

Quality, the factor by which stories are selected for publication, is entirely subjective. By and large, it’s hard to say where someone will land in that qualitative pool, but I have observed a common thread among people I see taking classes, joining writing groups, or otherwise actively trying to improve their work—they are always much better than they think. Imposter syndrome, low self-esteem, a lack of confidence in your work, fear of rejection, placing their peers on pedestals, etc. get in the way of improvement and success. We are our own worst enemies.

My advice to people looking to be writers or editors almost always starts with “read slush.” (Slush is a term used to describe the pile of submitted stories.) It’s by no means a glamorous task, but it gives you a sense of perspective of the field: what are the trends, common mistakes, and where you fall in that qualitative spectrum. I also tell writers to leave those positions once they reach a point of diminishing returns. Let someone else pick up the ball and you go and take advantage of what you’ve learned. Future editors should probably stick with it a bit longer, just to see if they can endure the process past the point of it being a learning experience.

Obviously there aren’t enough of these opportunities for every new author and editor to take advantage of, but you’d also be surprised by how few people actually pursue these positions. Our application pool often numbers below thirty and there are thousands of new writers in the field.

All that said, being a slush reader or taking classes isn’t luxury everyone can take advantage of and it’s certainly not a requirement. This month, I became a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Editor Short Form for the fifth time. My degree is in computer science and I have only one college level English course (required) to my name. I entered this field at age forty with no professional experience whatsoever. What I had to my advantage was decades of voraciously reading short fiction, a love for the genre, and a willingness to ask questions. I reached out to editors and a number of small press publishers for advice and began the long process of learning.

Why did I start? I thought it might be fun. I never anticipated just how much I’d enjoy it or that other people would think I was good to nominate for a Hugo. As time progressed, I took on more work and at some point it clicked that maybe this could be a viable career path. Five years ago, a near-fatal heart attack served as the latest wake-up call, shifting priorities and redefining what was most important in my life. I started pushing myself past my comfort zone and taking advantage of these situations to learn whatever I could in pursuit of my new goals. This past February, I was able to take the latest step forward and it was the result of both hard work and the support of those around me.

I’m now working full-time as an editor, but that next goal of earning a full-time paycheck still eludes me. Leaving academia provided me with the extra hours in the week I need to make this work. I also realize that I can take some of the best aspects of my old career with me by continuing to make time for students (self-taught or traditional). There’s no reason to leave behind something I enjoyed and given that so many people were willing to share knowledge or help me out when I started, I see this as a way to give back to the community and show my gratitude to those that helped me. That right there is why I was willing to take just over a day out of my schedule and travel halfway across the country to talk with a room full of students.

It’s easy to feel unwelcome or disrespected at the start of your career or even well into it. It’s not an easy path and it’s riddled with people rejecting your stories, saying no to your ideas, or even just doubting your ability to earn enough to provide food, clothing, and shelter for you or your family. Like many others in this field, I believe those of us further along the path have an obligation to reach back and help, even if only for a few hours. From my years in academia, I can tell you that it’s those little gestures that often have the biggest impact on individuals and the community at large. If you ever get the chance, I heartily recommend it.

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Forever Magazine, and Upgraded; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a five-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His latest anthologies are Galactic Empires and The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Two. An android anthology, More Human Than Human is scheduled for publication in late 2017. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Cover Art:
Darkess

Julie Dillon

About the Artist

Julie Dillon is a science fiction and fantasy illustrator creating art for books and magazines, as well as for her own projects and publications. She has won multiple Chesley awards, two Hugo Awards, and has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award.