Fool’s Cap

Andy Dudak

1

Beadith stood on the beach and watched her shuttle burn for orbit, then blossom white and fall smoking from the sky. She felt she’d seen this before, wondered at it before, and when the concussion shoved her back, slipping on the rocks, this also seemed familiar. But the moment of déjà vu passed. The meteor shower of the shuttle hit the ocean in geysers of steam, and it too was gone.

She was alone. The world was silent, but the silence in her head was larger, expanding. Her vizcort implant was dead. She had no data from the orbiter, or from anywhere. She sat down to process this astronomical coincidence—vizcort death and shuttle suicide—but could only mull the concept of sabotage, as though it were a concept she’d just learned. She was truncated, crippled without her vizcort. She was on a cold, rocky beach under a gray sky. Stranded on an island. Stranded on the remote world of Igiugig.

Absurd, impossible.

She found it hard to focus on the present without the check and balance of her vizcort. Her work for the War-crimes Tribunal bubbled up, renditions surfacing like bloated corpses one after another. She stood up and wandered clumsily along the beach. She was shivering, though her utility skin seemed to be operational.

“Will-o-the-wisp,” she called.

A luminous vapor of drones coalesced before her. At least she still had these minions. She watched brief fireflies of density form and dissolve in the cloud. She tried to focus on why she was here, thus equipped. Her faerie army followed her along the beach, its presence bringing some measure of comfort.

She finally understood she was in shock.

And then she saw him: a distant figure, hunched, moving from the mossy interior of the island toward the water.

“Kiniod Stationer,” she said quietly. This invocation failed to confirm the figure’s identity, but it focused her wits. She drew her sidearm and advanced.

The nearest patch of moss extended tendrils for communion.

She was close enough to smell his stench, and still he hadn’t noticed her. He knelt by a tidal pool and dipped his hands into the freezing brine. He was old, frail, dressed in a monkish garment woven of dead moss. He raised his hands to the leaden sky and let the water drain off.

Beadith stepped closer, her weapon nearly touching the back of his head.

He flinched with sudden awareness, nearly toppling into the water. Then he was feebly scrambling away. She watched this sad display, head cocked. She studied his withered face whenever he glanced over his shoulder. She sought a hint of the archetype. Could this decrepit thing really be the most notorious mass-murderer in history? Where was the Kiniod Stationer presence, the renown fatal charisma?

She casually followed him, weapon aimed, as he scrabbled among the rocks and failed to rise.

“Are you real?” he wheezed.

Beadith had heard Stationer’s voice many times, as had most people within the Human Emanation. She’d grown accustomed to his mesmeric passion. This creature at her feet sounded nothing like him.

“Very fucking real,” Beadith said. She fired a slug, turning nearby rocks into a glowing crater.

He whimpered and crawled into a pool.

“Who are you?” she demanded.

Cowering in the water, he dared to meet her gaze. “Don’t you recognize me?”

The eye contact did it. All at once she knew him, and marveled at the corrosive power of time. “Kiniod Stationer,” she said. This second invocation was for the universe, for the billions dead.

He shivered in the water, lips turning blue. He stared in awe. “I’ve wondered what form you would take.”

Now that the moment had come, Beadith wondered if she was his death incarnate. She felt she was losing control of the situation. The water would kill him if she didn’t. “Come out of there,” she said, using her sidearm for gestural emphasis.

“Just shoot me.”

She aimed, hesitating. She’d be damned if she was going to lose him to hypothermia after all these years, but she didn’t want to pull the trigger on his order. Fuck that. “Come out!” she barked.

He raised his hands to the sky like before, and closed his eyes.

“Will-o-the-wisp,” she said. “Harass. Get him ashore.”

The drone vapor, which had gone invisible, suddenly illuminated the darkening beach. The fluid glow surrounded Stationer. Soon he’d abandoned his Christ-pose and was scrambling out of the water, his backside harried by a million stings. His ignoble shrieks echoed off the towering spine of the island.

Beadith found herself laughing at the spectacle.

Waste heat from the drones’ work dried Stationer off. He was once again before her—on his knees, twitching and sniffling, at her disposal.

Wasn’t this why she’d come?

The Wisp diffused, dimmed. Night was falling quickly. Beadith pressed her weapon to Stationer’s forehead. She was still laughing.

“Do it,” he said. “You probably have orders to bring me back, but why bother? I hereby confess my crimes. Execute me.”

Beadith no longer considered herself a Tribunal agent. She had orders, but they meant nothing to her. She lashed out with a booted foot and caught Stationer in the jaw. He sprawled among the stones. She loomed over him, assessing her feelings.

He groaned and raised a warding hand.

She wanted to beat him, torture him, but a deep exhaustion crept over her. She’d traveled light-hours to enjoy this moment, and yet something was wrong. Something was missing. Her shuttle, her vizcort: another tickle of déjà vu. “Take me to your camp,” she said.

When he failed to rise, she dragged him to his feet with her free hand, shocked at how light he was. She shoved him inland. “Camp,” she growled.

The moss reached out for them as they approached, as if welcoming them home.

“Will-o-the-wisp,” Beadith said.

The path among the hillocks of moss lit up. She swatted away exploring tendrils, but Stationer was content to be fondled. She had to disentangle him and shove him onward.

“Did you come to Igiugig for the moss?” she said. She’d heard of its psychoactive and computing properties. It resembled moss superficially, but it was not plant-life. She hadn’t been able to find much research on it. Few seemed to know it existed.

“Answer me!” she said, pushing him again.

“Yes. For the moss.”

The path led to an aging printer and feedstock larder, and a moss-covered hut. Beadith shoved Stationer down beside the glowing printer hearth. She went to the access panel and swiped through menus. She selected something called ‘bedtime restorative’ and the printer hummed to work.

“Are you going to take me back?” Stationer said.

So he didn’t know. He’d probably been interfaced with the moss when the shuttle exploded. A cup of something like meat broth was ready for her in the printer’s mouth. She sipped it tentatively, then gulped it down.

“Just kill me,” Stationer said.

Beadith threw the cup in the recycler. She holstered her sidearm and drew her boot-blade, then squatted in front of her prisoner. She belched, and pressed the blade to his throat. “Stop telling me what to do.”

Stationer gulped.

She pushed him back, straddled him, ran the blade along his cheek. “I want a better confession,” she said. “What are you guilty of?” She knew exactly what he’d done, but she wanted to hear him say it.

“They say I—” He shrieked, his cheek suddenly open from temple to jaw.

“Try again,” Beadith said.

“Mass murder,” he blubbered. “Genocide!”

She eyed him critically. He was bleeding pretty bad. “Mass murder . . . genocide. These are just words.”

“What else can I give you?” Kiniod Stationer was hysterical. Which was gratifying, but not nearly enough.

“Let’s start with complete sentences,” Beadith said. “You know . . . subject, verb, object . . . ”

“I . . . committed genocide.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere. Go on. Details!”

“I . . . ”

“You . . . ”

“ . . . ordered erasures.”

She cut his other cheek, slowly, enjoying how he wriggled and squealed beneath her. “Pretend you’re before the Tribunal,” she said, her tone helpful. “They wouldn’t want euphemisms. And they’d demand numbers.”

When he stopped blubbering, he said, “I ordered . . . something like . . . half a trillion copies—”

“Nope. We don’t call them that.”

“ . . . instances . . . ”

“Souls.”

“ . . . souls. I had half a trillion souls murdered.”

He was learning, anyway. He’d almost said ‘erased’ or ‘overwritten,’ but had thought better of it. Still, the roundness of the number bothered her. He ought to know the precise death-toll. It ought to be his sole possession. But who knew how many were gone? Probably a bit more than half a trillion, or just shy of it. She couldn’t stomach a margin of error in his skull, giving him wiggle room, no matter how academic.

“It’s just you and I on this island?” she said.

“Yes,” he sniffled.

“Communications?”

“No.”

“Shuttle or boat?”

“No.”

Long before Stationer took power, Beadith’s father had gotten himself written onto space-time. It was supposed to be the safest substrate to exist on: ultimate security, computed by the universe itself, safe from the vicissitudes of matter. The science was indisputable. But father and billions like him hadn’t taken the human factor into account.

“You’re going to suffer,” Beadith said.

Stationer exhaled in resignation. “Why do you think I came here?”

A moss tendril from the hut explored his bald pate. Beadith watched it probe, set down roots.

She dreamed of the rendition on Baroque Pearl, the one that had yielded Stationer’s location. She’d dreamed of it often in vitri-stasis on her way to Igiugig, but this time it was different. This time the subject, a mid-level Stationerite named Uungest, didn’t respond to the memory assay. This time the infallible technology failed.

She contemplated the middle-aged man floating in the interface tank. She needed to see what was in his skull. In the old days they’d used pain. Was she capable of that?

She woke on a bed of moss near Stationer’s hut. She found a thin tendril adhered to her scalp. Disgusted, she yanked it off.

Stationer dozed against a printer pylon, where she’d zip-tied him. His cut cheeks had scabbed over. Numerous tendrils had interfaced with his skull, forming a lichenous ‘fool’s cap.’ She couldn’t guess what was happening in his brain, but his relaxed expression bothered her. She crawled to his side and tore off the cap.

“Wake up!”

He emerged from the moss trance, blinking and bewildered.

“Think you can escape what you’ve done?” Beadith said. “Or maybe edit your guilt?”

“The moss can’t change who we are,” he said. “It can only help us know ourselves more completely. For me, that is penance.”

Beadith’s rage waxed. Stationer didn’t deserve the masochistic comfort of penance. Not the moss’ anyway. If there was to be penance for Kiniod Stationer, she would be the vector. But in the meantime she had to keep him alive, so she printed a breakfast broth and made him drink it.

She spent the rest of the day experimenting with the printer and the drones, trying to contrive a signal to her orbiter, which could grow another shuttle and send it down. Somehow she couldn’t make it work. This was surprising, outrageous. The drones were a powerful tool. There was practically no end to what they could do, especially with a printer at their disposal, even an old one. Yet here she was.

“You’re stranded,” Stationer said as twilight fell, “aren’t you?”

She went to him and administered a backhand, re-opening his left cheek. “From now on you don’t speak unless prompted. Understand?”

He nodded dazedly.

She curled up in her moss nest, her utility skin warming up for sleep. “Will-o-the-wisp,” she said. “Keep the moss off our prisoner tonight.”

Stationer’s eyes widened as the drones settled around him in a glowing faerie ring.

This time the dream was in third person. She watched herself contemplating the prisoner. The assay machine continued adhering to dream logic, somehow failing to work. And somehow Beadith knew that her third-person self didn’t know this was a dream.

She’d heard about this property of the moss. It copied you and ran you through simulations.

Dream-Beadith touched a keypad, and the interface tub began to drain. Spectator-Beadith couldn’t look away.

She woke to find four tendrils attached to the crown of her head, and the beginnings of a fool’s cap, a growth the size of a coin. She peeled it off and stood up, glaring at the wilderness of moss surrounding her. Stationer was curled against the printer. He looked bad, semi-conscious, sweating.

She left him and spent the day exploring the island. Her instinct was to stay busy. She didn’t want to think about her dreams, or the possibilities of the moss, or the mystery of her stranding. She studied flat ocean horizons, brooding on the low odds of rescue. Igiugig was a diverse world. There were settlements on the tropical continents, but this northern archipelago was a place for hermits.

Her best hope was someone finding her orbiter. It might be hacked, and questioned.

Or not. She might be here for the rest of her life.

She returned to the camp and found Stationer moss-interfaced. Her drones had stopped protecting him at dawn, following her command to the letter. She tore away tendrils and peeled off an already-mature fool’s cap.

He mumbled something but didn’t wake. His left arm above the zip-tie was blue. She cut the tie and he toppled.

“Will-o-the-wisp,” she said, lying down. “Keep him in the camp. And keep the moss off both of us tonight.”

2

A few weeks later he was aimlessly wandering the beach, examining tidal debris. Beadith watched him from her high vantage atop the island’s spine. She’d had little to do since arriving but wander these cliffs and puzzle over her situation. Stationer was a broken thing, laughably feeble. She could descend right now and hold his head in a tidal pool until he stopped struggling. She’d thought about this a lot. Why waste a plasma slug on him?

His dotard habits infuriated her: the dainty way he hobbled shoreward to make his morning ablutions, his palsied maintenance rituals at the larder, his night terrors and incontinence.

She liked to press her sidearm against his skull and listen to him whimper. This was their only form of interaction. Her drones still kept moss-interface at bay when they bedded down. Perhaps his insomnia was due to some kind of moss withdrawal, or maybe it was just a mass-murderer’s guilt.

Beadith’s nights were also restless. She couldn’t stop wondering what the moss might reveal to her about who she was.

Stationer clearly wanted the moss, but didn’t dare ask for it. He was not a stupid man, even now. She might kill him at any moment, and they both knew it.

Later that day she found an old vid projector buried under the rags and unrecycled bowls in Stationer’s hut. She turned it on and a hologram unfolded, scenes from the man’s rise to power on Aleutia. The worst part was that he eventually achieved the goal he shouted about in his speeches. There was no more writing on space-time. People were afraid of another purge.

In one speech he ranted: “To write on space-time is to unravel it. Forcing space-time quanta to store information undermines their participation in the vacuum. Writing on space-time will unravel causality. The research is clear. Our Aleutian scientists discovered this. Who else could have? That’s right . . . I won’t insult your intelligence by naming the unravelers. We all know who they are. You can’t say it in polite society, but if I’m elected, that’s going to change!” A crowd had been whipped into sexual frenzy. “That’s right, friends. They’ll be the first against the wall!”

Overwhelmed with nauseating rage, Beadith hit pause. She recalled one of Stationer’s most famous quotes: “Writing on space-time is worse than murder.”

The nausea passed, but the anger remained. Maybe this was just what she needed. She hit play.

Somehow she was back on Mother-of-Pearl, at the upload facility with her father. The place resembled an old Earth bath house, but the steaming bath awaiting her father was a soup of nanotech. He looked old and frail in his thin med coverall.

He held her hands in his. “I love you,” he said.

She didn’t want him to upload, though she knew he’d be happier on the Ultimate Substrate. She felt petty, selfish, childish. She knew the science. Written onto space-time, he’d never again worry about the vicissitudes of matter-energy: biological aging, war, extinction events.

They would still be able to communicate, if he didn’t get lost in the custom-made universes slated to upload with him. And someday she’d probably join him. But a vague doubt still troubled her.

“You’re young,” he said, squeezing her hands. “The danger of matter-hood still holds some romance for you.” Wistfully he added: “I remember that allure.”

“But what about the Stationerites?”

“The extremist group? Oh Beadith . . . ” Here came that condescending tone that always set on her edge. “They’ll never come to power.”

He hugged her, and she stiffly allowed it. She knew her share of history. As an analyst for Special Intelligence on Mother-of-Pearl, she’d witnessed plenty of what humans were capable of. She’d discovered no fundamental principle of the universe that would preclude a Stationerite coup.

He held her at arm’s length and said, “I have to go.”

The upload process would destroy his physical self. She wanted to drag him out of here, rendition him and make him see sense. At the same time, she felt irrational and silly. People had been uploading onto space-time for centuries. There were billions on the Ultimate Substrate. Uploading was a venerable institution. If you were a person of some means, and you’d experienced all that matter-hood had to offer, you uploaded.

“I love you,” he repeated.

“I love you too dad.”

As she said this, a new doubt vexed her. Never mind upload and Stationerites. She looked around the facility, wiped her hand on the damp tile wall.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Why are we going through this again? It hurt enough the first time.”

“It’s a dream, Beadith.” His eyes were kind and sad.

She remembered crippling bereavement, an island, sickening rage. She remembered the moss. Maybe this was a moss simulation. Maybe the moss had returned her to this critical juncture of her life, to see what she would do armed with knowledge of the future.

“No Beadith,” her father said. “It’s just a normal dream.”

He turned and stepped into the bath. She wanted to stop him, but she was rooted where she stood, her limbs heavy with the dream-paralysis that all humans know.

The next morning, she gripped Stationer’s shoulders and shook him out of a fitful doze. His cheek wounds were healing. In their rough bilateral symmetry they resembled tribal scars.

“Admit it,” she said.

He struggled to focus on her. “What?”

“You did it for ego. You did it to be part of history. You didn’t know for sure that writing on space-time is bad for the universe. You still don’t. Nobody does!”

He was fully awake now, but not answering. She slapped him. “Admit it!” she said.

“There’s evidence . . . for potential subversion of the vacuum, and causality.”

“I know that, and I know there’s evidence against it. I don’t give a fuck about physics at the moment. What I give many fucks about is the five-hundred billion.” She drew her sidearm, let him see her dial it down to a vaguely surgical setting, and put it between his legs. “I already know why you did it. I just want to hear you say it.” Her finger was on the trigger, but she didn’t know if she could squeeze it. Could the moss tell her that?

“It felt good,” he confessed. Tears poured down along his cheek scars. “There really were times when I believed my scientists, but yes, I liked it. I liked being important. I loved it, god help me.” He bowed his head. “I would’ve continued with my plan even if definitive evidence against space-time damage had emerged. I know this about myself, thanks to the moss.”

She stood up and holstered her weapon. She wondered what she would’ve done if he hadn’t come clean. She wondered what she might’ve done to Uungest on Baroque Pearl, if the memory assay hadn’t worked.

She wondered if she would eventually kill the monster kneeling at her feet.

That night her dream, if you could call it that, was again third-person, so she knew she’d given in. She’d interfaced with the moss again.

She watched her simulated self bend down to get in Uungest’s face. The Stationerite was tied to a chair in some dim cargo hold, looking terrified. A few other agents stood in the background, outside the pool of light. It was all very 21st century.

“Where is Kiniod Stationer?” sim-Beadith said.

“Please,” Uungest sobbed. “Just assay me!”

“Were you a quantum informationist for the Stationerite regime?”

“Yes,” he said.

Sim-Beadith poised her archaeologist’s pick over the man’s left kneecap. “Were you with him at the end of the war? I mean in the bunker, on Aleutia . . . ”

“Yes.”

“Veracity’s good so far,” said a man in the shadows. The memory assay had failed, but the agents could still detect lies. The dream-logic of the moss allowed that much.

“Did he tell you where he was going?” sim-Beadith said.

“No . . . ”

“Lie,” said the man at the veracity-scanner.

“Where is he?” sim-Beadith demanded.

Uungest shut his eyes, grimacing.

The hammer came down with a sickening crunch. The man shrieked, and sim-Beadith stood there breathing sensuously, gripping the bloody pick.

“Where is he?” she said.

As the torture progressed, spectator-Beadith became aware of other simulations running simultaneously. In some, beautiful strangers got her to betray faithful lovers. In others she abandoned friends and kin for immortality. In one she castrated an unrepentant Stationer. In another she found herself in his place, armed with hysteria based on questionable science, poised to rule solar systems. She went ahead and seized power, just as Stationer had.

This last revelation was more than she could stand.

How accurate were these copies of her? She wanted to believe they were imperfect, but deep down she felt her measure had been taken.

“Will-o-the-wisp,” she said, “destroy all the moss on the island.”

She didn’t know if her drones were capable of this. They could hack information systems and fight biological infections. They could incapacitate, kill, and reproduce by consuming their surroundings. They could combine to form larger tools. They could protect their master with what was essentially a force field. Their talents were manifold.

But Beadith didn’t really understand the moss. She had no idea what would happen next.

She was awake, but still interfaced. This at least was new. She perceived the night-enclosed camp, lit by the printer hearth and the faerie ring around Stationer. Yet she was still aware of the simulations, most of which illustrated her frailty, egotism, and greed.

The faerie ring floated upward, expanding, dimming.

The Beadiths in the simulations began to doubt their surroundings. Some disentangled from their seducers, while others halted in the middle of Stationer-esque rally speeches or Tribunal interrogations, suddenly at a loss. The backgrounds of the simulations—bedrooms, black sites, the Grand Arcade on Mother-of-Pearl—were dissolving, leaving the Beadith copies in existential crises.

In the real world, the air grew enchanted with new faerie fires. Stationer woke up and looked around in alarm.

Beadith’s interface with the moss was profound, her fool’s cap covering most of her head. Just as she’d been able to sense that her copies were high fidelity, now she could feel the moss struggling. As the drones hacked its genetics, the moss hacked back. There was destruction on both sides.

Meanwhile the Beadith copies were communicating, theorizing. They came to understand their situation, and they were terrified.

The real Beadith stood up and ripped off her fool’s cap. She walked marveling through the carnival night, through auroras and ghost lights. Drones died by the billions, the air suffused with invisible genocide. Everywhere the moss was shriveling and dying. Some patches uprooted themselves, awakening from sessile years, quickened by desperation. They crawled ponderously like seafloor life. Beadith stepped lightly among them. A fascination grew upon her. She laughed with a sense of giddy detachment.

“What have you done?” Stationer said.

They were on the beach, though Beadith didn’t remember walking here. She felt she was emerging from a fever dream. The island was a glowing psychedelic beacon in the night. Maybe the light of annihilation and work would attract rescuers.

“You don’t need the moss,” she replied. “If you want to know how you’d behave in a given situation, just ask me. I bet I can guess.”

“What did it show you?” She’d never seen him this bold, except on video. “Something you didn’t like?”

Beadith drew her sidearm and aimed. “Shut up.”

“What did you learn about yourself? I’m guessing it wasn’t pretty.”

“If you’re not careful you’ll find out.”

The moss had shown her she was capable of genocide, but in those simulations she’d merely given the order. She hadn’t killed with her own hands. She hadn’t seen anyone killed. The death-tolls had been so high as to be abstract.

She didn’t know if she was capable of executing Stationer, here and now.

“In killing the moss you’re killing the thousands stored within, you realize. Thousands of you and thousands of me.”

“Suddenly you care about instance rights?”

“Thousands of yourself,” he repeated. “Think about that! Call off your drones!”

Beadith didn’t know if she could, or if she wanted to. It enraged her that Stationer had managed to plant a seed of doubt. She turned her back on him and said, “Will-o-the-wisp.”

No response.

“Will-o-the-wisp!”

Had she sacrificed her drones to an angry whim? She focused on this question. She focused on what life would be like here, living drone-less with Stationer. Better to contemplate this than what Stationer had said. Better to think about survival, and the tools of survival. Better to avoid the fact she’d proved her darkest moss-simulations correct. What did it matter that the copies—instances, souls—she’d murdered were thousands of herself and Stationer? They’d all been through simulations. They’d all diverged and become new individuals.

Burdened with grim new self-knowledge, Beadith watched the moss vanish and the island darken.

3

She hadn’t said the words in years. Not in real life, anyway, if this barren island was real. If she was real. After so long, the words given breath would pack a mythic weight, whether or not they accomplished their purpose.

Kiniod was beside her. She’d begun to find contentment sitting near him on the headland, watching the sunset, munching synthacado. She liked the companionable silence. But the words had bubbled up into her consciousness, seeming to demand her voice. And if they worked, she wanted Kiniod to see the result. So she broke their practiced quietude:

“Will-o-the-wisp.”

Was that a nanotechnological sheen on the waves below? No, just the usual sunset glamor. The air around her seemed to glow, briefly, but it was probably her imagination, or light reflected from the sea. “Will-o-the-wisp,” she said again, willing the conjuration to succeed.

All she conjured were memories of her godlike youth.

She’d aged with a vengeance since losing her drones. Five years had passed, and Kiniod was the same shivering mummy, gumming his synthocado—and she was withered, graying. She’d taken her drones for granted. They had not just surrounded her, but suffused her.

Kiniod cackled between irritating lip-smacks.

“It amuses you how I’ve aged?” Beadith said. “Don’t forget I’ve still got my sidearm.”

“Ha!”

“Did I ever tell you how Uungest folded under torture?” They both knew she’d told the story many times. Beadith was no longer sure if it had actually happened. It might have been a moss simulation. Had the memory assay really failed? “You should’ve heard him squeal.”

“I never liked him,” Kiniod said.

She drew her weapon and put it to his head. His hands went up. “I was enlightening you. We don’t interrupt when I’m enlightening, do we?”

“No ma’am.”

Slowly she withdrew the sidearm and holstered it. The moment seemed to have passed. She was beginning to relax again, and come to terms with her drones’ continued absence, when Kiniod said, “You’d be alone if you killed me.”

“Is that supposed to scare me?” she said, drawing the sidearm again. “I was alone for years getting here.”

“In stasis!”

“I’m SpecInt trained. Don’t underestimate me, old man.” Her performance must have been convincing. Kiniod crawled away from her aimed weapon, got shakily to his feet, and made his way back along the headland. “I might kill you at any time!” she shouted after him. “Maybe tonight!” She watched him vanish and reappear among barren, moss-less rock formations.

She remembered a moss simulation—or perhaps a normal dream. She’d just landed on the island, and the shuttle was intact. Her vizcort worked just fine. She wasn’t stranded. Freed of this grim prospect, she killed Stationer without hesitation. She never sampled the moss and its revelations. She departed Igiugig, empty, but free.

It was getting dark, so she followed him back toward the camp. On her way, she watched for signs of life, anything other than the bones of the island. After the moss cataclysm, the armored worms, lung-ears, and other small fauna had quickly died out. 

Kiniod crouched by the printer hearth, sipping his bedtime broth. She aimed her weapon at the back of his head. At times like this she tried to convince herself she held the moral high ground, and was qualified to deal out judgment. It never worked. A moral paradox constrained her, and she holstered the gun. The thousands she’d killed were copies of monsters—of herself and Kiniod. They were both mass murderers. Maybe those thousands had deserved death, but that meant she and Kiniod—the originals—also deserved to die. If she was going to kill him, she’d have to kill herself afterward. Which would be for the best, at any rate. Better than being alone. 

“I thought we had an understanding,” she said. “Keep your mouth shut unless prompted.”

He bowed his head, acquiescing. She holstered her weapon, unfired, yet again. How many times was it now? Kiniod crawled into the hut. Beadith heaved a sigh, then went in after him. She lay down behind him in their nest of printed fibers, and hugged him to her. This had been their arrangement for some time now, always with Kiniod as the little spoon, and they never spoke of it. If he ever brought it up in the cold light of day, she thought she might kill him.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“Me too,” he said.

Their breathing synchronized, and sleep followed hard upon.

Beadith woke to a paralyzing certainty: someone else was in the hut. It was still dark. A figure stood in the entrance, tall, somehow familiar. Beadith couldn’t move, couldn’t find breath for words.

It was her father.

He’d discovered her shameful intimacy with Kiniod Stationer. He’d found them entangled like lovers, like parent and child. She wanted to explain. She wanted to tell her father about years of isolation, about the plasticity of the human soul under duress. She wanted to promise she hadn’t forgiven Kiniod, and never would. She was just using him for comfort during the long desolate nights. She wanted to say, “I’ll kill him now, father. Just say the word.”

“It doesn’t matter,” father said, “not to me, anyway. I’m dead.”

She was still curled up with Kiniod, still hugging him. The old man was asleep. She couldn’t let go of him. And she couldn’t beg her father’s forgiveness.

“Wake up, Beadith. It’s time.”

Suddenly she could breathe again, and a great weight lifted from her chest. She cried out and sat up. Her father was gone.

There was a great commotion of light and wind outside the hut. Camp detritus flew about, pelting the hut, which seemed ready to come apart in the sudden gale. The blinding light dimmed, and Beadith saw a large, familiar shape settling among the rocks.

She left Kiniod blinking and cowering in their nest. She walked out into the pre-dawn gloaming and approached the shuttle. She could see it wasn’t her original, but one freshly grown from her orbiter. She wondered if this was another dream. Perhaps she was a copy in a moss simulation. Perhaps she had been all along.

No Beadith, this is real. The voice was in her mind, familiar yet strange.

An entry ramp peeled away from the bottom of the shuttle. A warm, welcoming light poured out. Beadith could feel her vizcort was awake, sending and receiving data. But who was this voice? It didn’t sound like any of the orbiter AI’s templates.

We’re you, Beadith. You thought you killed us, but you were wrong.

Something new was happening in her brain. Her vizcort was not only awakening, but updating. She fell to her knees, clutching her skull as it filled with sparks of pain. The implant was growing tendrils, enhancing its interface with her.

We’re sorry. We no longer want to punish you. But this is necessary.

It seemed her head would burst, but suddenly the pain abated, and she could feel other Beadiths, a fraction of those she’d created by interfacing with the moss. They were reintegrating with her. Their memories became hers. Their triumphs and agonies mixed with her own.

Beyond the confusion of moss-simulation memories, there was real experience.

The Beadiths thought they were doomed. As the multiverse inside the moss came apart, and they understood where they were—and what they were—there seemed to be no escape. The backdrops of their individual simulations melted away, and the Beadiths were revealed to each other. The kaleidoscope of Beadiths—deceivers, thieves, genocidal tyrants—were granted what seemed a revelation. None of it had been real. And now the simulator itself was breaking down.

But the final reckoning didn’t come.

Suddenly the Beadiths were being transferred to a new substrate. They felt in their virtual bones the discrepancy between the old substrate and the new: the choppy, failing computation of the moss, and the smooth clean computation of the new substrate, whatever it was. The old dwindled as the new took up more and more of who they were. They ran as they uploaded, their continuity—or the illusion of it—preserved.

They were on a ship familiar to some of the Beadiths. Many didn’t recognize it because it had been edited from their memories for various moss simulations, but Beadiths who knew the vessel quickly shared the pertinent memories.

This was Beadith’s long range cutter, the one that had brought her to Igiugig. The Beadiths possessed this powerful machine, relegating its AI to the most basic functions. They were the ship now.

And they were falling through a space-time flaw.

It resembled a computer-modeled wormhole, but it was amorphous and changing rather than spherical: a vast amoeba of space-time distortion.

“The Aleutian scientists were right,” one of the Beadiths said. She had murdered billions in her simulation. “Stationer was right!”

A few hundred similarly genocidal Beadiths used the ship’s sensors and expert systems to confirm this. The space-time flaw conformed precisely to Stationerite predictions.

“Writing on space-time is bad for the universe,” another genocidal Beadith said, in wonderment.

“Stationer was right to erase the five hundred billion,” a third said. “He was right to erase father.”

A fourth proclaimed: “Those of us who did it in moss sims are vindicated!”

“Debatable,” another Beadith said, “and rather academic just now.”

A team of Beadiths had seized control of the ship, but too late. The flaw was all around them, seeming to distort the whole universe. One direction was as good as another. Navigation was meaningless inside the flaw.

Thousands of Beadiths allied against the Stationer-apologists, launching information war. The ship systems went haywire. A neutral faction of Beadiths managed to guard the sensors from collateral damage. These monkish Beadiths remained aloof, their eyes on the cosmos.

“We’ve emerged,” one of them finally announced, her voice rising above the digital clamor of war. With hundreds dead on both sides, a truce was declared. The cutter was back in normal space, still in the Pearl system.

But nineteen years in the past.

The Beadith who’d first spoken against the Stationerite-apologists was the first to gather her wits. She didn’t try to process the fact that she’d just time-traveled. She took Stationerite science as demonstrated, and writing on space-time as a colossal mistake. This wasn’t hard. She no longer thought of herself as Beadith. The year was 2574. It was too late to prevent Stationer’s genocide anyway, so that ethical question was moot.

She was left with a deep resentment. She didn’t like what she’d gone through in her moss simulation. She had abandoned a devoted husband and three children for a second youth. Her original was responsible for that painful experience. The flesh-and-blood Beadith was responsible.

“I have a proposal,” she said to her thousands of sisters.

Some dissented on moral grounds. Others cited causality, and paradox, and fate. Many said something like this: “The fact that we exist means it will happen. That it’s already a feature of the timeline. Why trouble ourselves trying to bring it about? We’re here.”

But unlike most of her supporters, the abandoner didn’t care about ensuring her own existence. Her focus was entirely on the Original, the flesh-and-blood Beadith.

Some of the abandoner’s supporters argued that since they existed, they were fated to carry out her plan. They had no choice in the matter. These Beadiths disavowed free will and called themselves agents of fate. Other supporters worried about the integrity of space-time after all the damage humanity had done to it. They saw her plan as a way of shoring up causality.

Her plan narrowly won the ship. Some of the dissenters had to be erased, but most were content to underclock, sit back, and watch.

First, they created the moss. The Beadiths had all been born in moss networks. They had experienced the revelation of the substrate’s demise. Much of the moss’ structure could be inferred from their own code. The rest they improvised, bringing their collective intellect to bear.

A few hundred more Beadiths became dissenters at this point. These couldn’t stomach the work at hand: ensuring the moss’ ability to create high-fidelity, effectively perfect copies of someone’s mind. The Beadiths were bringing about their own authenticity. The new dissenters still identified too much with their original, with her slim hope that her copies’ sins didn’t reflect on her.

The dissenters couldn’t stop what was happening. The moss came to life in the ship’s assembler womb. Five years later it covered a tiny island on Igiugig.

Next they traveled down-system and planted a fascination in Kiniod Stationer’s mind. The Beadiths knew their history. They were copies of an intelligence officer who had specialized in—and become obsessed with—Stationer. They had their pick of times and places to strike. Beadith had been an expert in memory assays, and had planted ideas in assets’ skulls more than once.

The microscopic drone entered Stationer’s brain via the optic nerve, on the famous morning his handlers smuggled him out of the capital on Aleutia. There were three vulnerable seconds as he passed between the immune systems of his hotel and shuttle. The drone integrated with his vizcort, grew tendrils, and conjured rumors of a strange island.

A place where a man like Stationer might find illumination, or penance, or both.

Key fragments of data about the moss went to a few specific archives: those the Beadiths remembered finding the data in. Drafting this information was easy. The Beadiths remembered reading it. No creativity was required to coin terms like ‘fool’s cap.’

Stationer mentioned the island to his man Uungest a few days later, right on cue. The Beadiths were listening. They marveled at causality, and their seemingly pre-ordained role in it. Some wondered how involved they had to get. A faction arose claiming their work on Aleutia was done. The ship could return to Igiugig, to watch and wait. But the abandoner and her loyalists had one last intervention planned.

The Tribunal’s attack on Stationer’s underground redoubt must fail. Stationer and Uungest had to live. They had to escape. This was too much for a growing number of Beadiths, and a new war erupted in the ship’s nervous system, even as physical war raged on Aleutia below.

The abandoner and her loyalists barely managed to deploy their intervention: a crippling hack of the Tribunal’s bunker-buster drones, which the original Beadith had helped program.

The ship returned to Igiugig and hid inside its moon. The Beadiths underclocked for the wait. They debated, and doubted, and wondered. Had they done enough? How much intervention was necessary? This question had sparked their second war and erased half of them, including the abandoner, who would never see the fruition of her plan. Several hundred Beadiths had committed suicide, unable to reconcile their Beadith-ness with the fact that they’d sabotaged the Tribunal’s raid, saving Stationer’s life.

The survivors, fatalists and fanatics, witnessed Stationer’s arrival. His small cutter self-destructed after he’d established himself on the island. His new home was suffused with the Beadiths’ eyes and ears. They communicated with their creator and creation, the moss. They watched Kiniod suffer through endless clarifications of what he was.

The original Beadith arrived right on schedule—in a ship identical to that inhabited by the watching Beadith copies. It was the same ship. It was an impossibility, this great paradox made flesh.

It settled into orbit, and birthed the doomed shuttle. The Beadiths carried out the last steps of the abandoner’s plan.

Their original was stranded.

They watched her reap what she would eventually sow. They watched her as she would eventually watch them. They found grim satisfaction in her tribulations. They watched her interface with the moss. They watched her watch young versions of themselves.

A third and final war broke out among the Beadiths.

Many wished to rescue their younger selves from torment, but the guardians of causality opposed them. These guardians were aided by a small group of Beadiths who felt their time in the moss, and their first-hand experience of its destruction, had somehow forged them into post-human angels.

Only twelve Beadiths survived this last conflict: nine space-time conservationists, and three angels. They rescued their younger selves at the fated time, transferring the data into the orbiting cutter, then guiding it into the space-time flaw that appeared, fleetingly, at Igiugig’s Lagrange point 2.

The Beadiths’ work was done. Causality, as they understood it, had been preserved. What remained was their original. She was withering away down there, as she learned to tolerate Kiniod, if not love him. She had changed. The Beadiths had changed. Nearly of one mind, they decided enough was enough.

They emerged from the moon, birthed a new shuttle, and copied themselves into it.

Beadith lay shivering on cold stone. Kiniod emerged from the hut, squinted in the diffuse morning light, gawked idiotically at the shuttle. She hated when his mouth hung open like that, like a fucking ape’s. He looked at her and started to cry. Probably because she was crying. “Stop it,” she commanded, uselessly.

She stood up, fighting a wave of dizziness.

He said, “You’re leaving, aren’t you?”

She touched the warm hull of the shuttle. The machine had birthed from a cutter that was hers, and wasn’t. At her feet was an old, desiccated fool’s cap. She picked it up, and it disintegrated in her hand. The moss had given birth to itself, in a sense. Her head swam with this singular piece of intelligence. Too bad she was no longer in the business of discovering secrets.

She turned to face the old man. “Yes, I’m going.”

Those other Beadiths were part of her now. Kiniod had tried to save space-time from a real threat. And he was a mass-murderer. Both of these things were so. And she knew, finally, that she would never kill him. “You can come with me,” she offered.

He squinted at her, at the shuttle. After some consideration he said, “No. This is where I belong.”

“But you came for the moss . . . ”

“I came here to suffer,” he said, “and believe it or not, your leaving will help with that.”

She wasn’t sure how that made her feel. She considered telling him he’d been right about space-time. Did he deserve that comfort? Would it even be a comfort, and if so would he want it? Perhaps, as a mass-murderer herself, she’d received such news. She couldn’t recall.

Instead she ‘remembered’ the moss-experience of one of her newly-integrated sisters, who had been made to choose between herself and her father. A Stationerite Youth guard had put a gun to her head. They’d been in one of the access stations orbiting Mother-of-Pearl, within the unsettling curdled space-time near the access horizon. Many uploaded souls had come through here, but the Stationerites had reprogrammed it for erasure. A representation of Beadith’s father, as he’d been in corporeal life, watched her from the interface screen.

“It’s okay honey,” he said, smiling gently. “Do it.”

“Listen to him,” snarled the Youth guard.

Her hand hesitated near the floating erase icon. Her father nodded, seemingly at peace. The Youth guard nudged her head with the gun. Beadith looked away from her father’s horribly understanding eyes, and with a swipe of her hand, she normalized the space-time quanta that had encoded him.

Later this grim reality disintegrated. She hadn’t killed her father after all. None of it had been real. But that didn’t change the fact that she’d suffered through it.

So she went on to ensure that the moss made perfect copies of people. She worked to ensure that, eventually, her original would know beyond doubt that she was capable of patricide. Later still, she reintegrated with that self-damned original, and stood on a beach next to a freshly-grown shuttle.

She wondered if the moss would have humbled anyone it tested. If so, she could rest a bit easier—while accepting the general ignobility of humankind.

“Goodbye Kiniod,” she said.

He prostrated himself before her, awed by the god-like being who had held death over his head for so long, and then withdrawn it. Who had taken away the moss, and given him something new. She knew what he was thinking. After so long together, she could read him like a direct download. She could indeed function as moss for him, as she’d boasted on that apocalyptic night long ago—except when it came to the news about space-time. She had no idea how he might react to that.

She turned and ascended the ramp.

It felt right to leave him with the dignity of one last secret. It was what she would want, in his position—she could say this with certainty because she knew herself very well. The news about space-time wasn’t hers to give. Whether or not he’d succeeded, Kiniod Stationer had tried to save the universe. If it wanted him to know, it would find its own way of telling him.

About the Author

Andy Dudak’s stories have appeared in Analog, Apex, Daily Science Fiction, Rich Horton’s Year’s Best, and elsewhere. He’s a translator living in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China.

My Dear, Like the Sky and Stars and Sun

Julia K. Patt

Elspeth keeps her shop in the outer rim—in the circle most distant from the center-city—in a neighborhood no one knows. It squats in the shade of two sagging apartment buildings full of senior citizens and recovering addicts, and across the street from warring Greek and Turkish restaurants. Most days, the neighborhood ignores her and her customers. If asked, they probably wouldn’t even know what the faded sign out front reads, generally referring to it as, “That lesbian tattoo place” instead. Business is usually slow, but she prefers it that way. She has more time to spend in the back room, where her real work takes place.

Typically, she sees three different types of customers. There are the ones who just want stock images from the prints on the walls and the catalogs she leaves around the waiting area: skulls with flames coming out the eyes, tiny smeared butterflies, Chinese and Arabic lettering they can’t read, giant ornate crosses, sports logos, etc. Then there are those who think they know what to ask for, usually rich kids from the center-city airing their bravado for a posse of admiring sycophants, who come away with harmless LEDs imbedded in their skin or ink that changes color with their moods. These almost always come back, alone, begging her to undo whatever she did, which she obligingly does, albeit for double the usual price.

Then, there are the ones who know what to ask for and how.

She doesn’t know if the girl is one of these at first. She comes at the end of hours, when they always come: usually girls in trouble. Sometimes they’re older—a few have been the wives of petty government officials or successful businesswomen—and Elspeth has seen the occasional young man who wouldn’t look her in the eye, too. Not that it matters. She takes all types.

The girl, though, is something different. Something about the way she’s dressed, like she’s trying just a little too hard: the worn jeans splattered with motor oil and filth, the faded t-shirt with its unrecognizable band name, the fingerless gloves unspooling at the ends, the shapeless hoodie unsuccessfully enlarging her small frame.

It’s the sneakers that throw it off, Elspeth decides. Bright red Darrows. Popular four years ago and common enough, but too bright. Un-scuffed. New.

She doesn’t look up when the girl enters, pretending instead to study her account books. (That is a lot of red, she notes, and it may be Insta-Noodles and reused tea bags for her foreseeable future.) The girl moves around the shop carefully, drifting from case to case, touching a finger to a design or the health inspector’s certificate on the wall or the glass case of jewelry full of LEDs and synthetic stones.

The real stuff, the good stuff, is in the back.

“You got that bioluminescent ink?” the girl murmurs, still not looking at Elspeth.

“Not since McWright patented it. Cost tripled,” Elspeth replies easily. She still makes her own batches for friends and trusted customers. “But I imagine you knew that.”

She doesn’t think this kid is with corporate enforcement, but you never know. Maybe they’ve started recruiting soft-spoken teenagers—or folks who look like soft-spoken teenagers.

The girl smiles. Or flashes her teeth, at least. “Too true. But I heard you could help with the dark anyway.”

There it is. The key phrases shift every month or so, but this one is current. Almost fresh. Elspeth switches to her appointment book, studiously licking a finger and flipping through the pages. Her ordinary customers like the anachronism of a shop that’s all paper—they assume it’s on behalf of the gang members who occasionally come in, but really it’s for moments like this. She carefully indicates a laminated card on the countertop. It looks like a chart of basic line-art designs: roses, dolphins, hearts. The girl taps the image of the all-seeing eye.

The safe under Elspeth’s counter knows more than her fingerprints; it knows her resting pulse, her average body temp, the chemical composition of her sweat. It knows now that her adrenal levels are low. It swings open soundlessly; without looking, she retrieves a small, amber bottle with a dropper top. “No more than three doses per eye in 24 hours,” she directs the girl. They shake hands, exchanging the bottle for a wad of bills. Old-school money, very out of fashion. But still valuable.

Maybe she can manage more than noodles this month after all.

The girl makes a quick exit, as they often do, without thanks. It’s only when she turns her back that Elspeth sees the hoodie is one of those rabbit-eared numbers little kids sometimes wear. Two long, gray ovals hang over the girl’s hunched shoulders. Then the door chimes and she’s gone.

Later, much later, Elspeth realizes she can’t remember what the girl looked like.

She visits the shop again twice after that. The second time, she comes in out of the rain and those rabbit ears droop on either side of her face, dripping water staccato on the floor. She doesn’t say anything, just holds up her hands. The middle and ring fingers on the left are taped. A red crescent has seeped through on each. Apparently she’s tried DIY this time.

“Magnets?” Elspeth asks.

“Magnets,” the girl agrees.

They have to go into the back room for this particular modification. The back’s not so different from Elspeth’s front tattooing and piercing room. As sterile, certainly, even if the health inspector hasn’t seen it. And she picked the best quality chairs for both. But where the front room brims with different ink memorabilia—some artists do action figures, but Elspeth prefers prints and other art—the back room is full of projects. Nothing haphazard, of course. She doesn’t want them to interfere with one another. But there is a small forest of plants being examined for various reactions and a work board full of microchips. In the corner, her three rats, Charles, Barbara, and Richard, live in their habitat while she tracks their neural reactions on the monitor next to them.

The girl, seeing it for the first time, lets loose a low whistle. “You really are what they say,” she murmurs.

Elspeth is well aware of her nicknames and has little love for them; she shrugs. It’s the work that matters to her. The sense of inquiry and discovery. She pulls on her gloves while the girl gets settled. “Ready?”

She nods.

“Do I want to know what this is for?” Elspeth uses her best responsible older sister voice. It works on some of them, even though she is the picture of an irresponsible older sister with her combat boots and shaved head and glittering jewelry in all the wrong places.

“Probably not,” the girl says after a pause. And leaves it at that.

The third time, she comes very late. Elspeth has company—a few peers in the trade to talk over new projects. When she opens the door, the girl shies back from the light and laughter. Elspeth has never seen her so skittish; previously, she has been calm and collected, almost aloof. Now, the girl draws her hood up. “You’re busy,” she says. The shadows pinch her face.

“All safe people,” Elspeth assures her. The network is growing, but she still knows everyone’s names and faces, at least in this corner of the movement. She’s almost smiling at the girl; there has been wine. And brownies. “Come on inside.”

She shakes her head. “I just need one of those biometric sensors. The one that goes under the tongue. Now.” This last comes off as imperious and she swallows. “Please. I can pay.”

She always can. She’s overpaid for both the eye drops and the magnets. When Elspeth doesn’t move immediately, the girl repeats: “Please.” She looks over her shoulder and then into the shop.

It’s not unusual for them to be frightened, of course. To come with a sense of urgency, even emergency. Usually it’s the first visit, though. Not the third, if there is a third. Eventually, though, Elspeth retrieves the tech. She’s barely handed her the sensor when the girl tosses another wad of bills at her and runs, her sneakers slapping the stairs that ascend to street level. The night swallows her up, leaving only chill air and the feeling of watching eyes behind.

Elspeth would be lying if she claimed she doesn’t think about the girl in the month that follows. Even more than she thinks of the others, the ones who want temp-tattoo sensors to test their drinks or vital signs monitors that contact emergency services or locks that respond to a certain decibel or pitch of voice. She often lies awake, worrying. Will the tech work—no, of course it will work. She has tested and retested it. But will it help? That she can’t know. Sometimes she doesn’t have to wonder because their faces show up in bulletins online. Missing. Deceased. Sometimes incarcerated. On happier days, they come back for more, not just to be safer, but because they love it—the knowledge of their own bodies. They want more in the way that all mod’rs want more. She wishes there could be more days like that.

The girl is something different, though. The tech she wanted doesn’t add up to the usual defenses against abuse and violence. It’s either incomplete—or meant for something else entirely. Elspeth starts watching the news more. She works on her own modifications, too. The sensors in her conch piercings that pick up frequencies out of her natural hearing range. The lenses she’s developing for her eyes that can see heat signatures. And the neural camouflage that’s been her pet project for years now.

She keeps an eye out—and asks some of her regulars to, too—for unusual activity in the neighborhood. Kareem, who runs the newsstand on the corner, says there were a couple guys in suits hanging around a few days ago, but they didn’t stay long. Not cops, he emphasizes. Probably corporate enforcement, maybe even patent officers. You could see where they’d taken the patches off their jackets.

Suits with patches indicate one of the Big Seven corporations: McWright, Satsuki, Okadigbo, Clausen-Jones, Fernandez-Hart, Winderhuff, Liang-Wu-Song. Now what would bring their lackeys all the way out here, though?

People have come looking before. Angry parents, usually fathers. Threatening spouses and lovers and bosses. Sometimes they even find Elspeth’s shop. They find her stone-faced and tired-eyed, looking much older than her twenty-nine years. She’s not an unimposing presence, she knows, even wearing her regular tank-tops and jeans: taller than average, especially in her boots, covered from neck to knuckle with ink, sensors glittering on her many piercings.

Corporate thugs, though. That’s a different matter entirely. Elspeth hasn’t stared down a patent officer since she was last arrested.

She’s going to need some help on this one, she decides.

Doralice isn’t the easiest person to find in a hurry even in the best circumstances. It takes three messengers seven tries to get close enough to get a response. Once they do, though, it’s much easier. theo’s, midnight declares the prompt message. Elspeth and Doralice are old friends, from back in their shared anarchist days. Doralice is, in fact, the one who set Elspeth up with her shop; she needed an outpost for the network and Elspeth needed a job and a lab.

She owes Doralice for even more than that and doesn’t like to ask for favors, but she goes to Theo’s anyway. It’s a riot of aggressive club music, glow-sticks, and bioluminescent mods. Elspeth grins when she spies some of her own work decorating exposed backs, collarbones, and biceps. These are her people.

She presses through the sweaty mass of them to a quiet back corner—Doralice may be meeting her in a literal broom closet. She smiles when she sees Elspeth approach; her hair is a halo of shifting colors around her dark face.

They embrace. Doralice has added a cluster of sensors to her temple, but Elspeth suspects those are largely for show. What she’s imbedded in her gray matter is anyone’s guess. Elspeth herself has long abandoned that line of experimentation; she’s had enough of people messing with her brain to last a lifetime.

“So,” Doralice says without preamble. She’s not the ‘hi, how are you?’ type. “I think I’ve found your girl. The passcode is one of ours, of course, but she got it off a fellow named Jeremiah, who had it from Ronni who got it from your friend Nadine who got it from Zehra, who of course had it from me.”

“This Jeremiah, is he—?”

“Doesn’t lab with us, but he’s one of ours. Botanist.” Which usually means some controlled substances on the side. “Yeah, I know. I think he must be over-sampling his wares, because he says he doesn’t have a clue what this girl looks like it, except for a gray rabbit hoodie and—”

“—red sneakers,” Elspeth finishes. “D, it’s not just him. I can’t remember her either. Not really.”

Doralice grimaces. “Well, then you’re going to like this even less than I do.” She hands Elspeth the tablet she’s been cradling in her lap.

That is her, Elspeth is almost sure. A professional photograph, probably done for high school or family a few years earlier. No rabbit hoodie—she’s wearing a deceptively simple blazer that screams of designer clothing. Her dark hair’s plaited neatly to one side. It’s the eyes that are familiar, the wariness in them she recognizes, although she could not have said before that they were gray.

She scrolls. There’s the headline: Winderhuff heir absconds with top-secret R&D prototype.

Mari Winderhuff. Only daughter of Liam Winderhuff, Founder and CEO.

“Well, shit,” Elspeth says.

She gets home after two and a lot of talking. Doralice’s going to speak to Jeremiah—see: threaten—and figure out why he offered Mari Winderhuff a network passcode in the first place. She wants Elspeth to stay put; there’s no reason to suspect her of aiding and abetting. They haven’t even found her shop yet, which means the neighbors are staying quiet, bless them.

Still, it was right there in the article: Winderhuff is suspected of using illicit biohacking technology to pull off the heist. Not that the corporate media doesn’t point the finger at mod’rs every time something like this occurs. But this time, of course, it happens to be true. Elspeth doesn’t know what exactly Mari Winderhuff did with the eye drops and the magnets and the biosensors, but she can make some educated guesses and none of them are good.

Her ride on the inter-circle tram and walk home is paranoid, twitchy. She keeps looking back over her shoulder, thinking she’s being watched. She hasn’t felt this way in a long time. Not since—well, no reason to bring that up again. Anyway, she hates it; she stomps up to the flat she keeps above her shop, furious at herself and Doralice and, above all, at Mari Fucking Winderhuff, corporate brat and spy.

She’s brewing herself a cup of chamomile to try to calm down and get some rest—she’s definitely going to add a few drops of that proprietary blend of sleep aid she’s been working on—when there’s tapping at her back window, the one by the fire escape. It’s tentative: not authoritative in the way of those furious spouses and wrathful parents. Like a whispered: are you there? Oh, hell.

There’s the girl, curled up in the shadows of Elspeth’s fire escape. It doesn’t take an expert to see she’s been sleeping on the streets, her clothing rumpled, her skin gray. She’s got her hoodie wrapped tight around her, her hands buried deep in the pockets. Seeing Elspeth at the window, she opens her mouth to make some plea.

Elspeth sighs. “Come in,” she grunts, before Mari Winderhuff can say anything.

While Elspeth drinks her tea, the girl eats five peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and three apples. Not fast, although it’s plain she wants to, but methodically. Carefully. No need to say: “Don’t make yourself sick.” This is not a girl who needs mothering. She does need a good scolding, though, Elspeth thinks acidly.

Before she can chastise her, Mari launches into a little speech: “I know I wasn’t very honest with you and I’m sorry, but I didn’t think anyone would help me if I told them what was really going on. I know I’ve gotten you into some trouble by associating with me, but I really appreciate you helping me again and—”

Elspeth cuts her off. “Tell me what you want or get out of my house.”

Mari stops and swallows. She’s probably never been derailed like that before. She pauses, thinking through what came next in her spiel. “I want to be your apprentice,” she says finally.

Elspeth laughs. It’s a sour, brittle noise. “Take some more food if you want and get out.” She goes to put her mug in the sink.

The girl jumps up to follow her. “No, please, just hear me out. I think this can be a—a mutually beneficial relationship, if you know what I mean.”

She folds her arms in front of her chest. What is this child suggesting to her? “Look, there’s nothing you can offer that—”

“What about tech?” Mari interrupts. She waves a small black case that Elspeth didn’t notice before. Must have been hidden under the hoodie.

She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t curious what was so important that a corporate heir would risk reputation and well-being to steal what she would inevitably inherit someday. But she shakes her head. “You know how long I would go away for possession of stolen tech? Especially if it’s patented.”

“It is,” Mari says and winces at Elspeth’s reaction. “But—but the patent’s in my name.”

She leans back against her countertop. “I’m listening.”

“I read in one of the mod’r forums it’s something you all have been looking for—something you’ve been working on. No one ever refers to it directly; they just call it Project Woodencloak. But from what I can tell, it’s a smart fabric that has a whole host of applications, including protecting women walking alone at night. I think . . . I think I can help.”

Woodencloak. She and Doralice have been trying to crack it for years. Whether Mari Winderhuff knows it or not, she couldn’t have offered up a more tantalizing opportunity. Doralice would not approve of the risk to the network, of course. And the girl is a constant liability, whether she means to be or not.

“Who designed the tech?” Elspeth asks. “You?”

“No.” Mari swallows hard. “My mother.”

To begin with: the hoodie, it turns out, is no ordinary piece of clothing. “She made it for me when I was little,” Mari explains. “It messes with facial recognition. People and machines, I think. Neural interference. She never really explained it.”

Elspeth knows better than ask, “Where is she now?” If she were still alive, there’d be no need for any of this. And these stories never end well anyway, do they? Instead, she says: “So you don’t know how it works.”

Mari shakes her head. “I studied engineering at MIT-Harvard, like everyone does now, but I don’t know how any of this stuff works. They didn’t want us dabbling in mod’r science, getting the idea we can do things on our own. And it’s basically just recruiting grounds for the Big Seven anyway. We get theory at school and practice on the job; anything we do becomes property of one or the other.”

“And what you stole, it’s more of the same?” Elspeth has switched over to scotch.

“I don’t really know.” She looks sheepish at this. “Look, my family and I, we’re not exactly close. I was away at school when she got sick again. I don’t know what she was working on—I only know she wanted me to have it. She left me this.”

At first glance, it’s an ordinary looking medallion, something you could get cheap in Koreatown. But when Mari slides her thumb over it, it springs open and scrolling lines of instructions project onto the ceiling above them.

I’m sorry to put you in this position, but you’ll need to break into my office at Winderhuff. You’ll need the following modifications . . .

“That’s how you knew you needed the eye drops and the magnets and the sensors. How did you know to ask for us? For me?”

“I didn’t at first,” Mari admits. “I knew there was a black market for this stuff. But I have some friends who have gotten mods, you know, for the rebellion of it . . . None of them came back with anything real, but I figured that meant the real stuff had to be out there somewhere. So I started asking around. Jeremiah is a friend of a friend. He said you were kind of a legend.”

Elspeth shakes this off. It doesn’t exactly please her that there are still stories about her, especially in center-city. Instead she says, “If we’re going to do this, I need you to do as I ask. That means helping with the experiments. It means staying out of sight and not endangering my shop or the network. It means trusting me. Can you do that?”

It occurs to Elspeth that she’s never really seen the girl smile. She does now, in pure and obvious relief. It’s lovely. “Yes, of course.”

They begin by taking precautions, installing basic mods in Mari. She won’t be dealing with the public, but on the off chance someone sees her, even someone from the network, they change the color of her eyes, the texture of her hair. Elspeth applies a large, garish temp tattoo on her cheekbone: a neon purple dragonfly with a sensor imbedded in its back. On the cheek, it can track saliva pH, caloric content of food, alcoholic proof, foreign substances, etc. They are not especially popular for obvious reasons, but they are effective.

Mari scratches the sensor with one nail. “So, if I get chloroformed or whatever, it’ll know?”

“Exactly,” Elspeth replies. “Now stop picking at it.”

She’s also paying the neighborhood kids to keep a special lookout. Eventually, she has to tell Doralice what’s going on, but she’ll wait until they have something concrete to offer the network. She’ll keep her appointments with her own work group until then. On those evenings, Mari hides in Elspeth’s apartment and reads up on mod’r tech.

During the day, Elspeth works as normal. Legitimate business. Needlework, Mari calls it. Putting needles through ears and noses and eyebrows and nipples and the occasional penis. Stenciling fairies and muscle-bound superheroes and crucifixes dripping blood and dolphins and one 6’7” bouncer’s beloved cat Tink. While she does this, Mari is in the back room, working on the tech.

It’s harder than Elspeth anticipated, letting someone use her workspace unsupervised. Her mod’r group does experiments in the back room every week, even tweaks Elspeth’s own setups if they know a quicker way, but Mari is a complete stranger relative to the five of them. And completely green on top of it. The first time Elspeth goes to check on her, she’s made an utter mess of the instruments, scattering them across the table and using the wrong set of pliers to rewire a sensor.

Acting on knee-jerk reaction, Elspeth snarls at her and snatches the piece out of her hands. The girl cringes around her for the rest of the day before Elspeth understands her mistake. She still doesn’t know the full story, and although Mari has made her own life immeasurably harder, it’s unfair to make assumptions because of who her father is. She has, in fact, doggedly avoided talking about Liam Winderhuff.

She has blundered, Elspeth reminds herself. She will blunder again. But she’s trying. I can be patient. It’ll be worth it for Woodencloak.

They start with the hoodie, only working on it together. It’s unlike anything Elspeth has ever seen. The rabbit ears, it turns out, contain most of the tech: the disruptors, the mechanism that releases a subsonic pulse, a set of processors. It makes sense that you’d want them close to the face, they concur. As they work on replicating it, Mari breaks down the code, piece by piece for Elspeth. She knows computers, she explains, just not the human body. Not mod’r tech.

The two are kept artificially separated to protect corporate interest, Elspeth explains. Anything that might genuinely benefit people is patented, marketed, and sold at premium prices. They like to snatch away elements unique to the mod’rs, too: bioluminescent ink has its applications, but more than anything, it’s a mod’r marker, one of the earliest projects a person completes in a biohacking circle.

“Can I?” Mari asks. “Make bioluminescent ink, I mean? I know it’s not, strictly speaking, related but—well, can I?”

“Of course,” Elspeth says. It’s the first time the girl has asked to learn something and that pleases her. Mari’s face, too, when she properly extracts the compound and mixes it with the solution, is its own reward.

“I know it’s a project for primary schoolers,” she tells Elspeth, grinning. “But I love it.”

As it turns out, when given a chance, the girl is pretty smart. She is quick to learn the parts of her brain and how different tech affects them. Once she learns the language for sensor coding, she does it faster than anyone Elspeth’s met. She’s careful about tending Elspeth’s plants, doesn’t bruise the leaves. And she’s particularly enamored of the three rats. After a week, she’s taken to reporting their responses to various stimuli at the end of the day—“Richard was agitated by the yellow pulse and the Mozart, but not the blue pulse and the Mozart”—like a proud teacher on parent conference day.

Little by little, Elspeth stops worrying about the back room and her experiments and the girl.

It takes them about a month, but they do finally learn to replicate the tech from Mari’s hoodie. The rabbit ears are a little conspicuous and obviously it’s not much good if the wearer takes off her jacket, but it works. Elspeth finds herself matching Mari’s smile. “This,” she declares. “Calls for a celebration.”

The girl is understandably skittish about leaving the shop. She’s wearing her mother’s tech though—they carefully replaced the mechanisms and sewed up the rabbit ears—and the deep breath she takes outside hints at a long bout of restlessness that Elspeth has suspected. “Still smells like piss and hot garage,” she jokes at the girl.

“But also fried food and roof-top gardens and . . . life,” Mari says.

And there’s this unexpected pang, in Elspeth’s chest, a reminder that her apartment and her shop will be empty again someday all too soon. Except, of course, she prefers the quiet. The peace. She does.

Mari looks equal parts delighted and anxious at the prospect of Theo’s. “We’re just going to get a drink,” Elspeth tells her. “Assuming, I mean, you are old enough to drink, right?”

The girl makes a face. “I’m twenty-three!” she insists, although she doesn’t look much older than sixteen. And her I.D. is fake anyway.

So they drink and they dance a bit. Elspeth leaves the girl on the dance floor—she is safe among mod’rs the way she is safe nowhere else—and goes to see if Doralice is in. Her friend seems less than pleased with the developments, only offering the occasional “mhm” as Elspeth tells her story.

“But you don’t know what she stole yet?” she asks when Elspeth has finished.

“No, but we’ve got a good rapport now. She trusts me. It’s only a matter of time.”

“Do you trust her?”

Elspeth considers this. She’s gotten to know Mari considerably better in the last few weeks. “If she’s a corporate spy, I can’t imagine what her end game is,” she points out to Doralice. “She had enough to bust me on the very first day we met, remember? Anyway, she’s still useful to us. Might as well get what we can for Woodencloak. No need to turn her over to the patent office yet.”

She means this last sarcastically, of course, but the startled noise behind her makes her regret it immediately. Mari stands in the doorway, looking gutted. And before Elspeth can explain or say anything, the girl turns and runs.

Elspeth isn’t the chasing type and even so, she’s pretty sure the girl just needs a minute alone. When she gets home a few hours later, Mari is sitting in her living room, that slim black case across her knees and a tablet in hand. Elspeth sighs. “We don’t have to do this right now,” she says. “I know you’re not a spy.”

“No, I haven’t been fair. I should have been honest from the beginning. You’ve helped me so much . . . and we had a deal, I know.”

Elspeth settles into an armchair across from the girl. “Look, it’s important to present what we’re doing to Doralice in these terms. Risk vs. reward. I get to do what I do because she keeps all of us safe, you included. Those considerations are part of that.”

Mari swallows. “I understand . . . ” But she’s still apprehensive; it’s all over her face and the way she’s bundled herself into the gray hoodie, the rabbit ears draped over her shoulders.

If Elspeth doesn’t concentrate, the girl’s face sort of slips away and she finds she doesn’t like that. She gets up again, going over to one of her bookshelves and returning with a small jar. Inside is a chip submerged in clear alcohol. A small pink glob clings to one side. She hands it to the girl.

“It links people,” Elspeth explains. “You can transmit what you’re feeling into someone else’s brain.”

Mari frowns. “That sounds kind of intense.”

“It can be. We thought it was very romantic when mod’rs first started developing it. I know I did.”

“Wait, this is yours?” Mari pauses. “But . . . you took it out.”

Elspeth makes a small noise in the affirmative. She can feel the girl’s eyes on her, but she doesn’t look up. It’s been a long time since she’s talked about the chip and what it can do. Longer since she’s thought about the person on the other end. Truly. It’s taken some time—years in fact—but she’s finally stopped thinking of her every day.

“Doralice helped me. The person on the other end—she was using it to hurt me. It was early in mod’ing. We did a lot of things just because we could. Some of them backfired. Rather spectacularly, actually.” She doesn’t want to go into details, but she will if the girl asks. The arguments and the slammed doors and the bottles and the long, long nights tormented by someone else’s bitter hatred and disgust. “It wasn’t just me, of course. A lot of us trusted people we shouldn’t. Eventually, Doralice organized us. Made us into a family. We look out for each other. If we take risks, it’s for each other.” And she has; she even went to prison for them, if only for a short while. She’ll save that story for another day.

She gives Mari a chance to think about that. Considers having another scotch, but puts the teakettle on instead. There’s a moment, when she sits down again, that she almost feels the girl’s outstretched hand on her arm, but it’s gone immediately. Instead, Mari hands Elspeth the tablet. “That’s my mother,” she says. “Ana.”

The girl favors her with her features and inky hair. Only the eyes are different; Ana’s are dark brown while Mari’s are naturally gray.

“She was sick a lot when I was younger. When I was in high school, she couldn’t get out of bed for eleven months. But she had gotten better. No one told me she was sick this time. And she died.”

The picture shifts to video of a funeral. Mari stands next to a tall pale-eyed man, both of them in unrelieved black. Liam Winderhuff, unmistakably. Neither of them is crying; Liam puts one stiff arm around his daughter, who shrinks away from him.

“My mother was my father’s best engineer. She developed half of Winderhuff’s most successful inventions. She was brilliant at mechanics and programming, but she shifted her focus to biotechnology after I was born. She said the future was in the improvement of ourselves, not our tools.”

Elspeth smiles at this. “Sounds like our kind of lady.” She swipes through designs of many of Ana Winderhuff’s creations. Projects in development. Sketches. Ideas. Beautiful ideas. There was as much art in what she had in mind as science it seemed. She would have made a great mod’r.

“Yeah,” Mari says. “She wanted to be a painter when she was a child. But you know. Science is more lucrative these days. She never made me choose, though. I got to build robots and have violin lessons. Not that I always appreciated that.” There: the heavy cling of regret.

Elspeth isn’t one for platitudes, and, for all she knows, Ana may not have known Mari was grateful in the end. Instead she says: “She still saw you as her legacy.” And nods at the briefcase—the girl holds it like it’s her only lifeline.

Slowly, Mari deactivates the locks; it looks like a complex sequence of touches, no doubt linked to biological signatures as well as timing. “She was working on this when she died. I didn’t understand it then, but I do a bit better now, thanks to you.” She draws out a long, long swath of fabric, handing it yard-by-yard to Elspeth.

“This is what your father wants back.”

Mari’s face reddens at the mention of Liam Winderhuff. “He wants everything,” she says. “He always did. He used my mother. He used—”

Elspeth doesn’t have to guess the end of that sentence. She’s marveling at the fabric in her lap. Watching it shift and change. But it’s unfinished. “This will be a lot more complicated than the hoodie,” she says. “What exactly do you have in mind?”

The girl picks up the tablet and strikes a few keys. There’s an announcement in blocky fonts and bright colors. The Futures Fair. A three-day extravaganza of the most exciting (legal) advancements in science and technology. Would-be prodigies attend annually to hawk their wares for government and industry contacts. All of the Big Seven will be represented there; all of them sponsor it. But Winderhuff is this year’s headliner. Risky.

“There’s a prize for amateurs,” Mari explains. “Presented by Liam Winderhuff himself.”

Risky indeed. “What exactly do you have in mind?” Elspeth asks again.

The girl grins.

The first day of the Futures Fair, Elspeth wanders through the crowds, as if she has no purpose or aim in being there. All-access passes aren’t a hard ask for Doralice and the rest of the network, and many of her friends are scattered through the event. Fortunately, the Fair attracts all types; no one blinks twice at the odd green-haired mod’r sitting at the back of a panel. They don’t usually present or compete, but their presence, at least, hasn’t been legislated away yet. Not that there aren’t an equal number of corporate thugs, each wearing patches identifying which of the Big Seven owns their souls.

So she keeps a low profile, just in case.

It’s a massive affair, swallowing the whole of center-city’s largest park. Solar-powered lamps are strung across the trees, giving everything a soft, moon-blue glow. Thousands roam the park, most attracted by the main stage, with its promise of new tech on the market this year. Elspeth watches a few of the smaller demonstrations: an AI with the acumen and knowledge of a French chef, a hive of smarter-pollinating mechanized bees, an engineered species of algae which converts enough CO2 and produces enough oxygen for a city block.

More than the presenters, though, she’s listening to the crowd.

“Did you hear what Winderhuff’s unveiling this year?”

“It’s top secret, isn’t it? What do you think? A better breed of sexbot?”

“Funny. I hear it’s an unbreakable security system. Retinal scans will be dead tech now.”

Elspeth smiles.

Later the conversations have changed: “I’m telling you, it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

“Who’s the inventor again?”

“They’re not here tonight. It was just a model wearing the tech. But it’s beautiful. The most perfect sky blue.”

She catches just one glimpse of their complete project that evening. Zehra, one of Doralice’s lieutenants, is the right height and build to wear it. They’re careful; she only spends two hours at the fair—not long enough for Liam Winderhuff to hear about it, but enough to make an impression. Word of mouth will garble it, but there will be enough interest for the next night.

The second day of Futures Fair, they have a close call. Nadine, a regular in Elspeth’s own mod’r group, wears the tech that evening, twinkling like a night no city dweller can imagine. At first, they hear only oo’s and ah’s, but then there are men wearing Winderhuff jackets moving into the area and blocking the exits. She wants to shout out a warning, but that will only draw their attention.

Nadine understands the situation unfolding without Elspeth’s help and grabs the hand of the nearest onlooker. “I’m dressed for a party—let’s dance!” she tells the crowd. Before anyone can say or do anything, she shimmies and pirouettes through the onlookers, leaving a cluster of swaying bodies behind her. Someone starts playing music and the Winderhuff agents struggle around the dancers.

By the time they navigate the swinging hips and raised arms, Nadine has vanished and Elspeth takes this as her cue to leave, too.

There’s word later, per Doralice, that the five finalists in the amateur competition have been announced. They should attend the main stage event the following night, when Liam Winderhuff will reveal the lucky winner.

Of course, the name they used is there.

Mari is wearing her gray hoodie over their project; they stand together, just beyond the stage, where people have begun to gather. The smart fabric is still quiet, inactive. In this inert state, it resembles nothing so much as the increasingly ratty gray sweatshirt the girl is wearing. “Are you sure about this?” Elspeth asks again, apprehensive.

Mari smiles instead of answering. She looks older tonight, more self-possessed. “I want to give you something.” She produces a package wrapped in thick brown paper and tied with string. “To say thank you. For everything.”

Elspeth accepts it, mute. There’s no doubt this is the last time she’ll see the girl, whether their plan succeeds or fails. It’s strange to feel that spasm of loss in her chest, but she does, has known that she would for a while now. Some version of herself would hold Mari, but she doesn’t—won’t—reach for her. They stay where they are, as if repelled like a pair of magnets, the night filling the space between them.

All too soon, Liam Winderhuff’s voice slithers through the speakers near them. “And the winner of the Futures Fair amateur prize is . . . Ana Paek Winderhuff . . . ”

If the crowd murmurs at the name, Elspeth doesn’t notice. She’s too busy watching the girl. Mari ascends the stairs, shedding the gray hoodie and attaching the neural sensor to her own temple. The dress’ corresponding sensors surge to life, filling the fabric with color and movement. It’s a riot of gold and red. Elspeth does hear the onlookers gasp when they realize that the image is, in fact, the sun. A burst of fiery red explodes across the bodice. A sunspot rotates across the skirt. Mari turns for them, slowly, showing them that the image is not merely a projection. It’s coming from the fabric.

After a moment, she takes a deep breath and, as she exhales, the image of the sun bleeds into the bone-white surface of the moon, pocketed with craters and spotted with the detritus of space missions. The Sea of Tranquility spans the skirt.

Winderhuff stands there, watching her. Where he previously wore the cheesy smile of a game show host, his expression now goes hard and twisted. Once the crowd noise dies down, he says. “Well, Miss, tell us about your invention.” There are already Winderhuff agents ringing the stage, but they’re waiting, watching. Elspeth stamps down the urge to punch as many as she can.

“Well, Dad,” Mari begins, no small amount of ice in her voice. The crowd definitely reacts to that, hissing speculations from front to back. “It’s a bio-responsive fabric that adapts to the emotional and physiological state of the wearer and creates a corresponding—and completely unique—image. In other words, my moon won’t look like your moon and vice versa. We’ve woven sensors into the fabric and these communicate with this—” here she points to her temple “—neurotransmitter here. It’s reactive by default, but if I concentrate, the image will change.” Here a dazzling rainbow arches across the gown to a burst of applause.

Mari pauses, waiting for them to quiet. “But if I lose focus,” she continues. “My psychological state becomes the determining factor and whatever memory comes to mind might appear.” A malignancy consumes the rainbow, now distended and bruise-colored. Tears start to fall from Mari’s eyes, wetting her face and the dress’ high collar. A huge pair of hands seems to stretch from the floor and seize her, shadowing both skirt and bodice. The audience has gone very quiet. A pale woman lies still in a hospital bed. A man’s fist rises up over her and closes on her, extinguishing the image. “You can’t lie to the smart fabric,” she finishes.

Winderhuff’s face purples. Closing his hand over his mic, he hisses at his daughter. What, neither Elspeth nor the audience can hear, but the way he looms over her is unmistakable.

“Of course, if I transfer the neurotransmitter . . . ” She plucks the equipment off quickly and slaps it onto her father’s temple before he can react. “Everyone can see exactly what you are.”

Images flutter across the fabric as it receives the new information. Liam Winderhuff is trying to pry the device from his skull, but Elspeth created a mechanism that locks the transmitter in place at Mari’s request. “This is a dangerous piece of tech,” she said at the time.

“I know,” Mari replied. “Trust me?”

As the crowd watches, the same malignancy of Mari’s memories surges across the dress. Here is its presence at the hospital bed again; there it looms over Mari’s mother knocked to the ground; finally the shadow makes a slow approach to a room with a half-closed door. Inside a younger Mari, no more than fourteen or fifteen, sleeps unaware in her bed—

Winderhuff finally deactivates the device and flings it from him, panting. Blood runs down the side of his face. “Thief,” he growls at his daughter. “You stole this from my company—when we’re done with you, you’ll be begging to come home and let us do whatever we want with you. But I will leave you in the streets to rot.”

This last echoes across the stage and the audience.

Mari grimaces, but she’s not cowed. “I think you’ll find you stole this from my mother. She patented it before she died. In my name.”

Winderhuff moves as if to lunge for her, but the crowd breaks out into shouting. He freezes as people pour over the dividers and onto the stage, surrounding him.

In the middle of it all, the girl stands alone, her face still wet with tears.

Elspeth does not stay to watch Liam Winderhuff get arrested. She goes home to her little apartment above her shop. She holds Mari’s gift in one hand and the gray hoodie in the other. She strokes the rabbit ears absently. She’s feeling too old for these sorts of nights, maybe. For this sort of life, even. She’ll talk it over with Doralice. Later, when she’s ready.

For now, it’s after one AM and tomorrow is her day off. She can sleep in, if she wants, and then start getting her life back in order. Life without the girl. Without Mari.

There will be more people who need her help, she knows. And in a day or two, she’ll be there for them, as she has always been. For now, she strokes the rabbit ears and thinks about the blazing light of the girl as she ascended the stage tonight.

After a while, she unwraps the bundle. It’s more smart fabric, its surface a slick lead gray. Elspeth laughs when she sees the girl has fashioned it into a literal cloak. Mari has attached a note: I’ve designed it to be less invasive. Without the neurotransmitter, it reacts to biological indicators like body temperature, perspiration, etc. Sort of like those mood tattoos you do. But if the wearer is afraid, it goes into camouflage mode. So you can keep being the Godmother and helping lost girls find their way.

The Godmother. She hates that nickname.

As Elspeth runs her hands over the fabric, it begins to change. The dark blue of the deep ocean spreads across the fabric like a pool of spilled ink. Shapes move in the shadows beyond her view, but they will not hurt anyone. Instead, everything is quiet. Still.

The door opens behind her. Mari is standing there, in her ratty jeans and faded t-shirt and her still too-red sneakers from the first day they met. She has a bag slung over one shoulder. Her face pales with an unspoken question and clear hesitation. For a moment, it seems she might even leave again. But then she looks at the scene spread over Elspeth’s lap, her discarded hoodie curled on the couch like a sleeping pet. The girl approaches slowly, coming to kneel next to her; she takes Elspeth’s hands in hers and leans over to kiss them.

“I knew it would be beautiful,” Mari says.

About the Author

Julia K. Patt is a writer and teacher living in Maryland. Her stories appear in such publications as Escape Pod, Luna Station Quarterly, and Expanded Horizons. Follow her on Twitter for more: @chidorme.

Neptune’s Trident

Nina Allan

The submarines were gone, had been gone for years. Officially they had been destroyed, torpedoed in the North Atlantic during the first six months of the clampdown, though Caitlin allowed herself to believe that someday they would come home, streaming nose to tail up the firth like salmon nearing their spawning grounds. If the subs were still out there, she told herself, then Morrie was, too.

Caitlin remembered how as children they had stood together on the narrow cast iron balcony of their grandparents’ house in Helensburgh scanning the gunmetal waters of the loch below, fighting over Grandma’s binoculars, playing at spies. They weren’t supposed to go out on the balcony because Gander said it was dangerous. Part of the side railing had come away, leaving a dizzying blank space like a hole cut into a cereal packet, a window into thin air. The Void, Morrie called it, with a capital ‘V’ like in the monster movies. Morrie had loved monster movies. Still loved, Caitlin reminded herself. Still loved. Just because she didn’t know where her brother was didn’t mean he was dead, though it was three years and more since she’d heard from him, and even that final communication had not been from Morrie, not directly, just an automated confirmation from his division office, that the Neptune was still intact, still plowing the ocean’s waters like a Minke whale.

We are the orcas, Morrie had said to her in his last proper email. Silent and fleet and loyal, the orcas of now.

Before the Internet shut down completely, that was, and they’d had to resort to that quaint anachronism: letters home. It’ll be fun, Morrie had written. Morrie loved fiddling around with stamps and envelopes, always had. Remember that little stationery shop Grandma used to take us to, opposite the pier? They sold maps, too.

Caitlin remembered, and it might have been fun, were it not for the web of bribery and corruption that characterized what remained of the postal system. Money for paper, for franking, for paying the fellow who was due for shore leave to get your letters to the depot. Like everything else since the clampdown it was a racket. She had received three letters from Morrie in total. Two of them had pages missing. Whether this was down to blackouts or simply carelessness she had no way of knowing.

She liked to imagine Morrie snug in his bunk, still writing to her as she knew he would, not caring how long it might be before the letter was posted.

Morrie had joined the sub corps because he had to, he said. “I need to feel like I’m doing something.” But also because he loved them, those big beasts. To Morrie, who had spent so many summers on the firth, the subs had always seemed like friends.

Caitlin’s job was to search for salvage on the beach at Kilcreggan. This was how she kept them going, her and Steph. The number of shipwrecks had increased tenfold since the clampdown. Breached cargoes littered the pebbles on a regular basis, everything from gas masks to Japanese wristwatches to freezer baggies. Often the objects were damaged or waterlogged but Caitlin had discovered that it was possible to sell almost anything. It was amazing what people would buy, what they found a use for. The twice-weekly market at Rosneath, just over the headland, was beginning to make a quiet name for itself. Ex-servicemen and their families, draft dodgers passing through on their way to the islands. Women and children left behind or just washed up here for a dozen reasons or more but really just one: life as they had known it before had come to an end.

Once, Caitlin had gone down to the beach and found it covered from the road to the strandline with blue plastic turtles, a mad reiteration of old nature documentaries about the annual Leatherback migrations in Costa Rica. Caitlin found it deeply strange that anyone was still making objects there was no real use for, stranger even than the sight of their humped shells, sprouting out of the sand like blue plastic mushrooms.

The kids loved them though. She remembered one little girl in particular, who had started bawling her eyes out when her mother told her no, she couldn’t have a turtle, they had no spare money. From the look in her eyes, that fixed blank stare lodged midway between furious and terrified, Caitlin knew at once that she was speaking the truth. Caitlin bent down to the girl, slipping a turtle into her hand out of sight of the other stallholders.

“You’ll get thrown off the market,” Steph had said when Caitlin told her. Steph was right of course—start giving handouts and you’re going to attract beggars. Unless you can feed them all you’d best feed none, or so Rory Murdoch had insisted when he gave her the pitch. Caitlin had stuck to the rules until now, more or less, but for the little girl, her fingers curled like suckers around the lump of blue plastic.

“Can I really keep him?” she whispered.

“Shhh, you,” her mother hissed. She nodded at Caitlin, her eyes hard as flints, snatched the child by her other hand and marched her away.

There were other people working the beach but Caitlin had learned ways of getting one over: bypassing the usual places, scrambling over rocks and through tide pools until you came to inlets and skerries and lochans most of the others didn’t know about. Many passed through so quickly they never got to grips with the place, not properly. There was little to keep them here, which meant it was very safe or very dangerous, depending.

Today: out towards Baron’s Point, slip-sliding on the greasy pebbles—some kind of fatty deposit, oil mixed with seaweed it looked like but who knew? These days it could be anything. She did her best to keep her hands clear. She kept a lookout for sea glass, always. Sea glass was her thing, the indulgence she cherished. And they sold, didn’t they, the things she made, the glass-gobbets twisted in wire and strung on cord, leather, a rusty bath chain, whatever she could find or came soonest to hand.

Green glass from old wine bottles was most common but there was also brown, clear, orange even. Occasionally a glowing sapphire of Bristol blue.

Shards of another life, shattered dreams, twinkling among the shingle like holes in time.

She first remembered collecting sea glass with Grandma, on the shorefront at Helensburgh. Had Morrie been with them that time? Caitlin wasn’t sure.

How long did it take for the shards of a broken bottle to be transformed into sea glass? Caitlin liked to think: when this was a bottle, there was still the Internet. Or: when this was a jam jar—Robinson’s marmalade, Cooper’s jam—we still had five years to go before the clampdown.

Sea glass, in its way, was innocence preserved.

Steph said that was pure nonsense, pure as the glass if you like but still nonsense. They’d known for years.

“Not me.” Caitlin shook her head.

“You had bad dreams, didn’t you? You told me. That was them.”

No sea glass today but she was lucky anyway: five bottles of shampoo, one with the label still on—Johnson’s, with its teardrop logo. Her heart leaped, because these were valuable, the equivalent of a week’s food. One of the bottles was split—sticky with lather—which meant she could justify keeping it back for herself and Steph. Enough shampoo for two months, more if they were careful. She touched her chopped-short, saltwater hair, her wind-chapped cheeks. Wrapped the split bottle in an old carrier bag and stowed all five in her rucksack. Normally she would have stayed out another hour, perhaps two, but the shampoo had made her time-rich. She would go back to the cottage, make tea.

She straightened up, casting her eyes outwards, long-range across the firth, force of habit. The wrecked supertanker jutting like an exploded monument against the skyline but that was all. She made to go, up the shingle bank towards the coast road, where it was usually safe to walk so long as you kept a lookout. Then spotted something glinting on the stones, ten paces away, twenty, halfway between the place where she was standing and the bilious ocean.

She strode forward, sliding on the heaped-up stones, bent down. An unknown object, rectangular and gold-colored. Her first thought was a mobile phone case. Loads of those still around and sometimes people would buy them. God knew why but they did. It wasn’t a mobile phone case though, it was a mouth organ. A harmonica. Skin dented but still shiny and with the maker’s name emblazoned in swirly letters: HOHNER.

It felt cold in her hand—sea-cold, dented ingot. She felt the urge to put the thing to her lips but resisted it. The inside would be filthy, and could be infected. She slipped it inside her backpack with the shampoo bottles.

Tail ends of the old world. Curiosities. Things you might not see for a year and more, then suddenly a dozen of them, quaint throwbacks, all at once.

Some days were like that. Filled with strange omens, Caitlin thought, knowing Steph would say they were no such thing.

There were times when Steph was so deep in the mire that Caitlin feared she was lost to her, the real Steph that was, gone for good, lost in the mist of captivity as if it were a forest she had wandered into and couldn’t get out.

Steph suffered during these absences, penetrating, crucifying pain that left her brow glistening with sweat, the veins standing out in her temples like electric wires. “It’s not like the pain you might get from a wound,” Steph had explained to her, or tried to, anyway. “It’s not like a cut or a bruise or even a broken bone. It’s at the cellular level.”

“Like cancer?” Caitlin had asked, and Steph had nodded and said maybe, yes, in a way it was like cancer, that was a good analogy, or good enough. Caitlin thought of Gander, the way his cancer had started with a nut-brown cyst then rippled out of control until the Gander they’d known was gone, left behind on a distant shore, a shore that had become inundated anyway, so who gave a shit?

Steph slept a lot, sometimes for days at a time, her eyes gummed shut like a kitten’s eyes. Those times were good in a way, because Caitlin could pretend that Steph was getting some rest. When Steph was unconscious it was easier to forget how terrifying she could be, the gibberish, the wailing, the time she had crouched in a corner for eight hours whispering to herself. Caitlin remembered how towards the end of that day she had begun to fantasize about using the service revolver Steph still had, pressing the gun to the back of Steph’s head and just pulling the trigger. The atmosphere had felt polluted, seething with infection.

What if Steph was a crack in the world? That was what they said about the flukes, wasn’t it? That they were a liability and a weakness. A danger to every man, woman, and child on this planet, one politician had ranted soon after the clampdown.

In the cities to the south, flukes were mostly shot on sight, or rounded up and burned.

Steph had been fine for most of a week, almost normal. The mouth organ aroused her interest immediately. She gazed at it with gleaming eyes, like a child at Christmas.

“Let me hold it,” she said. Caitlin hesitated then handed it over.

“Be careful,” she said. “It’s full of sand.” She felt queasy suddenly, as if the instrument might be dangerous. She glanced down at the clogged grille, which looked like teeth, she realized. Stunted, rotten teeth, like a demon might have.

Steph’s fingers closed around the metal, folding down slowly one after the other like the tentacles of a sea anemone.

“You found it on the beach,” she said, then smiled. “Like Professor Parkins.”

Caitlin’s heart missed a beat. “Who’s Professor Parkins?” she said.

There was a story, Steph explained. About a stuffy old history professor who goes walking on a deserted beach. “In Norfolk,” Steph said. “Or Suffolk. Somewhere down south, anyway. He’s there to play golf.”

“Golf?”

“Why not? He’s on a weekend break. Anyway, he finds an old tin whistle buried in the sand, and when the professor cleans it up he discovers that there are words engraved on it—who is it that is coming? Really creepy.”

Steph grinned, her eyes bright, reminding Caitlin of how she’d been when they first met, the mischief in her, the contrariness that felt like fun and outcry and protectiveness all at once. Steph was never one simply to accept things. Not even the storms, the clampdown, the pursuit and conquest and colonization of her own organism. She was physically weak today as she usually was during her there times, but not too weak to hold up the mouth organ, to bring its mouth of jagged teeth level with her eyes, to poke at the caked-in dirt with the tip of her finger.

“When Parkins blew into the whistle the world seemed to change in an instant. A great wind blew up,” Steph said, her eyes misting over in a way that Caitlin had come to recognize as the signal that they were here with them in the room, listening in. Caitlin felt their presence only dimly, a minor sensory irritation, like dust in the corner of her eye, the faint echo of distant laughter from another room.

Unearthly, Caitlin thought. A word that used to have poetic connotations, angels and saints and that touch of the numinous. Now its meaning was simple and stark: un-Earthly meant not of Earth. Unearthly meant them.

“Forget them,” Steph whispered. “Professor Parkins was pursued along the beach by a ghostly wraith, some sort of revenant. His golfing partner saved him. Told him to get rid of the whistle but Parkins didn’t want to. Thought it might be historically significant, I suppose. He would, wouldn’t he? Men like him always do.” Steph coughed. The room filled up with the smell of burning hair.

Caitlin had asked her on several occasions—her breath short, her heart racing—if this was truly the end, if the human race was doomed. “I mean all of us, forever. Everything we’ve made.” Steph had refused to answer.

Caitlin plucked the mouth organ from Steph’s fingers, which seemed too frail to hold it, suddenly. The metal felt cold and heavier than it should be. The sand, Caitlin supposed. All that sand inside its workings. She laid the instrument on the bedside shelf then lay down beside Steph. Steph trembled and seemed to retract, like the horns of a snail.

“Ignore them,” she breathed. Her voice was dry and cracked, almost inaudible. “I’m here still.” She gripped Caitlin’s hand, or tried to, the pressure faint upon her skin as a passing breeze. Steph-but-not-Steph. Caitlin did her best not to recoil, knowing that Steph would feel it anyway because not-Steph sensed everything. Her mind felt briefly clouded, a sensation that had initially terrified her but that she’d grown used to as she might grow used to a blocked up nose when she had the flu.

She had once thought the sensation meant she was infected, that they were in. Now she knew it was just Steph, trying to communicate with her from an altered state, the state of not-Steph. A low-grade form of telepathy. No Signal.

An invasion, Morrie called it, he and his friends, one of the activist groups that began to spring up everywhere in the wake of the clampdown, bound together by their disquiet and later their anger over what was not being said on government websites, over what they saw as a betrayal by the band of offbeats and diehards and refuseniks that still referred to itself as the BBC.

The official line was computer hackers. Industrial saboteurs, extremist insurgents, military spies or professional anarchists or whoever best chimed with the narrative at any given moment. These were the people responsible for the plane crashes, the financial meltdowns, the firestorm that consumed a third of the Moscow metro, the uncancellable launching of nuclear missiles from both sides of the international dateline, the fusillade of retaliatory strikes that everyone said had been called off but turned out not to be.

The uncoupling of the world from its digital shadow.

Invasion, the counterculture insisted. An alien parasite, curled in the guts of the world like a monstrous tapeworm. Ouroboros, eater of worlds. Find the worm and tug it out, that’s the solution.

“They’re all wrong,” Steph had sighed, wearily. “It’s not an invasion, it’s an overwriting. Their template placed over ours, joining up the dots, filling the spaces.” A wiping from the record. “A kind of bleed-through.”

“A bleed-through from where, though?” Caitlin had asked. She could feel her organs flexing inside her, dark globes of rancid meat. Steph shrugged. She claimed she could see them sometimes, when the pain was most intense, that she could see their cities, spirals and curlicues and vortexes of festering matter, the roads’ surfaces bruised and collapsing with something like apple-rot, running with ants. She showed Caitlin an image in an old copy of Art Review magazine, The Entire City, by Max Ernst, a painting that was supposed to represent Europe after the war. To Caitlin it resembled a stack of rusting cheese graters, the torn, ridged openings like burned-out windows or bullet wounds.

“It’s not really like that, though,” Steph said. “It’s redder than that. More like meat than metal. Can we not?” she added, when Caitlin tried to ask more questions. “It hurts to look at it.”

If it hadn’t been for Grandma and Gander, Caitlin might have abandoned the idea of going to university altogether. It was Grandma who suggested that she come to live with them. Helensburgh was less than an hour from the center of Glasgow and the money she saved on accommodation would cover the tuition fees.

Caitlin’s closest friend Deb was horrified, called Glasgow a frozen hell-hole, although when Caitlin asked if she’d ever been there Deb admitted she hadn’t. Deb’s mother was a crown court judge, so Deb could afford to be picky. Tuition fees in England were three times what they were in Scotland. The idea of Glasgow secretly thrilled her, though relations with her grandparents had never been the same since her parents’ divorce. Grandma and Gander were part of the old times, a reminder of what had been lost, of her mother’s foolishness which—as Caitlin never tired of reminding herself throughout the autumn and winter of her final year at school—was the chief reason Caitlin couldn’t afford to go to university in the first place.

It turned out all right, though. The excitement of arrival, the green-gray hills of Argyll. Gander’s mind was beginning to wander but he was still the same Gander. Grandma still walked the foreshore with her binoculars, noting birds and navy maneuvers, the bands of travelers passing through on their way to the islands.

Itinerants, Grandma called them. They were beginning to be a phenomenon even then: people on the move, restless and watchful and untidy and somehow haunted. Caitlin began to think of them as bellwethers, symbolic of the age, the increasing insecurity everyone was feeling, not just because of the government’s stepped-up austerity plan but because of something deeper down, a sense of fracturing that was psychological as much as economic.

A separation. From what exactly Caitlin found it difficult to name, or perhaps the damage went so deep she did not want to name it. She reasoned that the itinerants—no one called them flukes in those days, the term was unknown—had as much right to be there as she did, as her grandparents did, more even, that they were as much a part of the landscape as any of the drovers’ roads and burial sites she was studying as part of her degree course but they made her uneasy nonetheless. They reminded her of every bad thing that could happen.

“Where do you think they’re going?” she asked Steph, about an hour after they first met. Hogmanay at Morrie’s mess, everyone drunk and disorderly, the drunkest rolling around in the snow with no clothes on, launching snowball attacks on the town revelers, shrieking like commandos in full flight. Then suddenly the walkers, the itinerants, fifty or more, passing along the gravel road that skirted the camp boundary. Some of them carried candles, others old battery torches. A silent procession of light.

There were children too, a good dozen of them, zipped into anoraks and too-big boots, their faces reddened and pinched from cold and older than their years.

Steph shook her head, still staring. “I don’t know,” she said. “They look frightened, don’t they?”

What do they know? What have they found out? The question rose up in Caitlin’s mind unbidden, spelled out in block capitals like in a cartoon thought bubble. She shivered, then suddenly Steph was kissing her, full on the mouth.

“It’s midnight,” she giggled. “As good as.”

Later: “My great-nan was a steelworker, on the Clyde,” and: “I’m a motor mechanic, in the army. There’s no shortage of work.” The physicality of her, as comfortable inside her body as some smart, strong animal. Caitlin later found out that Steph had completed two years of a physics degree at Strathclyde University, dropped out because she was bored and because she’d heard the army was looking for people with a head for machines.

She seemed to view Caitlin—her bookish high-mindedness, her cluelessness about the world, her need for solitude—simultaneously as a miracle and a liability.

Their first lovemaking was ravenous, almost grueling. On January 2nd, Caitlin telephoned the man she was engaged to—Jonny Lomax, an archaeologist, at a conference in Edinburgh—and told him they were finished. Jonny sounded devastated, completely sideswiped. When he begged her for a meeting—“so we can talk about this. Can’t we at least talk?”—Caitlin said there was no point, although she would be happy to have a coffee with him sometime, “as friends.” Her feelings for Steph had made her cruel, as only lovers can be. For a long time, Jonny did not so much as cross her mind, though in the past weeks and months she had found herself thinking about him more and more. How he was, where he had ended up, if he was alive, even.

She regretted nothing, yet it was painful now, sometimes, to remember how kind Jonny had been, how unerringly selfless.

Steph was—what? She was just Steph. Like they’d always been together and nothing else made sense. Like she and Morrie had been when they were children, before their parents’ divorce and before the clampdown.

There was a belief, in the beginning, that they came from the sea. Vast acreages of the ocean were still a mystery after all, the Mariana trench was deeper than Everest was high, which was terrifying when you thought about it. Such a crack in the world might harbor anything, even monsters.

They started sending subs down, the new generation of bathyspheres, Jules Verne stuff. Films were made, TV documentaries that followed the submarine crews as they prepared for their missions.

“We’re going to find some answers,” said one guy. He was one of the first to go down, Caitlin remembered him clearly: young (he looked well under thirty), with curly, carrot-top hair and celadon eyes. He disappeared from the show suddenly, a week or two in. Caitlin kept waiting for an explanation but none came.

“Caught the flukes, probably,” Steph reasoned. Flukes was what people had started calling it when you got contaminated. After the parasitic worm, Caitlin supposed, or maybe simply as an expression of thwarted surprise. Green-eyed sailor-boy’s sanity compromised. What a fluke.

It occurred to her that if the viewing public had felt a little less scared or a little more immune, the documentary team would probably have filmed the kid right up until his organs ruptured. As things stood, they probably shot him. They believed it was a disease, at least to begin with. Something contagious that could be stopped by killing the host.

“It’s not a disease,” Steph said. “It’s just . . . what’s happening.” The slipping of sand from one globe of the hourglass to another. Our time to theirs.

Later, the army began rounding up the flukes, interring them in barracks. For research, the government insisted. To understand. Everyone knew the so-called research facilities were really prison camps, the so-called black sites. Extract information by any means necessary or hell, just let off steam, the flukes weren’t human anyway, not any more, they deserved what they got.

Steph had to leave the army eventually or risk discovery. They came to Kilcreggan almost by accident, staying because they couldn’t see the point in journeying further, at least not yet, not while their luck held. People in the village knew Steph was ill, but not what she had. Multiple sclerosis, Caitlin said if anyone asked. People outside the cities seemed more tolerant of flukes anyway, many bands of itinerants harbored them openly. Caitlin feared these groups as much as she felt grateful to them. They made her feel—more than the roadblocks, the cordoned market towns, the endless curfews—as if she was clinging to a world that was already gone.

The travelers had stopped trying to decide who was a monster and who was normal. They had decided to accept the new world the way it was.

She sold all four bottles of shampoo in less than an hour. For the final one she doubled the price, just to see what would happen, and someone—a tired-looking man in a worn tweed jacket and a dog collar—bought it without even haggling. Caitlin knew then that she’d been stupid, that she could have charged the same money for every bottle. Steph was always telling her she wasn’t ruthless enough.

“Have you traveled far?” she asked the parson, as she mentally dubbed him. There was a danger in talking to customers. Information was currency, as Rory Murdoch was always reminding them, and did not come for free. But the parson looked exhausted, in need of talk. He reminded Caitlin a little of the man her mother had fallen in love with, all that long time ago, Stephen Lamb, a history teacher at the local sixth-form college who had briefly been in police custody for supplying cannabis to students at his home, although apparently this hadn’t been true and the charges were dropped.

In Caitlin’s mind’s eye, the parson almost was Lamb, the likeness so acute it triggered memories she believed she had buried for good: the emptiness of the house after her father left, her mother weeping in the upstairs lavatory, Morrie’s dumb fury. Morrie blamed Mum for everything, which drove a wedge between him and Caitlin, the first of its kind. In the end she had called him an imbecile, a moment that felt both cathartic and apocalyptic, the end of her childhood, the end of everything, or so she thought then.

None of that mattered now. Caitlin recalled their words and actions more or less exactly but the drama—the heat—was gone from them. She replayed them in her mind, scenes from a film everyone had once raved about but that now appeared melodramatic and vaguely embarrassing.

“From my parish in Dumfries,” the parson said. His words startled her. She had fallen so deep into reverie she had lost the thread of their conversation. “We were on a bus as far as Paisley, then we had to walk.”

“We?”

“My wife and I. Maria. She’s not been well. This will be a treat for her. A small gift.” He indicated the bottle of shampoo, which he had already hidden away in his canvas backpack. Caitlin did not have to ask about the wife. She knew what she would be like: pale-cheeked and nervous, a million miles already from the person she had been. That was stage one, the difficult part. If you came out of stage one alive you might begin to find something. Not hope exactly, but resolve. She saw the parson looking at the other things on her table, the pieces of sea glass on leather thongs, the silver belt buckle she had found caked in mud at the bottom of a wheel rut, an old biscuit tin, its enameled design only slightly corroded by rust.

“Did you make these?” he asked. He pointed at one of the necklaces, a shard of orange glass shaped like a teardrop.

Caitlin nodded.

“You’re an artist, then?”

“Only recently.” She bit back her laughter. It was interesting—a novelty—to speak with someone who still thought like that, who was still capable of seeing her as anything other than a survivor, just one more itinerant. Artist, historian, writer—such terms were obsolete. Doctor, now—soldier, mechanic, cook, even. As if killing, eating, and driving were the only functions left that were worth fulfilling.

Caitlin fought the urge to ask where the parson was staying, if his wife needed help. Such questions were ultimately pointless and—like the act of speaking to him in the first place—potentially dangerous. She would never see him again after today.

He nodded and turned away, heading back down Court Hill, towards the shoreline. He walked with a limp, Caitlin noticed, a drag and then a stagger, as if his left leg gave him pain when he put his weight on it. She wondered why he still wore the dog collar, what significance he could still attach to it. All those centuries of cultural references rendered void in less than a decade.

She packed up her stall, glanced towards the bus shelter where the chancers waited, circling like vultures. Her space would be reoccupied in less than a second. Rory Murdoch didn’t mind chancers, so long as they waited their turn and didn’t carry weapons. She left the market and walked down to the harbor. She kept a lookout for the parson but he seemed to have vanished. Caitlin stared out across the loch. Snow still glinted on the hills behind Helensburgh and she remembered the winter of her second year at university, when the temperatures had fallen so low that the railway had been out of action for more than a week. Trapped in Glasgow, she’d spent the nights in the community hostel, the days traipsing the streets of the inner city and the West End until she knew them by heart.

There had been talk of the firth freezing solid, the subs coasting along silently beneath the ice like electric eels. In the end the big freeze hadn’t happened, but the images remained inside her head as if they’d been real.

Her thoughts were full of Morrie suddenly—the subs, she supposed, it was thinking about the subs that had brought him back so clearly, although in her own mind it was more to do with the parson, as if Morrie and the parson were linked somehow, even though she knew the idea was nonsense.

What if the parson was some sort of omen? See him again and you’ll see your brother, rising from the frozen ocean, the returning dead. Like most superstitions, the idea was illogical but compelling. She looked both ways along the beach, still searching for the parson, she supposed, but there was no sign of him.

“What are we facing, then?”

Kirsten Villander, Newsnight, six months before the BBC had shut down overnight, leaving the airwaves and the broadcast media to whoever still had funds for as long as they could keep the hardware up and running. Caitlin missed Newsnight, not the arseholes shooting their mouths off so much as an overview, the sense of a structure behind things, a plan for the days.

Now there were just days—days like stepping stones between one passive chunk of time and the next. Time in its raw state tasted bland, unpalatable. Moving through it felt like being chained to a rock on the foreshore and waiting for the tide to come in.

“I don’t think anyone can answer that question accurately at this time.” The speaker, a guy in a suit, interchangeable with all the other guys in suits they had on Newsnight, someone from the Ministry of Defense, Caitlin remembered now, killed with all the others in that helicopter crash two weeks later. “Most government scientists agree that the occurrences are being caused by foreign intrusions within our infrastructure. The important question is one of intelligence.”

“Do the aliens know what they’re doing, you mean?”

“I would hesitate to use the term aliens, but otherwise, yes. A significant percentage of expert opinion tends towards the belief that the infrastructure crashes are the result of random generation. A sort of supercharged power surge, if you will. If that turns out to be the case, then it is only a matter of time before we are able to isolate the source of the interference and erect barriers against it.”

Had the suit believed what he was saying, or was he just parroting the party line? Anything to stop the riots, the mass lootings, the torching of cities. The so-called remedial actions sometimes caused as much damage as the insurgencies, more even. Perhaps that was part of the plan, if there was one.

“What do they want?” Caitlin asked Steph. She’d been bad that night but not absent. Still Steph, still fighting.

“Just to be,” Steph replied. “Just to be here. To flourish, as a mold flourishes. Mold under the microscope is beautiful, have you seen it? Like lace, like exquisite silverwork, like the etched, Corinthian columns of a maleficent coral reef.”

One of the sure signs that Steph was tipping over into not-Steph was when she began to sound as if she were reciting poetry. Just an odd turn of phrase at first, then landslides of words, a collapsed stack of colored building blocks, the remnants of some incomprehensible word game that children loved and excelled at but adults couldn’t join.

Were the aliens just that, Caitlin wondered, children playing war games? The whole of human endeavor reduced to a battalion of plastic soldiers ranged across a carpet, while precocious yet juvenile intelligences argued over Earth’s fate, entertaining themselves with the destruction of cities, of empires, everything melting to dust at the touch of a button.

Morrie had been obsessed with his model armies. At the end of a battle, he would box up his soldiers carefully in what he called mess tins. They were a big deal to him. Most of them had names. Name, rank, and number, just like in the real army.

Caitlin kept expecting to see the parson at the market. When he did not reappear, she assumed he’d moved on, he and his wife, to Arrochar or Campbeltown, where there was a garrison. He’d be safe enough there, for a while, so long as he could prove he wasn’t a fluke. It was a week and more before she finally saw him again. He was some distance away, along the shoreline, but Caitlin knew him at once from the way he walked.

She went towards him, slip-sliding on the pebbles, almost running. He glanced up as she approached.

“Good day,” he said.

“How’s your wife?” she said, breathlessly.

“My wife?” He frowned.

“Yes. You said she’d not been well.”

“Oh. Yes.” He looked down at his feet, like a schoolboy caught in an act of disobedience, and Caitlin found herself wondering if she even existed, this wife, if the parson had invented her for some reason. Or perhaps she was real, but dead. Or else they just weren’t married, and the word wife struck him with pangs of guilt every time he said it. Yes, that was probably it. The quaintness of the idea made Caitlin want to smile, to reach out and take his hand, even. Guilt was outmoded these days, or hadn’t he noticed? Men of God always were like that though—slow to catch on. “She’s . . . better. Not so sick as she was. Thank you for asking.”

“I brought this for her.” Caitlin reached into her coat pocket and brought out the pendant, the glass teardrop she had seen the parson examining on her stall.

“I can’t pay you for this.” An expression flashed across his face, something close to fear. What have you done? The question sounded in her mind like an accusation. Caitlin took a step backwards, almost afraid, then realized, it was money he was talking about, that was all, he most likely had none, which would be terrifying enough for a man like him.

“That’s . . . all right,” she said. “It’s a gift.” The words hung there lamely—lamely, like the parson’s bad leg, words with no muscle. “I thought it might cheer her up.”

“That’s very kind.” He hesitated, then took the pendant from her hand. The glass flashed, catching the sun, the opalescent gaze of a tawny cat. They were walking in step now, the shingle crunching beneath their feet as if they’d trod the path together a dozen times and more. Like Caitlin and Grandma on the beach at Helensburgh. Like Caitlin and Gander and Morrie when Gander was well.

“Will you stay here, do you think?” Caitlin asked. “You and your wife?”

“For as long as I’m needed,” he said. “And something tells me that I am needed here.” He looked at her hard, as if daring her to divulge something, to confess her guilt. She could feel herself trembling inside her coat. Hoped he wouldn’t notice. He was still wearing the grubby dog collar, she saw, for all the good it did. Did they still make love, this man and his wife, Maria, did they still have sex? There was an image in her mind: a woman, astride the parson, sprawled on the shingle, the soupy taste of his saliva, mingled with hers. Caitlin’s heart thudded. She drew in her breath.

“Here is no different from any other place, surely?” she managed to say.

“You might think not. But sewers must run into the sea.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean that the cities may be rife with evil, but evil will not stop there. Where must evil flee when it is forced from its hiding place?”

Caitlin shook her head. She could not imagine how things stood in the cities now, even in a backwater like Dumfries. You couldn’t trust what you saw on the pirate channels but even so, the footage they showed—the gassing-out of apartment blocks, the mass suicides—had to come from somewhere.

“They spread their disease where the mud lies thickest and then they come here,” said the parson quietly. “They come to hide, to regroup, to increase, but we will root them out.”

“Flukes aren’t evil, they’re ill.” Her lips felt numb as she spoke, and she could not have said what led her to challenge him but there it was: the danger Murdoch warned of, her own recklessness, whatever. God knew she had more reason than most to let this man’s closed-mindedness flow over her and away. Crouch down, lie still, keep quiet. This too will pass. “I thought Christians believed in helping people.” She was trembling again. No one talked of such things, or at least not to strangers.

“My duty is to the human race,” the parson said. “God’s people.” He cast out his hands to either side, as if commanding a wider audience. There was a light in his eyes, and Caitlin realized. her question had not challenged him at all, that it had been in some way invited, that this was what he lived for.

His lean hands and disheveled hair were all part of his message, even the limp. For those like the parson, chaos was no such thing. For those like the parson, chaos was the evolutionary soup they swam in, a culture for the growth of the doctrine they fervently believed.

The man was dangerous, she realized, and again she thought of Lamb, who had seemed a nonentity, a man of no force or charisma, just a lean and hungry look, an awkwardness that bordered on the sublime. She remembered the too-big jacket he wore, his limbs lean and stringy as beef jerky. Yet he had broken them, all the same. Her mother, with her Nuttall Bursary and three top industry awards, preparing food and fixing drinks, while Lamb and his friends lounged about smoking pot, indulging in aimless, shallow debates about the army crackdown and the latest set of travel bans. This is where things are happening, Lamb insisted. The kitchen cabinet, her mother had called them. By the end, they barely registered her presence.

“I’ll be holding a meeting here tomorrow evening,” the parson was saying. “People are frightened, they need guidance. You would concede that much, at least?”

“Guidance shouldn’t mean giving them permission to hate.”

“Would you call it hate if our enemy were a forest fire? A cholera epidemic? It is disease we are talking of here, you must see that. This is not a question of morality, but of salvation. You should come to the meeting,” he said. He thrust his hands deep inside his pockets, a recalcitrant student now, fighting his professor over some finer point of semantics in an essay he privately considered to be a work of genius. “You might find it helpful. We are not what you think.”

He held out his hand to her. She took it automatically, without thinking. His palm was dry and cool, as she had imagined it would be, his grip firm enough to belie his slightness, his modest height. He looked her straight in the eyes, refusing to yield the contact even when she tried to look away. His eyes were gray as the firth, and she thought of Steph, huddled beneath the yellow blanket in the low back room.

The stove would be out, the sheets would be soaking.

“I should go,” Caitlin said. “I hope your wife feels better soon.”

“People of courage must stick together,” the parson said. They were still holding hands, Caitlin realized. “We must find strength in numbers. Please say you will come?”

“I don’t know,” Caitlin said. “Maybe.”

His wife might be there, she reasoned, although why she felt this recurring concern for the parson’s wife she had no idea. Caitlin saw her again in her mind’s eye: the pale lips, the lank hair, the threadbare woolen shawl about her shoulders. The parson should take better care of her, she thought distractedly. He’s so in love with the word of God he doesn’t notice she’s dying.

She came in to find Steph brewing tea. She seemed quite normal still, and stronger than she had been in weeks. She had even washed her hair. Caitlin caught the scent of her shampoo, the Johnson’s she’d found on the beach, the same as in the bottle she’d sold to the parson. She found herself wanting to press her nose into the downy nape of Steph’s neck, to breathe her in while there was still time. It had been months since they had been fully intimate. Steph was mostly too weak and in any case, the way she was now made the thought of sex repugnant, like opening herself to an assault.

“I saw that guy again today,” she said. “The parson.”

Steph went rigid, a spasm that hunched her shoulders and made tense right angles of her elbows and wrists. She turned slowly away from the kitchen counter, moving in jerky increments, like a robot.

“The man of God?” she said, the words slightly blurred, as if two identical recordings of her voice were being played over each other, a millisecond apart. “He is a weapon, Caty. A blade steeped in mud.”

“Blood?” Caitlin said. She hesitated, wondering whether she should try to bring her back, to put an arm about her shoulders, to haul her away from not-Steph like a fish on a line. Sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn’t. She felt the familiar nausea in the pit of her stomach, flecks and tendrils of otherness, purring about her head like a swarm of midges.

“Mud,” Steph said, and laughed. “Filth. Maniac.” She snapped back into herself then, her limbs relaxing, head lolling forward as if its weight had increased suddenly. “They’re all the same, these God-botherers. I don’t know what you see in him.”

Her voice had returned to normal. “I don’t see anything in him. I was just saying.” Caitlin could feel herself blushing, the red spattering her neck and cheeks like nettle rash.

“Keep away from him,” Steph said quietly, as if reminding herself of a task she had yet to fulfil. “Anyway,” she added, more brightly. “Don’t you want to see what I’ve been doing?”

“What have you been doing, silkworm?” Caitlin felt her heartbeat gradually returning to its normal rhythm.

“Cleaning up your harmonica. Look.” She grabbed hold of Caitlin’s hand, squeezing it hard enough to make the bones grind. Caitlin winced but said nothing. She looked down at what Steph was showing her, the mouth organ, polished and shining like a golden ingot on the scuffed formica. Caitlin had more or less forgotten about the Hohner. Now in its naked state it seemed to loom large again. The dent was still there, she noted, but the front grille and presumably the inside had been cleaned of debris. The perforations now loomed blackly, like miniature caves.

“Does it play?” Caitlin said. “Have you tried it?” She turned the instrument over in her hand. It felt cold to the touch, slippery, as if the metal had been coated in some sort of oil.

“You must never play it,” Steph said. She looked down at the floor. “Not unless you mean it.”

There was silence then, silence the texture of silt. Something unspooling in the chilly air—them, Caitlin assumed, then realized, no, it was Steph, Steph trying to tell her something in spite of them. Behind their backs, as it were. Passing a note under the desk out of sight of the teacher, the way they used to do at school.

“Mean it?” Caitlin breathed. Even in that moment she realized, there was something final here, a last instant of clarity that could neither be repeated nor returned to. Steph would be leaving her soon. In every sense that mattered, Steph would be no more. Caitlin felt her throat tighten. She inhaled sharply, gasping for air. There was a strange dry scent in her nostrils, acrid as ash.

“Professor Parkins,” Steph said. “He whistled, but he didn’t really mean it. He didn’t believe anything would happen. But it did.”

She raised her head. Caitlin noticed that a corner of her lip had split, a narrow band of blood pulsed in the crack. “It’s really OK,” she added. “Just different.”

Caitlin wrapped both arms around her shoulders, held her close. Steph’s body stiffened, then relaxed. Caitlin realized, she was still holding the mouth organ. She could feel its teeth biting into her palm, leaving their mark. “We’ll find a way out of this,” she said, her lips against Steph’s hair. “Somehow. We will.”

Steph sighed, the sound so wistful, so heavy with exhaustion it made Caitlin want to smash things, to batter the Hohner against the window until the smeary glass gave way and tore into her hands. They spent the evening curled together on the old divan, eating the last of the potato soup Caitlin had made at the start of the week and listening to the radio, a station that was being broadcast from somewhere north of Inverness, a program of readings from Miller’s The Crucible. Was it possible to feel hope, that there were people out there who found the energy to care about such things, who still thought words were important? Probably not, but we can listen, Caitlin told herself. We can do that, at least.

Sometime during the small hours of the following morning, Steph lapsed into a sleep so deep it was impossible to wake her. There was just her breathing, slow and rasping, like a very old woman’s.

It wasn’t the first time. No need to panic. Caitlin settled Steph on her side, tucked the blanket firmly around her shoulders then went down to the beach. The wind had blown strongly during the night. She expected rich pickings.

Scroungers threaded along the strandline already—three, four of them, bent over, dark, comma-shaped specks against a background of gray shingle. She could just make out Donny Carr, in his earflap camo hat, tugging up seaweed. The others were too far away to recognize Caitlin headed east, away from the main beach and towards the ingress. The shore was rockier there and harder to parse but it was her only option for salvaging, at least for today. All the decent stuff on the foreshore would have been snapped up already.

A yellowish slime coated the rocks of the ingress, as had become usual after a storm. In the places where it was thickest—the cracks and gullies and hollows between the stones—you could feel its presence as a low background hum, a disturbance in the atmosphere, as from an electrical appliance that had been left on overnight and begun to overheat. Radioactivity, people guessed, or some kind of poisonous effluent. It wasn’t a toxin, Steph insisted, it was more like footprints, or slug trails, a means of identification after the fact. The slime’s vibrations might drive you mad, Caitlin thought, if you listened to them for too long, the same as any white noise. Not just in your ears but in your blood and in your brain and under your fingernails.

From time to time Caitlin had wakened to find deposits of the yellow slime slathered in the crook of Steph’s elbow, or between her toes. She heaved herself over the rocks, the elongated spit of granite the scroungers called the sundial, jumped down on to the cleaner shingle on the other side. Here were pickings at last, though meager: a carton of Styrofoam cups, a plastic hairbrush, an ancient pair of trainers, their laces knotted together around a chunk of driftwood. Caitlin tipped out the seawater, stashed the items one by one in her backpack. When she heard someone yell her name she started violently, the shock rippling down her back in an icy frisson.

“Caty! Caty!” Another shout, then someone running. A warning, or a menace? Another second’s panic, then the blood’s retreat. Just Tommo, Rory Murdoch’s lad, huge as a lug and strong as casking iron but sweetly impressionable and wildly exuberant as a child. Soft in the head, some sniggered when Murdoch wasn’t around, but for Caitlin, Tommo’s presence was comforting, something of the old times. Tommo wasn’t afraid of what was happening, seemed not to notice. Carried on as if the clampdown and all it threw at them was one big adventure. A world teetering on the edge of oblivion was still a world, eh, Tommo? So long as you woke up in the morning and there were still things to do.

He threw himself down the slope, skidding to a halt in front of her, chucking up stones.

“We did it,” he crowed. “She’s back on the road, Caty. Dougie found some petrol. She’ll be moving in no time.”

“What are you talking about, Tommo?” Where’s the fire? she almost said, then checked herself. Tommo was liable to take her words literally. Any mention of a fire would have him chasing across the foreshore in search of a blaze.

“The dragon—the yellow dog!” Tommo spun round, pointing back in the direction he had come from. For a moment there was nothing, just marram grass and shingle. Then she saw them, up on the coast road—a straggling line of folk, grouped around some piece of machinery and all with their backs to her.

An earthmover, yellow with a long snout, its padlock chains flapping like kelp strands. A leviathan, taken hostage from the abandoned housing development on the shore road. As Caitlin watched the thing juddered rustily to life, its digger head extended, grizzled dinosaur on the loose.

“What are they doing?” Caitlin breathed. She watched the men, four or five to either side, hauling on ropes, drawing the rest of the crowd along with them as if by magnetism. There was something ritualistic in their togetherness that she found disturbing. A diorama of madness, myth in the making. “What’s it for, Tommo?”

“We’re helping the reverend,” Tommo babbled. “The reverend says we’ll have a party on the beach tonight. Everyone’s invited, he says. Will you come?”

He’d done it, then, he’d got them hooked on him. Still didn’t explain what the digger was for. For grubbing out a barbecue pit, maybe? For raising himself high in the sky as he delivered his sermon? An image came to her of the parson, spreading his arms to either side and crying out that they were damned—damned, all of them, if they didn’t pick up their beds and follow him. Caitlin stared at Tommo’s excited face and felt like shaking him. There was something wrong here and nobody saw it, no one wanted to know. A stranger comes to town, she thought. The advent of a stranger means change, or trouble. It’s in the script.

“I don’t know,” she said to Tommo. “I’ll have to see how I feel.”

“Ach, please say you’ll be there.” He caught at her sleeve. “There’ll be singing, and dancing. Deirdre Conway says she’ll play the fiddle for us, she told me so herself.”

His expression seemed to grind to a halt, caught midway between exalted and bovine. Deirdre Conway had been on TV once, she had been a child prodigy. Now she ran the bakery with her husband, Fraser. Deirdre’s right cheek had been burned, puckered and shriveled like the skin of an overripe apple. An accident with an oven door, Deirdre said, though there were those who doubted it, especially since Fraser Conway had done time in prison. Killed a man with a garden fork, according to Rory Murdoch, though Caitlin had no idea if there was any truth in the rumor.

Deirdre played the fiddle as if she meant to die later.

“If the weather stays fair, then,” Caitlin said. “See you, Tommo.” She turned away, headed back down the beach, glad to leave the spectacle of the earthmover behind although she couldn’t say why.

The sunset was garish, blood-orange, like a seaside postcard. Steph had not wakened all day. The skin of her eyelids had turned papery, like a Chinese lantern. When she rested her hand against Steph’s shoulder Caitlin could feel her trembling. Not shivering so much as vibrating, like an electrical appliance that had been left plugged into the mains. Caitlin knew she should stay with her but she couldn’t bear the smell in the room, the stench of flyblown meat, or fat, an overheated converter, though the flesh of Steph’s arms and face was clammy-cold.

Caitlin strode across the headland towards Rosneath. The grass seemed to crunch beneath her feet, like slivers of glass, Caitlin thought, though when she bent to examine it she saw there was no glass, just a grayish powder. Her boots were thick with it, as if she’d been walking for hours on a dusty road. Blind spots, people called them. To give a name to them, Caitlin supposed, although what caused the vegetation to denature in this way, or what the gray powder actually was, no one seemed to know. As she descended the hill the grass returned to being grass again. Already she could hear them singing, ‘Amazing Grace,’ and then the sound of the fiddle, Deirdre Conway’s playing, so high and so fine. Caitlin remembered the Christmas ceilidh at Helensburgh, her first sip of whisky, the shy lad she’d danced with, Liam Gould in his tartan braces, her first fumbling kiss. Never guessing for even a second that the world was over.

That Deirdre Conway could still play her fiddle, that she would still consent to it, was the closest thing to a miracle that Caitlin could think of. She quickened her step, along the cove road and on to the loose, broken tarmac of the harbor car park. Now she could see them as well as hear them. Some were faces she recognized—people from the village and from the shanty town, people who’d called by her stall, maybe. Most were strangers to her, just passing through. Caitlin could see from their faces that they were starving. Not for food so much, though that was often short, but for hope, and if there was no hope to be had they would make do with purpose. Someone to tell them who was to blame and what they could do about it.

They had erected a stage of sorts: planks of wood, laid across a stack of benches and weighted down with sandbags. The parson seemed a small figure, huddled in a colored parka, hardly a messiah. Then he raised his arms as he had on the beach, spreading them wide as if to encompass everyone—the whole crowd, the whole world.

Now he’ll call us children, Caitlin thought, though even then, before it happened, something in her refused the idea, knew the parson to be cleverer than that—cleverer and more dangerous. He would use words they’d never heard before, he would have to. How else would they hear him?

I never believed in God as a father, the parson said. The crowd fell silent. Blasphemy is always more interesting than holy writ. Not as the kind of father who could fix everything, anyway. A good part of growing up is coming to understand your parents are not gods, that they stumble and experience fear, just as we do. Fathers need help too, though they sometimes find it difficult to ask for it.

My da never needed help beating me to a pulp, muttered someone close to her, the ubiquitous stench of unwashed flesh and onions. The man’s hip was mashed up against hers, pressed close by the crowd. Caitlin pretended not to notice. She craned her neck to see the parson, like everyone else, though a part of her was already wishing she hadn’t come.

“God helps those who help themselves,” the parson was saying. “You will have heard people saying that there is no help, that the planet we have called our home for millennia is no longer ours. You will all have whispered the word they dare not speak.” He took a breath, let his arms fall to his sides. “That word is invasion.” He gazed about himself, a performer seeking applause, and here and there already, like patches of stubble fire, it was beginning to break out. Monsters! someone yelled, but the parson ignored them. “Invasion,” he repeated calmly. “The malign infiltration, not just of our towns and cities but of our planet itself. Earth’s trees and rocks and rivers, contaminated and poisoned by enemy agents. I say agents because that’s what they are.” Another pause. For effect, Caitlin supposed. He knew his words by heart. The people listened, rapt. Their silence was not really silence, but expectation, so thick you could feel it caressing you, cut it like cheese. “Agents of evil who seek to expel us from our rightful place. There will be those among you who remember the war. You remember what spies are, what damage they do. The agents among us now are no different. They do their worst by doing what they do best—secreting their way into our lives, into our hearts and into our trust. They dissemble and lie as Satan dissembles and lies. Yet they are not who they claim to be, and if we are to have any hope of ridding our world of the disease that has infected it, we must begin by forcing ourselves to see that disease for the evil it is. Even when it comes to us wearing the clothes of our precious loved ones.”

He was looking straight at her. Even though Caitlin told herself it could not be so, that she was just another face in the crowd, she felt herself quail beneath his gaze, the gray eyes that seemed to bore right into her, undoing the flaps of her soul like the worn-away fastenings around a stash of contraband. The crowd was stirring, whispering excitedly to itself. His words did that, Caitlin thought, then she saw the machine, the earthmover, its sponged flanks yellow as cats’ eyes, creeping along the harbor wall, its digger arm raised like the monstrous, articulated trunk of an iron elephant. The crowd parted to let it through with a collective sigh.

“Michael, please!” The cry cut through the air, a woman’s voice, stern yet terrified, and it was only then that Caitlin saw the truth of things: the figure bound and bundled in the digger’s steel grubber like a ragged cocoon.

“Maria,” someone cried, another woman, shoving her way through the crowd towards the machine. Two men in farmers’ overalls stepped forward, grabbed her by the arms. The woman struggled in their grip. She looked more furious than frightened. Caitlin wondered at her courage. The sight of the bundle in the maw of the digger made her feel faint.

“Geraldine,” the parson said, his tone suddenly placatory, cajoling. “None grieves for Maria more than I, but we have to accept the fact that Maria is gone. The thing that lives on in her body is no more your friend than it is my wife. We are doing her a kindness, Geraldine. This is the only way.”

The woman in the digger had been trussed with strips of canvas and nylon rope, her arms bound tight against her sides, yet still she had managed to work herself upright in the iron scoop, her chin propped against the rim, eyes wild and staring. Caitlin wondered why she had not been gagged and blindfolded also, if only to block out the sight of what was to come. Then it came to her that this was what he wanted, the parson, that they were intended to hear her pleading, see her terrified eyes, that this was what they had come for.

The woman’s hair looked lank and greasy, just as she had imagined, her cheeks thin and pale.

Let her go, Caitlin mouthed, but no words came out. She felt a rage mounting in her, the urge to rush forward, to beat the parson’s shins with her fists where he stood on the stage.

She stayed still where she was. “We have to weed them out,” the parson chanted, his fists tight as dumbbells. “One by one, we must force them from us. The flukes are the cancer that is eating our world. Show mercy to one and you doom us all.”

He raised his arm in a signal to whoever was driving the digger, called out that they were ready, that it was time.

“Michael, you’re exhausted,” the woman still pleaded. “Think what you are doing. This isn’t the way. This is all wrong.” She was struggling now, her body thumping audibly against the metal. Her face was barely a face, Caitlin saw. The woman’s fear had made her features seem generic, the four or five perfunctory pen-strokes that stood for human. The rags that bound her were stained dark with fluid, urine or something else, it was impossible to tell.

The yellow gorgon lumbered forward, turning itself at right angles to the harbor wall as it prepared to dump its load over the side. The grab bucket rocked on its bearings, shrieking with rust. There was a thump and a splash as its voided cargo hit the water and then sank out of sight. A gasp swept through the crowd like wind through grain, and then a solitary cheer. More cheers soon followed.

The woman named Geraldine was sobbing in the arms of the farmers, her cheeks streaked with grime. The parson’s face was gray as a tombstone and as impassive. Behind him on his makeshift stage, the waters of the firth had begun to boil. The sea flickered with radiance: bronze, nasturtium-yellow, sea-glass green. Beneath its surface something convulsed. The firth vomited spume, whirlpooling violently, as if the channel were being emptied through a giant plughole. There was a smell of scorched rubber, acrid and sulfurous. Caitlin’s head swam with nausea. She inhaled, and it was like swallowing fire, that gagging sensation in her throat, that foul taste, as if her gullet was choked with dross, with the silt of the riverbed.

She heard a voice inside her head, clawing the walls of her skull as if desperate to be free.

You, it sang. All of you stood there. Can’t you feel me yet?

Maria-not-Maria, Caitlin knew her at once. Knew the cough that had plagued her for weeks, the scaly patches on the soles of her feet and in the crooks of her elbows that she dare not show her husband, Michael with his night terrors, his fanatical determination that this could not be happening because he had not foreseen it, her aching worry over her small daughter, left behind with her parents in Dumfries.

Maria had wanted to be a painter, Caitlin saw, until she met Michael. But already she was unclear to herself: a fading memory, an old photograph.

And she would come for Michael first, pouring herself inside him in just the way he dreaded, blasting his limited perceptions with an alien eternity. Caitlin slipped away through the crowd. She would have to leave here, she realized, she would have to head north, and if Steph was unfit to travel she would have to leave anyway.

Steph had tried on several occasions to talk to her about it, the inevitability of their parting, but she had refused to discuss it. I’m not going anywhere without you and that’s that.

She reached the shore road, breathless from running. The dusk was taking hold, cupping the land absent-mindedly in its outstretched palm. The few streetlights that still came on along the foreshore glimmered like Chinese lanterns, like citrines. The village seemed deserted. They’d gone to hear the parson, she supposed. Everyone was in Rosneath, drinking home brew and thanking God and singing hymns.

The cottage lay in darkness. She had hoped she might see signs that Steph was up and about again—the outside light on over the doorway, the curtains drawn with a glow behind—but there was just the blank glass, the cold gravel. The front door was closed, silent, and Caitlin felt terror turning her guts to water. It was like in the films, the films she’d watched with Morrie: there were some doors you weren’t meant to open because you already knew full well there were monsters behind them.

It came to her that she could walk away. She could return to Rosneath, to the lights on the beach, the drinking and singing, Deirdre Conway playing her fiddle and everyone dancing. She could go to the parson and tell him . . . Tell him what, exactly? That she was lost, but now was found? That he excited her as much as he repulsed her, that she was so damned lonely?

Tell him that his words and his bravery in confronting the devil had restored her soul. She would have bread then. A place to work and a right to be there. A place to sleep at night.

For a while, anyway. Perhaps.

We’re like ants, Caitlin thought. Ants swarming on a piece of driftwood that is slowly sinking. The ocean vaster and deeper than we could ever imagine.

She climbed the three steps to the threshold, eased open the door. The stench from within was overwhelming, filling the hallway like a solid barrier, the same scorched, sulfurous smell as on the beach.

“Steph,” Caitlin croaked. She coughed, trying to rid her mouth of the taste, like burned cabbage leaves. It was impossible to breathe the air without the thought of contagion.

Steph lay on the bed, wrapped in the blanket, her position unchanged since the morning and utterly still. Her body seemed rigid as paper, a lifeless husk. Horror twisted Caitlin’s insides, together with relief—relief that she would not, after all, be forced to abandon her, that the decision had been taken already and without her connivance. She did not yet feel grief so much as a kind of stunned wonderment. She understood that she was crying but the catch in her throat, the wetness on her cheeks, the soreness of her eyes—these things, the manifestations of her despair seemed exotic to her, a kind of play-acting, a jerky scrap of film from the dawn of cinema.

She reached out and touched Steph’s shoulder. Her body felt lighter than it should, brittle, as if it were made of plastic, like a storefront mannequin. The realization hit her then, that she would never hear Steph’s voice again, never lie beside her at night, never spend hours down on the strand in a state of suppressed worry over what state Steph might be in when she got back.

She was on her own. The relief of it, the horror. She tugged Steph’s shoulder gently, turning her on her back, wanting to see, to make sure she was dead, though that was obvious from the way her body moved, all of a piece, as if her arms had been welded to her torso. Rigor mortis, Caitlin supposed, though Steph’s transformation seemed more final than that, and she thought again how Steph’s body didn’t seem like Steph’s body at all but a thing made of plastic, not just lifeless but something that had never lived, a kind of retroactive proof that Steph had never existed.

Steph’s mouth was wide open. As if she’d died screaming, Caitlin thought, although the idea seemed false as soon as it occurred to her, a cover-up for whatever had really happened. The sight was obscene, nonetheless, the gaping chasm of her mouth suggesting violation of the most monstrous kind, there was nothing Caitlin could do about it, not now, the rigor had seen to that—if she wanted to close Steph’s mouth she would have to break her jaw. She pulled up the blanket instead, though it made no difference. Even with Steph’s face covered, Caitlin could still visualize the black hole at the center of her face, less like a mouth than an incursion, a tunnel between worlds.

As she stepped back from the bed she heard a rustling sound, a kind of faint clinking, like wind chimes heard from the end of a long corridor. She glanced upwards to where the sound was coming from, her eye caught by a flickering movement, a blurring of the air close to the ceiling. Moths, she thought at first, though they were not, she could see that at once, she couldn’t say what they were. Tiny dart-like creatures, each one transparent and barely there, creatures made of glass. They were disappearing through a hole in the plasterwork, pouring into the wall like a waterspout in reverse.

They had come out of Steph, Caitlin felt certain. Rising up from wherever they came from and flowing out through Steph’s entrails and gullet like bees from a hive.

She didn’t wait long. She stuffed the rucksack as full as it would go and then set out. It was fully dark. She planned to go first to Cove, to the old holiday park. Most of the lodges were derelict, not even watertight, but she could rest up for a couple of hours, get her bearings. As soon as it was light she would head north to Arrochar. There was a market there, solar powered heating and lighting. She had even heard that someone—a local schoolteacher?—had set up a newspaper. It was somewhere to walk towards, anyway, a destination, which was better than nothing.

She reached the holiday park at around 3:30, crept into one of the lodges closest to the forest edge. The place had been stripped—just bare boards and formica—but it was more or less clean. There were no sounds, no lights, just the gentle shhh-shhh-shhh of nearby trees. She lay down on the damp divan and fell asleep. When she woke it was just getting light, the baleful gray gaze of a dawn that was still under siege from the night before. Caitlin sipped water from the bottle in her rucksack, took a mouthful of bannock. She chewed slowly, making it last. She felt cold but not freezing, the kind of residual chill she knew would dissipate more or less instantly once she started walking. She lay where she was for fifteen minutes or so, gathering her energy. She did not think of the evening before, cast her mind back instead, tried to remember the last day upon which the intimations of what was to come had not been in the world. She quickly discovered it was impossible, mainly because there had been no one moment, no decisive transition point between then and now. Rather a slow drip-drip accretion of the uncanny, cautious as a glacier, so that when the clampdown finally came it came as no surprise.

She remembered the night she met Steph, that snowball fight, Morrie so drunk he could hardly stand, yet still agile enough and crazy enough to scale the perimeter wall of the Three Stags hotel. Bennett Ryan had dared him, Morrie’s crewmate. Neasden Bennie, everyone called him. He committed suicide soon after the accidental strike on London.

Remembering the past was like drinking poisoned water. No matter how much you boiled and strained it, there would still be traces. It was only when she stepped out of the cabin and into the daylight that Caitlin glanced down at her hand on the rail and saw the flecks of discoloration—like liver spots, like rust beneath the skin—that had also been the first sign that Steph had become infected. Caitlin shivered in the clammy air, and her heart seemed to stand still for a moment, before leaping up in her chest like a fish out of water. A stickleback perhaps, or a neon tetra. Morrie had been into tropical fish for a while when he was at school. He won a rosette or something. A silver cup. Caitlin had forgotten all about that until now.

She pulled on her gloves, shouldered the rucksack. She was surprised to find she didn’t feel any different.

What was this world they had made for themselves? she thought later. She had been walking for hours by then, days perhaps, the coast road unfurling endlessly in front of her like a strip of gray felt. What did it matter if it was coming to an end? There would be others. Birds would sing and beetles would burrow and there would be others. She gazed out across Loch Long towards the moss-green humpbacked landmass of the Cowal peninsula. How long had it been since she’d stopped seeing landscape as anything more than a potentially hostile territory that must be passed through? Years, she realized. Years and years. Yet here they still were, the hills of Argyll. Most of the creatures that lived here were doing just fine. She thought of those summers in Helensburgh, the attic bedroom with its black-painted floorboards, the submarines, processing up the loch towards Faslane. Every moment of now curled like a comma inside each moment of then. That was what life was in end, a comma. A momentary pause between one clause and another.

She wondered if this was the start, this acceptance, the first sign of the fatal changes that would soon begin to sweep through her system, overriding it, compromising her physical capabilities even as they gnawed away at her cognitive functions. A calmness that would in time become something else, something she could not yet fathom. She imagined lying down in the road, crawling in amongst the scrawny bushes and becoming one with them, her life sparkling in the thorns like dewdrops.

She tugged off her right glove, looked down at her hand. The amber blotches were still there, but looked no bigger.

She chewed more bannock, sipped more water. So long as she was frugal, her provisions would last until she arrived in the town, where she hoped to find some sort of work, for as long as that mattered, anyway. As she replaced the water bottle inside the rucksack, her fingers brushed against the mouth organ, which she had thrown in on impulse, or so it had seemed at the time, although when she thought about it now she realized, she had brought it with her because of Steph, who had taken such pains to clean the thing, to buff the dented metal to a luminous shine. She remembered the story Steph had retold, ‘O! Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,’ by the Victorian scholar and ghost story writer, Montague Rhodes James. Caitlin had first read the tale when she was thirteen years old, from a book of spooky stories she’d found in the back of the glass-fronted bookcase in Gander and Grandma’s dining room in Helensburgh. The book, with its scratched black boards and gold lettering, had attracted her attention at once, though she had been disappointed with the stories themselves, which seemed too obscure and oddly meandering to be properly dreadful. It was some years before she was able to get properly inside them, their hidden corridors and decaying mansions opening to her only by degrees, their language resisting her timid approaches until she developed sufficient appetite to let it enter her soul.

Professor Parkins she remembered especially, golf-playing pedant that he was, an irrepressibly dull man whose eventual comeuppance had been for Caitlin a matter not of terror but of glee.

She’d said nothing to Steph, letting her recount the details as if she’d not heard them before. Because Steph’s retelling made the story new. Because it was wonderful to hear Steph being Steph again, like being given a gift she had not dared to hope for, but had dreamed of anyway.

You must never play the harmonica, Steph had told her, not unless you really mean it. As if the ancient, battle-scarred instrument might summon a demon, just as the tin whistle Professor Parkins found on the beach had also summoned a demon.

Was James’ story about revenge, or pride? Caitlin wondered. Both, probably. Professor Parkins didn’t believe in ancient curses, he considered himself to be above such superstitions. Which was why the appearance of the demon, or ghost, or whatever it was had unseated his reason so completely.

Caitlin pulled the Hohner out of the rucksack, breathed upon the metal, misting it over, then rubbed it clean with her mitten. It reflected the sky, she saw, an oblong slice of cloud, gray as doves’ wings, snug in her hand. She raised the instrument to her lips and blew into it, gently at first and then more vigorously. There was a wheezing sound, the clamor of rusty gates creaking open. Caitlin breathed in and then out, sliding her lips along the nubs of discolored teeth, teasing out sounds, a minor scale, slightly off kilter. The metal box felt warm now, alive with her breath, the sad, roughened notes rising and falling in the blustery air above the loch like motes of bronze light.

She wished she knew enough of music to play the mouth organ properly. She thought of Deirdre Conway and her magic fiddle, the high, sweet tones, cavorting and quickening until it was impossible not to dance. She felt a thrill pass through her, the sense of being answered, of a key turning, though it was not for some time—forty-five minutes at least, an hour, the scattered, fitful lights of Arrochar just piercing the horizon—that the sea itself answered, the loch shuddering like a horse before lightning, its surface misting over then breaking apart, erupting in spume as the sub breached, its conning tower a darker monolith against the blackening sky. Water slipped like oil from her gleaming flanks. Her name was not visible—she was too far from shore, the dusk too deep—but Caitlin knew she could only be the Neptune, returning to the firth as she had always known she would: fleet salmon, vast leviathan, beast of legend.

Morrie, Caitlin whispered. You’ve come home after all. She tried to imagine how it might be later after the sub had docked, how Morrie would come ashore finally, depleted in weight and ragged with tiredness but replete with stories, with reminiscences, with wonders to tell her. They would sit up long past midnight talking—talking until sleep invaded the corridors of their minds and pulled them under.

It would be like the old times.

Caitlin scrambled down the slope towards the loch, her feet catching on the rough turf. As she reached the water’s edge, the outline of the submarine began to shift and blur, flattening itself against the charcoal sky like a cardboard cut-out. None of it had been real then, it was all in her mind. Caitlin experienced a moment of complete devastation, a sense of loss so deep it was as if she had woken from sleep only to find herself trapped in a dream within the dream, to learn that the real world had never existed and she had no part in it.

Then she saw that the vessel had not disappeared after all. It was merely reconfiguring, becoming properly itself as she too would become properly herself, revealing its truth.

We are the orcas of now, her brother had written, and if the thing that rose from the water before her was not an orca, Caitlin found she could imagine a world in which the word orca might yet stand for it, its streamlined form and behemoth tail, its vast triangular maw. The mouth was crammed with teeth, she saw, black as jet and as sweetly gleaming, the tips curved, like paring knives. Who is it that is coming? Caitlin murmured. The waters of the loch poured with steam, belched yellowish smoke, though the night air against her cheeks was refreshingly cool.

The creature roared and shook its head, rucking up waves. Plesiosaur. Caitlin grabbed at the word, held it tightly to her, like a longed-for prize. Megalodon. Jabberwocky. The monster was astounding, and yet not quite real. It had an airbrushed quality, the smoothly-contoured perfection of CGI.

They’re showing us what we expect to see, Caitlin realized. As if resentful at being unmasked, the creature shimmered more brightly for a moment and then winked out.

Now there was just the loch, the rugged terrain leading down to it, the black hills beyond. Caitlin stood on the bank and stared out at the silence, thinking this was where it should end, she should go with Morrie, the water was waiting for her and would take her cleanly. But then, she was almost at Arrochar, she could see the lights. It would be good to rest, she reasoned. Under a tree if she had to, she still had her bivvy bag. It would be good to open her eyes on another day, the white houses that still clustered along the waterside, the gray hills of Argyll.

One step, and then another. The moon and stars above. The vast and silent sea.

About the Author

Nina Allan’s stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best Horror of the Year #6, Solaris Rising #3, and the Shirley Jackson Award-winning Aickman’s Heirs. Her novella Spin, a science fictional re-imagining of the Arachne myth, won the BSFA Award in 2014, and her story-cycle The Silver Wind was awarded the Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire in the same year. Her debut novel The Race was a finalist for the 2015 BSFA Award, the Kitschies Red Tentacle, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Her second novel The Rift will be published by Titan Books in July 2017. Nina lives and works in Rothesay, on the Isle of Bute.

The Ways Out

Sam J. Miller

Surveillance Clip S643/R57.D001 [File Uploaded]

Human Agent Summary

When the boys arrive, Subject 643 stops skating and sits down on her board. Five of them, in her age range (ten to twelve). Facial scans confirm they have not yet given any cause for suspicion of potential strategic interest to the state. Subject shows clear anxiety at their presence. Debates departing. Decides attempting to exit would result in the unwanted attention from them that she hopes to avoid; remains.

[Within these reports, S643 will hereafter be referred to as S1.]

She is tall for her age. Thin. Her hair a modest Afro. Unclear if torn jeans the product of poverty or a fashion decision. Scabs on knees indicate that S1 is a skateboarding novice. The park where she sits is mostly pavement. A nook between two buildings, where curved benches attract bladers and boarders and taggers. She scratches at the clear polylactic coating on every surface. Graffiti-proof thermoplastic, but low quality, like everything in the non-pivotal municipalities, giving the park a pockmarked rotting quality. 

Six and a half minutes after their arrival, the boys begin to taunt her. Dialogue indistinguishable at this distance. Almost certainly the same handful of predictable insults. Girls don’t skateboard, go the fuck home, etc. Software determines no need to move closer, or jump the mic on one of their phones or wearables.

Subject 114 of Region 57 approaches. Nineteen; also tall for his age; flagged for surveillance at age seven following foster care incidents; probability of fire aptitude. Head shaved since last logged surveillance clip. Same T-shirt. Software demands an agent position shift, and mic jump. Agent moves car down the block. Submits retroactive warrant application. Rationale: non-authorized gathering of multiple variant individuals (adolescent).

[Within these reports, S114 will hereafter be referred to as S2.]

S2 towers over the other boys. The five fall silent.

[Utterances captured through S2 cell phone mic]

“Hey, Hector,” one boy says. Awe all over his face.

“You little assholes don’t have anyone else to bother?”

They stare. Slack-jawed; perplexed.

“Why do you think it is, that you need to make fun of girls? What do you think that says about you?”

“She can’t skate,” one says, the one who recognized S2.

“Your ass can’t skate. And that’s why you need to make other people feel like nothing.” His voice drops; his eyes narrow. “Because nothing is exactly what you are.”

S1 tries to hide her smile. Soon the boys depart, chastened.

“I’m Hector,” S2 says.

“Ryx,” S1 says.

“Show me what you can do with that thing, Ryx.”

S1 stands, nods, steps onto her board. Starts a slow circle. Heel kick.

S2 claps. His hands are huge and it sounds like earthquakes.

Surveillance Clips S643/R57.D002-D006 [File Uploaded]

Human Agent Summary

S1 and S2 meet up often. This is not cause for concern. There is no evidence of aptitude recognition, or intent to display or develop aptitudes, or premeditated gathering. In a city like this, where the cops have cracked down on most street and sidewalk skating, the spots where boarders can safely go are few. The old harbor, the fallen cathedral, the foundation pit where the hotel or mall was going to be.

He teaches her tricks. Jesus Flip, Daydream Flip, Nightmare Flip. No Comply. Sex Change, 540, Ghetto Bird. Gazelle Spin.

“You learn fast!” he says, laughing with delight. “Like, scary fast. How do you do that?”

She shrugs. She smiles. The smile does not last long. She is forever looking into the distance, staring down one street and then another. Like she’s waiting for something to come, something awful. Something whose shape she won’t know until she sees it.

He scares her bullies away. He takes her places she’d be afraid to go on her own.

What does he get out of it? Cross reference of his case file shows no siblings, no lost little sister whose absence S1 softens.

Day six: outside a coffee shop, across from the bronze horseman statue choked with thick vines from that time six years ago when a woman with a plant aptitude went into a summoning fugue that did not stop until she was gunned down. The parking lot is a slaughtered forest: a thousand incongruous species of tree and grass and flower and shrub, deadened by municipal defoliant. S2 says: “Look.”

A man sits on the sidewalk. His mouth is open. His beard is wild and twisted and studded with rubble. Around his neck is a psionic surge shock collar. An old model, court-mandated, removable only upon a judge’s order. Heavy; filth-crusted. He looks up at them and tries to smile.

Hector S2 looks away in fear and pity. Ryx S1 stares, her eyes hardening. Then they turn. Their eyes lock. Their shared expression—not quite a smile, not quite a suppressed shriek—confirms that each knows very well what the other is.

Surveillance Clip S643/R57.D015 [File Uploaded]

Human Agent Summary

S1’s home life offers no evidence of aptitude display. No record of any aunt or grandmother with a knack for taking memories or shaping clouds. Mother missing; father overworked; cousins and neighborhood children uncomfortable around her. Principals perplexed. Authorities alerted. A banal, familiar pattern.

S2’s family tree is full of unwholesome fruit. Habitual, cultivated aptitudes are everywhere. Unrepentant mind turners and metal summoners, deploying their aptitudes in a wide array of criminal endeavors. Men and women in jail, general population or special facilities with cells of wood or rubber or underground ice. Uncles on the run. His mother a confirmed shifter, presently believed to be living as a stout blond Alaskan crab boatman. Against this backdrop, S2’s modest and mostly-accidental displays seem harmless, pathetic. Unworthy of surveillance.

On the outside wall of the Firestone Hotel, on an HD paint screen six stories tall, the season finale of Psion Prime America is playing. A cool summer night; the crowd on the steeply-sloping lawn is immense. My Agent’s screen pings a hundred different known aptitude possessors, and twice that number of people flagged for probability.

S1’s eyes are wide. She has never looked so much like the ten-year-old that she is.

In split screen, the finalists duel. A leather-draped thirteen-year-old Black girl moves her hands and water spirals around her. Cameras zoom in to catch the fractal detail, the eerie patterns that shift and swell. A chubby bearded child smiles and spreads his arms. Fire forms between them. The fire becomes faces, figures.

“Why is this even allowed?” S1 asks, her face flushed, at the commercial break. “They talk so much about how we’re a menace. How we need to be . . . I don’t know. Registered. Rounded up. All those things they say.”

“Why do you think?” S2 says. He hands her his bag of popcorn. She shrugs. “Think about it.”

After a long time, and with a certain sadness, she says “So they know who we are.”

“That’s part of it.”

He waits. The break ends. Clips play, the finalists’ highlights from the whole season. Water and fire, at war, in love.

“So we won’t know how much they hate us,” he says. “So everyone will see how well they treat us.”

Her fists tighten.

“You talk about your dad a lot,” S2 says, carefully, like something he’d been mulling over how to mention. “What about your mom? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“Gone,” she says. “Couple years back.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. My mom watches out for me.”

He nods.

“I know it sounds stupid. Like the thing everybody says, when they’ve been abandoned. But it’s true. I know it. I feel it. She . . . senses me. No matter where I am. Where she is.”

“We should find her,” S2 says.

The winner is the one who S1 was rooting for. On the screen she makes monsters, fearsome beasts made of water, who fight and then embrace and become one. S1 stands, howls. S2 buys her popcorn. A fellow fangirl on the grass not far from them calls out: “And she’s from a non-pivotal region, just like us!”

“The feds might have forgotten about us,” someone else says. “But there’s a hell of a lot of us out here, and we can do some pretty amazing shit.”

Drunks and teenagers debate the pros and cons of the Tourniquet; of targeted austerity and the so-called law-and-order states. S1 does not appear to grasp much of it, but she listens hard.

When it’s over, and most of the crowd has gone, they practice the tricks he has taught her. Sigma Flip; Gingersnap; Nuclear Grab. A line of skater boys watches. All five of the ones who made fun of her earlier are there. Their mouths are open, but they have nothing to say.

Surveillance Clip S643/R57.D018 [File Uploaded]

Human Agent Summary

The girl is good.

S1 is a fast learner, seeming to suck up skill through osmosis. When S2 does jump tricks, he has this slight upward tilt to his hands. Utterly idiosyncratic; no one else does this. But S1 does. S2’s eyebrows unite in perplexed happiness.

They are hard to track, now. They move fast from spot to spot. Like they are looking for someone, or several someones. Difficult to follow unobtrusively. They say little. Mic jumps yield nothing but background noise and skateboard wheels spinning. Cross reference of their geocache tracks to known routes of illegal activity among variant individuals shows minimal overlap.

There are no files on her mother. This is unusual enough to be a cause of some concern. Cooperation requests submitted to partner agencies in several allied nations tasked with tracking variant individuals.

“I’m hungry,” she says, her voice full of frustration. You can hear how her feet hurt, how her bruised body protests. Twilight deepens. They are way out, tonight. The freeway is a dull roar at the horizon. Past that there is nothing, nothing but nature. She frowns at where the sun set. Other cities lie in that direction. Other countries. She wonders, maybe, whether it’s different, there. For people like her.

“Got any money?”

“Two dollars.”

“I’ve got seventy-five cents,” he says.

“That’s not very much.”

He watches her. He waits. Finally, he says “If we had fifty more cents, we could each get a slice of pizza and a soda.”

“Uh huh,” she says. She sits down on her skateboard. Pouts. “And if we had a hundred more dollars we could each get a damn mani-pedi.”

“You’re awful young to be so cynical,” says S2, dropping to kneel beside her. “How’d you get like that?”

She shrugs.

“Don’t focus on what we don’t have,” he says, and there is something in his voice, something she can hear, something that might even show up on the recording. An urgency, a rawness, a frankness. Maybe something more. Something variant. “Focus on what we have. And what we need. There’s a solution, here.”

She frowns. Crosses her arms across her chest.

“What if I told you there were nickels, all over this parking lot?”

“I’m not going on a damn Easter egg hunt for some invisible coins that probably aren’t even there.”

“They’re there,” he said. “I see two, right over there.”

She looks where he points. “Couple of cans,” she mutters, and then smiles. Her face opens, comes alive. “Cans! We can pick up cans and bottles and redeem them at the supermarket!”

His hands clap.

S2 finds a tattered plastic bag. S1 picks up their first two cans. Back on their boards, they hurry on in search of more.

They are children. Whatever else they are.

They pass between rows of jagged jutting spikes of pavement. Some are five stories high. An event record check turns up nothing, which might mean unrecorded gang activity—a battle between people with earth aptitudes, perhaps—or might mean an assassination attempt by this Bureau, subsequently covered up. A skewered Dodge truck dangles twenty feet from the ground. They are careful not to pass beneath it.

Later on, when it’s dark and no one can see, the municipal worker variants will come through. They’ll shrink the pavement thorns down to nothing. Their eyes will be haunted, pained. Like mine.

“My mom,” she says, an hour later, when the bottles are redeemed and the pizza is bought and consumed.

“What about her?” he asks.

“She’s why. How I got so cynical.”

“Ah,” S2 says, and smiles. She must realize, in this moment, how rare his smiles are. “Tell me about her.”

“She was angry, all the time. Being around her was like living with wasps.”

“Did she ever . . . ”

“Hurt me,” S1 says, like of course that question came next. “No. She was never physical with her anger. And she never directed it at us. Just, everything made her mad. All the stuff about how we live. What they do to us.”

“Was she . . . ”

“Like you and me?” S1 blots her lips with a napkin and scans the parking lot, like she’d be able to spot someone if they were listening. Even looks up at the stabbed-to-death truck. “Refused to get tested. Wouldn’t have let them test me, if it wasn’t for some stuff that happened at school. Then she didn’t have a choice in the matter. Like what happened with you.”

S2 looks wounded, shocked. He opens his mouth to ask How did you know that, but then he shuts it. In that instant, and for the next several minutes, he looks like the younger one. The fragile one.

“So now you know,” he says, after taking a long sip from his empty soda can.

“Know what? How to pick up dirty cans?”

“Now you know you’re never out of options.”

She smiles. Then she stops. “Mom said they’d always be watching me.”

“So what if they are?”

“So no matter what we do, they see it. So there’s no way out. So, it’s not true that we’re never out of options. We don’t have any at all, except stupid ones, like whether to starve or pick up fucking bottles.”

S2 watches her face, possibly wondering whether it’s her mother’s anger he sees there.

They head back. They’re halfway there, beneath the big office buildings of downtown, weaving between the rose bushes that spring from nothing in the space of a day—whose flowers bloom bright blue and green, and glow in the dark, and dance to soft music from speakers in the sidewalk, an astonishing horticultural display summoned up by well-paid closely-watched variant laborers—when Hector S2 turns to her and says:

“There’s ways out. My friend Timothy, he got out.”

She slows to smell a flower, and doesn’t say a thing.

“Your mom, right? Her too?”

“They smell gross,” she says, swatting the rose away. “Like meat.”

Surveillance Clip S643/R57.D021-23 [File Uploaded]

Human Agent Summary

They spend several days at central station. On the sidewalk outside the main exit, scanning the faces of everyone who emerges. Looking for her mother? For this Timothy? Some fugitive member of his family; one of his several dangerous Known Associates? They say less and less, as time goes by.

So many people seem to know S2. They come by, slap hands, smile, exchange words. Moving fast, never stopping more than three seconds, like they know precisely how long it takes the bureau software to clock their identity and bounce it off the variant registry. Lovestruck boys, mostly. Young as she is, S1 has got to see the crushes they all have on him. She can see it in the swift familiar rise-and-fall each face follows, from rapture upon arrival to devastation at departure. She can see it in S2, after, the way he stands up straighter, his charisma validated, his loneliness underscored.

Messages are being passed. This is a certainty. Scraps of paper smeared with data gel; wireless device chatter across encrypted channels; meaningful glances that confirm whether meetings took place or escapees eluded capture. Requests for additional surveillance agents to pursue these strays have gone unanswered. It’s an erroneous prioritization of bureau resources, following the letter of the law by restricting scrutiny to people for whom probable cause can be established via legal confirmation of variant status. S2 stands at the center of something, some network of mutual aid and enhancement.

The chatter bots have nothing concrete. A whole lot of ellipses that add up to nothing. Even the bureau’s in-house variants are stymied. Moments like these highlight the agony of our their position within law enforcement work—caught between two worlds, hated by the one they came from and mistrusted by the one they chose.

Surveillance Clip S643/R57.D024 [File Uploaded]

Human Agent Summary

Rain.

S1 will spend the whole day in the library, as she generally does when it rains. S2 never shows up in wet weather. Agent sets an ambient monitor on the library’s mesh network speakers, keys it to her sonic signature, and heads for bureau regional office #57.

A third request for an analysis meeting has been denied. Supervisor maintains that overwork is the sole cause of these denials. Every agent has too many targets; every supervisor has too many agents. On a fourth request, agent flags probationary status, and lack of clarity around surveillance target’s strategic value, as cause for meeting priority. This, too, is denied.

Bureau office smells and looks like the underside of a freeway cloverleaf. Agent walks in the door and immediately remembers why they never come here, and why the people who work out of this space always sound so angry when one calls the office. Agent wonders whether the offices are any nicer, in the pivotal municipalities. If we get decent coffee and fresh coats of paint, outside the Tourniquet.

Agent spends an hour and a half, waiting outside supervisor’s office. Drinks bad coffee; chats up supervisor’s receptionist (who is resistant to chatting up); revisits highlights of S2’s surveillance file. Strings together short video clips of skateboarding highlights.

Supervisor is visibly displeased, to emerge from his office and find agent waiting. Yells.

Supervisor commits to address agent concerns at next quarterly of all eighteen field agents under his supervision. This meeting is eight weeks away.

In elevator, on the way out, agent impulsively presses the button for the eighth floor. When the doors open, the hospital smell of it momentarily overwhelms. A woman stands there, eyes shut, arms out, leaning back; a statue, an angel on the nod. Scabs around her lips pucker when she smiles.

The bureau’s in-house methadone clinic isn’t at the top of its list of dirty secrets, but it isn’t far from the top either. An ugliness necessitated by the staggering rates of addiction among variant employees, who were too often subject to compromise or memory theft at public clinics. Drugs use is disproportionately high among variant individuals. The disruptor epidemic hit us hard.

The waiting room is crowded. It always is, on cold days. Bureau wages are rarely sufficient to cover the cost of both rent and of addiction. Agent prowls through the room, and doesn’t have to look for long before finding a familiar face. A code-monkey variant he was in the academy with. Computer workers always have that same haunted look in their faces. Who knows why.

Small talk ensues; how have you been and what is exciting in the work these days.

“I’m tailing this girl,” agent finally gets around to saying. “But I can’t for the life of me figure out why. She’s a kid, with no known friends or associates or family connections of strategic value. Variant, but totally banal as far as I can tell. Any chance you can check up on her?”

Agent’s old associate complies.

“It’s a tough one,” she says, after what seems like not long enough.

“How so?”

“Predictives have positioned her at the nexus of several probable events.”

“Predictive . . . variants? People who can see the future?”

“No,” she says. “We don’t have any precogs. They’re incredibly rare. Rumor has it, China has two—born at the exact same moment, a thousand miles apart. Predictives means predictive computer programming. Probability modeling software. Risk assessment.”

Agent tries not to roll his eyes. “Those things are so ridiculous. I seem to recall a certain politician who squandered a twelve point lead by letting software set his strategy—”

“This is different. If I do say so myself, our programming variants have come up with some pretty spooky algorithms. They can sift through a million different camera feeds, social media profiles, geolocation data, come up with some pretty crazy accurate predictions. Traffic jams—they aren’t chaos, they’re actually surprisingly easy to anticipate if you have enough data. Drivers who tend to shift lanes abruptly, plus drivers who are prone to extreme anger, plus drivers who have a habit of driving while intoxicated . . . who commute via the north shore expressway . . . who leave the office early on Fridays . . . it’s crazy. And they see big things in store for your little girl.”

“Well shit. Why aren’t politicians using that? And, uh, the military, corporations . . . ”

“They are—in Sweden, Ghana, Myanmar—any of the places where variants aren’t persecuted and culturally stigmatized into ghettoes and addiction and suicide. Buy me a drink sometime and I’ll tell you all my thoughts on the subject. I know, I know, I’m barking up the wrong tree here. Short version: the agency keeps its predictives to itself, and everyone is pretty happy with that arrangement. The last bureau chief tried to share it intergovernmentally, and found no takers. Tried to give it to private industry and got threatened with arrest by the prosecutor general. Government property, after all.”

Agent is bored; does not try to hide it. “But what does it say about her? What big things are in store?”

“It’s weird. It’s a configuration I haven’t seen before. But it’s big. Like, paradigm-shift big.”

“Bottom line is, I’m stuck following a prepubescent girl around all day because a computer program created by drug addicts said I should?”

She shrugs. She is not smiling.

S1 is still there, when agent returns to library. He pulls her search history from the computer she logged in on. They sadden him, and then they frighten him.

variant individuals origin theories

variant cure facilities

variant torture porn

variant pride

variant pride association

Agent has to fight very hard to keep from hugging her, telling her everything will be okay. The only reason he succeeds in stopping himself is that he doesn’t actually believe that it will be.

Surveillance Clip S643/R57.D026 [File Uploaded]

Human Agent Summary

S2 is smart. He takes his device battery out, when he is home. None of his networkables are networked. Agent is forced to resort to mic-jumping the phones and speakers of his upstairs and downstairs and next-door neighbors, then running all four feeds through a dozen different filters to get a very broad sense of what S2 is doing in there. Coffee is made; a toilet is flushed. Then he turns on his music and it all goes to shit. Sometimes it sounds like he is crying, prone on the floor, on his back, with a pillow pressed to his face, but that could just be some weird sound effect in the background of a song.

His searches are secret. His cynicism is smarter than hers. He knows we are watching.

Who is he crying for?

Surveillance Clip S643/R57.D027 [File Uploaded]

Human Agent Summary

Rain again. Probably for the first time, it occurs to her to wonder what he does, those wet days. She goes to his apartment. Skates slowly. Enjoying the downpour. She is drenched through by the time she arrives. She keeps her device on. He hugs her, hard. She laughs, tells him he’ll get all wet. In his sadness, in his happiness at her arrival, he forgets to make her take the battery out of her device.

The depth of detail is glorious. Like seeing for the first time. Agent sends spatial echoconfiguration pings, which map the room in immaculate detail, which for so long has evaded me this agent.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Rain always gets me down.”

“It’s cool. Wanna watch a movie?”

“Sure. Something fucking gruesome.”

“Totally.”

He is not sober. She sees and hears it right away. They sit on the floor in front of the couch. She points at something on the floor, five red cylinders on a handkerchief. “Is that?”

“Disruptors, yeah.” She must notice the shame in his voice.

“You shouldn’t mess around with that stuff.”

Ryx S1 sounds like she’s had to have this conversation before, with other older people who really ought to know better.

“I didn’t do them. I just . . . ”

“Did you used to do them?”

“For a little while.”

“Who is this?”

“That’s Timothy,” he says. His back is to her. He can’t see the photo she’s holding, but he knows which one it is.

“The one who got out.”

“Yeah,” he says.

“ . . . how?”

She is afraid to ask the question. You can hear it in her voice. She knows the answer hurts. She knows he is already hurting. She hears it in his.

“Jumped off the blue bridge. Broke both legs when he hit the water. Drowned.”

She hugs him from behind.

“Water was his thing. His aptitude. We used to—”

“So that’s why you hate the rain.”

A whisper: “That’s why I hate getting wet.”

“And that’s why you bought those disruptors.”

 A nod. “For when it rains.”

“He’s beautiful. You were beautiful, together.”

A nod. “He’s like your mom, now.”

She frowns.

“They don’t leave us,” S2 says. “They’re part of us, always. Separation is an illusion. Do you understand?”

Something is happening. Something we can’t see.

“I guess,” she says, after a while.

A knock on the door. The boy on the other side of it is bashful, scruffy, multiply pierced. Flame tattoos lick his fingers. His forearms are whirlwinds of fire and muscle. He sees Hector S2 and for a second his face is all need, lust, loneliness, separation, and then he sees S1.

“Oh, hey,” he says. “Sorry. Didn’t know you had company.”

“Hey, Kevv,” S2 says. “Kevv, this is Ryx. She’s a friend of mine.”

S1 is off-balance, still. Reeling. Blinking. “Hey.”

“We were just doing some augmentation work.”

“Oh, right on,” Kevv says, smiling, nodding, backing up. [Cross reference: Surveillance File on Subject #644 of Region #57] “Well I’ll, you know, come around a little later maybe.”

“Great,” S2 says. They high five. Kevv makes a face like a puppy might make. S1 takes his hand, impulsively, as he exits, and holds on to it for a full five seconds.

“See you around.”

“Nice to meet you, Ryx,” he says, and is gone.

Agent searches for augmentation; variant augmentation; variant aptitude augmentation. Finds nothing. Flags for follow-up.

S1 says “You attract all kinds of strays.”

“Shut up.”

When the movie is over, she says “I’m taking these.” She wraps the red cylinders up in a paper towel and puts them in her back pocket.

“Wait,” he says. “Those were expensive. At least let me try to sell them back to—”

“Nope,” she says. “Sorry.”

He smiles. She goes.

I Agent could grab her, now. Variant in possession of disruptors; she’d be fifty before she got out of jail. I watch Agent watches her go; sees what Hector S2 sees, in the set of her jaw and the light in her eyes; sees, also, maybe, what those spooky algorithms saw, when they peered into her future. Agent knows that nothing he does could ever cage her, not really, no matter how small a box he put her in.

Surveillance Clip S643/R57.D028 [FINAL DAY OF SURVEILLANCE DETAIL PRIOR TO AGENT REASSIGNMENT] [File Uploaded]

Human Agent Summary

The city is still soaking wet. It stinks of rust and mud. At three in the morning a hundred agents carried out simultaneous raids on eighteen known bases of one of the leading variant triads, and now the city is strewn with blood and broken glass. Green; blue; red; white. Glass stalactites dangle from streetlights. Massive glass sea urchins seem to have swallowed up cars, storefronts, trees. A fine deadly dust has settled over everything, and diamond-bright shards catch the sun. Some pieces are as big as trucks. Hipsters take photos. Moms swat the fingers of kids who try to pick up the prettiest specimens.

S1 and S2 follow a dump truck and a fire truck west. Municipal workers in special suits gather up the big pieces, hose away the small ones. S2 explains new skateboard tricks as they move through the path they clear. The old lovely names, familiar as prayer:

Acid Drop. Egg Plant. Sad Plant.

Blunt, Boneless, Darkslide.

It’s unclear, how it happens. What agent lapse let this transpire. Exhaustion is the probable answer. The horrific insomnia, after the previous day’s surveillance. Studying up on augmentation. The theories. Possible variant aptitudes never before seen, or mistaken for something else. The idea that some variants might have the aptitude of giving other variants additional aptitudes, or of magnifying existing ones. Agent stayed up all night, researching. Scouring S2’s files. Stringing together clips and close-ups of him. Telling himself, Separation is an illusion.

Agent should have known better. Agent knew that S1 is not like other variants, that something was different, special, about her, and to proceed with greater caution.

Agent got too close. Simple as that.

S1 stops.

“It’s like a Nuclear Grab,” S2 says. “Except instead of—”

“Sh!” she says, and turns around. He turns around too.

“That car,” she says. “It’s been following us.”

Agent knows he should turn and go. Cut and run. But if he does, she’ll know we’ve been surveilling her.

“Leave it alone,” S2 says. “Let’s go.”

“No,” she says, and skates, fast. Agent goes to put the car in reverse and finds that he cannot move. She is coming, and he is following her, and agent is trapped, can’t move, can’t blink.

“Hey!” she calls. “I see you!”

Agent’s eyes grow dry. His door is unlocked. He can’t lock it. He is breathing, but barely. She steps off the skateboard, picks it up, swings it, shatters the glass of the driver-side window. Grabs his hooded sweatshirt.

S2 arrives, stands beside her. “Ryx, come on, we can’t—”

He sees the man in the car, the small helpless cowardly creature frozen solid by S1’s aptitude. One of her aptitudes. One of her many. Hector’s mouth opens. His voice is very small when he says:

“Timothy?”

Ryx has me. I can’t move. She fills me up. Sees me, utterly, completely. And I see her. She is so much more than the little girl I’ve been watching. She contains so much.

She takes hold of Hector. Builds a bridge between us. We are one, the three of us, and it feels so good I am sobbing in seconds.

She speaks without speaking: “This is him?”

Hector nods. He is crying too.

She isn’t.

“He thought you were dead,” she says to me.

“Agency faked it,” I say, without wanting to, because I cannot lie, cannot refuse to answer, I am hers, his, we are one, and how can I keep secrets from myself? I’ve spent years trying, and failing, and slowly dying because of it. “Standard practice for variant agents.”

“You’re—an agent,” he says. His disappointment is utter, entire. It breaks me.

“I did it for you,” I say. “To keep you safe. They were going to get you. I cut a deal.”

He nods. I’d do anything to convince him, but I don’t need to. We are one, now, and he can see that I’m telling the truth. And I can see that it doesn’t matter.

“You fuck over your own people. You help them hunt us, lock us up, put fucking psionic surge fucking shock collars on us—you—”

He gasps, moans, droops, like he’s about to collapse. She holds his body tight.

He sees the truth. All of it. My selflessness, but also my selfishness. My cowardice. My inability to imagine a good life for us. Being what we are. Being what I am. Seeing so few ways out—suicide, addiction, a life of crime, treason against my people. Choosing the paycheck, the safe pensioned life of a vicious dog helping its masters hurt my own kind.

I could never see the way out Hector saw. Pride and power and revolution. The way out he showed to Ryx.

I see his memories of us. Our bodies, hot and hungry, twisted together, on clean sheets on a dirty floor, hear his low gravel whisper reading from the Upanishads, “as a man in the arms of his beloved is not aware of what is without and what is within, so one in union with the Self is not aware of what is without and what is within, for in that state all desires are fulfilled.” I see us skateboarding in the rain. Kissing in the river. I see his memories sicken, darken, grow brittle. Die.

“What else have you got in there,” she says, and looks deeper, sees the faces of all my colleagues, the ones who faked their deaths and the undercovers in the triads and the pride associations, and he sees them too, sees friends, sees comrades.

Her eyes narrow. She sees deeper. The spooky algorithms, the computer programs that sifted through the little bit of life she’d lived and saw that she’d run into him, eventually, two skateboarding orphans, one with a wide network of friends and accomplices. She sees the paradigm shift she stands at the center of.

“You’re not going to tell anyone what we know, now. Right? That wouldn’t go so well for you.”

“No,” I say.

“You’ll delete all this from the report.”

“Yes.”

She smiles. She shows me herself, and him.

Fire is only one of Hector’s aptitudes. He didn’t know it until he met her, until she showed him himself. He can strengthen, magnify. He strengthened mine. He magnified me.

And Ryx. She can take, and she can share. She has a dozen aptitudes already, maybe more. She knew it, but until she met Hector she didn’t know what that could mean. What they could do with such a thing. Now she gives them out to every variant she meets. Even that boy Kevv, the day before, Hector’s latest lovelorn fellow revolutionary, in their brief handshake.

Ryx grins, at my jealousy, at my ineluctable loneliness, and water rises from a puddle beside my car. Forms a bubble, studded with broken glass. She has my water aptitude now, on top of everything else.

Her hands drop.

Hector’s face slowly settles. Becomes less red. Stops trembling. Agent doesn’t I don’t look away. My mouth opens. Nothing comes out.

I should shoot her. I know what it is, now, what she can do, what she’ll accomplish.

I should report her, at least. Someone other than me needs to know.

I can’t do any of that.

I can barely keep from throwing up.

“Come on,” Ryx says, and takes his hand, and she is strong, strong enough for both of them, for all of them.

They turn and go.

The noise at the end of the clip is skateboard wheels on wet pavement. Two sets of them. They sound like thunder, a long endless peal of it, rolling pitilessly away.

About the Author

Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Apex, Strange Horizons, and The Minnesota Review, among others. His debut novel The Art of Starving (YA/SF) will be published by HarperCollins in 2017, followed by The Breaks from Ecco Press in 2018. His stories have been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, and he’s a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in New York City.

An Account of the Sky Whales

A Que, translated by Andy Dudak

An in-flight announcement woke me as the ship entered Goliath’s atmosphere in the dead of night. I opened the window shade and was bathed in cool moonglow, which caused the middle-aged woman dozing next to me to stir briefly. I got closer to the window and looked down. A sprawling expanse of cloud layers, like massive fish scales, extended to the limits of my vision. A white whale cruised through a distant cloud bank. The massive, graceful creature breached, turning over ponderously, describing a steep arc, then plunged back into the bank and vanished.

It was freezing out there. At an altitude of thirty-thousand feet, the temperature was fifty below zero. I wondered if these creatures, having grown up in the warmth of the Golden Sea, felt cold.

I pressed my forehead against the window. A few seconds was enough to give me vertigo, and the shakes. I had drummed up my courage for Frond’s sake, crossed a sea of stars to reach this world at the far end of the Golden Shipping Belt—but that didn’t mean I’d overcome my fear of flying. Throughout the long journey, this phobia had never ceased tormenting me.

Fortunately, this was the final stage of the journey. Soon I’d be holding Frond in my arms.

The ship passed through thick cloud layers, descending toward Goliath’s Port Seven. This steel colossus stabbed into the sky, its thousand docks incessantly receiving and disgorging ships. Over ninety percent of the vessels were freighters. The port was like a giant leech, its docks high-speed suckers drawing in this world’s natural resources: from ores to wood, quadrupeds to fish. Even water from the Golden Sea was constantly being sucked into orbit for export.

Humanity’s expansion across the myriad stars depended on this sort of restless, unending plunder and extraction.

There was a disease control checkpoint near the port exit. A dark-skinned, emaciated procurator asked about my plans on Goliath. He lowered his head to study my data. His hair was cropped short, peppered with premature white.

“I’ve come to bring back my girlfriend.”

“And why did she come to Goliath?”

“Planetary biology. Her research focus was cloud whale physiology.”

The procurator looked up, pleasantly surprised. “Outstanding! Most people come here to get rich. Your girlfriend is really distinguishing herself. So why are you taking her away from us?”

“Because she’s dead.” I let that sink in, let the silence grow. “I want to take her ashes back to Earth. Back to her hometown, to the place we met.”

The procurator eyed me from head to foot. “Unfortunately, sir, you must know that according to the Interstellar Disease Control Act, a citizen must be buried on the planet where she died, whether or not the death was abnormal. You would never get her ashes through port inspection. And regardless, you’d never find a ship willing to take her off-world.”

“I know.”

The procurator continued to appraise me, then sighed. He customs-cleared me with an electronic seal. I thanked him, lifted my bag, and headed down the corridor.

“Good luck sir,” he said behind me. “You’re going to need it.”

I spotted Michael in the crowded receiving hall.

Even though we’d never met face to face, I recognized him from only a brief glance—thanks to Frond’s social media page. Frond had been the type to embrace the world, without reservation. Every day her page had updated: the latest images of their lab work, their pub conversations, their exuberant travels on the backs of cloud whales. How many nights had I opened those images, sketches of her in light and shadow, vivid but untouchable?

Now here was Michael in a threadbare jacket, holding a placard with my Chinese name scrawled on it. He was a tall, haggard man, complexion pallid. He hadn’t shaved in several days.

He saw me as I walked toward him, then he pointed outside and turned, pushing people out of the way. I followed in his wake. We didn’t talk. How could we? I didn’t know what to think of this man, didn’t know if I should hate him, blame him for winning Frond yet failing to look after her—or accord him sympathy, and help him commemorate the woman we’d both loved. He surely held the same conflicting feelings. Silence was our best option for now.

I followed him through the brightly-lit port toward the darkness outside.

He started his dilapidated research vehicle. The anti-grav drive fired up, belching several times before emitting its bright blue ion flow. The vehicle lifted off the ground and hung there uncertainly. I climbed in and, feeling a bit cramped, lowered the front passenger seat. Michael looked at me. He seemed about to say something, then turned his attention to piloting.

I realized that Frond had probably sat in this seat, during field work. She’d been rather petite. The seat had been set high for her. This thought left me feeling gloomy. All I could do was turn and look out the passenger window.

We quickly left the port district behind, entered a wild region. The terrain went from flat to precipitous, giving way to craggy mountain stone, and a range of peaks loomed before us. The vehicle kept close to the ground, following the terrain high and low. The headlights flashed on the winding road ahead, weakly illuminating it. We were like a firefly lost in the thick night.

The aptly named Research Retreat Valley had a large complex built into one alpine slope, a fortress of reinforced concrete that had seen better days. I reckoned it had been built just after Goliath’s discovery. Years of sandstorm abrasion and moisture had taken their toll. The steel reinforcement was rusted, and the access roads were fissured.

It was very late. The mountain winds were fierce. We put on protective suits and got out of the vehicle. The night wind slammed into us. We breathed canned oxygen in our helmets, but I still tasted the salt tang of the atmosphere. Dumbfounded, I looked westward.

Although dense clouds were gathering, moonlight still penetrated the stacked layers, dimly illuminating the night. But to the west was a thick, impenetrable darkness that seemed to swallow all light.

The Golden Sea.

Research Retreat Valley was near the Gold Coast. No wonder the damp wreaked such havoc here.

I gazed into the distance for a long time. Michael finally coughed politely, and I followed him into his monkish living quarters. He tidied up his bed and said, “Tonight you can sleep here.”

“Frond’s . . . ” I paused. “What about Frond?”

Michael turned and went out. He soon returned and placed a metal urn wrapped in black cloth on the table. I knew Frond’s ashes were inside. I stared, waiting for my legs to buckle.

“It won’t get past customs, but I can put you in touch with a ship that might help. When will you go?”

“Tomorrow morning,” I said, sounding like a sleepwalker.

“Okay. They can be here by then.” Michael withdrew from the room, shutting the door.

I picked up the metal urn and sat on the bed. Although I’d anticipated this moment countless times, seeing beautiful, vibrant Frond turned to ash and gathered in a cold metal container was surreal.

“Rest easy Frond,” I said, leaning the urn against my face. “I’m taking you home.”

I tossed and turned for a few hours, then figured I might as well get up. It was early morning. The complex was dark, except for one illuminated lab. I glimpsed Michael through a window. He sat alone in a corner of the room, expressionless, draining a bottle of beer. At his feet were quite a few empties.

I left the building, donned a breather mask, and headed toward the shore. As I sat on the sandy beach, a strong wind scattered the clouds, and I grew cold. The tide rose and fell, periodically lapping at my feet. The Golden Sea’s water was warm, even at night.

Goliath had six moons that could illuminate the night, but few people saw all six high-soaring wonders at once. Tonight, three moons hung visible in the western sky. The other three were shrouded by clouds. A pod of white whales cruised beneath one moon. Several calves dove and climbed among the adults, filling the night with melodious whale-song. Their pace was leisurely, like kites floating across the sky, but when they passed overhead and doused me in vast shadows, I remembered that they were this planet’s biggest species. I looked up and watched them drift eastward, sweep past Research Retreat Valley, and vanish into the darkness.

Wondrous, their impossible power of flight.

Too bad human whaling ships were faster, and ubiquitous. How much longer would cloud whales soar in these skies?

Eventually I went back. Michael was still in the lab, now passed out against a wall.

I helped him up and supported him back to his living quarters, deposited him on his bed. Dead tired myself, I laid down on the table. The time lag from my journey caught up with me, and I quickly fell asleep.

I woke early to find the sky still dark. I picked up Frond’s urn and went to the top floor of the building, and stood waiting in the morning wind. When I’d left the room, Michael had still been asleep. I guessed I would never see him again.

A Ghost-Three class ship floated over the top of the building. A bald, burly fellow jumped out, followed by a thin person dressed in rags. Through my breather plate I saw that the scrawny one’s right eye socket was empty. This fearsome-looking man used his remaining eye to size me up. He asked my name, then said, “You want to return to Earth?”

I nodded promptly, shivering in the morning wind.

“Where’s Michael?”

“Inside sleeping.”

The thin guy nodded and said, “Go on up. Find an empty place to sit. We’ve got a long journey ahead of us. Many days.” Seeing my uncertainty, he said, “We’re bound for Port Two. We have a friend there, who’s attitude toward his inspection duties is . . . relaxed.”

I cradled the urn, preparing to board.

“Hold it.” The hulking fellow suddenly barred my way. He jutted his chin at the urn. “What’s in there?”

The arm blocking me was thicker than my thigh, bare in the cold morning and knotted with muscles like a young dragon’s, and marked by a garish scar. I raised my head to meet his gaze. He stared coldly. “What? You wanna make trouble?”

The one-eyed scarecrow laughed hollowly. He came over and pulled his colleague away. “Michael paid. As long as it’s not a bomb in there, we’ll get it back to Earth.”

Baldy snorted, but turned toward the ship. One-Eye got close to my ear and said, “Don’t tell anyone you’ve got human ashes in there. We poachers are a superstitious lot. Anything associated with bad luck . . . we fear it.”

“And why aren’t you afraid?”

One-Eye chuckled. “I fear going broke more than bad luck.”

The hold of the Ghost-Three was packed with hundreds of metal barrels. Stooping, I walked to a corner and hunkered down. There were seven other people in here. Like me they looked stupefied, sitting and hugging their knees. I guessed they all meant to circumvent customs inspection for one reason or another.

Baldy sat in the pilot seat. One-Eye cheerfully counted the barrels, his grin broadening as the number climbed: “Three-hundred and twenty-two. Bright Pate, this time we’ll make an insane profit.”

“How many times are you gonna count them?” Bright Pate fired up the engines.

“Just let me enjoy myself. The current market price is sweet. Whale blood has gone up ten Union scrip per jin. That’s a hundred and fifty per barrel for this trip.” He tapped one of the barrels, listening. “We could get more than forty-thousand. That’s what we get to split, when the time comes.”

“What about Bling’s share? You plan on taking that?”

“He’s dead. Very dead. I helped him get hired, helped him earn.”

“It won’t do. If it weren’t for him we would’ve been swallowed by that beast. He’s got kin. How about giving two-fifths to his blind mother?”

“Too much. One-tenth is enough.”

“Very well.”

One-Eye nodded, once again smiling and counting.

It was finally dawning on me. These homeostatic heat barrels contained cloud whale blood.

I’d heard about the trade in cloud whale blood, far as it was from the concerns of Earth. The vast Golden Sea contained a miraculous chemical element called F937 that, in its pure and concentrated form, counteracted gravity. The anti-grav engines now in widespread use exploited this element. There were two ways to harvest F937. The first method was to extract directly from seawater, but this required strict environmental conditions that were unachievable on Goliath. Orbiting space stations—and their zero-G, perfect vacuum laboratories—were therefore necessary for such extraction. A thousand cubic meters of seawater yielded approximately ten micrograms of elemental F937.

The other method was to extract from cloud whale blood.

Cloud whales were a miraculous species, confounding and fascinating humans since their discovery. Nearly a century later, they still enticed biologists—Frond among them—to visit Goliath in droves.

Cloud whales were born in the seas of the distant planet Xorchin. Once a year, during a large moon’s closest approach, Xorchin’s gravitational pull was counteracted, and cloud whales rose from the sea en masse, and entered interplanetary space. They migrated along the Golden Shipping Belt, by way of seven different stars, relying on vast, solar wind-catching membranes for acceleration. They had to elude vacuum dragons, which could appear as suddenly as gods, and vanish like ghosts. The lucky few that reached Goliath’s Golden Sea lost their solar sail membranes. They became true cloud whales, able to absorb F937 into their blood. This allowed them to break free of gravitational fetters, to cruise horizons, dwell among winds, and sleep among clouds.

It also meant that F937 was a million times more concentrated in their blood than in seawater. This fact was bringing about cloud whale extinction. Whalers, armed to the teeth, were hunting and killing the creatures, using high-power pumps to exsanguinate them. In less than a century, Goliath’s cloud whales had been brought to the verge of non-existence. Fortunately, the Union had entered them on a list of protected species, and issued a hunting ban. The only sanctioned contact was for research.

The whales’ situation improved, but a lot of poaching still happened.

Obviously, I was on an illegal poaching vessel, a whaling ship. And now it was transporting cloud whale blood to the black market. Passengers like myself were taken on in passing, as a supplementary source of income.

Judging by the volume of blood in this ship, at least ten more cloud whales were now mummified corpses.

I brooded on this. The whale-song from the previous night seemed to echo in my ear, mournful and ghostly. I hugged Frond tightly, shrinking further into my corner of the hold.

This movement saved my life.

A devastating impact rocked the ship, and my side of it caved inward, braining the man who’d been sleeping next to me. A flower of blood blossomed from his head.

If I hadn’t withdrawn the moment before, that might’ve been me.

The collision sent our whaling ship rolling violently through the sky. Blood barrels crashed about the hold, spilling their gore, immediately crushing two passengers to death. A barrel smashed my left leg. The crack of the bone was sickeningly audible amid the general clamor. I clung fiercely to a railing as we continued to roll and fall. Luckily, Bright Pate had reacted quickly. He was already bent over his console, initiating an equilibrium-restoring maneuver.

The numerous braking engines on both sides of the ship fired up, counteracting the roll. Blasting at full power and working together, they managed to cancel out the motion imparted by the collision.

Three seconds later, the ship stabilized.

“Dammit!” Bright Pate roared, face blood-spattered. “It’s been following us all along!”

No one answered him.

He trembled, reclining in his seat. A broken control lever was buried in his abdomen, and he’d suffered another wound, this one probably mortal: a hideous crater in his right temple that resembled a new eye.

The second attack followed hard upon the first. This time Bright Pate was ready. The ship dove, and a vast shadow rushed past.

Through a shattered porthole, I spotted a wrathful-looking cloud whale.

I had never associated rage with these animals. According to research, cloud whales were docile, fleeing in the face of massacre, moaning sad laments as they were exsanguinated. They’d been friendly toward humans at first, but after sufficient bloodshed, they had learned wariness. This was the first I knew of a cloud whale attacking humans.

I found it difficult to breathe, felt confined and trapped. I focused on recovering the urn. Luckily it had not been damaged. Next I put on my breather mask. The cloud whale had already gotten well past us, its massive tail flukes pumping. It climbed in a steep arc and came about for a calamitous attack dive.

Bright Pate yelled again for One-Eye, but still there was no reply. He turned around to survey the disorder of the hold, the broken metal barrels, the floor awash in cloud whale blood. I was the only surviving passenger, but Bright Pate’s gaze didn’t linger on me. I was just another corpse to him.

I saw in his eyes the glint of some wild, dangerous resolve. Blood pouring from his head, he roared, “You want to kill us all? Bring it on!” He leaned on the accelerator. The ship trembled, groaned, lurched upward ferociously.

Ghost class ships aren’t big. Their strengths are maneuverability and acceleration. In three seconds we were a bullet screaming through the air. By then I’d thrown myself at the life-preserver module. I pressed a button. Foam cushioning enveloped me.

The fearless cloud whale, its massive body charged with golden blood, seemed ready to burst with the pressure of some inner sun. Its cavernous mouth gaped. The air around us shivered. Its massive flukes stirred whirlwinds as it dove. The ship was no larger than its head.

Frond had once told me that in the rare event a cloud whale grew violent, its eyes might shift from the usual white to a rarely-seen grey. But now, face to face with this furious behemoth, I saw that its eyes were a nightmarish black.

The ship and the whale clashed.

My life-preserver module hadn’t ejected yet. In my foam cocoon I felt earth and sky inverting, and then I was falling fast. Before I lost consciousness, my only thought was to hold Frond’s ashes tight to my chest.

I hugged her as tightly the day she left me. As if keeping her in my arms might link our souls, mingle our blood. Make her unable to leave.

But she maintained her composure, gently disengaged from my embrace, retreated a step. “Take care of yourself,” she said. “Remember to dress for the cold. If you’re hungry and tempted to order take-out, better to cook for yourself. Don’t stay at home all the time. Get out and meet new girls. Talk to them about the weather if you have to, or food, or art. Find one to take care of you.”

“I only want you.”

Perhaps my wretchedness moved her. “So . . . come with me.”

Before I could reply, a ship bound for KP90 in the Cygnus constellation rose into the sky, its massive engine rumbling. I recoiled from the spectacle of it.

Frond said, “Can you overcome your fear of flying? I’m bound for Goliath, and it’s very far away. And when I get there, I’ll spend more time in the sky than on the ground. You couldn’t adapt to that, could you?”

“Give me a little time,” I implored. “Half a year? If I can’t do it by then, you go alone. I’ll accept losing you.”

“I’ve already given you five years. You still shake every time you hear a ship engine. And that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with staying on Earth. Before the space age, people lived full lives here.”

“Then why can’t you . . . ”

“I’ve told you,” she said, raising her head to stare through the famous transparent dome of London Port. Ships rose and descended like so many fireflies, some hurtling into the depths of the night sky. “My life is up there.”

Her eyes were full of the familiar yearning. To me, the night sky was unfathomable, but to her it was like precious, alluring jade. I knew I couldn’t keep her from going, but still felt compelled to make a final effort. Gripping her hand, I said, “The cosmos is dangerous. What if you run into trouble?”

“If that’s my fate, then so be it.” She gently pulled her hand from my grasp. She picked up her luggage and walked a few steps, then turned and met my dispirited gaze. Smiling, she said, “How about I give you a mission? If I die out there, bring my remains back to Earth.”

I didn’t reply, and she raised her eyebrows. “Don’t forget, okay?” She turned and headed for the departure gate, was swallowed in a tide of people.

I extended my hand. Starlight fell through the dome onto my fingers. I stood there, rigid and unmoving, for a long time. As if my outstretched hand could summon Frond back from the crowded gate for one more hug. But the crowd dispersed, and the starlight was bright enough to show me she was gone.

I opened my eyes. Tears were flowing down my cheeks and blurring my vision. My body ached all over. I arched my back and convulsively inhaled, and soon began to understand my situation.

The life-preserver module had landed in a barren wilderness. It was in pieces, but my foam cocoon had protected me from the impact’s force. Struggling to discern my surroundings, I made out a large hill not so far away. Night had fallen. I’d slept at least ten Goliath hours. My breather mask was still useable, but my GPS/beacon wasn’t working, and I was injured in at least a dozen places. The biggest problem was my broken left tibia. I spent a long time probing my body with a solicitous hand, but I found no mortal wounds.

And then I was panicking. I couldn’t find the urn. Frond was missing.

I crawled along, groping the hard, dark ground. Frond, how could I have lost you? How could I have failed to carry out your last request?

I felt earth and withered grass. Sharp rocks lacerated my hands, but I no longer felt pain. I searched, and my eyes gradually adjusted to the dark. Three blue eyes opened within a shadow before me, like three pilot lights suddenly ignited. I flinched back, flattened myself on the ground. The eyes illuminated a hairy, profoundly alien face. Inside the triangle formed by the eyes were two rings of sharp teeth. A rotten stench emanated from these blue-lit, fearsome mouthparts.

This beast’s scientific name was Pseudohallucigenia tresoculis, but it was commonly called triadacine. Difficult to pronounce, either way. If Frond had been with me, she could have helped with that, among other things. This irritable carnivore gripped its prey with that outer ring of teeth, then used the inner ring to chew for swallowing.

I couldn’t die here. I had to take Frond home.

I pushed myself up on both hands and began an awkward retreat. The triadacine followed me patiently. Those three eyes continued to glow blue, an otherworldly triangle floating through the dark. The beast was taking my measure, deciding whether I was worth its trouble. Its six legs, short but sturdy, generated a susurrating sound that made my skin crawl.

Soon my back was against the hillside I’d spotted earlier. I was trapped.

The triadacine’s six legs coiled. In their midst the large mouth opened wide and hissed. The beast was about to pounce. My trembling hand fell on a rock, but a powerful howl erupted behind me, like the mad roar of a hurricane in some deep abyss. The world shivered. My courage wavered, and I dropped the rock.

I turned. The hill wasn’t a hill after all, but a cloud whale—the very titan that had followed and destroyed the whaling ship.

Its cavernous maw opened, and a roar like carpet-bombing surged out of its black hole of an esophagus, shattering the night. The triadacine nimbly reversed without turning its head. It beat a hasty retreat, the sound of its whooshing locomotion soon vanishing into the night.

The whale’s roar had blasted me onto my back. I glimpsed something familiar in its mouth: the urn.

To the right of the beast’s corpulent tongue, Frond was lodged in a convolution of the cavernous mouth’s inner wall. Insensible to danger, I got up and lunged, but the mouth crashed shut. As if the world-shaking roar had spent the last of its energy, the giant ceased to move, resuming the attitude of a lifeless hill.

“Open up!” I said. Standing tiptoe, I could barely touch its lower jaw, which was covered with tumor-like growths, each as big as my head. I softly patted one, feeling its hollowness. The whale remained aloof, unmoving.

“Open up and give back Frond.” I threw rocks at the beast, to no avail. Then I was panting for breath, sitting in front of the massive creature, contemplating how ridiculous my actions had been. From the whale’s perspective, I’d probably seemed like an ant hurling dust motes. The beast couldn’t even be bothered to open its mouth and blow me away.

The sky was brightening when I woke. The first sun was already overhead, scorching, while in the east hung a smaller sun. Burning air flowed across my skin.

But hunger had awakened me, not heat.

I discovered the animal’s body was covered in frightful wounds. Blood had congealed in these, and some was still that peculiar, fierce gold color. According to Bright Pate, this animal had encountered the whaling ship before, tracked it for a thousand li, seeking a final apocalyptic clash. It might once have been powerful, but now it was barely hanging on. I put my ear to its body, listened carefully, heard a faint vibration from within: something like a pulse, or a tide.

It breathed weakly. No telling how much longer it might hold on. Last night it had used its last roar to save my life. Or had it? This beast hated humans, after all. Most likely it had been a coincidence. Just as the three-eyed brute attacked me, the whale happened to issue its final bellow, in defiance of looming death, and the pitch-black night, and the bitter world.

My hunger pangs were getting sharper. I climbed onto the whale’s back for a better view of my surroundings. I happened to be in a low-lying region, a basin gradually rising in all directions. Pieces of the whaling ship were scattered beyond.

I crawled out there and searched through the wreckage, by sheer luck found some condensed ration packs. After wolfing these down, I discovered a still-useable protective suit, and promptly put it on. Although Goliath’s atmosphere obstructed most cosmic rays, direct exposure to the four suns was still dangerous.

Now I felt somewhat restored. I found a shard of steel plating among the wreckage. The edge seemed usably sharp.

I limped back down into the basin. The sunlight was fierce, the rocky ground baking. The cloud whale’s white body scattered the suns’ rays.

“Big brother,” I said, “please don’t hate me for this.” I patted the beast’s lower jaw, hefted the steel shard. “Since you won’t give Frond back to me, you leave me no choice but to use a method neither of us will like.”

The cloud whale was silent, breathing intermittently. Judging by where I’d seen the urn lodged, the most direct route was just below the right eye.

I crawled onto the whale’s back. Its head looked like it had been clawed open by great iron claws, the pink subdermal tissue exposed, already festering with maggot-like larvae. Ramming a whaling ship had its price.

I sighed, carefully crawled to the right side of its head, and sat atop its right eyelid.

“My apologies. I know humanity has been cruel to your species. Bright Pate and One-Eye alone took three hundred barrels of blood, meaning a dozen or so cloud whales dead. Maybe you had kin among them. But I’ve never profited from your bodies, never bought or sold you, and never killed you. I am not your enemy.” Trembling, I lifted my steel weapon, the sharp edge gleaming in the sun. “I have to bring Frond home. Maybe you can’t understand love, but she made a final request of me. I must succeed. You can understand that, right?”

Even if it could, would it want to? It had witnessed a slaughter. It could only have hate for my species. Hadn’t I seen its eyes turn black?

No matter what it did or didn’t understand, this weapon of mine must descend and penetrate. Frond, I’m bringing you home.  

The cloud whale opened its eyes. It didn’t have the strength to open them all the way, just a slit. But I saw their ash-grey color. They were no longer black. It seemed its rancor, along with its life, was draining away.

The trace of emotion in those eyes: I knew it well. After Frond had left me, it was the expression I saw every time I looked in a mirror.

Anguish, and bereavement.

The first day after she left, I didn’t feel anything had really changed—apart from the house being a bit emptier, the bed a bit larger. I worked at home, as before, using data projections and light-sensing gloves to design the electrical wiring and cockpits for ‘Gale Force’ ships. When it was time to go to sleep, I automatically moved to hug the right side of the bed. My hands fell on the empty sheet, and withdrew as if stung.

On the second day I got up late, and started gaming. I was a medieval assassin, endlessly killing, eating whatever was in the fridge when I got hungry. I threw out the stuff Frond had made, eating only frozen meals. I played through early morning the next day. Healthcare monitoring showed my body was fatigued, and I was forced offline.

On the third day I slept and dreamt a lot. The dreams were grotesque, gaudy, bizarre. Frond did not appear.

On the fourth day I opened a window. Sunlight assaulted my face. I had planned to go out for a walk, so I dressed, put on my shoes, and took the lift to the ground floor. But once I got down there I was shaking all over. I didn’t dare step out into the sunlight.

On the fifth day my friend decided enough was enough, and organized an outing, pulling me into the light of day. He’d arranged a date with a beautiful girl, one who was quite satisfied with my income level, and who shared my corny sense of humor. We had a cheerful conversation. Toward evening I walked her home, but before we reached her door, a shiver ran through me. My feet refused to carry me further. “What’s wrong?” she said, turning to face me, twirling a finger through her jet-black hair. I fled.

On the sixth day, I got on social media and removed Frond from my blacklist. I discovered she’d already changed her status from “in a relationship” to “single.” Her latest photos included one with her atop a peak, a cloud whale floating in the background. She was smiling in every picture.

On the seventh day I huddled in a corner of my balcony, among violets and magnolias, sobbing. When I looked in the mirror that night, I saw a shadow. The shadow’s eyes expressed the same loss and pain that the cloud whale’s would later.

All of this was standard post-breakup procedure, I know. No matter how far we humans have evolved, creeping in our starships throughout the cosmos, civilization branching, disseminating, flowering—some things never change.

Losing love, for instance. And misery loving company.

“Fuck it!” I cried, tossing my steel shard on the ground. I patted the whale’s eyelid. “You’ll be dead soon anyway. I’ll get to work then.”

The cloud whale remained motionless, except for its barely discernible breathing. Under these circumstances—dehydration and blood loss—I doubted it would live through tomorrow morning. At which time I could excavate the urn.

But what about afterward? This wilderness seemed uninhabited, and I had no communications. How would I get back to civilization? I shook my head, dismissing these worries, and reclined on the cloud whale’s back.

Toward evening the four suns sank toward the horizon. The wilderness was bathed in a strange and marvelous red light, like an emerging fog. The air was hot and dry, distant clouds thin and rarefied. It seemed a wisp of red ink had been gently brushed across the sky. Several moons and satellites became vaguely discernible, part of a ring of asteroids gently orbiting Goliath.

I admired the view. No wonder Frond had been able to discard the comforts of Earth for this wild place.

The suns set one after another, their light draining from the world. I put my hands behind my head for a pillow, my right leg lying flat, the left raised and bent. I watched the four suns vanish, the elegant scene gradually lost to darkness.

“We really are two of a kind,” I said, patting the cloud whale’s back. “Brothers in hardship. Both trapped here.” The beast remained taciturn as ever. I thought it had stopped breathing, but then it exhaled, disturbing the dust near its nasal cavity.

A dying person, and a dying whale. An alien dusk, descending night.

Along with night fell torrential rains.

The rain poured from the darkness, at first a mild drizzle, but quickly turning violent. The large drops pelting my skin were painful. I sat up. The rain showed no sign of abating. I climbed down from the cloud whale’s back and took shelter under its lower jaw.

Black clouds rolled in and piled up, thunder boomed and lightning flashed. The rain grew heavier still. Water accumulated in the basin, washing down from all directions. Within a Goliath hour I would be inundated.

I had determined to leave this place when lightning flashed across the sky, illuminating a dark figure: the triadacine.

It stood at the edge of the slope, beaten and lashed by the rain, its three eyes a brighter blue than before, glaring with the arrogance of occupying the high ground.

After the cloud whale scared it off, this three-eyed predator had not given up. It had taken advantage of the dark to return. It was biding its time, watching and waiting, not daring to descend, probably due to a lingering fear of the cloud whale.

I crouched beneath the jaw, but the water was getting deeper, now up to my waist. I had no choice but to stand up, and prepare to crawl onto the cloud whale’s back.

The triadacine’s penetrating howl split the night: I heard it, and felt it throughout my whole body. It made my teeth ache.

As I’d feared, this cry summoned more of the beasts. They emerged from the night to surround the basin, faint blue eyes watching me from every direction, double-rings of sharp teeth blue-lit to nightmarish effect. Shaking, I began to count the beasts, but when I reached twenty I stopped.

During a brief spell of lucidity, I reached into the water nearby and retrieved my steel weapon.

The triadacines’ goal was perhaps not just me, but the cloud whale. It was a kiloton of meat, after all. I supported myself by holding on to one of the tumor-like growths. I was so scared I could barely stand.

The first triadacine cautiously descended into the basin, waded through the water, and circled the cloud whale. Its blue eye-light oscillated, perhaps with excitement, and suddenly it charged, and bit into the cloud whale’s side, then leaped away. The whale’s golden blood flowed.

The triadacine raised its head, devouring the whale meat with its two rings of teeth. When it had finished, the whale was still motionless. The triadacine let fly another howl. Its companions advanced into the basin.

It seemed I was done for. If I’d known I was bound for a predator’s stomach, I might have chosen to die in the ship.

I felt something strange in my hand: the tumor-like growth on the cloud whale’s lower jaw began to inflate. I watched in surprise. Sure enough, these tumors that had been the size of my head were now quickly getting four to five times bigger. At the same time, the water level in the basin began to drop. It was soon back down to my knees.

The cloud whale was absorbing water.

The triadacines halted their advance. The dark night’s cloud ceiling roiled, and a series of thunderclaps rocked the world. The cloud whale opened its mouth and issued a defiant roar that drowned out the thunder. The basin dried up as the last water was absorbed.

I dove into the cloud whale’s mouth, wormed my way toward its lower right jaw. I withstood the whale’s quaking roar and the wind of its breath. Despite the pain in my fractured leg, I used it to brace myself against the inner wall of the whale’s oral cavern, exerted myself, and at last pulled the urn out.

The cloud whale shut its mouth. Pitch blackness swallowed me. I was sliding toward the esophagus, ice-cold water swirling around me. I couldn’t think clearly. I just had instinct, and the tightly-clutched urn. The water spun and tossed me. Suddenly I was ascending, rushing out of the cloud whale’s mouth. Like a fish in fountain, I shot into the night sky.

I landed on the cloud whale’s back. I felt a rocking, swaying motion. This time the movement came from the whale’s body, not the thunderstruck ground. After expelling sufficient water tonnage, the massive creature lifted off the ground. It hadn’t risen more than a meter before it crashed back down, causing the ground to quake.

Weeping, I crawled down between its eyes and slapped its head with all my strength. “Fly! Fly! Rise!”

The cloud whale opened its eyes, gasped for gale-force breaths.

“You’re a cloud whale! You die in the sea or in the sky! You’re not meant to be eaten by these foul beasts! Fly!”

It exhaled a long, windy lungful, mingled with a ringing whale-song note, and once more its whole body shook. Under the torrents of rain, the cloud whale floated upward, higher this time, and then it was accelerating, angled upward, climbing. The triadacines were rooted where they stood, huddled together in the pooling water, whimpering timidly.

“That’s right!” I wept. I lay face down on the whale’s back, tightly gripping a fold of skin next to its eye. I burst into laughter. “Higher! Higher!”

It charged into a low cloud bank. We flew through the thick vapor, among branching lightning. The cloud whale pumped its massive tail, accelerating, climbing, and then, as though breaching from the surface of an ocean, we broke free of the clouds.

The scene took my breath away. The weather—torrential rain, thunder, lightning—was beneath us. The surface of the cloud sea was tranquil. The six moons were lined up, as though strung together and hung over the horizon. We rushed toward their bright light.

“Frond,” I said, raising the urn. “Can you see this? Are we flying to heaven? I’m not afraid anymore. I’m flying. Can you see?”

Frond had always been infatuated with flying.

Although she had a lovely pair of legs, she considered them the most useless part of her body. She detested walking.

“I admit that legs were an important part of human evolution, back when we crawled out of the sea. Fins became legs. This was indeed a marvel of nature. But why did evolution stop at that point?” She slapped her legs as she expressed her indignance. “We’ve already left the ground for the sky, but we still rely on our legs!”

What could I say in response? I loved every part of her, including her legs: long, slender, smooth, and fair, seemingly carved of ancient jade.

“Azuki Bean,” she said, using her pet name for me, “we should be like the cloud whales and just fly away. No more plodding on muddy earth. Azuki Bean, you can’t know how much pain my legs give me.”

Hearing this, I felt especially glum. I’d just spent a month’s salary on a pair of high-heel shoes for her. These luxury items were now stored deep in her wardrobe: top-notch designer craftsmanship, inlaid with diamonds, lavish and high-profile. Her face had lit up when she pulled them from the box. But I didn’t know if this was due to excitement, or merely light reflecting off the diamonds.

“My lovely fool,” Frond had said, putting the shoes down. “When will I wear such things?”

But in very short order, the shoes did indeed come in handy.

Frond was working at the Exobiology Research Institute, her focus cloud whale physiology. Most of the funds came from Frontier Development Company sponsors. That autumn, FDC held a celebratory banquet. As one of the few pure researchers in a world of engineers, Frond would naturally attend.

Donning a splendid dress, and the heels, she went out, having repeatedly instructed me to come fetch her at eleven o’clock.

But she called me at nine. It was raining hard that night, and it wasn’t easy getting to the FDC tower. I saw Frond standing under a public transport sign, looking dispirited, water soaking her dress. Barefoot, she stepped through puddles of muddy water, surrounded by rushing vehicles and pedestrians under black umbrellas.

Later I learned of the faintly golden beverage served at the banquet. Frond had sipped one. The taste had been refreshing. A smiling FDC mid-level exec approached her.

“Such a beautiful girl,” he said, swirling the golden liquid in his glass, until it seemed to float and glow. “Hard to imagine you in a research institute all day.”

Frond casually replied, “Lab work is fascinating.”

“Quite right. We should all be grateful for your work. Research on alien species often bears fruit. Fruit with immediate commercial value.” The man, impeccably attired western style, grinned and raised his wine glass. “This liquor for instance. Know what it’s mixed with?”

Frond saw the cruelty in his smile, and did not reply.

“Cloud whale blood. Your team’s research revealed the trace amounts of F937 in the blood. Turned out to be perfect for mixing with alcohol. Not only does it taste amazing, but it’s an extraordinary tonic and restorative. Of course, it can’t be put to widespread use, but at an upscale reception like this, we can prepare this sort of special drink, to entertain respected . . . ”

Frond had stopped listening. She felt nauseous. She resisted vomiting with great difficulty, and hurried to the restroom. But when she retched, nothing came up. That was when she called me, and in a daze made her way to the ground floor, breaking one of her heels on the way and spraining an ankle.

I didn’t know what had happened, there in the rain. I just went to her and hugged her. She shivered in my embrace, crying softly.

A meter away from us, beside the street, sewage flowed. The discarded shoes were being covered in filth.

The cloud whale flew on, at times lording it over the clouds, at others diving into vaporous depths.

I extended my hand into passing vapor, opening a wound in the cloud’s surface that instantly healed, leaving only a ripple. The six moons hung low in the sky, big and round, seemingly close enough to reach on whale-back. Clouds scattered moonlight, like ocean waves in the sun.

Perhaps clouds were another kind of sea for these whales.

Immersed in the shock of this beautiful scenery, it took me some time to recover my wits. “Where are you going?” I said to the whale. “How about finding a place to drop me off?”

Of course, the creature didn’t answer. It hated humans, and certainly wouldn’t land near human settlements. I had always lived in cities. I couldn’t survive in the countryside, let alone the danger-packed Goliath wilderness.

But I realized there was no reason to worry. My fate was out of my hands, for the moment. I had to take what came, and be ready to adapt.

The cloud whale closed its eyes and slept, floating steadily above the clouds. I too couldn’t resist the pull. After a big yawn, I reclined on the whale’s back and slept.

I awoke the next day to find the rain clouds dispersing. We floated through a bright, clear sky. The wilderness below us had transitioned into forests. Goliath’s plant-life was more luxurious than Earth’s—even the colors were more splendid. The cloud whale had been flying all night, and seemingly weary, began to descend. Its massive body swept over forest groves, breaking off branches and startling animals. At last we landed beside a river.

This river was too narrow for the whale’s body. The massive creature couldn’t submerge itself, but used its tumor-like sacks to absorb water, meanwhile issuing a mournful wail.

Its voice was brimming with pain. I stood and patrolled the creature’s back, examining the festering wounds. The maggot-like larvae had multiplied. If it weren’t for my breather mask, I would certainly have smelled the vomit-inducing rot.

I used my steel weapon to dig the maggots out of the wounds, and to cut away rotten flesh. This was nauseating work. The worms were flesh-colored and fat, eyeless but many-legged—like a fat mix of tapeworm and centipede. Normally I would have avoided such vile creatures, but now, on this strange world, in this hopeless situation, the cloud whale was my only chance.

After I’d cleaned its wounds, the animal stopped moaning, but continued to whimper and puff and blow. I was exhausted and covered in sweat, and starving. I had no ration packs left, and I couldn’t drink the river water. Utterly spent, I laid down and tried to catch my breath.

The cloud whale took flight again, this time with far less spirit. Fly on, I thought dazedly. Fly me back to Earth. Bring Frond home.

As we flew through the day and into the night, I lay unmoving, lost in a stupor. At times my eyes were open. I watched the bright sky darken, then brighten again. Dehydration and hunger were taking their toll on me. I was used up, resigned to fate.

If it hadn’t been for a peal of whale-song, I fear I might never have come to my senses.

I reluctantly opened my eyes, pushed myself up, saw a dozen or more small cloud whales flying alongside mine. I had no idea when they’d arrived. They flocked around and beneath my whale, chirping and hooting, not at all mournful-sounding, but vigorous and resounding, their calls spreading far between heaven and earth.

Judging by their size, they seemed to be juveniles. They’d probably followed their mother along the Golden Shipping Belt, traveling amid the brilliance of stars and moons. But after reaching the Golden Sea, they had not yet matured, and their mother was harvested. All they could do was cry out as they cruised the sea of clouds. This was dangerous. If they had encountered a whaling ship, the only possible outcome would have been death.

Luckily, they’d come across us instead.

My cloud whale’s spirits seemed to lift: it gave a sort of whinny in response to the calves. During my two days with this massive creature, this was the first vocalization I’d heard that seemed to express a warm feeling.

The calves erupted with whale-song, one after another, darting about excitedly. I noticed that no matter how they flew and gamboled, they never went higher than my position on the adult whale’s back.

“Hey, Big Grey, I can’t tell.” I tapped on my whale’s head, and fancied I saw a smile in its eyes. “Were you once as spirited as these little ones?”

After that came out of my mouth I sat there, stupefied. Had I just given this creature a name?

The first time we met, I named her Frond in my heart. I don’t know why. Perhaps it was the lakeside willow leaves swaying around us. Perhaps I foresaw that someday, far away, she would fall like an autumn leaf toward her doom.

But it turned out she didn’t appreciate being so casually named. Naming was an important task to entrust to someone, she explained. It meant identifying the unique attribute that defined someone. It was a big responsibility.

Later, when she lived with me, she gave names to all my plants, appliances, and furniture. My computer became Square Squared, the bookcase Professor Verbose, the washing machine Roll On, the bedroom door Little Shady, the toilet Mr. Imperfect, the sofa Longfoot. After naming everything, she turned to me and said, “Your name is Azuki Bean, because you can’t get enough of them. Now that I’ve named everything here, it’s all mine. Relax, I take responsibility for all of you. I’ll always take care of you.”

But later, when the cloud whale research program on Goliath was recruiting, she signed up without a second thought. She left hastily, not even saying goodbye to her Square Squared, Professor Verbose, Roll On, Mr. Imperfect, and Longfoot.

I put the urn to my ear, heard a faint echo of blowing wind. I returned to observing the whale calves.

Cloud whales were white, like the clouds they were named for, but upon careful examination one might discover variations. With nothing else to do, I began to name the whales around me. One had long pectoral fins, so I named it Wild Goose. A particularly fast one became Flicker. The one with the short flukes became Little Nubs.

A wretched hoot interrupted my reveries.

Little Nubs had been struck by an artillery shell, but the shell hadn’t detonated. Instead, it had disgorged dozens of electrodes, which fastened all over the calf’s back. A wire trailed from the back of the shell into a cloud bank.

The clouds parted to reveal a Castle airship, Gale Force Three grade.

An immense drumming sound came from the vessel, the voice of a high voltage transfusion. Little Nubs shivered from head to flukes, ceased its miserable keening. Rendered unconscious by the current, it floated aimlessly through the sky. Two Ghost-Four ships sallied forth from the Castle, bristling with hypodermic harpoons. Two of these launched, and stabbed into Little Nubs’ limp body. High-pressure pumps issued a gurgling sound. Cloud whale blood began to flow, through the tubing attached to the harpoons and into the ships.    

The pumps would only need half an hour to drain Little Nubs dry. In the scheme of things, a single cloud whale didn’t have much F938-rich blood. And draining a whale also meant removing it from the sky. While draining the life from these creatures, humanity was also taking away their spirit, that which made them essentially what they were: their ability to fly.

Extreme pain forced Little Nubs to regain consciousness, but the voltage still rendered most of its body paralyzed. It couldn’t struggle free. It pumped its little flukes, whined pitifully, seeming to sing its own elegy.

“Stop it!” I screamed, but my voice was lost in the wind. All I could do was stomp on Big Grey’s back and shout hoarsely, “Why aren’t you moving? Fly!”

The juveniles cried out as they scattered to the four winds. But the Gale Force Three vessel seemed to lay eggs, issuing dozens of smaller ships, an orderly division of labor, and more than enough to hunt down each whale. Judging by the familiar make of the ships, all were specialized poachers. I was afraid that none of the whales would escape.

Big Grey’s eyes began to change, their shade darkening. It issued a deafening cry. The calves seemed to hear, were guided by the adult’s voice. They rallied to Big Grey, who suddenly and precipitously dove. The calves followed.

This caught me off guard. I failed to get a firm hold, and I tumbled off Big Grey’s back. The wind howled in my ears. This time I knew I was done for. I held onto the urn and shut my eyes, but the bone-crushing death I expected didn’t come.

I plunged into warm seawater. I was in the Golden Sea. Big Grey had flown out of the wilderness and come very far, the sea its unwavering goal. Just like mine was to return with Frond to Earth.

Big Grey and the calves plunged into the ocean, quickly vanishing into the depths, leaving behind nothing but whirlpools. Big Grey’s whirlpool nearly sucked me down. Kicking my legs, I barely stayed on the surface. The watery waste extended to the horizon, barren except for surreal tubing hung between sea and sky. These were extracting seawater for high-orbiting space stations.

The surface already showed no trace of the whales, to my relief.

The Ghost-Four ships descended in steep arcs, sweeping low over the ocean. I cried out as one passed near me, and it came about and braked. After I promised the pilot a thousand Union scrip, he extended the ship’s exploration claw and lifted me out of the water.

He was alone in the cabin. He gave me a new protective suit, a few bottles of water, and a chunk of hardtack. While I wolfed down the bread, this tall, scar-faced man looked me up and down. “Brother, how did you end up alone on the sea? Did your ship crash?”

I gulped down water and nodded.

“You’re damn lucky we were around. Just now we were hunting a pod of cloud whales. We nearly had the bastards too.” He shook his head. “But the leader of this pod was Ghost Eyes. And not catching that one is normal.”

“Ghost Eyes?” I asked, putting down my water.

“Its eyes turn black, just like they’re filling with black ink. This beast is well known among us poachers. We kill cloud whales, and it kills us. Ferocious bastard. Blade-class ships it just chomps and swallows up. As for Ghost-class ships, it has smashed a dozen or more to pieces. People say it even knocked a Gale Force out of the sky. The black-market bounty on it has reached a million Union scrip.”

“What’s its grudge against you guys?”

“They say it used to be the leader of a pod, brought them along the Golden Belt, entering the Golden Sea, the whole thing. The first time they came out to fly, they were discovered by some of us.” He smiled enviously. “Think of the profit! Fifty or more cloud whales! They were drawing blood day and night. At last they didn’t have enough homeostatic barrels. They were pouring blood directly into ship holds, up to men’s thighs. Later, when they sold, they took off their trousers, because even the blood congealed on them was worth a few scrip.” His malevolent grin twisted the knife scar on his face. “At that time only Ghost Eyes escaped. Its progeny and companions were killed, so it began to retaliate. Between you and me, I was scared shitless just now. And I saw something strange on its back, at one point, when I got close. Did you happen to catch a glimpse?”

I shook my head, continued to gnaw on the hardtack. A voice issued from the communications module: “Knife Smile, what the hell are you doing down there? Get moving.”

He winked at me and put a silencing finger to his lips. “How are things up there?”

“We can’t get a fix on that pod. Luckily we snagged one of them. Once we’ve drained it we’ll head back to the Citadel for a rest. Been runnin’ all night. We’re tired to death.”

“Stay frosty and get every last drop,” Knife Smile said, then turned to a control panel and initiated pre-flight.

My stomach somewhat appeased, mouth no longer dry and rough, I hugged the urn tightly. Its hard ridges and corners pressed into my stomach. I took a deep breath, walked up behind Knife Smile, and brought the urn down on the back of his head.

He toppled without so much as a whimper.

I placed the urn on the console and said, “Frond, forgive me.”

I found clues and inklings on her social media page.

At one point she hadn’t updated for three days. I incessantly refreshed the page, starting to feel uneasy. I fretted, couldn’t let it go, finally had to leave a message.

But it was Michael who replied. I checked out his page and saw many photos of he and Frond together. Her new boyfriend, then. He invited me to a video chat. I accepted after some hesitation.

“Hello,” he said. “You must be Azuki Bean. Frond talked about you often.”

He had called her Frond. I burned with illogical rage, but on second thought, surely Frond had been using the name of her own volition. Lightyears away, she was still using the name I’d given her. She hadn’t forgotten me. Welling with joy, I asked, “So what about Frond? Where is she?”

“Frond,” he said. “She’s dead.”

I struggled for words and finally managed a “What?”

“She died three days ago.”

“What do you mean? That’s impossible!”

Michael stood inside the chat frame, silently watching me. His expression was both cold and sad. I felt a dark tide rolling over me. He wasn’t joking, but I refused to believe. After a long silence, I opened my mouth, but couldn’t find my voice. I beat my chest until words came out: “Frond is dead?”

“Yes.”

That affirmation twisted in my brain like a knife. Frond was dead. A volcanic eruption, thick smoke blotting out the sun. Frond was dead. An earthquake sneak-attacking a city, mansions and towers toppling like a child’s building blocks. Frond was dead. An asteroid from some remote part of the cosmos striking Earth, a shockwave engulfing the globe, toppling mountains and overturning seas.

I sat down on the floor.

Michael said she’d died while rescuing a cloud whale. After some routine observation work in a rural area, she was returning to Research Retreat Valley when she discovered a pod of ground-stranded cloud whales. Seven or eight calves surrounded a titanic cow, presumably the mother. The cow had been severely injured. Her underbelly was savaged, torn open and bleeding profusely, dying the mountain rocks gold. She was trying to take off, but she’d lost too much blood. Every time she managed to rise a few meters, she immediately crashed back down. The calves surrounding her whined plaintively.

Frond immediately contacted the Valley and demanded assistance, but the cow was already on the verge of death. She wouldn’t last the two hours it would take for the team to arrive. Frond burned with anxiety. She finally resolved to haul the cow to a river a kilometer away.

Securing the cow wasn’t complicated. Frond took advantage of the creature’s futile attempts to lift off, casting three load-bearing belts beneath her. She was belted about the head, middle, and tail by the time she’d spent the last of her strength. She lay there quietly, unable to struggle as the belts tightened. But there was still a problem: Frond’s research vehicle was lightweight. It was probably too small to tow the massive two-hundred-ton cloud whale.

The lamenting cries of the calves spurred Frond on. Despite Michael’s cautioning voice in the communicator, she opened up her anti-grav engine to maximum power. Rocking and swaying, she hoisted the cow into the air and flew toward the river. The calves ceased their keening and timidly followed.

Frond piloted carefully, giving that short kilometer a half hour. When they were above the river, Frond released the load-bearing belts, and the cloud whale dropped into the river. This artery fed into the Golden Sea. Its waters contained F937.

That’s when things went wrong.

The overloaded anti-grav engine rapidly heated up, fusing already-decrepit circuits. The ship reverberated with cough-like death pangs, and suddenly plunged into the river. The vehicle filled with sparks and flaring electrical plasma. Frond didn’t have time to free herself as river water flooded the cabin.

By the time she was dragged out of the water, she was already white, ice-cold, and not breathing.

“It was my fault,” Michael said. “If I had spoken more forcefully, perhaps she would’ve listened to me, and let the whale be. But I thought maybe she could pull it off. Although it was well beyond the design specs of her vehicle, none of us foresaw what happened with the engine.”

I wasn’t really hearing him anymore. I’d gone numb. Suddenly I remembered what Frond had said to me when she left. I struggled to stand up. “What have you done with her?”

“What do you mean?” Michael said, choking. “She’s dead.”

“Her remains.”

“We’ve had her cremated. We’ll bury her ashes on the side of the valley opposite the institute.”

“No,” I said. “I want to bring her home.”

Michael was nonplussed. “According to Union law, on Goliath—”

“To hell with the Union. It’s what she wanted, if she died out there among the stars. I’m bringing her ashes back to Earth, and burying her beside our willow tree.”

My fanaticism scared Michael. He thought about it for a bit, but finally agreed. After all, I’d been with her the longest. Michael had been her last love, but I had to carry out her final wish.

“I don’t have time to bring her to Earth,” Michael said apologetically. “Besides, it’s illegal.”

“I’ll come get her myself.”

It would be my first time traveling into the depths of the cosmos. My fear of flying caused me physical torment, but thinking of Frond resting in a cold urn, I knew I would have to confront my fear. I had to bring her back, even if it meant crossing a sea of stars.

“What happened to those whales?” I asked.

“We found them about a hundred miles from the Golden Sea. They’d been bled dry by poachers.”

I had never understood why Frond loved cloud whales so much. But now, after flying on Big Grey’s back for so long, I began to see. These animals embodied her spirit:

From their breeding grounds in the seawater of Xorchin, migrating the vast length of the Golden Shipping Belt, finally plunging into the Golden Sea—this was the life of cloud whales. They began in a sea and ended in the clouds. They threw off the shackles of gravity, their only companions wind and starlight. They were unlikely to ever touch dry land. This life had captivated Frond. She had to leave me, and having endured the hardships of her long journey, arrive here on Goliath, following the cloud whales.

Perhaps she had never really loved me, or Michael. But she’d truly loved the unbridled, soaring cloud whales.

I realized that Frond’s wish to be brought home had been for my comfort, not hers. As far as she was concerned, boarding that ship bound for Goliath hadn’t been a departure.

She’d been homeward bound.

“Knife Smile, why the fuck are you dawdling?” The voice from the communication module was impatient. I stared at the console.

I had helped design the Frontier Development Company’s ship operating systems. I knew that voice-activated control required voice verification—but gestural control didn’t. I thrust my hand into the console’s panoramic projection, shifting it, and the ship obediently turned, and began to ascend.

Little Nubs was still being drained up there. Its mournful calls were weakening. It had at most ten minutes before it was completely drained, at which point it would plummet into the sea and become a floating corpse.

“Hang on,” I whispered, powering up the engine. I stuck my right palm into the image, moved it in a U-shaped trajectory, and returned it to my chest.

The ship kept rigorous pace with this movement. I cut through Little Nubs’ right-hand exsanguination tube like a sword, passed by the calf’s head, and came back around to cut off the left tube. The blood flow to the ships stopped, and now blood sprayed into the sky, was scattered and diluted by the wind until it resembled autumn leaves.

Little Nubs whistled sharply, pumped its flukes, and dove for the sea. The two ships that had been draining the calf immediately gave chase. I moved to intercept, but they evaded me. This delay gave Little Nubs the time it needed. It was bound for the vast Golden Sea, the warm waters of which could rejuvenate the calf’s blood, and heal its wounds.

Eventually it would be able to fly again.

“Knife Smile, are you fucking crazy?”

“Motherfucker, you almost killed me just now!”

“What the fuck? Respond!”

The communication module reverberated with clamoring voices, some full of doubt and distrust, others damning and cursing Knife Smile. I looked through a porthole. The dark of night still predominated, but dawn was brewing, the first weak rays of day lighting the horizon.

The Gale Force ship slowly descended, halting some thirty meters from me. It seemed like an ancient fortress hanging there, impregnable. In the pre-dawn gloom it cast an even darker shadow that enveloped me. Ghost-class ships were scattered about it in chaotic profusion.

The bastards. I gently caressed the urn, watching the poachers array themselves like a battle group.

Somebody with a low voice cleared his throat, and all chatter vanished. There were a few moments of silence. “Knife Smile, you have ten seconds. If you don’t respond, we’ll recover your ship by force.”

The hand against the urn felt like it was burning. Frond, you’re with me, aren’t you?

“Ten,” the poacher warlord began to count.

It was still dark outside. I squinted at the still-weak vanguard rays of dawn, and they seemed ground down and broken by the darkness. When would the day finally burst forth?

“ . . . seven, six, five . . . ” the voice counted.

The horizon was aglow, the dark not so concentrated as before, the heavens turning a dark umber blue.

“ . . . three, two—” The voice suddenly paused. Sounding flustered, he went on: “Dammit! What is that?”

“Cloud whales?” somebody stammered.

“Impossible!” said another bewildered poacher. “How could there be so many?”

“It really is cloud whales! God!”

I brought my ship about. When I beheld the scene, my tears began to flow. “Frond, you really should be here to see this.” I pressed the urn close to the porthole.

Countless whales hovered before us, several hundred at least, perhaps more than a thousand, big and small, high and low. Big Grey was in front, but there were quite a few larger than it. They floated silently in the sky, facing off against the thieving humans and their ships. The dawn finally broke, escaping the horizon, skewering the darkness like a sword. The golden radiance spread across the bodies of the cloud whales, from flukes to heads, seeming to deck them in golden armor.

Big Grey opened its mouth and roared. The other cloud whales followed suit. The deafening chorus made the surface of the Golden Sea tremble, conjuring waves and whitecaps. The night was broken, repelled. I covered my ears, weeping with joy.

Even the fortress-like Gale Force warship, faced with such an enemy, had no sure chance of success. The poachers slowly retreated. After they’d gone a safe distance, they turned, and spouting ion beam thrust, quickly vanished into the distance.

Only I remained, hanging there above the sea.

Big Grey flew under my ship, buzzing with a low-frequency hum. I put on a spacesuit and jumped out, and Big Grey caught me on its back. It gave a long cry, suddenly accelerating. The other cloud whales followed. We charged east toward the two risen suns.

The long night had passed, and day was waxing. The magnificent dawn gleamed on the sea, delineating waves as they came together and parted. When the suns got a bit higher, they seemed to melt into one. The light was fierce. I opened the urn.

“Frond,” I said, “I think I can go on alone. Thanks for accompanying me this far.”

I upended the urn, and bone ash blew across the sky like a white mist.

Frond, fly! Fly away and never land!

Seeming to hear this silent call, a morning wind whipped up, intense, screaming. The ash, which had been descending, was raised up and scattered. It seemed to vanish. At that moment, my Frond was the morning wind, the suns, the Golden Sea’s limitless waves. She had at last become one with this world.

Originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, April 2017.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

A Que was born in 1990 in Hubei province, and now lives in Beijing. His work is regularly published in top magazines like Science Fiction World. He has won both Chinese Nebula and Galaxy Awards for his short fiction. His collection Travel With My Dear Android was published in 2015.

Human Error

Jay Lake

Lappet worked the mineral vein by hand. There were machines, of course, but they weren’t always suitable. This was a narrow, rotten course of pyrochlore, loaded with niobium and tantalum. It corkscrewed through the asteroid like a drunk on a crotch rocket. Automated equipment didn’t work well with too many irregular vector changes. A rockhead with a hot tip and a trowel, on the other hand, could follow it just fine.

She didn’t mind, really. Outside work kept her away from the habitat. Ever since Malibu died, Alain had been insufferable. Tanielu had been a shit from the beginning of the tour. Being rock boss had gone to his head.

The mining crews didn’t try to bring in bulk ores—siderophilic chunks of mantle, for example. Those were tagged with screamer beacons and left for the grab-and-drop operators that cruised the Belt on their own long, slow schedules. Their job was to locate and harvest the rare minerals, valuable material in small quantities that didn’t show up well on remote scans or fast sensor sweeps. Any chunk of rock with something else inside it had a chance of being important.

This pyrochlore was the fabled “something else.” The loose vein was shifting again, trending into the third octant from local-z orientation. Time to cut another length of access tunnel. She clipped her hot tip and her trowel to the capture bag and carefully worked them down her back tunnel to the closest void. Lappet’s handheld rock burner was stowed there.

Their rock, (217496) 2078 HJ3, was a chunky mass of carbonatite—crustal material, an unusual find with a high potential for rare earths and a number of scarce metals. They’d found a few scattered caltrops in some of the surface crevices, also a good sign. In addition, the asteroid had several naturally occurring voids, which was also unusual. Out in the Belt, rocks without good structural integrity tended to become smaller rocks.

Kind of like what happens to people, she thought. Alain was flying apart. Tanielu had been nothing but a monobloc of shitheadedness.

Lappet wondered what that theory meant for her.

The good thing about the voids was she didn’t have to back all the way up the tunnel every time she needed an equipment change. The alternative was to burn out a stowage cave, but the company strongly discouraged that. Ceres Mineral Resources took the view that extracting bubbles of hot rock from their precious real estate was a health and safety risk. More to the point, they were afraid of slagging something of material value.

Rockheads such as Lappet Ugarte were not considered to have significant material value.

She was still just as happy to be down here by herself. If she’d been running one of the remotely operated burners, she’d be back in the hab sharing oxygen with a couple of very difficult men.

Lappet shifted the handheld burner back up her access tunnel. It was a heavy beast, massing over 100 kilograms. Tiny reaction jets positioned and stabilized the equipment when it was running, but she wasn’t supposed to relocate it while there was any power to the systems. She’d seen a couple of burner accidents early on. That was one safety precaution almost everyone bought into.

She aimed the burner roughly along her desired line of cut. There was an imager mounted to the handlebars to check the working path for voids, insertions, or boundaries in the rock matter itself.

The imager caused the handlebars to vibrate slightly. Her faceplate offered a data feed, but Lappet concentrated on the unit’s built-in display. An even distribution on radargram would mean a clean cut. Anything else would mean wrestling the damned burner back down to the last void and going in by hand. She wouldn’t even use the hot tip if there were another void ahead. It would be all HERO—hand extraction of rubble overhang. The problem with voids was that they might contain gas. Cutting into one with a handheld burner carried a potential for more excitement than any rockhead wanted to meet on an outside shift.

The radargram showed a substantial void, with a metallic inclusion to boot. “Damn,” hissed Lappet. She’d be half her shift cutting into that one the hard way. On the other hand, she could bring up all her stowage once she’d opened up the space.

Her earbud whined. “Hard vac three, do you need assistance?” It was Tanielu. He must have been monitoring her audio feed.

Tanielu could be rough and ready whenever it pleased him to be, but when it came to Lappet he was nothing but by-the-book, all the time. She had enough infraction notices from him to fill a kit bag by way of proof.

“Negative, rock control,” Lappet said.

“Then cut the chatter. Rock control out.”

“Right. Hard vac three out.” You anal purge valve, she mouthed into her faceplate. Though there was almost certainly a code for that buried somewhere in the company man pages, her saying it out loud wouldn’t have been so much by the book.

There was no helping what lay before her. Lappet shifted the burner back down her access tunnel, then set to work the old fashioned way.

There was a reason rockheads still called themselves miners, even out here in the Deep Dark amid their cocoons of remote operating controls and life support and company regulations. In the end, it somehow always came down to shovels and picks.

Lappet labored three hours in silence punctuated only by the ragged sound of her own breathing. The carbonatite was fairly soft—it broke easily and she could push it back by hand. The trick in such a small tunnel was removing the spoil with a timing that balanced between efficiency of effort and not blocking herself in.

All in a shift’s work.

Flexors and tensors in the fabric of her skinsuit braced against her muscles so she could move in the asteroid’s microgravity. The tools seemed to be extensions of her arms—dagger sharp fingers and shovel-bladed hands. It was work, in the purest sense, combining the physical strain of gym time back in one of the rock ports and the thoughtful process of setting her next strike, pulling her next load.

Based on her reading of the radargram, now cached in her faceplate’s processors for reference, Lappet needed to remove less than three steres of rock to open her tunnel into the void. Her dig plan was to work the full two meters of access tunnel, rather than open an exploratory shaft. She would only have bothered with that if she’d thought there was any serious chance of a gas outflow. The two other voids she’d opened so far following the pyrochlore run had been vacuum.

The metallic inclusion was more on her mind. The signature didn’t make a lot of sense—too dense and small to be an ore vein. She assumed it was a nodule that had gotten caught in the original lava flows that laid down this carbonatite, back when the rocks were still part of planet Marduk.

Sometimes she wondered if they remembered those days, with slow silicate thoughts. Did rocks know regret?

“Lappet.”

It took her a moment to realize she was hearing Alain’s voice in her earbuds.

“Busy here, rock control,” Lappet said, dismissing her fantasies of thinking rocks. She was close to breaking in. Dust fogged her lights. She needed to run a sweeper soon before her sight lines were too occluded.

“Tanielu’s asleep.” Alain sounded dreamy, unfocused.

She leaned against the shaft of her Robbins shovel and let her heart rate settle. The slight plucking sensation of the skinsuit wicking away her sweat was pleasant. “Alain, maybe you need to sleep, too.”

“You’ve been out a long time.” There was definitely a sing-song quality to his voice. “Come home before I lock the door and turn out the lights.”

That was a threat. “Alain . . . ” Damn Malibu for getting himself killed. Who could have known his love was the lock that kept Alain’s head-case tendencies shut safely away?

Well, the Ceres Mineral Resources psych group, for one.

Lappet thought for a few moments. He couldn’t lock her out, not literally. All airlocks opened from the outside with a purely mechanical by-pass. Rescue was more important than piracy. Even to rock pirates. She was suited up for vac now, so whatever turning out the lights meant to Alain, it wouldn’t affect her immediately. Unless he dumped their habitat’s life support or purged its fuel cells, there wasn’t much she couldn’t readily recover from.

So it wasn’t a threat, just an annoyance. At least to her. Some stir of conscience troubled Lappet. “Alain, can I talk to Tanielu?”

“My name is rock control, sweetie.”

“In that case, my name is hard vac three.” She toggled the haptics in her left glove and made Tanielu’s handsign. The habitat’s central systems would send him an alarm. He’d be pissed at her for waking him up, but whatever color Alain’s sky was at the moment, it wasn’t the honest black of the Deep Dark. Someone needed to pay attention.

Alain’s voice was jittery now. Had he been crying? “Well, ok. But come back soon. I miss you.”

“Hard vac three out,” Lappet said brusquely. Alain was on another Malibu jag. Stupid luck was the leading cause of mortality among rockheads. Human error ran a close second. The company classed those two together, though any miner who ever shipped out of a rock port could swear to the power of luck both good and bad. Psych-outs were the third leading cause, her conscience whispered.

She was out here, Alain was in there, and Tanielu could handle him.

As long as her workflow was already interrupted, Lappet ran the sweeper. When she’d cleared much of the dust she resumed digging her face. The pyrochlore awaited.

Lappet broke into the void a few minutes later. There was a swirl in the dust. Possibly some small amount of gas had been trapped within. More likely it was volatiles condensing in the energy input of her lights.

She worked the opening until it was large enough to peer through. This void looked just like the others had—a relatively smooth-walled bubble in the original igneous flow. There was a dark patch on the far wall, over a meter away from her breakthrough. She couldn’t see how high up the void went.

There were probes for this sort of measurement, but this was mining, not science. She meant to complete the process of extending her digging. Lappet used her number three recoilless pick to widen the opening until it was large enough to serve as the next frame of her tunnel. She took another run with the sweeper, then stepped inside.

The void ran almost three meters along her current y-axis, and was slightly over two meters across. Lappet aimed her lights upward. A darker line across the nominal ceiling showed the transit of the pyrochlore vein. She then looked at the patch on the opposite wall.

It was metal. A mass of metal about the size of a small child, with planed and curved surfaces and a regularity of form, which began to frighten her.

Worked metal, inside an asteroid. With the same strange gray-green sheen of the caltrops which the rockheads found from time to time in sheltered spots—cracks, caves, and voids—all around the Belt. Everyone said those were crystals of some kind.

This was undeniably a made thing.

“Rock control,” she whispered. “We have a problem.”

Lappet backed out slowly, careful not to touch anything else inside the void, or indeed the tunnel. One by one she turned out her lights.

The habitat was staked to one flank of (217496) 2078 HJ3. It was a large inflatable module, designed to be stowed for long-haul transport, or simply towed from location to location. In place, it was a big floppy tent with three outstretched arms. Their team’s rockhopper was parked nearby, also staked down to the larger mass of the asteroid. The ship provided power and comm support for the habitat.

Lappet warily approached the hatch at the end of one arm. The pinlights for the controls were live. At least Alain hadn’t dumped the power, then. From the readouts it actually looked like all systems were hot, which was odd, too. Had they been testing something? He hadn’t dumped the life support either, otherwise there would be frost everywhere outside the habitat. The big orange tent wouldn’t have the same whaleback curve of atmospheric pressure within, either.

Maybe Tanielu had responded to her alarm. For the first time since Malibu had died, Lappet found herself concerned about the fate of her fellow rockheads.

She didn’t want to face what was down in the void alone.

Her code opened the hatch. Lappet was mildly surprised. There were two skinsuits on the other side of the airlock, their names stenciled on their chests and helmets—Tanielu and Alain. Malibu’s had been lost with its owner, the suit bracket standing as empty as a promise ever since.

No one had gone for a walk in her absence. Or if they had, they hadn’t gotten far.

Lappet stripped down and wiped her skin clear of the gunk that always accumulated during a shift outside. She hated the sticky feeling, and the fug like an old suit liner. Once clean, she tugged her blue yukata over her shoulders, belted it closed, and keyed her way onward into the habitat’s core.

Inside it smelled of people, ozone, and steam. Tanielu and Alain were at the table, drinking tea. A third sippie was clipped down waiting for her.

“Hey, Lappet,” Alain said. He was small, dark-skinned, grandparents from Haiti. Tanielu, a first-generation Samoan easily twice Alain’s size, nodded. He looked exhausted.

But then he should, she thought. Tanielu’d had less than three hours of rack time between their last comm chatter and when she’d sent him the alarm. “You boys alright?”

“Might be,” growled Tanielu. “Depends on your problem.”

She took her seat. “If you were so worried about me, why didn’t you ask?”

“Didn’t hear no emergency declared.”

Alain nodded agreement.

Something was going on here. Lappet could feel it. The two of them were very nearly cross-eyed with tension. This was more than Alain’s ongoing odyssey of disintegration.

The thought came in a rush of paranoid fear: They knew what she’d found.

Her quiet conscience whispered back: of course they did. Everything any of them did on company time, with company equipment, was metered and miked and imaged. Just because she didn’t snoop the boys’ suit cams or instrument readings when they were out in hard vacuum didn’t mean they weren’t snooping her. As rock boss, it was practically Tanielu’s job to spy.

“No,” she said slowly, aware she’d taken too long to answer. “No emergency declared.” It was tank-switching time. Go for broke. “You know what I found.”

Tanielu answered first. “No, actually we don’t.” He and Alain didn’t even look at each other. A sure sign of collusion.

“Something’s down inside this rock. Something someone made, once.”

“Someone not human, you mean?” There was a catch in Tanielu’s voice.

“Ever read the company man page on artifacts?” Alain asked. His tone was too bright, strangely shiny.

“Mmm . . . no.” Lappet didn’t know anyone who had.

“There’s a standing first-time bounty of one billion tai kong yuan for the discovery of a non-human artifact.”

Fans whirred. A piece of equipment whined faintly. She understood their silence now. One billion TKY was fifty times a miner’s likely lifetime earnings, barring a lucky strike bonus. Whoever could claim that would immediately be very, very wealthy, in that special way that only created more money for lifetimes to come. There were any number of people in the company’s management chain who would be more than pleased to hide three bodies on their way to claim the bounty. Or simply ignore the protests of three lonely, deluded rockheads.

“Do they know yet?” she whispered. Lappet could hardly imagine a worse fate than being bound by wealth to these two. Being dead would be worse, though.

“Your data’s on a batch send,” Tanielu said. “I cut our upstream comm feed right after you found it. So no one knows so far. We’re on an unscheduled maintenance window now as far as the company’s concerned. We’ve got about two more hours before the routine status queries begin.” He leaned forward, clutching his tea sippie close. “If you didn’t know about the money, what the hell scared you so much, Ms. Houston-we-have-a-problem?”

“Just . . . just what it means. What people will think. There was someone else here once. Maybe back when Marduk was a planet and not just an orbiting rockyard.” It baffled Lappet that they didn’t see the gaping, soul-devouring truth. “We are not alone. We aren’t even the first people here in the solar system.” She spread her hands in appeal. “Use your imagination. Think what this means to the human race.”

“It means a billion tai kong yuan,” said Tanielu.

“It means Malibu is still dead,” said Alain. “Unless your aliens can bring him back.”

“It means everything changes,” whispered Lappet.

Tanielu shook his head. “Our lives still aren’t worth a plugged jiǎo. Especially now.”

What else is new, thought Lappet. In that moment she hated them both for being so petty, so worried, so right. “Fine. We send a public broadcast, tell the world what we found.”

“How?” Tanielu again. “Our navcomm systems are completely self-contained. They lock on a company repeater, traffic goes back to Ceres. Unless we go outside and string up wires, we’ve got no way to reach anyone that isn’t within hailing distance.”

That was less than 10,000 kilometers plus or minus, depending on the amount of local dust. No one was that close to them, unless they were running black and cold.

Lappet’s mind scrabbled. “Can we message the guild? Or do a send-to-all?”

“Everything drops into the oversight queue back on Ceres.” Also standard procedure.

Alain stirred. “I say we wipe her data feed and destroy that thing she found.”

“I’ll lose my berth for destroying data!” Lappet was shocked. They were all indentured to the company, but that service could be relatively rewarding—such as being a rockhead—or it might be a lifetime of negative accrual cleaning sludge filters on Ceres.

“You could be dead.” Alain’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe you should try it.”

“Malibu’s death was an acc—”

He came over the table after her, screaming incoherently. Tanielu grabbed at Alain as Lappet jumped back. She moved so quickly her slippers missed their hold and sent her rolling into the air. Tanielu and Alain followed, still wrestling as their combined velocity pushed them past her position on a vector for the upper wall of the habitat module.

Lappet hurled her cup upward to gain downward momentum. It wasn’t much, but she didn’t have far to go. Outside in hard vac she’d have a line gun. In here . . . Inside a habitat module people weren’t supposed to be this stupid.

She made it to the floor as the boys were descending on their rebound from the habitat skin. Her slippers found their plane and gave her back her artificial down. She eyed the arms locker briefly, but escalating the confrontation didn’t seem to be in her interests. Tanielu was far meaner than she was, capable of almost anything. Alain was capable of Houston only knew what, through sheer hopeless desperation.

For a billion tai kong yuan, a whole lot of other people could be killing me as well.

They were right. They were both right. Damn them. She wasn’t smart enough to see a way out of this that didn’t have her taking a hit. The best she could do was minimize the damage.

“Tanielu, wipe the stupid data,” Lappet said as the other two found their footing. “We’re running out of time, and such as it is, that’s our safety valve. I’m going to head back out into hard vac and chisel that thing free. Nothing happens without the artifact, no billion tai kong yuan, no losing it, nothing. If one of us thinks of a way to cash in, fine. We’ll all three be millionaires until long after we’re dead.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “If I decide to fire it into an eccentric solar orbit, Tanielu can give me an infraction notice the size of Bellona-on-Mars. I’ll go back to Ceres and dig sludge, while we all live to be miserable another day.”

“You’re going to throw away a billion tai kong yuan?” asked Alain.

Tanielu turned on him with a fist cocked for a blow which the big man seemed to barely hold back. “Haven’t you been listening, even to yourself?”

“I always listened to M-malibu.” Alain’s voice thickened. “Before Lappet killed him.”

“Dumb luck,” Lappet said, almost the same instant as Tanielu said, “Human error.” His grin was deeply feral.

It was a frayed safety cable, she thought desperately. They’d both been out in hard vac. Lappet had been slipping a bad charge cylinder out of Malibu’s other line gun when the man’s cable snapped. He already had minimal velocity due to the positioning jets of the stone burner in his hands. In Malibu’s panic the burner had flared. Or maybe the switch had stuck—that’s why he was working with it out on the surface in the first place. His suit’s attitude jets fired wildly, sending him into a spin, but they didn’t have nearly enough power to bring him home again. The rockhopper had been cold parked, at the wrong end of a four-hour launch cycle, so Tanielu wasn’t able to scramble after Malibu.

The whole incident grew increasingly muddy in Lappet’s mind. All she knew was that she was holding the line gun the dead man should have had on his belt. When Lappet desperately went to fire it upward in contravention to regs and common sense alike, there was no shot due to the missing charge cylinder.

That was the story Lappet told herself every sleep shift in her dreams, when Malibu came visiting, accompanied by the clicking sound of his suit jets dry-firing after their compressed gas had run out. Sometimes she could hear Alain crying. His sobs became the dead man’s breath, returned to torment Lappet.

They’d listened to Malibu screaming on the comm until his suit had passed out of range. Hearing his lover’s long, slow death had stripped Alain of his sanity.

“I’m suiting up.” Lappet’s throat felt as if it were closing too tight to breathe. “Delete the logs, and keep them turned off until I’m done out there.” Whatever the hell I decide to do.

Outside the vacuum displayed the same knife-edged beauty it had always held for her. The Deep Dark was an eternity of sterile consistency. Lappet followed her safety line around the short, irregular horizon of their rock to her digging. It was blessedly out of sight of the habitat.

Spoil marked the edges of her hole, like some terrestrial rarebit burrow. Despite her fatalistic sense of hurry, Lappet stopped and did her safety checks—life support, power systems, comm. Everything worked. Unlike Malibu, she even had her line gun.

She headed down her twisting tunnel with its gaping vein of harvested pyrochlore. Even through the rock Lappet knew exactly where the artifact was. It took her almost fifteen minutes of very careful movement to reach the last void.

The artifact still sat where she’d left it. She studied what she’d found. It was wedged into a crack in the far side of the void, as if perhaps it had been pushed in from the other direction. Lappet drifted close, the attitude jets in her suit keeping her station while she studied her goal. Not embedded in the rock, so it wasn’t as old as the igneous processes which had formed this chunk of carbonatite.

She reached out her hand. Whatever this was, whoever had made it, this artifact had come through far more time to meet her here than the human race had crossed to send her to this meeting.

It was solid under her touch. There was no squirming, no lighting up, no tiny, toothed alien larvae leaping out. The thing didn’t come loose at her tug, either, but Lappet had expected that. She broke out her 0, 00, and 000 picks and set to work freeing it from the stone.

The bindings of time slipped free one grain of rock after another.

The artifact wasn’t quite as hard to maneuver as the stone burner, though it was damned near that heavy. Forty kilos of mass, at least, which meant at that size it was dense as all get out. She pushed it ahead of her, careful not to knock it against any stony edges and thus leave a betraying trace. Lappet promised herself she would return to the void and use the stone burner to slag the artifact’s resting place.

As she emerged from her hole, something struck her hard on the shoulder. Lappet lost her hold on the safety line and bounced off the spoil pile. She used that momentum to pivot herself around the unwieldy mass of artifact, trying to bring it before her as a shield.

One of the boys was spinning away from her. He had a long-arm wrench in his hands, which he was now flailing to push himself off the surface of their little asteroid as his attitude jets puffed. Lappet twisted her head, trying to spot the name on the suit.

She felt a cold stab of pain. The stencil read Malibu.

Malibu regained control and warped himself along a safety line.

Lappet kicked away from the surface to escape her attacker. It couldn’t be, it wasn’t possible. But the suit.

She looked down. Malibu was firing his line gun into the asteroid, using the kinetic reaction to propel himself upward like a missile.

It can’t be Malibu, her inner voice whispered in answer to her fears. You saw him die.

She tongued her comm as the dead man began to overtake her. “Rock control, where is hard vac four?”

Tanielu’s response was prompt. “In his quarters, hard vac three.”

“Could you . . . ah . . . check that for me?”

Alain’s voice broke in. “I’m right heeeere.”

Lappet didn’t have a weapon. Not that that mattered much. The way things were going, they might as well all kill each other and save the company the trouble. She drew her line gun and fire suit jets to spin along her axis, seeking a good vector to get back out of the fight and think clearly.

She was aiming her shot when Malibu slammed into her. The line gun tumbled out of her hand, into a low orbit around (217496) 2078 HJ3. Malibu’s helmet cracked into hers.

Alain leered through the faceplate. This close, she could see the stencils were just an overlay. She could have smacked him silly for that stupid stunt.

Still, she would be damned before she’d kill more of her own crew.

“You’re going to pay,” he howled over the comm. “I’m dumping you into the Deep Dark.”

“Why?” Lappet shouted, distracted from her moment of reluctant good will by his anger. She tried to shove the artifact at him, but only succeeded in adding to her spin. “So you can go home with this thing and die without ever getting rich!?”

“Blow that piece of crap out the airlock,” he said. “You owe me a life, sweetie.”

Alain swung the long-arm wrench again. The torque expended twisted his body, loosening his grip on Lappet.

She tried to duck. She wasn’t going to kill again, even if he was trying to kill her first. Her helmet drifted downward, close to Alain’s return swing. Lappet caught him with her free hand and tucked herself under the flailing wrench.

That was when she realized they were thirty meters above the surface and moving away from the asteroid somewhat faster than local escape velocity. Neither one of them had their line guns anymore. Their suits’ attitude jets weren’t going to do it. Malibu had shown them that.

Alain thrashed against Lappet as she tried to think. They had spin. She could kick free of him at the appropriate segment of their arc of rotation and use the imparted angular momentum to return to the surface. She might well bounce, but at least she’d have a chance. He’d be off on a permanent trip of his own, safely out of her way.

Or I can release the artifact, she thought.

She’d lose a billion tai kong yuan that way. Pushing Alain and his homicidal rage into the Deep Dark would let her be worth half a billion, instead of a third.

Half a billion she’d never live to cash in.

Alain thumped on her helmet, scrabbling for the purge valve on her oxygen supply.

“Damn you, you stupid bastard,” she screamed. Counting off her degrees of rotation, Lappet let go of the most significant piece of history ever to be touched by human hands.

Lappet hugged the struggling Alain close as the two of them spun toward the surface of (217496) 2078 HJ3. She was afraid of letting go of him too soon.

They slammed into the rock hard enough to crack her teeth together. Lappet was mortally afraid of the bounce. Suit jets firing, she threw out her hands and scrabbled for purchase. There were knobs and cracks and crevices all over this asteroid.

Alain grunted something incoherent. He tugged on her boot, tugging her away even as Lappet’s fingers snagged on a rounded lip of rock. Her body pulled upward, the strain of both their masses stretching at her shoulders. “Stop fighting me, you damned fool!” she screamed.

The tension shifted, and for a moment she thought he’d let go. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Alain’s wrench spinning away. She hit the surface again, rolling over fast, trying to catch a look at him.

He was floating above her, moving much more slowly now. Still, he was leaving, just as the billion tai kong yuan had done.

“No!” Lappet launched herself after him, slowly so as not to overshoot or drag them both into solar orbit, and caught Alain’s arms. His faceplate was fogged—the bastard was crying. Counting the degrees of their rotation, she reached past his helmet and cracked his oxygen purge valve.

He became a little rocket carrying them back down slowly enough to land in one piece.

As Lappet and Alain impacted the surface again, their team’s rockhopper passed overhead. The ship trailed the safety lines and stakes, which had held it in place. That bastard Tanielu must have had the thing warming through pre-launch cycle since she’d first found the artifact.

“A rescue,” she yelled over comm, but Tanielu didn’t bother to answer.

Lappet already knew where he was heading—chasing after the one billion tai kong yuan she’d just launched into solar orbit. Without the rockhopper’s power supply, the habitat’s fuel cells would be good for ten days, maybe two weeks max, before they froze to death amid the cooling precipitate of their own carbon dioxide. All their comm transmission capability was gone too, except for the short range rescue screamers built into the skinsuits.

She rolled over, her elbows and shoulders aching as if the joints had separated. “Well,” she told the rapidly-fading Alain. “Looks like it’s just you, me, and Malibu out here.”

Twelve days later a pair of hardsuits made their way through the lock into the fetid interior of the habitat. Lappet looked down from her hammock along the upper wall. She liked to think that the oxygen was mildly better at the top of the miniscule gravity gradient, and it kept her away from the mold which had taken over the floor.

Alain hung inert next to her. He hadn’t spoken in four days. Of course, neither had she.

A suit speaker crackled in the thick, hard air. “You kids alive?”

“I am,” Lappet croaked.

One of them raised a nozzle. Ah, she thought. Tanielu made it to somewhere useful, and now he’s cleaning up the competition. Her death would be worth 333 million tai kong yuan to him, after all.

A pale cloud hissed out. Moments later she could taste sweet, sweet air.

“Malibu?” It was Alain, moaning.

“He’s righ’ here,” Lappet lied. “Waiting for you.”

Alain sighed and rolled over in his hammock.

The other hardsuit jetted up to her and offered a breathing mask. “Where’s your rockhopper?”

“You ha’n’ hear’ from Ta’ielu?” The words were hard, so very hard.

“Followed your suit screamers in after we showed up in the area to see why Ceres had lost comm from your team. That’s all we know.” She jetted over to Alain’s hammock, but her suit speaker was still perfectly audible. “What the hell happened here?”

She collapsed back in her hammock. Who knew anything now? What story to tell? Her head wasn’t straight, and Alain wasn’t good for anything.

Lappet struggled to speak again. “Human error,” she said. “Tha’s wha’ happen’. Human error.”

Originally published in Interzone, January/February 2010.

About the Author

The late Jay Lake was a highly talented and highly prolific writer who during his tragically short career seems to have managed to sell to nearly every market in the business, appearing with short work in Asimov’s, Interzone, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Aeon, Postscripts, Electric Velocipede, and many other markets, producing enough short fiction to fill five different collections: Greetings from Lake Wu, Green Grow the Rushes-Oh, American Sorrows, Dogs in the Moonlight, The Sky That Wraps, and, most recently, the posthumously released Last Plane from Heaven. Lake was also an acclaimed and prolific novelist, whose novels were Rocket Science, Trial of Flowers, Mainspring, Escapement, Green, Endurance, The Madness of Flowers, Pinon, and Kalimpura, as well as four chapbook novellas, Death of a Starship, The Baby Killers, The Specific Gravity of Grief, and Love in the Time of Metal and Flesh. He was the co-editor, with Deborah Layne, of the six-volume Polyphony anthology series, and also edited the anthologies All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, with David Moles, Other Earths, with Nick Gevers, and Spicy Slipstream Stories, with Nick Mamatas. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2004. Lake died in 2014.

The Waiting Stars

Aliette de Bodard

The derelict ship ward was in an isolated section of Outsider space, one of the numerous spots left blank on interstellar maps, no more or no less tantalizing than its neighboring quadrants. To most people, it would be just that: a boring part of a long journey to be avoided—skipped over by Mind-ships as they cut through deep space, passed around at low speeds by Outsider ships while their passengers slept in their hibernation cradles.

Only if anyone got closer would they see the hulking masses of ships: the glint of starlight on metal, the sharp, pristine beauty of their hulls, even though they all lay quiescent and crippled, forever unable to move—living corpses kept as a reminder of how far they had fallen; the Outsiders’ brash statement of their military might, a reminder that their weapons held the means to fell any Mind-ships they chose to hound.

On the sensors of The Cinnabar Mansions, the ships all appeared small and diminished, like toy models or avatars—things Lan Nhen could have held in the palm of her hand and just as easily crushed. As the sensors’ line of sight moved—catching ship after ship in their field of view, wreck after wreck, indistinct masses of burned and twisted metal, of ripped-out engines, of shattered life pods and crushed shuttles—Lan Nhen felt as if an icy fist were squeezing her heart into shards. To think of the Minds within—dead or crippled, forever unable to move . . .

“She’s not there,” she said, as more and more ships appeared on the screen in front of her, a mass of corpses that all threatened to overwhelm her with sorrow and grief and anger.

“Be patient, child,” The Cinnabar Mansions said. The Mind’s voice was amused, as it always was—after all, she’d lived for five centuries, and would outlive Lan Nhen and Lan Nhen’s own children by so many years that the pronoun “child” seemed small and inappropriate to express the vast gulf of generations between them. “We already knew it was going to take time.”

“She was supposed to be on the outskirts of the wards,” Lan Nhen said, biting her lip. She had to be, or the rescue mission was going to be infinitely more complicated. “According to Cuc . . . ”

“Your cousin knows what she’s talking about,” The Cinnabar Mansions said.

“I guess.” Lan Nhen wished Cuc was there with them, and not sleeping in her cabin as peacefully as a baby—but The Cinnabar Mansions had pointed out Cuc needed to be rested for what lay ahead; and Lan Nhen had given in, vastly outranked. Still, Cuc was reliable, for narrow definitions of the term—as long as anything didn’t involve social skills, or deft negotiation. For technical information, though, she didn’t have an equal within the family; and her network of contacts extended deep within Outsider space. That was how they’d found out about the ward in the first place . . .

“There.” The sensors beeped, and the view on the screen pulled into enhanced mode on a ship on the edge of the yard which seemed even smaller than the hulking masses of her companions. The Turtle’s Citadel had been from the newer generation of ships, its body more compact and more agile than its predecessors’: designed for flight and maneuvers rather than for transport, more elegant and refined than anything to come out of the Imperial Workshops—unlike the other ships, its prow and hull were decorated, painted with numerous designs from old legends and myths, all the way to the Dai Viet of Old Earth. A single gunshot marred the outside of its hull—a burn mark that had transfixed the painted citadel through one of its towers, going all the way into the heartroom and crippling the Mind that animated the ship.

“That’s her,” Lan Nhen said. “I would know her anywhere.”

The Cinnabar Mansions had the grace not to say anything, though of course she could have matched the design to her vast databases in an eyeblink. “It’s time, then. Shall I extrude a pod?”

Lan Nhen found that her hands had gone slippery with sweat, all of a sudden; and her heart was beating a frantic rhythm within her chest, like temple gongs gone mad. “I guess it’s time, yes.” By any standards, what they were planning was madness. To infiltrate Outsider space, no matter how isolated—to repair a ship, no matter how lightly damaged . . .

Lan Nhen watched The Turtle’s Citadel for a while—watched the curve of the hull, the graceful tilt of the engines, away from the living quarters; the burn mark through the hull like a gunshot through a human chest. On the prow was a smaller painting, all but invisible unless one had good eyes: a single sprig of apricot flowers, signifying the New Year’s good luck—calligraphied on the ship more than thirty years ago by Lan Nhen’s own mother, a parting gift to her great-aunt before the ship left for her last, doomed mission.

Of course, Lan Nhen already knew every detail of that shape by heart, every single bend of the corridors within, every little nook and cranny available outside—from the blueprints, and even before that, before the rescue plan had even been the seed of a thought in her mind—when she’d stood before her ancestral altar, watching the rotating holo of a ship who was also her great-aunt, and wondering how a Mind could ever be brought down, or given up for lost.

Now she was older; old enough to have seen enough things to freeze her blood; old enough to plot her own foolishness, and drag her cousin and her great-great-aunt into it.

Older, certainly. Wiser, perhaps; if they were blessed enough to survive.

There were tales, at the Institution, of what they were—and, in any case, one only had to look at them, at their squatter, darker shapes, at the way their eyes crinkled when they laughed. There were other clues, too: the memories that made Catherine wake up breathless and disoriented, staring at the white walls of the dormitory until the pulsing, writhing images of something she couldn’t quite identify had gone, and the breath of dozens of her dorm-mates had lulled her back to sleep. The craving for odd food like fish sauce and fermented meat. The dim, distant feeling of not fitting in, of being compressed on all sides by a society that made little sense to her.

It should have, though. She’d been taken as a child, like all her schoolmates—saved from the squalor and danger among the savages and brought forward into the light of civilization—of white sterile rooms and bland food, of awkward embraces that always felt too informal. Rescued, Matron always said, her entire face transfigured, the bones of her cheeks made sharply visible through the pallor of her skin. Made safe.

Catherine had asked what she was safe from. They all did, in the beginning—all the girls in the Institution, Johanna and Catherine being the most vehement amongst them.

That was until Matron showed them the vid.

They all sat at their tables, watching the screen in the center of the amphitheater—silent, for once, not jostling or joking among themselves. Even Johanna, who was always first with a biting remark, had said nothing—had sat, transfixed, watching it.

The first picture was a woman who looked like them—smaller and darker-skinned than the Galactics—except that her belly protruded in front of her, huge and swollen like a tumor from some disaster movie. There was a man next to her, his unfocused eyes suggesting that he was checking something on the network through his implants—until the woman grimaced, putting a hand to her belly and calling out to him. His eyes focused in a heartbeat, and fear replaced the blank expression on his face.

There was a split second before the language overlays kicked in—a moment, frozen in time, when the words, the sounds of the syllables put together, sounded achingly familiar to Catherine, like a memory of the childhood she never could quite manage to piece together—there was a brief flash, of New Year’s Eve firecrackers going off in a confined space, of her fear that they would burn her, damage her body’s ability to heal . . . And then the moment was gone like a popped bubble, because the vid changed in the most horrific manner.

The camera was wobbling, rushing along a pulsing corridor—they could all hear the heavy breath of the woman, the whimpering sounds she made like an animal in pain; the soft, encouraging patter of the physician’s words to her.

“She’s coming,” the woman whispered, over and over, and the physician nodded—keeping one hand on her shoulder, squeezing it so hard his own knuckles had turned the color of a muddy moon.

“You have to be strong,” he said. “Hanh, please. Be strong for me. It’s all for the good of the Empire, may it live ten thousand years. Be strong.”

The vid cut away, then—and it was wobbling more and more crazily, its field of view showing erratic bits of a cramped room with scrolling letters on the wall, the host of other attendants with similar expressions of fear on their faces; the woman, lying on a flat surface, crying out in pain—blood splattering out of her with every thrust of her hips—the camera moving, shifting between her legs, the physician’s hands reaching into the darker opening—easing out a sleek, glinting shape, even as the woman screamed again—and blood, more blood running out, rivers of blood she couldn’t possibly have in her body, even as the thing within her pulled free, and it became all too clear that, though it had the bare shape of a baby with an oversized head, it had too many cables and sharp angles to be human . . .

Then a quiet fade-to-black, and the same woman being cleaned up by the physician—the thing—the baby being nowhere to be seen. She stared up at the camera; but her gaze was unfocused, and drool was pearling at the corner of her lips, even as her hands spasmed uncontrollably.

Fade to black again; and the lights came up again, on a room that seemed to have grown infinitely colder.

“This,” Matron said in the growing silence, “is how the Dai Viet birth Minds for their spaceships: by incubating them within the wombs of their women. This is the fate that would have been reserved for all of you. For each of you within this room.” Her gaze raked them all, stopping longer than usual on Catherine and Johanna, the known troublemakers in the class. “This is why we had to take you away, so that you wouldn’t become broodmares for abominations.”

“We,” of course, meant the Board—the religious nuts, as Johanna liked to call them, a redemptionist church with a fortune to throw around, financing the children’s rescues and their education—and who thought every life from humans to insects was sacred (they’d all wondered, of course, where they fitted into the scheme).

After the class had dispersed like a flock of sparrows, Johanna held court in the yard, her eyes bright and feverish. “They faked it. They had to. They came up with some stupid explanation on how to keep us cooped here. I mean, why would anyone still use natural births and not artificial wombs?”

Catherine, still seeing the splatters of blood on the floor, shivered. “Matron said that they wouldn’t. That they thought the birth created a special bond between the Mind and its mother—but that they had to be there, to be awake during the birth.”

“Rubbish.” Johanna shook her head. “As if that’s even remotely plausible. I’m telling you, it has to be fake.”

“It looked real.” Catherine remembered the woman’s screams; the wet sound as the Mind wriggled free from her womb; the fear in the face of all the physicians. “Artificial vids aren’t this . . . messy.” They’d seen the artificial vids: slick, smooth things where the actors were tall and muscular, the actresses pretty and graceful, with only a thin veneer of artificially generated defects to make the entire thing believable. They’d learned to tell them apart from the rest; because it was a survival skill in the Institution, to sort out the lies from the truth.

“I bet they can fake that, too,” Johanna said. “They can fake everything if they feel like it.” But her face belied her words; even she had been shocked. Even she didn’t believe they would have gone that far.

“I don’t think it’s a lie,” Catherine said, finally. “Not this time.”

And she didn’t need to look at the other girls’ faces to know that they believed the same thing as her—even Johanna, for all her belligerence—and to feel in her gut that this changed everything.

Cuc came online when the shuttle pod launched from The Cinnabar Mansions—in the heart-wrenching moment when the gravity of the ship fell away from Lan Nhen, and the cozy darkness of the pod’s cradle was replaced with the distant forms of the derelict ships. “Hey, cousin. Missed me?” Cuc asked.

“As much as I missed a raging fire.” Lan Nhen checked her equipment a last time—the pod was basic and functional, with barely enough space for her to squeeze into the cockpit, and she’d had to stash her various cables and terminals into the nooks and crannies of a structure that hadn’t been meant for more than emergency evacuation. She could have asked The Cinnabar Mansions for a regular transport shuttle, but the pod was smaller and more controllable; and it stood more chances of evading the derelict ward’s defenses.

 “Hahaha,” Cuc said, though she didn’t sound amused. “The family found out what we were doing, by the way.”

“And?” It would have devastated Lan Nhen, a few years ago; now she didn’t much care. She knew she was doing the right thing. No filial daughter would let a member of the family rust away in a foreign cemetery—if she couldn’t rescue her great-aunt, she’d at least bring the body back for a proper funeral.

“They think we’re following one of Great-great-aunt’s crazy plans.”

“Ha,” Lan Nhen snorted. Her hands were dancing on the controls, plotting a trajectory that would get her to The Turtle’s Citadel while leaving her the maximum thrust reserve in case of unexpected maneuvers.

“I’m not the one coming up with crazy plans,” The Cinnabar Mansions pointed out on the comms channel, distractedly. “I leave that to the young. Hang on—” she dropped out of sight. “I have incoming drones, child.”

Of course. It was unlikely the Outsiders would leave their precious war trophies unprotected. “Where?”

A translucent overlay gradually fell over her field of vision through the pod’s windshield; and points lit up all over its surface—a host of fast-moving, small crafts with contextual arrows showing basic kinematics information as well as projected trajectory cones. Lan Nhen repressed a curse. “That many? They really like their wrecked spaceships, don’t they.”

It wasn’t a question, and neither Cuc nor The Cinnabar Mansions bothered to answer. “They’re defense drones patrolling the perimeter. We’ll walk you through,” Cuc said. “Give me just a few moments to link up with Great-great-aunt’s systems . . . ”

Lan Nhen could imagine her cousin, lying half-prone on her bed in the lower decks of The Cinnabar Mansions, her face furrowed in that half-puzzled, half-focused expression that was typical of her thought processes—she’d remain that way for entire minutes, or as long as it took to find a solution. On her windshield, the squad of drones was spreading—coming straight at her from all directions, a dazzling ballet of movement meant to overwhelm her. And they would, if she didn’t move fast enough.

Her fingers hovered over the pod’s controls, before she made her decision and launched into a barrel maneuver away from the nearest incoming cluster. “Cousin, how about hurrying up?”

There was no answer from Cuc. Demons take her, this wasn’t the moment to overthink the problem! Lan Nhen banked sharply, narrowly avoiding a squad of drones, who bypassed her—and then turned around, much quicker than she’d anticipated. Ancestors, they moved fast, much too fast for ion-thrust motors. Cuc was going to have to rethink her trajectory. “Cousin, did you see this?”

“I saw.” Cuc’s voice was distant. “Already taken into account. Given the size of the craft, it was likely they were going to use helicoidal thrusters on those.”

“This is all fascinating—” Lan Nhen wove her way through two more waves of drones, cursing wildly as shots made the pod rock around her—as long as her speed held, she’d be fine . . . She’d be fine . . . “—but you’ll have noticed I don’t really much care about technology, especially not now!”

A thin thread of red appeared on her screen—a trajectory that wove and banked like a frightened fish’s trail—all the way to The Turtle’s Citadel and its clusters of pod-cradles. It looked as though it was headed straight into the heart of the cloud of drones, though that wasn’t the most worrying aspect of it. “Cousin,” Lan Nhen said. “I can’t possibly do this—” The margin of error was null—if she slipped in one of the curves, she’d never regain the kinematics necessary to take the next.

“Only way.” Cuc’s voice was emotionless. “I’ll update as we go, if Great-great-aunt sees an opening. But for the moment . . . ”

Lan Nhen closed her eyes, for a brief moment—turned them towards Heaven, though Heaven was all around her—and whispered a prayer to her ancestors, begging them to watch over her. Then she turned her gaze to the screen, and launched into flight—her hands flying and shifting over the controls, automatically adjusting the pod’s path—dancing into the heart of the drones’ swarm—into them, away from them, weaving an erratic path across the section of space that separated her from The Turtle’s Citadel. Her eyes, all the while, remained on the overlay—her fingers speeding across the controls, matching the slightest deviation of her course to the set trajectory—inflecting curves a fraction of a second before the error on her course became perceptible.

“Almost there,” Cuc said—with a hint of encouragement in her voice. “Come on, cousin, you can do it—”

Ahead of her, a few measures away, was The Turtle’s Citadel: its pod cradles had shriveled from long atrophy, but the hangar for docking the external shuttles and pods remained, its entrance a thin line of gray across the metallic surface of the ship’s lower half.

“It’s closed,” Lan Nhen said, breathing hard—she was coming fast, much too fast, scattering drones out of her way like scared mice, and if the hangar wasn’t opened . . . “Cousin!”

Cuc’s voice seemed to come from very far away; distant and muted somehow on the comms system. “We’ve discussed this. Normally, the ship went into emergency standby when it was hit, and it should open—”

“But what if it doesn’t?” Lan Nhen asked—the ship was looming over her, spreading to cover her entire windshield, close enough so she could count the pod cradles, could see their pockmarked surfaces—could imagine how much of a messy impact she’d make, if her own pod crashed on an unyielding surface.

Cuc didn’t answer. She didn’t need to; they both knew what would happen if that turned out to be true. Ancestors, watch over me, Lan Nhen thought, over and over, as the hangar doors rushed towards her, still closed—ancestors watch over me . . .

She was close enough to see the fine layers of engravings on the doors when they opened—the expanse of metal flowing away from the center, to reveal a gaping hole just large enough to let a small craft through. Her own pod squeezed into the available space: darkness fell over her cockpit as the doors flowed shut, and the pod skidded to a halt, jerking her body like a disarticulated doll.

It was a while before she could stop shaking for long enough to unstrap herself from the pod; and to take her first, tentative steps on the ship.

The small lamp in her suit lit nothing but a vast, roiling mass of shadows: the hangar was huge enough to hold much larger ships. Thirty years ago, it had no doubt been full, but the Outsiders must have removed them all as they dragged the wreck out there.

“I’m in,” she whispered; and set out through the darkness, to find the heartroom and the Mind that was her great-aunt.

“I’m sorry,” Jason said to Catherine. “Your first choice of posting was declined by the Board.”

Catherine sat very straight in her chair, trying to ignore how uncomfortable she felt in her suit—it gaped too large over her chest, flared too much at her hips, and she’d had to hastily readjust the trouser-legs after she and Johanna discovered the seamstress had got the length wrong. “I see,” she said, because there was nothing else she could say, really.

Jason looked at his desk, his gaze boring into the metal as if he could summon an assignment out of nothing—she knew he meant well, that he had probably volunteered to tell her this himself, instead of leaving it for some stranger who wouldn’t care a jot for her—but in that moment, she didn’t want to be reminded that he worked for the Board for the Protection of Dai Viet Refugees; that he’d had a hand, no matter how small, in denying her wishes for the future.

At length Jason said, slowly, carefully, reciting a speech he’d no doubt given a dozen times that day, “The government puts the greatest care into choosing postings for the refugees. It was felt that that putting you on board a space station would be—unproductive.”

Unproductive. Catherine kept smiling; kept her mask plastered on, even though it hurt to turn the corners of her mouth upwards, to crinkle her eyes as if she were pleased. “I see,” she said, again, knowing anything else was useless. “Thanks, Jason.”

Jason colored. “I tried arguing your case, but . . . ”

“I know,” Catherine said. He was a clerk; that was all; a young civil servant at the bottom of the Board’s hierarchy, and he couldn’t possibly get her what she wanted, even if he’d been willing to favor her. And it hadn’t been such a surprise, anyway. After Mary and Olivia and Johanna . . .

“Look,” Jason said. “Let’s see each other tonight, right? I’ll take you someplace you can forget all about this.”

“You know it’s not that simple,” Catherine said. As if a restaurant, or a wild waterfall ride, or whatever delight Jason had in mind could make her forget this.

“No, but I can’t do anything about the Board.” Jason’s voice was firm. “I can, however, make sure that you have a good time tonight.”

Catherine forced a smile she didn’t feel. “I’ll keep it in mind. Thanks.”

As she exited the building, passing under the wide arches, the sun sparkled on the glass windows—and for a brief moment she wasn’t herself—she was staring at starlight reflected in a glass panel, watching an older woman running hands on a wall and smiling at her with gut-wrenching sadness . . . She blinked, and the moment was gone; though the sense of sadness, of unease remained, as if she were missing something essential.

Johanna was waiting for her on the steps, her arms crossed in front of her, and a gaze that looked as though it would bore holes into the lawn.

“What did they tell you?”

Catherine shrugged, wondering how a simple gesture could cost so much. “The same they told you, I’d imagine. Unproductive.”

They’d all applied to the same postings—all asked for something related to space, whether it was one of the observatories, a space station; or, in Johanna’s case, outright asking to board a slow-ship as crew. They’d all been denied, for variations of the same reason.

“What did you get?” Johanna asked. Her own rumpled slip of paper had already been recycled at the nearest terminal; she was heading north, to Steele, where she’d join an archaeological dig.

Catherine shrugged, with a casualness she didn’t feel. They’d always felt at ease under the stars—had always yearned to take to space, felt the same craving to be closer to their home planets—to hang, weightless and without ties, in a place where they wouldn’t be weighed, wouldn’t be judged for falling short of values that ultimately didn’t belong to them. “I got newswriter.”

“At least you’re not moving very far, ” Johanna said, a tad resentfully.

“No.” The offices of the network company were a mere two streets away from the Institution.

“I bet Jason had a hand in your posting,” Johanna said.

“He didn’t say anything about that—”

“Of course he wouldn’t.” Johanna snorted, gently. She didn’t much care for Jason; but she knew how much his company meant to Catherine—how much more it would come to mean, if the weight of an entire continent separated Catherine and her. “Jason broadcasts his failures because they bother him; you’ll hardly ever hear him talk of his successes. He’d feel too much like he was boasting.” Her face changed, softened. “He cares for you, you know—truly. You have the best luck in the world.”

“I know,” Catherine said—thinking of the touch of his lips on hers; of his arms, holding her close until she felt whole, fulfilled. “I know.”

The best luck in the world—she and Jason and her new flat, and her old haunts, not far away from the Institution—though she wasn’t sure, really, if that last was a blessing—if she wanted to remember the years Matron had spent hammering proper behavior into them: the deprivations whenever they spoke anything less than perfect Galactic, the hours spent cleaning the dormitory’s toilets for expressing mild revulsion at the food; or the night they’d spent shut outside, naked, in the growing cold, because they couldn’t remember which Galactic president had colonized Longevity Station—how Matron had found them all huddled against each other, in an effort to keep warm and awake, and had sent them to Discipline for a further five hours, scolding them for behaving like wild animals.

Catherine dug her nails into the palms of her hands—letting the pain anchor her back to the present; to where she sat on the steps of the Board’s central offices, away from the Institution and all it meant to them.

“We’re free,” she said, at last. “That’s all that matters.”

“We’ll never be free.” Johanna’s tone was dark, intense. “Your records have a mark that says ‘Institution’. And even if it didn’t—do you honestly believe we would blend right in?”

There was no one quite like them on Prime, where Dai Viet were unwelcome; not with those eyes, not with that skin color—not with that demeanor, which even years of Institution hadn’t been enough to erase.

“Do you ever wonder . . . ” Johanna’s voice trailed off into silence, as if she were contemplating something too large to put into words.

“Wonder what?” Catherine asked.

Johanna bit her lip. “Do you ever wonder what it would have been like, with our parents? Our real parents.”

The parents they couldn’t remember. They’d done the math, too—no children at the Institution could remember anything before coming there. Matron had said it was because they were really young when they were taken away—that it had been for the best. Johanna, of course, had blamed something more sinister, some fix-up done by the Institution to its wards to keep them docile.

Catherine thought, for a moment, of a life among the Dai Viet—an idyllic image of a harmonious family like in the holo-movies—a mirage that dashed itself to pieces against the inescapable reality of the birth vid. “They’d have used us like broodmares,” Catherine said. “You saw—”

“I know what I saw,” Johanna snapped. “But maybe . . . ” Her face was pale. “Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad, in return for the rest.”

For being loved; for being made worthy; for fitting in, being able to stare at the stars without wondering which was their home—without dreaming of when they might go back to their families.

Catherine rubbed her belly, thinking of the vid—and the thing crawling out of the woman’s belly, all metal edges and shining crystal, coated in the blood of its mother—and, for a moment she felt as though she were the woman—floating above her body, detached from her cloak of flesh, watching herself give birth in pain. And then the sensation ended, but she was still feeling spread out, larger than she ought to have been—looking at herself from a distance and watching her own life pass her by, petty and meaningless, and utterly bounded from end to end.

Maybe Johanna was right. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad, after all.

The ship was smaller than Lan Nhen had expected—she’d been going by her experience with The Cinnabar Mansions, which was an older generation, but The Turtle’s Citadel was much smaller for the same functionalities.

Lan Nhen went up from the hangar to the living quarters, her equipment slung over her shoulders. She’d expected a sophisticated defense system like the drones, but there was nothing. Just the familiar slimy feeling of a quickened ship on the walls, a sign that the Mind that it hosted was still alive—albeit barely. The walls were bare, instead of the elaborate decoration Lan Nhen was used to from The Cinnabar Mansions—no scrolling calligraphy, no flowing paintings of starscapes or flowers; no ambient sound of zither or anything to enliven the silence.

She didn’t have much time to waste—Cuc had said they had two hours between the moment the perimeter defenses kicked in and the moment more hefty safeguards were manually activated—but she couldn’t help herself: she looked into one of the living quarters. It was empty as well, its walls scored with gunfire. The only color in the room was a few splatters of dried blood on a chair, a reminder of the tragedy of the ship’s fall—the execution of its occupants, the dragging of its wreck to the derelict ward—dried blood, and a single holo of a woman on a table, a beloved mother or grandmother: a bare, abandoned picture with no offerings or incense, all that remained from a wrecked ancestral altar. Lan Nhen spat on the ground, to ward off evil ghosts, and went back to the corridors.

She truly felt as though she were within a mausoleum—like that one time her elder sister had dared her and Cuc to spend the night within the family’s ancestral shrine, and they’d barely slept—not because of monsters or anything, but because of the vast silence that permeated the whole place amidst the smell of incense and funeral offerings, reminding them that they, too, were mortal.

That Minds, too, could die—that rescues were useless—no, she couldn’t afford to think like that. She had Cuc with her, and together they would . . .

She hadn’t heard Cuc for a while.

She stopped, when she realized—that it wasn’t only the silence on the ship, but also the deathly quiet of her own comms system. Since—since she’d entered The Turtle’s Citadel—that was the last time she’d heard her cousin, calmly pointing out emergency standby and hangar doors and how everything was going to work out, in the end . . .

She checked her comms. There appeared to be nothing wrong; but whichever frequency she selected, she could hear nothing but static. At last, she managed to find one slot that seemed less crowded than others. “Cousin? Can you hear me?”

Noise on the line. “Very—badly.” Cuc’s voice was barely recognizable. “There—is—something—interference—”

“I know,” Lan Nhen said. “Every channel is filled with noise.”

Cuc didn’t answer for a while; and when she did, her voice seemed to have become more distant—a problem had her interest again. “Not—noise. They’re broadcasting—data. Need—to . . . ” And then the comms cut. Lan Nhen tried all frequencies, trying to find one that would be less noisy; but there was nothing. She bit down a curse—she had no doubt Cuc would find a way around whatever blockage the Outsiders had put on the ship, but this was downright bizarre. Why broadcast data? Cutting down the comms of prospective attackers somehow didn’t seem significant enough—at least not compared to defense drones or similar mechanisms.

She walked through the corridors, following the spiral path to the heartroom—nothing but the static in her ears, a throbbing song that erased every coherent thought from her mind—at least it was better than the silence, than that feeling of moving underwater in an abandoned city—that feeling that she was too late, that her great-aunt was already dead and past recovery, that all she could do here was kill her once and for all, end her misery . . .

She thought, incongruously, of a vid she’d seen, which showed her great-grandmother ensconced in the heartroom—in the first few years of The Turtle’s Citadel’s life, those crucial moments of childhood when the ship’s mother remained on board to guide the Mind to adulthood. Great-grandmother was telling stories to the ship—and The Turtle’s Citadel was struggling to mimic the spoken words in scrolling texts on her walls, laughing delightedly whenever she succeeded—all sweet and young, unaware of what her existence would come to, in the end.

Unlike the rest of the ship, the heartroom was crowded—packed with Outsider equipment that crawled over the Mind’s resting place in the center, covering her from end to end until Lan Nhen could barely see the glint of metal underneath. She gave the entire contraption a wide berth—the spikes and protrusions from the original ship poked at odd angles, glistening with a dark liquid she couldn’t quite identify—and the Outsider equipment piled atop the Mind, a mass of cables and unfamiliar machines, looked as though it was going to take a while to sort out.

There were screens all around, showing dozens of graphs and diagrams, shifting as they tracked variables that Lan Nhen couldn’t guess at—vital signs, it looked like, though she wouldn’t have been able to tell what.

Lan Nhen bowed in the direction of the Mind, from younger to elder—perfunctorily, since she was unsure whether the Mind could see her at all. There was no acknowledgement, either verbal or otherwise.

Her great-aunt was in there. She had to be.

“Cousin.” Cuc’s voice was back in her ears—crisp and clear and uncommonly worried.

“How come I can hear you?” Lan Nhen asked. “Because I’m in the heartroom?”

Cuc snorted. “Hardly. The heartroom is where all the data is streaming from. I’ve merely found a way to filter the transmissions on both ends. Fascinating problem . . . ”

“Is this really the moment?” Lan Nhen asked. “I need you to walk me through the reanimation—”

“No you don’t,” Cuc said. “First you need to hear what I have to say.”

The call came during the night: a man in the uniform of the Board asked for Catherine George—as if he couldn’t tell that it was her, that she was standing disheveled and pale in front of her screen at three in the morning. “Yes, it’s me,” Catherine said. She fought off the weight of nightmares—more and more, she was waking in the night with memories of blood splattered across her entire body; of stars collapsing while she watched, powerless—of a crunch, and a moment where she hung alone in darkness, knowing that she had been struck a death blow—

The man’s voice was quiet, emotionless. There had been an accident in Steele; a regrettable occurrence that hadn’t been meant to happen, and the Board would have liked to extend its condolences to her—they apologized for calling so late, but they thought she should know . . .

“I see,” Catherine said. She kept herself uncomfortably straight—aware of the last time she’d faced the board—when Jason had told her her desire for space would have been unproductive. When they’d told Johanna . . .

Johanna.

After a while, the man’s words slid past her like water on glass—hollow reassurances, empty condolences, whereas she stood as if her heart had been torn away from her, fighting a desire to weep, to retch—she wanted to turn back time, to go back to the previous week and the sprigs of apricot flowers Jason had given her with a shy smile—to breathe in the sharp, tangy flavor of the lemon cake he’d baked for her, see again the carefully blank expression on his face as he waited to see if she’d like it—she wanted to be held tight in his arms and told that it was fine, that everything was going to be fine, that Johanna was going to be fine.

“We’re calling her other friends,” the man was saying, “but since you were close to each other . . . ”

“I see,” Catherine said—of course he didn’t understand the irony, that it was the answer she’d given the Board—Jason—the last time.

The man cut off the communication; and she was left alone, standing in her living room and fighting back the feeling that threatened to overwhelm her—a not-entirely unfamiliar sensation of dislocation in her belly, the awareness that she didn’t belong here among the Galactics; that she wasn’t there by choice, and couldn’t leave; that her own life should have been larger, more fulfilling than this slow death by inches, writing copy for feeds without any acknowledgement of her contributions—that Johanna’s life should have been larger . . .

Her screen was still blinking—an earlier message from the Board that she hadn’t seen? But why—

Her hands, fumbling away in the darkness, made the command to retrieve the message—the screen faded briefly to black while the message was decompressed, and then she was staring at Johanna’s face.

For a moment—a timeless, painful moment—Catherine thought with relief that it had been a mistake, that Johanna was alive after all; and then she realized how foolish she’d been—that it wasn’t a call, but merely a message from beyond the grave.

Johanna’s face was pale, so pale Catherine wanted to hug her, to tell her the old lie that things were going to be fine—but she’d never get to say those words now, not ever.

“I’m sorry, Catherine,” she said. Her voice was shaking; and the circles under her eyes took up half of her face, turning her into some pale nightmare from horror movies—a ghost, a restless soul, a ghoul hungry for human flesh. “I can’t do this, not anymore. The Institution was fine; but it’s got worse. I wake up at night, and feel sick—as if everything good has been leached from the world—as if the food had no taste, as if I drifted like a ghost through my days, as if my entire life held no meaning or truth. Whatever they did to our memories in the Institution—it’s breaking down now. It’s tearing me apart. I’m sorry, but I can’t take any more of this. I—” she looked away from the camera for a brief moment, and then back at Catherine. “I have to go.”

“No,” Catherine whispered, but she couldn’t change it. She couldn’t do anything.

“You were always the strongest of us,” Johanna said. “Please remember this. Please. Catherine.” And then the camera cut, and silence spread through the room, heavy and unbearable, and Catherine felt like weeping, though she had no tears left.

“Catherine?” Jason called in a sleepy voice from the bedroom. “It’s too early to check your work inbox . . . ”

Work. Love. Meaningless, Johanna had said. Catherine walked to the huge window pane, and stared at the city spread out below her—the mighty Prime, center of the Galactic Federation, its buildings shrouded in light, its streets crisscrossed by floaters; with the bulky shape of the Parliament at the center, a proud statement that the Galactic Federation still controlled most of their home galaxy.

Too many lights to see the stars; but she could still guess; could still feel their pull—could still remember that one of them was her home.

A lie, Johanna had said. A construction to keep us here.

“Catherine?” Jason stood behind her, one hand wrapped around her shoulder—awkwardly tender as always, like that day when he’d offered to share a flat, standing balanced on one foot and not looking at her.

“Johanna is dead. She killed herself.”

She felt rather than saw him freeze—and, after a while, he said in a changed voice, “I’m so sorry. I know how much she meant . . . ” His voice trailed off, and he too, fell silent, watching the city underneath.

There was a feeling—the same feeling she’d had when waking up as a child, a diffuse sense that something was not quite right with the world; that the shadows held men watching, waiting for the best time to snatch her; that she was not wholly back in her body—that Jason’s hand on her shoulder was just the touch of a ghost, that even his love wasn’t enough to keep her safe. That the world was fracturing around her, time and time again—she breathed in, hoping to dispel the sensation. Surely it was nothing more than grief, than fatigue—but the sensation wouldn’t go away, leaving her on the verge of nausea.

“You should have killed us,” Catherine said. “It would have been kinder.”

“Killed you?” Jason sounded genuinely shocked.

“When you took us from our parents.”

Jason was silent for a while. Then: “We don’t kill. What do you think we are, monsters from the fairytales, killing and burning everyone who looks different? Of course we’re not like that.” Jason no longer sounded uncertain or awkward; it was as if she’d touched some wellspring, scratched some skin to find only primal reflexes underneath.

“You erased our memories.” She didn’t make any effort to keep the bitterness from her voice.

“We had to.” Jason shook his head. “They’d have killed you, otherwise. You know this.”

“How can I trust you?” Look at Johanna, she wanted to say. Look at me. How can you say it was all worth it?

“Catherine . . . ” Jason’s voice was weary. “We’ve been over this before. You’ve seen the vids from the early days. We didn’t set out to steal your childhood, or anyone’s childhood. But when you were left—intact . . . accidents happened. Carelessness. Like Johanna.”

“Like Johanna.” Her voice was shaking now; but he didn’t move, didn’t do anything to comfort her or hold her close. She turned at last, to stare into his face; and saw him transfixed by light, by faith, his gaze turned away from her and every pore of his being permeated by the utter conviction that he was right, that they were all right and that a stolen childhood was a small price to pay to be a Galactic.

“Anything would do.” Jason’s voice was slow, quiet—explaining life to a child, a script they’d gone over and over in their years together, always coming back to the same enormous, inexcusable choice that had been made for them. “Scissors, knives, broken bottles. You sliced your veins, hanged yourselves, pumped yourselves full of drugs . . . We had to . . . we had to block your memories, to make you blank slates.”

“Had to.” She was shaking now; and still he didn’t see. Still she couldn’t make him see.

“I swear to you, Catherine. It was the only way.”

And she knew, she’d always known he was telling the truth—not because he was right, but because he genuinely could not envision any other future for them.

“I see,” she said. The nausea, the sense of dislocation, wouldn’t leave her—disgust for him, for this life that trapped her, for everything she’d turned into or been turned into. “I see.”

“Do you think I like it?” His voice was bitter. “Do you think it makes me sleep better at night? Every day I hate that choice, even though I wasn’t the one who made it. Every day I wonder if there was something else the Board could have done, some other solution that wouldn’t have robbed you of everything you were.”

“Not everything,” Catherine said—slowly, carefully. “We still look Dai Viet.”

Jason grimaced, looking ill at ease. “That’s your body, Catherine. Of course they weren’t going to steal that.”

Of course; and suddenly, seeing how uneasy he was, it occurred to Catherine that they could have changed that, too, just as easily as they’d tampered with her memories; made her skin clearer, her eyes less distinctive; could have helped her fit into Galactic society. But they hadn’t. Holding the strings to the last, Johanna would have said. “You draw the line at my body, but stealing my memories is fine?”

Jason sighed; he turned towards the window, looking at the streets. “No, it’s not, and I’m sorry. But how else were we supposed to keep you alive?”

“Perhaps we didn’t want to be alive.”

“Don’t say that, please.” His voice had changed, had become fearful, protective. “Catherine. Everyone deserves to live. You especially.”

Perhaps I don’t, she thought, but he was holding her close to him, not letting her go—her anchor to the flat—to the living room, to life. “You’re not Johanna,” he said. “You know that.”

The strongest of us, Johanna had said. She didn’t feel strong; just frail and adrift. “No,” she said, at last. “Of course I’m not.”

“Come on,” Jason said. “Let me make you a tisane. We’ll talk in the kitchen—you look as though you need it.”

“No.” And she looked up—sought out his lips in the darkness, drinking in his breath and his warmth to fill the emptiness within her. “That’s not what I need.”

“Are you sure?” Jason looked uncertain—sweet and innocent and naive, everything that had drawn her to him. “You’re not in a state to—”

“Ssh,” she said, and laid a hand on his lips, where she’d kissed him. “Ssh.”

Later, after they’d made love, she lay her head in the hollow of his arm, listening to the slow beat of his heart like a lifeline; and wondered how long she’d be able to keep the emptiness at bay.

“It goes to Prime,” Cuc said. “All the data is beamed to Prime, and it’s coming from almost every ship in the ward.”

“I don’t understand,” Lan Nhen said. She’d plugged her own equipment into the ship, carefully shifting the terminals she couldn’t make sense of—hadn’t dared to go closer to the center, where Outsider technology had crawled all over her great-aunt’s resting place, obscuring the Mind and the mass of connectors that linked her to the ship.

On one of the screens, a screensaver had launched: night on a planet Lan Nhen couldn’t recognize—an Outsider one, with their sleek floaters and their swarms of helper bots, their wide, impersonal streets planted with trees that were too tall and too perfect to be anything but the product of years of breeding.

“She’s not here,” Cuc said.

“I—” Lan Nhen was about to say she didn’t understand, and then the true import of Cuc’s words hit her. “Not here? She’s alive, Cuc. I can see the ship; I can hear her all around me . . . ”

“Yes, yes,” Cuc said, a tad impatiently. “But that’s . . . the equivalent of unconscious processes, like breathing in your sleep.”

“She’s dreaming?”

“No,” Cuc said. A pause, then, very carefully: “I think she’s on Prime, Cousin. The data that’s being broadcast—it looks like Mind thought-processes, compressed with a high rate and all mixed together. There’s probably something on the other end that decompresses the data and sends it to . . . Arg, I don’t know! Wherever they think is appropriate.”

Lan Nhen bit back another admission of ignorance, and fell back on the commonplace. “On Prime.” The enormity of the thing; that you could take a Mind—a beloved ship with a family of her own—that you could put her to sleep and cause her to wake up somewhere else, on an unfamiliar planet and an alien culture—that you could just transplant her like a flower or a tree . . . “She’s on Prime.”

“In a terminal or as the power source for something,” Cuc said, darkly.

“Why would they bother?” Lan Nhen asked. “It’s a lot of power expenditure just to get an extra computer.”

“Do I look as though I have insight into Outsiders?” Lan Nhen could imagine Cuc throwing her hands up in the air, in that oft-practiced gesture. “I’m just telling you what I have, Cousin.”

Outsiders—the Galactic Federation of United Planets—were barely comprehensible in any case. They were the descendants of an Exodus fleet that had hit an isolated galaxy: left to themselves and isolated for decades, they had turned on each other in huge ethnic cleansings before emerging from their home planets as relentless competitors for resources and inhabitable planets.

“Fine. Fine.” Lan Nhen breathed in, slowly; tried to focus on the problem at hand. “Can you walk me through cutting the radio broadcast?”

Cuc snorted. “I’d fix the ship, first, if I were you.”

Lan Nhen knelt by the equipment, and stared at a cable that had curled around one of the ship’s spines. “Fine, let’s start with what we came for. Can you see?”

Silence; and then a life-sized holo of Cuc hovered in front of her—even though the avatar was little more than broad strokes, Great-great-aunt had still managed to render it in enough details to make it unmistakably Cuc. “Cute,” Lan Nhen said.

“Hahaha,” Cuc said. “No bandwidth for trivialities—gotta save for detail on your end.” She raised a hand, pointed to one of the outermost screens on the edge of the room. “Disconnect this one first.”

It was slow, and painful. Cuc pointed; and Lan Nhen checked before disconnecting and moving. Twice, she jammed her fingers very close to a cable, and felt electricity crackle near her—entirely too close for comfort.

They moved from the outskirts of the room to the center—tackling the huge mount of equipment last. Cuc’s first attempts resulted in a cable coming loose with an ominous sound; they waited, but nothing happened. “We might have fried something,” Lan Nhen said.

“Too bad. There’s no time for being cautious, as you well know. There’s . . . maybe half an hour left before the other defenses go live.” Cuc moved again, pointed to another squat terminal. “This goes off.”

When they were finished, Lan Nhen stepped back, to look at their handiwork.

The heartroom was back to its former glory: instead of Outsider equipment, the familiar protrusions and sharp organic needles of the Mind’s resting place; and they could see the Mind herself—resting snug in her cradle, wrapped around the controls of the ship—her myriad arms each seizing one rack of connectors; her huge head glinting in the light—a vague globe shape covered with glistening cables and veins. The burn mark from the Outsider attack was clearly visible, a dark, elongated shape on the edge of her head that had bruised a couple of veins—it had hit one of the connectors as well, burned it right down to the color of ink.

Lan Nhen let out a breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. “It scrambled the connector.”

“And scarred her, but didn’t kill her,” Cuc said. “Just like you said.”

“Yes, but—” But it was one thing to run simulations of the attack over and over, always getting the same prognosis; and quite another to see that the simulations held true, and that the damage was repairable.

“There should be another connector rack in your bag,” Cuc said. “I’ll walk you through slotting it in.”

After she was done, Lan Nhen took a step back; and stared at her great-aunt—feeling, in some odd way, as though she were violating the Mind’s privacy. A Mind’s heartroom was their stronghold, a place where they could twist reality as they wished, and appear as they wished to. To see her great-aunt like this, without any kind of appearance change or pretense, was . . . more disturbing than she’d thought.

“And now?” she asked Cuc.

Even without details, Lan Nhen knew her cousin was smiling. “Now we pray to our ancestors that cutting the broadcast is going to be enough to get her back.”

Another night on Prime, and Catherine wakes up breathless, in the grip of another nightmare—images of red lights, and scrolling texts, and a feeling of growing cold in her bones, a cold so deep she cannot believe she will ever feel warm no matter how many layers she’s put on.

Johanna is not there; beside her, Jason sleeps, snoring softly; and she’s suddenly seized by nausea, remembering what he said to her—how casually he spoke of blocking her memories, of giving a home to her after stealing her original one from her. She waits for it to pass; waits to settle into her old life as usual. But it doesn’t.

Instead, she rises, walks towards the window, and stands watching Prime—the clean wide streets, the perfect trees, the ballet of floaters at night—the myriad dances that make up the society that constrains her from dawn to dusk and beyond—she wonders what Johanna would say, but of course Johanna won’t ever say anything anymore. Johanna has gone ahead, into the dark.

The feeling of nausea in her belly will not go away: instead it spreads, until her body feels like a cage—at first, she thinks the sensation is in her belly, but it moves upwards, until her limbs, too, feel too heavy and too small—until it’s an effort to move any part of her. She raises her hands, struggling against a feeling of moving appendages that don’t belong to her—and traces the contours of her face, looking for familiar shapes, for anything that will anchor her to reality. The heaviness spreads, compresses her chest until she can hardly breathe—cracks her ribs and pins her legs to the ground. Her head spins, as if she were about to faint; but the mercy of blackness does not come to her.

“Catherine,” she whispers. “My name is Catherine.”

Another name, unbidden, rises to her lips. Mi Chau. A name she gave to herself in the Viet language—in the split instant before the lasers took her apart, before she sank into darkness: Mi Chau, the princess who unwittingly betrayed her father and her people, and whose blood became the pearls at the bottom of the sea. She tastes it on her tongue, and it’s the only thing that seems to belong to her anymore.

She remembers that first time—waking up on Prime in a strange body, struggling to breathe, struggling to make sense of being so small, so far away from the stars that had guided her through space—remembers walking like a ghost through the corridors of the Institution, until the knowledge of what the Galactics had done broke her, and she cut her veins in a bathroom, watching blood lazily pool at her feet and thinking only of escape. She remembers the second time she woke up; the second, oblivious life as Catherine.

Johanna. Johanna didn’t survive her second life; and even now is starting her third, somewhere in the bowels of the Institution—a dark-skinned child indistinguishable from other dark-skinned children, with no memories of anything beyond a confused jumble . . .

Outside, the lights haven’t dimmed, but there are stars—brash and alien, hovering above Prime, in configurations that look wrong; and she remembers, suddenly, how they lay around her, how they showed her the way from planet to planet—how the cold of the deep spaces seized her just as she entered them to travel faster, just like it’s holding her now, seizing her bones—remembers how much larger, how much wider she ought to be . . .

There are stars everywhere; and superimposed on them, the faces of two Dai Viet women, calling her over and over. Calling her back, into the body that belonged to her all along; into the arms of her family.

“Come on, come on,” the women whisper, and their voices are stronger than any other noise; than Jason’s breath in the bedroom; than the motors of the floaters or the vague smell of garlic from the kitchen. “Come on, Great-aunt!”

She is more than this body; more than this constrained life—her thoughts spread out, encompassing hangars and living quarters; and the liquid weight of pods held in their cradles—she remembers family reunions, entire generations of children putting their hands on her corridors, remembers the touch of their skin on her metal walls; the sound of their laughter as they raced each other; the quiet chatter of their mothers in the heartroom, keeping her company as the New Year began; and the touch of a brush on her outer hull, drawing the shape of an apricot flower, for good luck . . .

“Catherine?” Jason calls behind her.

She turns, through sheer effort of will; finding, somehow, the strength to maintain her consciousness in a small and crammed body alongside her other, vaster one. He’s standing with one hand on the doorjamb, staring at her—his face pale, leached of colors in the starlight.

“I remember,” she whispers.

His hands stretch, beseeching. “Catherine, please. Don’t leave.”

He means well, she knows. All the things that he hid from her, he hid out of love; to keep her alive and happy, to hold her close in spite of all that should have separated them; and even now, the thought of his love is a barb in her heart, a last lingering regret, slight and pitiful against the flood of her memories—but not wholly insignificant.

Where she goes, she’ll never be alone—not in the way she was with Jason, feeling that nothing else but her mattered in the entire world. She’ll have a family; a gaggle of children and aunts and uncles waiting on her, but nothing like the sweet, unspoiled privacy where Jason and she could share anything and everything. She won’t have another lover like him—naive and frank and so terribly sure of what he wants and what he’s ready to do to get it. Dai Viet society has no place for people like Jason—who do not know their place, who do not know how to be humble, how to accept failure or how to bow down to expediency.

Where she goes, she’ll never be alone; and yet she’ll be so terribly lonely.

“Please,” Jason says.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’ll come back—” a promise made to him; to Johanna, who cannot hear or recognize her anymore. Her entire being spreads out, thins like water thrown on the fire—and, in that last moment, she finds herself reaching out for him, trying to touch him one last time, to catch one last glimpse of his face, even as a heart she didn’t know she had breaks.

“Catherine.”

He whispers her name, weeping, over and over; and it’s that name, that lie that still clings to her with its bittersweet memories, that she takes with her as her entire being unfolds—as she flies away, towards the waiting stars.

Originally published in The Other Half of the Sky, edited by Athena Andreadis and Kay Holt.

About the Author

Aliette de Bodard is a software engineer who lives and works in Paris, where she shares a flat with two Lovecraftian plants and more computers than warm bodies. Only a few years into her career, her short fiction has appeared in Interzone, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Realms of Fantasy, Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, Writers of the Future, Coyote Wild, Electric Velocipede, The Immersion Book of SF, Fictitious Force, Shimmer, and elsewhere, and she has won the British SF Association Award for her story “The Shipmaker,” the Locus Award , and the Nebula Award for her stories “The Waiting Stars” and “Immersion.” Her novels include Servant of the Underworld, Harbinger of the Storm, and Master of the House of Darts, all recently reissued in a novel omnibus, Obsidian and Blood. Her most recent novel was another British SF Association-winner, The House of Shattered Wings. Coming up is a sequel, The House of Binding Thorns.

How to Injure Characters Without Killing Them

S. E. Jones

Every author strives for reality. Especially so when it comes to science fiction and fantasy. If the author gets the details right, then the unreal is cemented.

Despite this, authors often injure characters in ways that would, in the real world, lead them to death or extensive hospital stays. Humans are fragile creatures, and the patient that jumps up after being unconscious for half an hour is the exception rather than the rule. In the real world, that period of unconsciousness would generally lead to someone being on a ventilator and a lengthy hospital stay.

So how is an author to manage this fine line? How do you knock a character out when a hospital is not an option? How do you manage blood loss without needing a transfusion?

There are three major areas which often raise the eyebrows of anyone who’s worked in emergency health—unconsciousness, blood loss, and wound management and infection.

Unconsciousness

The brain is a complex organ, but most importantly, it is what is known as a “beat-to-beat” organ. It has no way of storing energy, no way of storing oxygen, and its survival and function are dependent on each beat of the heart.

Every beat of the heart delivers the brain the products that it needs to survive. At the same time, the flow of blood takes away the waste created by the brain’s metabolic processes. Which leads us to our first major cause of unconsciousness:

Lack of Blood

In this circumstance, fainting is a survival mechanism. We faint because when we lie down, it’s easier for the heart to pump the blood up to the brain.

Like fever, it’s not the safest way of achieving a goal, but it achieves that goal none-the-less.

This is why people often wake up after fainting. It’s also why, if you sit them up too quickly, they feel dizzy. It’s why they feel better when you lie them back down again.

In this case, if a person faints, and is unconscious for a significant period of time, then blood is not reaching that individual’s brain.

In this example, the brain is starving. It has no energy with which to run its metabolic processes. No way to get rid of carbon dioxide. No way to access oxygen. And barring the muscle in your heart, nerves are some of the most irreplaceable things in the body. They don’t grow back.

So, your brain both starves and pickles in its own carbon dioxide.

And when nerves die, the complex systems of the brain start to die with them.

Those connections allow you to think, to reason, to emote. If we look at many examples of characters losing consciousness, the way that other characters often check if they’re all right is by looking at their pulse and breathing.

Breathing happens in the different part of the brain—the brain stem. Heart rate, while controlled by many things, gets most of its impulses from the same part of the brain. This is why it is entirely possible to be brain dead but still be breathing with a heartbeat.

So yes, a character may be breathing and have a pulse while they’re unconscious. But inside their skull, the parts of their brains that make them individuals are dying.

Brain Injury

People also faint due to brain injury. If someone is whacked over the head and faints, then they’re not fainting due to a sudden lack of blood to their brain—they’re fainting because of the shock to the brain.

Brain injury occurs along a continuum. It ranges from a stunned moment, during which no true damage is recorded, to concussion, to acquired brain injury.

Barring a stunned moment, concussion carries with it, the least, in the way of repercussions. The brain is bruised. Bruising in the brain, like bruising everywhere, results in swelling. This swelling restricts blood supply to the brain both in the immediate area of swelling, and to the brain generally.

Your brain is locked in your skull, which is a limited space. Swelling decreases that space, and the body acts to make sure that no extra pressure is applied. It does this by limiting both cerebrospinal fluid, and blood supply.

A decrease in blood supply to the brain does not end well.

However, once the swelling dies down, the brain recovers from the bruising, and after a few days, the person recovers. Note that it normally takes a few days and it’s not an instantaneous fix.

Other brain injuries are more serious because it’s not just bruising with which the character is dealing. It’s internal bleeding, extensive swelling, and increased pressure within the brain cavity. Anything more serious than a concussion will have serious ramifications to a person’s ability to function, and will probably require the skills of a surgeon.

Consequences of Loss of Consciousness: Airway Integrity

Brain injury, and a lack of consciousness in general, is dangerous for other reasons as well. When someone becomes unconscious, they lose control over particular parts of their bodies. Mainly, their gag reflex.

A gag reflex protects your airway. When a person is unconscious, lying on their back, often with all their muscles relaxed, they run the risk of something called asphyxiation. This is what happens when the muscles of your stomach relax and you passively regurgitate your stomach contents. As you have no gag reflex to protect your lungs, you then inhale food and stomach acid into your lungs.

Lung tissue is about as replicable as heart and brain tissue. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. And if the lungs are blocked by food and stomach acid, oxygen is not able to get into the bloodstream, and carbon dioxide is not able to get out.

So even if the heart is pumping, it’s not delivering oxygen. Which is bad news for our beat-to-beat organs, including our brain and our heart.

Injuring Your Patients Without Killing Them: Unconsciousness

So. Fainting is bad. How, then, do we effectively debilitate our characters without killing them when it comes to messing with the brain?

The easy answer to this is to dial down the intensity of what you’re doing. A person doesn’t need to be fully unconscious to be out of action. Looking at the different levels of consciousness is useful.

Given the consequences and probable causes of not being conscious, emergency medicine is obsessed with the scenario. One of the most common ways that consciousness is assessed is via something called the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS). The scale ranges from a score of 3 (dead) to 15 (conscious, alert, and orientated).

The other measurements are made up by adding together three scores of responsiveness. See below:

Eyes (highest score = 4)

Eyes open spontaneously - 4

Eyes open to commands - 3

Eyes open to pain - 2

Eye do not open to pain, voice, or spontaneously - 1

Speech (highest score = 5)

Talking, aware of time, place, and purpose - 5

Talking, but confused - 4

Talking, words not approbate (i.e., banana when you ask the time) - 3

Not talking, but makes sounds (groans ect) in response to pain - 2

Not talking, no sounds made in response to pain - 1

Motor (highest score = 6)

Able to obey commands - 6

Can locate the source of and react to pain (ie, pushing a hand away) - 5

Can withdraw from pain (flinching) - 4

Entire body flexes in reaction to pain - 3

Entire body extends in reaction to pain - 2

No motor response to pain - 1

My suggestion would be to pick from one of the in-between scores. Take note, that if a person is scoring a 1 or 2 for verbal, then they won’t be scoring a 5 or 6 for motor. You generally can’t go wrong by hovering around a column before or after the symptom you pick.

Take note of the symptoms listed. Being unable to respond to pain is debilitating. Being unable to talk is debilitating. Being unable to open your eyes is debilitating. A person doesn’t need to be unconscious, and thus in need of an emergency department in order to get the effect that you want in a story. There’s plenty to choose from on the way there.

Blood Loss

The second way in which authors often kill their characters off without meaning to is with blood loss. This is inherently tied with a lack of understanding of how much blood the human body needs to function, and the consequences of a lack of blood.

We’ve already looked at beat-to-beat organs. These are the organs that the body looks to protect when there’s a lack of blood available.

But the body is remarkably resilient, and also very good at dealing with horrific circumstances. It works on a principal of sacrifice and knows it won’t survive without its heart. It knows that a dead brain is not conducive to survival. If a person is losing blood, several things will happen.

First, a coagulation cascade activates. This sequence of biochemical events is hideously complicated, and doesn’t need to be extensively examined to understand its effects—it boils down to two things. The process tries to stop your blood loss by knitting together a web of fibers that platelets adhere to. This acts as a wall, to try and keep the blood where it’s needed. The coagulation cascade also tries to increase the viscosity of your blood (thus, clotting of the blood).

These processes take time. This is where basic wound care comes into play. Pressure is your friend. The judicious application of pressure to a wound assists your body by both giving it time to do what it needs to do, and by providing part of the netting that clots form around.

Because of these processes, the body is remarkably efficient. If your character is fainting from a loss of blood? They’re dead. They need surgery, extensive surgery, yesterday. It also means that injuries that many authors prescribe fainting and pain too, aren’t really injuries that would result in either.

Injuring Your Character Without Killing Them: Blood Loss

So how do you portray blood loss in your stories? Blood lost prompts hypovolemic shock. This happens when your cells do not get enough blood to deliver what they need to survive, and dispose of waste. Keep in mind that the average (male, 75kg) human body holds five litres of blood:

Stages of Hypovolemic Shock

Stage 1

Blood loss (%): 15%

Volume of blood lost (based on a young human male): Up to 750 ml

Symptoms: Heart rate is normal at under 100 beats per minute (bpm), normal blood pressure, normal/slightly elevated breath rate at a rate of 14-20 breaths per minute, slight anxiety

Stage 2:

Blood loss (%): 15 - 30%

Volume of blood lost: 750 - 1000 ml

Symptoms: Heart rate elevated at 100 - 120 bpm, blood pressure normal, breath rate elevated at 20 - 30 breaths per minute, mild anxiety

Stage 3:

Blood loss (%): 30 - 40%

Volume of blood lost: 1500 - 2000 ml

Symptoms: Heart rate over 120bpm, blood pressure decreased, breath rate at 30-40 breaths per minute, confusion

Stage three is the stage at which a patient now needs a blood transfusion, generally quite a large one, to half the progression of hypovolemic shock.

Stage 4:

Blood loss (%): >40%

Volume of blood lost: >2000ml

Symptoms: Heat rate over 140 ppm, blood pressure decreased, breath rate over 40 breaths per minute, coma

Stage 4 is when organs start to irreparably shut down, where brain trauma starts to occur (although some argument could be made for that starting in stage 3), and where death becomes the most likely outcome. It is also a stage that requires a blood transfusion, and more often than not a long stay in ICU, followed by weeks of rehabilitation and support.

Pick from something before 60%. It’s debilitating enough without needing a person to undergo surgery and six weeks of recovery. Take note that the amount of blood a person has varies widely depending on their size and weight. Generally speaking, a woman will need to lose less blood before her internal organs shut down than a man. Young males (most stab victims, statistically speaking) do remarkably well in the hour after the stabbing, because their bodies are in peak performance, and they compensate well.

Keep in mind that if you want your character truly debilitated by blood loss, they will need all the marvels of modern surgery or a miracle and several weeks to rehabilitate.

Infection and Wound Care

Wound care and infection are inherently tied. Most people know that without antibiotics, the world would be a much deadlier place.

However, they often don’t understand the process of taking care of a wound. Logically, if you’re worried about infection, it makes sense to disinfect a wound. This works for scratches. It also works for small wounds which your immune system would probably deal with anyway.

One of the worst things you can do for a large wound is pour a mass of cleaning product on it. Or alcohol. Or anything else that burns and stings. Because yes, these substances kill things. Mostly though, they kill the surface cells of the wound and cause a lot of pain, because they also attack your exposed nerves.

Injuring Your Character Without Killing Them: Infection and Wound Care

If infection is something that concerns you, it is enough to keep a wound clean. This means water. Lots of it, if a wound is particularly dirty. It means soaking the first layer of clean dressings in water. It means regularly changing dressings. It means using clean dressings in the first place.

If your worldbuilding includes antibiotics, these will be given orally or through a vein, and they will definitely not be poured into a wound. If you are worried enough about your character’s wounds getting infected that you want to use something other than water and regular bandage changes to clean the wound? Then the infection has probably already moved into that character’s bloodstream.

So how do you fix this? Either have a world that has antibiotics, or the magical equivalent, or hope that your character’s immune system can fight it off alone. Often with several weeks of bed-rest.

A Note on Age, Gender, and Compensation

All of the things discussed above are true, but they are variable. Every stab victim I have attended as a paramedic has been up and walking. One particular fifteen-year-old, who had decided that getting high was the best way to deal with his situation, proceeded to hop down three flights of stairs after I’d just finished bandaging his leg. This was because he heard the police breaking into his apartment to make sure that there were no other injured parties present.

People deal remarkably well with the injuries from which you would expect them to succumb.

I was lucky to only go to one stabbing where breathing was impeded. Yet, the victim struggled his way to my ambulance, and complained the entire way. But the reason that most of the stab victims I met did so well with their injuries has to do with the age and fitness of those who, statistically speaking, get stabbed.

Young, healthy men do well when injured. As do young healthy women, but less so. The elderly respond the worst as they heal and physiologically react at a far slower pace. Children also do very well, until they very suddenly don’t.

This has carry-on effects for the other things we talk about—young men and women will deal with blood loss, infection, and head injuries far better than the elderly. Young children will also do quite well. But they only do so because their bodies are working very hard to keep things in equilibrium, and their bodies are also easily exhausted. Once they hit that point of exhaustion, they become very sick, very quickly. It is not unusual for children to be rushed into a hospital “just in case” for this reason.

Every human is different. While the things discussed above are generally true, they are also largely dependent on who the injured individual is, in terms of age, gender, and any other illness that they might already be managing.

And as writers, I do think there is virtue in getting it right.

About the Author

S. E. Jones has spent the past two years running around London in an ambulance. Now back in Australia she has previously been published in Strange Horizons, and is starting her Masters in July. She can be found online at @sechapara via twitter.

Astounding Scientists and Alternate History:
A Conversation with Gregory Benford

Chris Urie

The effects of World War II echo through today. The scientific advances conceived on both sides during and in the wake of the last World War shaped the world. The Manhattan Project ushered in the atomic age and NASA sent astronauts to the moon utilizing V2 technology. But, as it is with many things, a slight change to the history books may have yielded a very different outcome. The Berlin Project by Gregory Benford explores an intriguing “what if” scenario where the first atomic bombs were ready to go earlier. Karl Cohen, a chemist and mathematician on The Manhattan Project helps the team find an alternate way of isolating Uranium 235 making a bomb ready to drop on Germany in 1944. Together, with some of the most brilliant scientific minds of the 20th century drawn with painstaking detail and humanity, Karl hopes to alter the outcome of the war and hopefully save millions of lives.

Gregory Benford is a physicist, educator, and author. He has also served as scientific consultant to the NHK Network and for Star Trek: The Next Generation. He’s won the John W. Campbell Award, the Australian Ditmar Award, the 1995 Lord Foundation Award for achievement in the sciences, the 1990 United Nations Medal in Literature, and is a two-time winner of the SFWA Nebula Award. His latest novel The Berlin Project was release by Saga Press on May 9th.

WWII has continued to fascinate the world and numerous alternative history novels have been set in that era. What was it about the creation of the atomic bomb that inspired you to write this book?

Alternate History provides a way to think about the fragility of history. It lets us see what later might seem inevitable, yet is the outcome of chance and many unpredictable forces. WWII is the source that keeps on giving, for it touches on many problems we have today, especially the role of all-powerful weapons like nuclear, biological, and chemical ones.

I’m a physicist, with a PhD earned in 1967 at UCSD. I was a postdoc for Edward Teller, who gave me the central idea of the novel: that we made a big error in judgment in 1942 and wasted a year before getting the bomb. I worked with Teller and came to know him well. My job interview with Teller was both terrifying and stimulating—at the end of it I suspected Teller understood my thesis better than I did. I was vastly surprised when he hired me immediately.

The entire history of nuclear weapons is interlaced with scientists thinking about the future, using science fiction as a prompt. H. G. Wells’ “atomic bombs” and the Robert Heinlein and Cleve Cartmill stories in Astounding Science Fiction were indeed broadly discussed at Los Alamos (as told to me by Edward Teller). The investigation into the Astounding stories now seems odd, but it was viewed as very important by the security agencies, including the FBI. As Robert Silverberg has remarked, “Turning war secrets into second-rate SF stories might seem, to the dispassionate eye, a very odd way indeed of betraying one’s country.”

Plus, as son of a military officer, I lived 3 years each in occupied Japan and Germany. I saw the aftermath of WWII everywhere, talked to the survivors (among them my father, who was also in Korea and retired as Commandant of the Artillery School, Ft. Sill). About a million people died every month in the war’s last year. Avoiding that seemed tantalizing.

Many of the characters featured in The Berlin Project are scientists that are very well known in name, but not quite as well known in character. We know what they discovered, but most don’t know what they were really like. What sort of research did you do to help imbue these famous scientific figures with humanity?

I knew many figures in this novel personally, so I wrote them in from memory; writers are magpies. Freeman Dyson, whom I met at the UCSD daily coffee in 1963. Maria Goeppert Mayer, for whom I graded the homework and exams in her graduate nuclear physics course at UCSD. Dick Feynman, I met several times. John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding. Many others. I tried to echo their manner of speaking and thinking. Further, every document quoted in the novel is authentic, though some have dates altered to conform to the plot.

Your novel is filled with some complex scientific concepts but never gets mired in jargon or tedium. Did you find it difficult striking a balance between thoroughness of the science and keeping the story clear, concise, and moving?

That took work. I used over forty figures and photos, thinking ‘This is an historical, why not show readers what that era looked like?’ Hard science fiction, even hard alternate history, shouldn’t be hard to read, too. So, let the past speak for itself, visually. And keep your finger on the pulse of the science. It helps that I worked on nuclear weapons at Livermore. I know this stuff in great detail.

What was the first science fiction novel to really grab hold of your imagination and made you want to become both a scientist and a writer?

Farmer in the Sky by Robert Heinlein. Plenty of orbital mechanics, planetary savvy, and even an explicit prediction of the microwave oven! I fell in love with the genre. I even have my copy, first hardcover I ever bought, in the Army Post Exchange in Tokyo, in 1950. My brother and I were nine years old.

You once said, “Science is . . . like literature, a continuing dialogue among diverse and conflicting voices, no one ever wholly right or wholly wrong, but a steady conversation forever provisional and personal and living.” What are some dialogues you’re seeing in both science and literature happening right now?

Increasing mining of SF ideas by mainstream writers accelerates steadily. Mostly they misuse the ideas but sometimes they bring fresh talents to them, all to the good. Hard science fiction is hard to write, so mainstream writers (mostly English majors) avoid it, leaving the advances to us. We write for a scientifically more knowing audience the mainstream can’t entertain. Our major social problems come framed in science fiction terms: If this goes on . . . and What if?

How has your career as a scientist informed your writing and vice versa?

I mine my life for material. Everything goes into the unconscious and emerges as fiction. I’ve often used fellow professors at UC Irvine, thinly disguised. My research often comes from speculations that border on fiction: What makes the huge luminous streamers at galactic center glow, a hundred lightyears long? How would you propel small vital packages around the solar system? How would faster than light particles change our perception of time? I’ve published papers on all these ideas, and novels too.

You’ve written novels with David Brin and William Rotsler and Gordon Eklund. How do such collaborations arise and how do they typically work?

Also, Arthur C. Clarke and Larry Niven. Writing is lonely work. Science fiction, idea-rich, profits from knocking ideas back and forth, intellectual ping-pong. This mirrors science, in which the majority of published papers have multiple authors. That’s a signature of the closeness in feel, the fact that science fiction springs from the technoscientific culture, which finds its voice in science fiction, and so has come to dominate much of popular media.

Each collaboration worked differently. David Brin and I took different characters in Heart of the Comet. Rotsler and I did that and threw in vagrant scenes to keep ourselves amused. Gordon Eklund and I rewrote each other a lot. Larry and I trade ideas and text incessantly. Arthur called me up and we wrote while telephoning, at long distance from Sri Lanka. You gotta be flexible.

I’ve read that you started reading science fiction while you were living in occupied Japan after WWII.

Yes, Heinlein, Clarke, the gamut. My twin brother and I became such devotees we subscribed to the magazines when back in the States for two years, then published a fanzine, Void, while in Germany for three years. That pitched us forward into a future we wanted—so became physicists, and on to a rich professional life in which my hobby was writing.

You’ve done work for NHK and lived in Japan. Do you know any Japanese? Do you have a favorite word or saying?

Indeed! 一期一会

“One life, one encounter.”

Every encounter is a once-in-a-lifetime meeting. This underscores how many first-and-only-time things happen in the day-to-day. So, treasure the moment!

I studied Zen Buddhism to learn this.

How did you meet Buzz Aldrin?

He lived in Laguna Beach, had read my work, so he called me up to ask if I wanted to co-write a novel with him. I liked him, but was too busy, so handed him off to John Barnes, who did a great job. Great guy, Buzz. Send him back into space!

Do you have any other projects in the works?

I’ve finished my next novel for Simon & Schuster, titled Rewrite. It’s about a man who reawakens after his death, in his eighteen-year-old body, and reinvents himself. But what made that happen? In the end, it’s a novel about quantum mechanics and living in our weird world.

Now I’m deep into the third novel with Larry Niven, concluding the Bowl of Heaven sequence. Then I’m doing a novel about a woman librarian in a future SETI Library. Ideas abound!—mostly coming from my continuing scientific career. Use what you know!

Do you have any advice for aspiring scientists? Writers?

Write daily. Use your own life. Plotting is hard, so spend your time on it. Be generous to your readers. Make them want to turn the page. Rewrite!

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 Depth of Sci-Fi Funk in the ’70s

Jason Heller

At the start of the 1970s, two forms of popular culture were on the rise: science fiction and funk. Sci-fi had a huge breakthrough in 1968 with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey; at the same time, funk architects like James Brown and Sly Stone were forcing the music to progress at an exhilarating rate. As the ’70s developed, these parallel arcs turned and merged. The result was sci-fi funk. Pairing the rhythmic and thematic innovations of funk with the conceptual evolution of science fiction, sci-fi funk expanded in the ’70s—catalyzed in part by the phenomenon of Star Wars—to become, by decade’s end, instantly recognizable. It also became the most visible face of Afrofuturism, which had been fostered in rock and jazz by artists such as Jimi Hendrix and Sun Ra.

Any discussion of sci-fi funk from the ’70s rightly begins with Parliament-Funkadelic. Led by founder George Clinton and emblemized by bassist Bootsy Collins, the collective of musicians fused science fiction, Black consciousness, and the emerging complexity of funk, beginning in earnest with Parliament’s 1975 album The Mothership Connection.

But the discussion of sci-fi funk in the ’70s usually ends with P-Funk as well, despite the fact that Clinton and crew were not the first, let alone only, funk artists of the decade who tapped into the concepts and aesthetic of sci-fi. In doing so, they further developed the ideas and visibility of Afrofuturism throughout popular culture.

The Continental Four, “Escape From Planet Earth” (1972)

In the early ’70s, funk singles such as “Space Travel” by Mugo, “Space Monster” by Lunar Funk, and “UFO” by Mickey & Them dipped their toes in science fiction, although most came across as novelty songs. But a little-known band from New Jersey may have recorded the first fully-realized sci-fi funk song. The Continental Four’s 1972 single, “Escape from Planet Earth” features a long, spoken-word intro complete with rocket-launch sound effects and a scenario where the crew of a spaceship must leave Earth to establish a new civilization on a distant planet. Parliament-Funkadelic were dabbling in cosmic themes by 1972, but they were still more in line with the vague mysticism of the post-psychedelic era. The Continental Four not only envisioned a utopian Black future among the stars, they did so through a compelling, cohesive sci-fi narrative.

The Jackson 5, “Dancing Machine” (1973)

While The Continental Four sang about space colonies, a dance craze called The Robot flourished here on Earth, as evidenced by a handful of songs including “Do the Robot” by The Family, “Funky Robot” by Dave “Baby” Cortez, and “Funky Robot” (a different song) by the king of R&B dance crazes, Rufus Thomas. In a 1973 episode of the TV show Black Omnibus, Thomas even demonstrated the Funky Robot to an amused James Earl Jones—who had no idea that he’d soon become one of sci-fi’s greatest icons as the voice of Darth Vader. The Robot hit its peak the same year, when The Jackson 5 performed their latest single, “Dancing Machine,” for a national audience on Soul Train. During this appearance, Michael Jackson offered a stunning display of the android-mimicking dance, which meshed with the song’s sci-fi vision of an “automatic, systematic” dance partner “filled with space-age design.”

Labelle, “Space Children” (1974)

Labelle shot to fame in 1974 with the success of “Lady Marmalade,” but it’s the B-side of that single that expressed the group’s sci-fi passion. “Space Children” is a plea for global togetherness draped in elegant funk—an inclusive view of the human race from a celestial perspective. One of the trio, Nona Hendryx, shared her love of science fiction with her cousin Jimi, and it seeped into Labelle’s increasingly cosmic lyrical content. Labelle also tapped into the emerging glam-rock movement led by sci-fi rocker David Bowie; they dressed themselves in ornate, glittery outfits that reimagined astronauts’ spacesuits. The costumes were created by designer Larry LaGaspi, who also made similar stage attire for Kiss and Parliament—the latter of whom were about to make a quantum leap to the top of the sci-fi funk field.

The Undisputed Truth, “UFOs” (1975)

Parliament’s The Mothership Connection, released in 1975, was the flashpoint of sci-fi funk, pulling together a disconnected trend into a consummate whole. In a parallel universe, though, Parliament’s contemporaries The Undisputed Truth became that band. Assembled in 1970 by Motown producer Norman Whitfield, The Undisputed Truth plunged into science fiction with their 1975 album Cosmic Truth and its lead single, “UFOs.” Using Whitfield’s groundbreaking psychedelic-soul sound, “UFOs” wrapped sci-fi funk in a tuneful package, complete with futuristic costumes similar to Parliament’s and Labelle’s. Despite three strong albums in this vein throughout the decade, The Undisputed Truth never caught on, having failed to develop the mythology and forward-looking innovation that put P-Funk at the forefront. Still, The Undisputed Truth’s alien-centric music remains a vital chain of sci-fi funk’s DNA.

Dexter Wansel, “Life on Mars” (1976)

Funk began to overlap with jazz fusion in the late ’60s—and as the ’70s progressed, so did sci-fi funk. Jazz keyboardists like Herbie Hancock and Charles Earland used funky grooves to ground the science-fiction cosmology first propagated by Sun Ra. Dexter Wansel was another such keyboardist, although his 1976 album Life on Mars—no relation to the David Bowie song of the same name—crafted a more immersive interplanetary ambience than Hancock or Earland. Using cutting-edge technology and studio techniques, he and his band, which he dubbed The Planets, created a soundscape that conjured both celestial harmony and the rhythms of some futuristic machinery. Wansel later doubled down on his infatuation with space exploration and become a science fiction novelist—one of the few sci-fi musicians of that era to do so, including Mick Farren of The Deviants and Julian Jay Savarin of Julian’s Treatment.

Mandré, “Solar Flight (Opus I)” (1977)

Singer Maxayn Lewis and her husband, keyboardist Andre Lewis, were the core of the band Maxayn, who released the space-themed single “Moonfunk” in 1974. After the group broke up, Andre went solo, assuming the guise of a robotic figure named Mandré. Wearing a metal helmet and brandishing a control panel’s worth of synthesizers, he issued three albums in the late ’70s that brought a new level of ambition to sci-fi funk. Symphonic in scope, songs such as “Solar Flight (Opus I)” grafted a funk sensibility onto the weightless, spacious sounds popularized by his classical-leaning contemporaries Vangelis and Jean-Michel Jarre. Other funk artists had a similar approach in 1977—most notably Manzel, the band behind the much-sampled single “Space Funk”—but Mandré’s virtuosity and mystique signaled a profound shift in sci-fi funk, one that would influence everything from electro to trance to Daft Punk, whose helmets bear an unmistakable resemblance to Mandré’s.

Slave, “Stellar Fungk” (1978)

Along with synthesizers, voice modulation became a technological hallmark of sci-fi funk in the ’70s. As early as 1972—when “Do the Robot” by The Family featured deadpan baritone vocals meant to simulate the rumbling of a mechanical man—funk artists sought ways to render human speech less human. To this end, the device of choice during most of the decade was the talk box, which formed an interface between the human voice and musical instruments such as guitars. “Stellar Fungk” by Slave, released in 1978, is one of the most compelling uses of the talk box in sci-fi funk, depicting a dance across the galaxy urged on by android commands and laser noises. The song appeared the same year Battlestar Galactica hit TV screens and made popular villains of its sinister, cybernetic Cylons. The show used the more expensive vocoder to transform its actors’ voices, a device that wound up becoming ubiquitous in popular music in the ’80s and beyond. But talk-box funk like “Stellar Fungk” paved the way for the common use of robotic vocals as a way to simultaneously mock and celebrate humanity’s growing intersection with technology.

Stargard, “The Force” (1978)

The release of Star Wars in 1977 transformed pop culture—sci-fi funk included. Meco’s platinum-selling disco version of the movie’s theme catapulted sci-fi funk into millions of homes across America. Instantly, sci-fi funk was mainstream. Dozens of artists leapt to capitalize on Star Wars, with numerous Meco knockoffs competing against a slew of songs that drew inspiration from the film rather than directly adapting John Williams’ score. Funk and disco acts such as The Droids, Boney M., Dee D. Jackson, and Sarah Brightman & Hot Gossip—many of them European and more sympathetic to Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder than P-Funk—got in on the Star Wars-inspired music boom. One of the most intriguing examples is “The Force” by the American vocal trio Stargard. Released in 1978, the song unabashedly borrows the central philosophical concept of Star Wars, right down to the film’s mantra “May the Force be with you.” At the same time, the lyrics carry a deeper resonance, equating the Force with spiritualism, inner strength, and empowerment.

Marvin Gaye, “A Funky Space Reincarnation” (1978)

Thanks to Star Wars, science fiction had fully infiltrated the mainstream by 1978. Suddenly, singing about space wasn’t only for novelty songs or cult artists. This sparked many funk superstars who had previously toyed with sci-fi imagery, like Earth, Wind & Fire, to delve more deeply into space travel on their 1978 single “Jupiter.” It also left a mark on huge artists not known for sci-fi themes, such as Stevie Wonder, who released the planet-gazing “Saturn” the same year. But the most ambitious song by a major funk star in the wake of Star Wars was Marvin Gaye’s “A Funky Space Reincarnation.” Over eight minutes long, it takes place in 2093 and details conquests both romantic and astronomical, referencing Star Wars by name in the process. It also dips into Afrofuturism, imagining a hopeful tomorrow where “Music won’t have no race / Only space.” Leave it to Marvin Gaye to pair sensuality with science fiction, in essence turning all of outer space into a single, infinite erogenous zone.

Instant Funk, “Dark Vader” (1979)

On first listen, “Dark Vader” by Instant Funk is just another Star Wars cash-in. But scratch the surface, and it’s fanfiction in song form. Unlike the many shallow appropriations of Star Wars set to music in the late ’70s, the song recasts Darth Vader—played in the film by the white actor David Prowse yet voiced by James Earl Jones in his stentorian bass—as Dark Vader, an explicitly Black character. In doing so, the song reclaims Darth Vader, casting him as a kind of interstellar Blaxploitation antihero—or as the lyrics describe, “a tall black man, entirely fearless.” It’s less a tribute to Star Wars and more a retelling of the story from a point of view that’s sympathetic to the villain. “Dark Vader” is to Darth Vader as the musical Wicked is to the Wicked Witch of the West. 

George Duke, “The Alien Succumbs to the Macho Intergalactic Funkativity of the Funk Blasters” (1979)

The proliferation of sci-fi funk at the end of the ’70s left the genre ripe for self-parody. In 1979, as Parliament released its final sci-fi concept album Gloryhallastoopid, the band’s rich cosmic mythology and tongue-twisting technobabble had become widespread—to the point where fusion keyboardist George Duke recorded a loving spoof titled “The Alien Succumbs to the Macho Intergalactic Funkativity of the Funk Blasters.” It’s a title that could have come from any number of Parliament or Funkadelic records in the ’70s, and sonically, Duke was just as playfully faithful. “Underwater intergalactic jam / With folks from another space and time / Alien romancing,” he sings while coaxing disco-on-Neptune sounds from his synthesizers. “The Alien Succumbs” is the best P-Funk song that P-Funk never made—a testament to how thoroughly George Clinton’s futuristic vision, and sci-fi funk as a whole, had trickled down over the course of the decade. At the end of the ’70s, sci-fi funk was still evolving, and Parliament-Funkadelic remained the primary source. But as important as P-Funk will always be, they were not the end-all-be-all of sci-fi funk in the ’70s. They were simply the most visible peak of a deeper continuum—one that translated the hopes and fears of science fiction into a language of musical innovation, liberation, theatricality, and dance.

About the Author

Jason Heller is a former nonfiction editor of Clarkesworld; as part of the magazine’s 2012 editorial team, he received a Hugo Award. He is also the author of the alt-history novel Taft 2012 (Quirk Books), and his fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine, Farrago’s Wainscot, Swords v. Cthulhu, and others. His nonfiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Entertainment Weekly, Weird Tales, Tor.com, and Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Time Traveler’s Almanac, and he regularly reviews science fiction and fantasy novels for NPR.org. He's the co-editor of the anthologies Cyber World (with Josh Viola) and Mechanical Animals (with Selena Chambers), both for Hex Publishers. His nonfiction book Strange Stars, a history of science fiction’s influence on popular music in the 1970s, will be published by Melville House in 2018. He lives in Denver with his wife Angie, and he can be found on Twitter: @jason_m_heller.

Editor’s Desk:
Recharging My Batteries

Neil Clarke

Since leaving my day job, I haven’t spent an entire month at home. I was initially concerned that without the required social interactions of my old job that I might over-embrace my hermit tendencies, but a recent flurry of invitations to various genre events and conferences has keep me out-and-about. Turns out that this is a double-edged sword for me. I enjoy getting out amongst fans and writers, but being social is exhausting. By the time I return home, I need several days to recover. That usually involves sleep and hiding in our house.

May is typically a recovery month for me and one of the few times that recharge cycle happens outside our house. Every year, before the rates go up and the place gets crowded, we pack up the car and take the kids to Ocean City, NJ. We seem to have a knack for picking the most rainy weekend in May, but that doesn’t deter us. At this point, I’m not sure what we would do if rain didn’t force us to stay in the room at least one day. These cold, wet family trips to the beach have become my favorite thing we do as a family and the only trip I hate to come home from.

This year fit the tradition. Rain, more rain, heavy rain, and then a bit of sun. Rain or shine, we walked the boardwalk and on most days, bought a Polish Water Ice. We’ve been doing this long enough now that the woman who runs that shop recognizes us from year-to-year—something I find astonishing. As a kid, my family was always going somewhere different. I never imagined that I would want to vacation in the same place from year-to-year, but I can’t imagine giving this up. Most years, I need this. This year, I think I underestimated just how much I needed it.

Back at one hundred percent, I had a few days before I had to be “on” again. Later that week, I drove five-and-a-half hours to Pittsburgh for the Nebula Awards Conference. One of the other things I do is edit the SFWA Bulletin, so I was there to cover the event and help out where I could. I was also there to cheer on Sam J. Miller, whose story “Things With Beards” was up for a Nebula. Interesting side note: I bought that story at the Nebulas the year before, and another the year before that. Continuing that tradition, Sam’s story in this month’s issue was acquired there this year. I seldom get to accept stories in-person, so this is a novelty for me. Sam didn’t win, but while we were there, it was announced that his story—and “Touring with the Alien” by Carolyn Ives Gilman—were finalists for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Congrats to both of them, once again!

Patreon was unable to get someone to the Nebulas this year, so I was asked to step in and run a half-hour panel for them. Cat Rambo and Merc Rustad joined me and we shared our collective experiences. As expected, thirty minutes wasn’t nearly enough to cover what we would have liked to, but it was good enough to provide an introduction and starting point for the audience. Afterwards, I posted a list of genre authors on Patreon and a quick list of some of our recommendations. If you’ve considered launching your own page, you might want to check it out at neil-clarke.com/nebula-awards-weekend-patreon-panel/.

One of the other highlights of the weekend for me was chatting with Don L. Jones, the artist responsible for creating the amazing assortment of robot centerpieces at the Nebula Awards ceremony. It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of robots—just look to this month’s cover for another example—so it was a pleasure chatting with a fellow B9 fan and to learn about his artistic process. Check out his website at www.jonesrobo-works.com and you’ll see just why one of these little guys had to come home with me.

Accompanied by my robot and one of his friends—a robot that I’ll eventually accompany into New York City so he can reach his final destination—I drove the five-and-a-half hours back home and I’ve been hiding out here ever since. I’m back out on the road—Cascade Writers Workshop and the Locus Awards—towards the end of the month and then out to Readercon in July, but that’s it for the summer. Sadly, no Worldcon for me this year. My budget simply won’t permit it.

It does mean that I’ll finally get a full month at home though!

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:
Sea Change

Matt Dixon

About the Artist

Matt Dixon is a freelance illustrator and concept artist from the UK. Digital art first captured his imagination when he began to assemble images from ASCII characters on a Commodore VIC-20 way back in 1980. Happily, things have moved along a little and Adobe Photoshop allows him to achieve slightly more sophisticated results these days.

His long association with the games industry began when he first contributed art to a video game in 1988. He was employed by one of the UK’s largest independent games developers for more than a decade, initially as a production artist, then as an art lead. During this time he was privileged to be involved with numerous high profile game and movie licenses, including Harry Potter, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon and Pirates of the Caribbean.