An Age of Ice

Zhang Ran, translated by Andy Dudak

1

Feng Su had always been an open-minded person. Regarding age, for instance: she felt it was just a number for medical records. It didn’t signify who you must look up to or down upon, and it wasn’t a reason for intimacy or estrangement. She had never played the age card with her daughter, never put on those airs. Their relationship had been like a friendship, or sisterhood. She’d never taken offense when her daughter called her Old Feng. It was an expression of intimacy. It had nothing to do with the question of respect.

But on that fateful day, when after a long silence her daughter tearfully said, “Old Feng,” Feng Su didn’t know how to respond. Age had become a communication barrier for the first time. She had not foreseen this. Avoiding eye contact, she considered phrasing and tone, composing a reply that would cause no further discomfort. She said it, and quickly regretted it. But it was too late. There was no taking it back:

“Daughter . . . so many years. Are you well?”

The speech synthesizer’s voice sounded mellow, natural. You could barely tell it was a transformed electrical signal captured by a cranial nerve interface. Feng Su felt like it was really her voice, although she couldn’t remember what her real voice had sounded like. She waited for her daughter’s response. She feared her tone had contained the arrogance of seniority, and hoped she hadn’t been inadvertently hurtful.

Age had indeed finally come between them.

“I’m fine,” her daughter said. “I’ve given legal birth to two children, and I have a grown-up grandchild. My husband’s health isn’t bad. I have no regrets.”

Feng Su thought for a moment. “There must have been difficulties over the years. Tell me everything.”

“Nothing that bad, really. Things are getting expensive, but our pensions are sufficient, and we can afford the rent on our flat. Last year the flat reached its seventy-year property right expiration, but the government granted us renewal. That only cost twenty thousand kuai. We don’t have to worry about paying for our grandson’s education. Every license plate gets just one day on the roads per month, so that’s inconvenient I suppose. The air is still passable, but we seldom go out. People say China’s population began to decline in 2026, but the streets are still crowded. Mostly with old folks, dancing and so on, looking after children.”

Feng Su smiled. “Dancing? What dances? Ethnic minority dances?”

Her daughter also smiled. “Think of what you’re saying. They’re old. It’s dancing in a public square, in the evening, just like the old days. Foolish, blind, bouncy old people.”

Feng Su laughed a while. “Why don’t you come wipe my face? It always feels terribly grimy.”

Her daughter fished a wet wipe out of her purse, came over, wiped the corners of her mother’s mouth and around her nostrils, saying, “Automatic cleaning is much better. I’m not so skilled and nimble as a robot. Old Feng, I think you’re just feeling depressed. Your face isn’t grimy.”

“Who says? I can see the grime on that wet wipe.”

“Come now. The machines keep you very clean.”

Feng Su lost interest in this subject. “Remarkable. We two look very much alike, don’t we?”

“Naturally. You’re my mother.”

They were near enough to see each other’s wrinkles, but neither was embarrassed or self-conscious. Feng Su thought she saw a vague sadness in her daughter’s eyes. She could guess what it meant, of course.

“Tell me, am I especially frightening?”

“Don’t start with that. You’re the same as before. No change.”

Feng Su pictured herself as her daughter must see her: a disembodied head on a silver plate. The doctor had considerately given her a wine-red wig, the hair long enough to cover the wires and tubes interfaced with the bottom of her neck. She couldn’t clearly remember what her real hair had been like. Perhaps it had indeed been this wavy, this deep, rich red. She felt about as fashionable as an old head on a plate could.

She’d been sixty-one the year she died of cancer. She was still sixty-one.

The year she died, her daughter had been twenty-seven. This year, her daughter was seventy-seven.

Feng Su had been sleeping for fifty years, cooled by liquid nitrogen to -196 degrees Celsius. The world she’d awakened to seemed, superficially, not much changed. But she was now younger than her daughter, physiologically anyway—which posed a bit of an ethical dilemma.

2

Ayer Longevity Foundation technicians guaranteed their “vitrification” freezing technology didn’t harm human tissues. Cellular structure remained intact because the process didn’t involve freezing the body’s water content. The Foundation had over a thousand specialists, conserving a hundred frozen bodies, and at least forty pets. These guests, prophets and gamblers, slept soundly in their liquid nitrogen beds. When they were frozen, humanity had yet to develop safe thawing technology. The future had been uncertain. None of the patients knew if or when they might wake up. They might have rested eternally in their coffins of ice.

Feng Su didn’t understand science and technology, and she didn’t have far-reaching ambitions. She was just inherently curious. She wanted to see the extremities of time and life. Her daughter and son-in-law unconditionally supported this decision. They helped her raise money for the expensive freezing process. In order to lower the cost, she’d just had her head frozen, abandoning her defeated body in 2015.

The final moment had been quite indistinct. She couldn’t clearly remember what had happened in the emergency room. There hadn’t been time to say goodbye to her daughter. But what would goodbye have meant, given the possibility of meeting again in the future? A minute after her heart stopped beating, Ayer Foundation pharmaceuticals poured into her. Her temperature was lowered, and her head was collected and taken to Foundation headquarters for preservation. Time marched on. Arizona’s bright sunlight waxed and waned. In the blink of an eye, forty years passed. A new thawing technology was in use, which involved slowly raising body temperature in tandem with molecular restoration. It revived the frozen with a success rate of over ninety percent.

The first person to thaw and open his eyes relied on extracorporeal circulation machines. He survived four months, then died from multiple organ failures. The second and third thaws slowly learned to control their muscles, aided heavily by doctors and machines. Their brains, which had been on pause for decades, had to become familiar with a new world. Modern medicine could cure their bodies’ former afflictions, but it was difficult to treat the psychic wounds resulting from a long-term freeze.

The fourth to be thawed was a politician, rock star, and orator. He was soon on his feet and back in the spotlight, becoming the focal point of the world’s media. A debate began, one involving ethics, religion, sociology, and anthropology. Fierce arguments flooded the Internet. Everyone was coming out for or against the new technology. A few years later, the thawed orator was shot dead by a religious fanatic, a fundamentalist cult member. This tragedy accelerated the passing of new legislation. The General Assembly law committee’s ‘U.N. Declaration Regarding Human Deep Freeze,’ proposed for the sake of humanity’s continued health, comprehensively affirmed the rights of the thawed. The legal gray area of cryonics was finally delimited: Ayer-type technologies and processes were sanctioned worldwide. Further research was legalized, with freezing and thawing both categorized as professional services.

The dust finally settled. Around this time, Feng Su’s daughter handed in the thawing application form.

Feng Su emerged from a dreamless sleep. The thawing process went smoothly. Her only problem was light memory confusion: during the process of dying, neurons were some of the first things to go. This was natural, and more or less unavoidable. More troublesome was the persistent ethical controversy regarding human cloning. Because such cloning was still prohibited, and because biomechanical technology had not yet matured, if you wanted a healthy new body, you had to wait for a viable donor to die. That meant a very long wait. Ultimately, it meant a stranger’s unfamiliar body.

Feng Su had something to ask of her daughter, now her senior. She wasn’t looking forward to this.

3

“What’s the matter? Are there still fees owed to Ayer Foundation?”

Feng Su averted her eyes and said, “No, but if the burden’s not too heavy, I would like to sleep a few more years. Current technology isn’t advanced enough to give me a body.”

Her daughter said, “Relax, membership fees aren’t bad. We can pay. But just to be clear, you mean you want to be frozen again? And years from now, thawed again?”

Feng Su closed her eyes. “Right now I can’t bear what I am. I was awakened too soon. I’m sorry for being such a nuisance.”

The room was quiet and still. Feng Su nervously waited for her daughter’s response, not daring to meet the gaze of that unfamiliar old woman. Terrifyingly, she’d forgotten the appearance of her 27-year-old daughter, which had once been etched on her heart.

Her daughter sighed. “I understand. You’re my mother. It’s my duty to do what you ask. But if you go back under, we might never meet again.”

Feng Su was dumbstruck. As far as she was concerned, time meant as little as old age. She remembered being on her sickbed, struggling for the greater part of a year against cancer. Thanks to the Ayer Foundation in America, and thanks to some careful planning, here she was. According to the doctors, cryonics and thawing technology would certainly continue to improve. Modern tech had already rendered freezing a brief, trifling matter. Sleeping, waking, preserving what memories were left to her, all required little more than pressing a dreamlike pause button.

But she might never see her daughter again. Not to mention other loved ones and friends still alive now. Once upon a time she’d worked at a publishing house. She had copy-edited science fiction novels, so she’d long ago considered the problem of cryonics and time. But now, face to face with her daughter, she didn’t know what to say.

The dim lighting brightened, and a voice said: “In consideration of Mrs. Feng’s health, today’s visiting hours are over.”

Her daughter leaned close, half-rising from her chair. Her wrinkled forehead briefly touched Feng Su’s face. “Old Feng, time for me to go. I’ll come back tomorrow. You can give me your decision then. And don’t worry about money.”

“Is someone coming to pick you up? Take it slow.”

“I know.”

Her daughter slid a lever, and her wheelchair carried her out of the room. The door closed behind her. The lights slowly darkened. Feng Su gazed out the window as it gradually turned transparent, revealing the hazy dusk of twilight. Beijing was immersed in a grayish-yellow fog that might have been slightly worse than fifty years ago, but seemed little changed.

She closed her eyes, felt the fluid being pumped into her blood vessels. She wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come. Perhaps her tear ducts were short of fluid, or perhaps it was brain damage. Perhaps her brain had forgotten what muscle to flex to squeeze out tears.

She had died once, and now she was alive, but you couldn’t call it a real life. She still remembered real life. She remembered strolling down a street, on a sunny day long ago, window shopping.

4

Her daughter drove the wheelchair out of the China Cryonics Center building. She rode the chair along its pre-charted course. She ascended to a train station. While waiting for a capsule, she used her retinal display screen to browse the newest cryonics prices: Ayer Foundation, fifty years, 3,000,000 RMB. China Medical Cryonics Research Center, fifty years, 2,000,000 RMB.

The train stopped at the platform. She rolled into the car, and her wheelchair automatically anchored into place. The cabin door closed. The train smoothly accelerated, in a few minutes reaching its top speed of 1050 kilometers per hour. Two hours later she had crossed China from north to south, Beijing to Shenzhen. She transferred to the high-speed seabed rail and headed for Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. She had important business there.

An unlicensed cryonics company was offering 50 years at 200,000 RMB. A black-market price.

In Johor Bahru, Malaysia, in an underground warehouse beneath an industrial park, there were a hundred thousand aluminum ice coffins. A prophet reposed in each coffin, or a gambler, or simply someone wanting to retire from the world. Among them were terminal cancer patients, people harboring dangerous secrets and hoping one day to board a ship to a more congenial world, people brought to the verge of death by traffic accidents, criminals waiting for statutes of limitations to expire, adventurers who had paid for a million years of frozen respite, art brokers waiting for buried antiques to appreciate in value, and hobbyists who just wanted to experience a freeze.

Among the frozen were her husband, and her eldest son. A cerebral hemorrhage leading to paralysis had put her husband there. Her son had been bullied and humiliated by classmates, and had killed himself.

This was an era of disdain for the Grim Reaper.

With high-speed freezing and molecular restoration, the boundary between life and death was blurred. As far as humanity was concerned, death was now just a hazy midsummer dream. Those doomed to die could come back to life in a future era. Such prolonged life took on a new shape: people connected with each other less frequently, and goodbyes became more profound. People lost touch with the real world. There was no guarantee of reuniting with loved ones in some unknown future.

There were a thousand underground cryo storehouses around the world. The same thing was happening everywhere.

She rolled out of the Kuala Lumpur high-speed rail station, steered her wheelchair through bustling crowds. The world’s population was in decline, but no one seemed to care. Cryonics technology was like an ultimate form of masturbation, God-given. People were becoming evasive creatures. They were evading reproduction, evading both life and death. It was greed, as if in a time of plenty they sought to devour Heaven and Earth.

“Hello,” said the ice coffin broker. “Glad to see you back again.” He smiled solicitously, advancing to welcome her. “You have a piece of business you wish to transact?”

“I think perhaps two pieces,” she replied.

Originally published in Chinese in Southern Weekly, January 10, 2016.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Born in 1981, Zhang Ran graduated from Beijing Jiaotong University in 2004 with a degree in Computer Science. After a stint in the IT industry, Mr. Zhang became a reporter and news analyst with Economic Daily and China Economic Net, during which time his news commentary won a China News Award. His stories have won numerous Gold and Silver Chinese Nebula Awards, and three Galaxy Awards for Best Novelette. He runs a coffee shop in southern China and writes in his spare time. The Windy City, his short story collection, was published in 2015.

Travelers

Rich Larson

The torpor pod is open, amber lights blinking in the gloom, intravenous and recycling systems still pumping like a slow heartbeat. Bubbly blue insulatory fluid pools on the floor, stamped with the malformed crescent of a bare footprint. A splattered blue trail leads from the pod to a status screen, where a woman is swaying, squinting at the blurred numbers.

She is naked. Her skin is ruddy red and grainy with goosebumps; a tattoo of a swallow stutters up and down her ribcage, the animated ink working through cold capillary beds. Her hands and feet are swollen but when she straightens up the nodes of her spine show like a stray cat’s. She has been in torpor for a long time.

She knows she should not be awake yet. Nobody else is. But the status screen shows an emergency thaw was triggered for reasons of health and safety. It shows color-coded charts of hormone cycles and energy consumption. It shows her the way to the medbay.

There has been a glitch. That is the thought that pushes to the front of her fragmented head. But if she goes to the medbay and submits to the full scan, maybe the glitch will resolve. She presses her vein-webbed hand to her stomach and the corner of her mouth twitches.

A drawer rolls open, revealing a burned-orange coverall. She dresses slowly, clumsily. The orange fabric swallows her like a shroud. She puts on the gel slippers; they hug slick and warm to her feet and undo the knot between her shoulder blades. She straightens up.

Small swatches of hologram lead the way to the door, a trail of digital breadcrumbs. She watches them blink while she composes herself, drawing lungfuls of cold air through her nose, puffing them out her pursed lips.

She knows you are not supposed to dream in torpor, but she feels as if she has had a nightmare. Pangs of fear and disorientation slice up through the fog in her head and disappear just as quickly. She reminds herself that it is not unusual. Extended torpor takes a toll on the brain.

“How long til we arrive?” she whispers. Her voice has flaked away to almost nothing.

The status screen flashes: 32 years, 49 +- 2 days to Pentecost.

“Thank you,” she says.

She follows the breadcrumbs.

The ship’s interior lights are dusked down to conserve power, but the holographic trail glows a bright acid yellow in the dark. She follows it down the narrow corridors, walking in step with her own stretched shadows, sometimes pausing hands-on-head to catch her breath. She can hear her own labored breathing, her pulse battering her eardrums, the soft suction plop of her gel shoes against the floor.

She can hear guitar notes. As she walks she tries to remember if extended torpor can cause audio hallucinations. The guitar grows louder, starting to strum. She knows the song. A smile drifts over her face and when the trail directs her left, she heads right, toward the music.

The airlock’s inner door is open. Hullsuits dangle from racks in the ceiling like mannequins and there’s a man sitting underneath them, pooled to the waist in blankets. A heat lamp illuminates him. He has broad shoulders but a boyish face only dusted with beard. His eyes are half-closed as he plays the printed guitar cradled in his lap. He looks familiar, but the ship carries over a hundred refugees and most of them she did not meet in the panicked days before the launch.

“You play pretty good,” she says.

The man’s eyes fly open. The guitar tumbles from his hands. He stares at her like she might be a ghost, then his eyes gleam with tears.

“Thank god,” he says. “I thought I was the only one.”

He says his name is Derek and that he has been awake for nearly two months now. Like her, he was told it was an emergency thaw. Like her, he was directed to the medbay. But, as he shows her on the way to the mess, the medbay is sealed off. The locklight glowers red when he swipes his thumb; she tries it herself and gets the same result.

“And we can’t go back to sleep?” she asks him.

They are in the mess now, sitting at one of the cheery yellow tables that flexes up from the floor like a toadstool at their approach. The man brought the heat lamp with him. She leans into the warmth, rubbing her hands together.

“Not without medbay approval,” he says, raking his hands through his hair. “It’s, it’s, it’s . . . ” He makes a loop in the air with his finger.

“A catch twenty-two,” she says. She sets her fork and knife down and uses her fingers to pick up the last strands of vegetable. She folds them into her mouth, chewing slowly with sore jaws.

“Did you like it?” he asks. There is an eager look on his face. “The vatmeat was ration, but the eggplant came from the hydrogarden. I got it up and running.”

“I liked it,” she says. She was ravenous. She would have eaten anything. “It only took two months to grow that big? The eggplant.”

“Genemod strain.” He shrugs. “Those scientists, they, they know their shit. The potatoes are gigantic.”

“There must be an override,” she says. “To restart the torpor cycle.”

The man hangs his head. “I’ve tried,” he says. “I’ve tried everything. But I was a plankton farmer, not a tech. Are you a tech?”

“No,” she says. “What did the status screen say when it woke you up? What was the reason it gave?”

“Irregular heartbeat, I think. I don’t remember.” He blinks. “What did it say for yours?”

His hand is spread flat and calm on the tabletop. His fingertips are thick with calluses.

“The same thing,” she says. “Thanks for the food.”

She takes her plate and fork to the scrubber.

Whatever error woke them early has been causing other problems, too. The oxygen stores are lower than they should be. Emergency lights are malfunctioning. Half the ship is sealed off by the same red locklights blocking the medbay.

“Fifty years is a long time for a ship to run itself,” the man says. “Too long. They troubleshoot these things in virtual, you know, these self-monitoring systems, but reality is always trickier.”

“Always,” she says. “At least we maintained trajectory.”

Then she goes into the bathroom and vomits into the puckered mouth of the disposal unit. She tells herself it is only because she ate too much, too quickly, for her shrunken stomach to handle. The other possibility looms dark and jagged.

She looks at her sunk-eyed reflection in the mirror and tongues a sliver of meat from between her teeth. She touches the cool molded handle in the pocket of her coverall.

The man is waiting for her when she comes out, shifting foot to foot. “Sorry,” he says, sheepish. “It’s just, you know, two months without having anyone to talk to, it’s scary, you know? I’m half afraid I’m dreaming.”

In the cramped space of the corridor, the man seems bigger. His arms and shoulders are layered with thick muscle. Nothing like her own atrophied limbs.

She smiles for him, stretching her lips off her teeth. “I’m real,” she says. “Don’t worry.”

He smiles back so wide.

She has slept for years but is soon exhausted. Extended torpor takes a toll on the body. The man offers her the airlock and its nest of blankets.

“It’s warmer,” he says. “And you can see stars sometimes, through the viewport.”

“You’re not afraid of getting flushed?” she asks. “With everything else going haywire?”

The man blinks. “I hadn’t thought about it.”

She takes blankets to the mess instead, raising one of the tables to half-height and stretching out on top of it. She does not sleep. Instead she lies there in the dark and imagines the man’s calloused fingers roaming over her skin. She bites down on her knuckles hard.

The guitar starts to strum again. The same notes, the same song. He plays it well, and as soon as the last note fades in the air, he starts over. She lies there listening as long as she can stand it, clutching at her belly. Then she slides quietly off the table and takes off her gel shoes.

The corridors are pitch black and the cold floor bites her feet. She goes slowly, feeling her way along the wall, until she sees the red glow of the sealed medbay doors. Peering close, she can see now what the man obscured with his half-turned body: the locking circuitry has been tampered with. A drizzle of hardened epoxy marks where the panel was resoldered.

She moves on. The guitar grows louder as she approaches the airlock. The man has his broad back to her, facing the viewport, looking out into black space as he plays. For a moment she imagines the inner door slamming shut, the exterior rushing open, the man spinning out into nothing.

Then she pads past, heading back toward the torpor room. The door hisses open with a jet of cold air; she folds her arms around herself. The pods are in two long rows that stretch back into the dark. She can dimly make out the one that was hers, its shell sprung open. But she is not here to find her own pod.

She goes to the status screen and pulls up the passenger directory. D-E-R-E and the man appears in grayscale photograph, clean-shaven, smiling so wide. Torpor pod number eighty-seven. She taps to see the pod’s health report, and sees there has been no input for nearly three years.

Her heart stops. She goes back to the directory, viewing it as a top-down diagram of the torpor room, and finds there are other empty pods, teeth missing from a grin.

“Couldn’t sleep?”

The man is in the doorway, hands up on the frame. His face is all shadow.

“There has to be an override somewhere,” she says. “To put us back in torpor. I was looking.”

“You need to rest,” the man says. “Extended torpor takes a toll on the brain. You won’t be thinking clearly for a few more days.”

She nods, keeping her half-turned body between him and the screen. He steps forward. In the dim illumination of the torpor pods, his eyes seem to gleam. They travel from her face down her body and back.

“Can you piggyback me?” she says. “My legs are giving out.”

The man shrugs. “Alright.”

He turns and sinks to a crouch. She blanks the screen with a trembling finger. Then she reaches into her coverall pocket, wraps her arms around his thick neck, and places the edge of the knife up under the corner of his jaw.

He freezes. Then he laughs. She can feel an artery bobbing against the blade.

“Take me to the medbay,” she says.

“I don’t think you want to see the medbay,” the man says.

She tries to keep her voice from breaking. “Take me to the medbay, you sick fuck.”

“Three years is a long time to be by yourself,” the man says. “After a few months, I started seeing things. Hearing things. Started to talk to myself.”

“Just open the door,” she tells him. Her arms are still clamped around his neck, aching from the effort.

“The hydrogarden didn’t produce for the first year and a half,” he says. “Emergency rations ran out after the first year.”

He pushes a matte black keystick against the pad, and the locklight turns blue. The medbay door slides open, gushing icy vapor. He has the temperature dialed down even colder than the torpor room. She holds out her hand and he puts the keystick in it. Then he walks her into the room.

Lights switch on, stark white halogens. Wine-red splashes stain the floor.

A frost-furred autosurgeon hangs from the ceiling like an enormous spider with scalpels for limbs. On the table beneath it, there is most of a woman’s leg. The autosurgeon is frozen in its work, calipers peeling muscle back from bone, cubing the meat into neat portions.

“She was already dead,” the man says. “She full flatlined in torpor. I needed to eat, didn’t I?”

Her stomach heaves. “You fed me meat,” she says.

“You said you liked it.”

He throws her off; she tries to slash with the knife but her arm is still weak. She hits the floor hard and it slams the breath out of her. Her vision swims. When it clears the man is standing over her, fingering a bloody notch in his ear, grimacing.

“They would understand,” he says. “We’re all survivors. That’s why we made it on board, you know? We all had to do things.”

“How many?” she asks.

He shakes himself like a dog. Instead of answering, he goes to the autosurgeon and switches it back on. It starts to pull and slice, monomolecular blades jittering through the frozen muscle, almost soundless.

“I checked your pod,” he says. “I saw why it woke you. I didn’t know that would happen. I didn’t know it was possible.”

She remembers how he looked at her belly in the torpor room. She clutches at it now with her fingernails, like she can tear it open. Her other hand scrabbles for the knife.

“Maybe it’s a miracle,” the man says. “A sign. You’re carrying the first free child. First of the new generation. Try to think of it that way, maybe.”

“Shut up,” she says. “Shut up.”

“You don’t know what it’s like to be by yourself for this long,” he says. “At first I only looked at you. But then it got so I could hear you talking to me. Saying things. Saying what you wanted.”

She sets the point of the knife to her belly button. “I’ll carve myself open,” she says. “Carve myself open and tear it right out.”

“I don’t think you will,” the man says, watching the autosurgeon work, almost hypnotized by the flashing scalpels. “You’re a survivor. You’ll adjust.”

“Did you even try to restart the torpor?” she says.

He finally looks at her. “What?”

“Did you even try to go back to sleep?” she says. “Or was this perfect for you? Your own little kingdom.”

The man’s face is blank for a moment, then contorts. “You think I wanted this?” he says. “I never wanted this. I never wanted to do this.” He advances on her. “I spent six months trying to get back into that pod. Four months trying to get into someone else’s. It never worked.”

She uses both hands to drive the knife into his foot. The blade jars against bone and she nearly loses her grip on the handle as he stumbles back, howling. She picks herself up off the floor, a tidal wave of adrenaline crashes through her aching body, and she runs.

Remembering the hullsuits, she heads for the airlock. The cold stabs at her bare feet. She peels down the top half of her coverall as she runs; when she arrives she climbs out of it completely, holding the handle of the knife in her mouth so she can use both hands. Then she pushes through the dangling hullsuits and pulls the last one off its hook.

She is trembling all over as she wrestles with the hullsuit, stuffing her coverall inside, letting one orange sleeve flap loose. Her reflection in the viewport is ghoulish, eyeless. Beyond it there is nothing but blackness. She slips the knife from between her teeth, and when she hears uneven footsteps approaching in the corridor, she worms the tip of the blade into the hullsuit’s pressurized knee joint.

There is no time to hide around the corner. She bellies out on the floor and pulls one of the blankets overtop of her just as the man arrives.

“I know my way around the autosurgeon now. If it’s what you really want, I could set it up to take care of the problem.”

She bites down on her knuckles, willing herself stone. Unmoving, unbreathing. She hears the man come closer until he is standing almost directly over her. She can smell his grime and sweat and musk. She can feel his body radiating heat. Her hand is twitching and she is sure he will see it ripple the blanket.

“I won’t touch you again,” he says. “Not until you’re ready. Thirty years is a long time. Humans, we’re adaptable. You know? We forgive and forget. Eventually we’ll forget all about this. We’ll live in the hydrogarden. We’ll play music. We’ll grow old together. Doesn’t that sound okay?”

He sucks a sharp breath and she imagines the punctured joint of the hullsuit finally flexing, the tell-tale orange fabric of her coverall waving in the air. She feels him vault over her prone body. As soon as he does, she rolls the other way. Her heart hammers staccato in her chest. He shouts but she is already out of the airlock, already has both hands slammed against the control panel.

He yanks his outstretched fingers back a nanosecond before the inner door thunks shut. His laugh comes hollow through the plastiglass. He pushes his forehead up against it, making a circular splotch of flesh, and she can see tears in his eyes again.

“I didn’t mean for you to wake up,” he says, breath fogging his face like a mask. “If you’d have just stayed sleeping, everything would have been fine. You wouldn’t have ever had to know.”

She keys the outer door. It doesn’t fly open how she imagined it. The airlock only starts to hiss, venting its atmosphere back into the ship, not a molecule of oxygen to be wasted.

“I could have woken you,” the man says. His eyes are moving up and down her naked body, up and down, following the swallow tattoo. “Could have woken everybody. But I didn’t. I knew the ship couldn’t support it. I didn’t wake even one other person. I didn’t want to make them suffer how I suffer. I sacrificed.” A vein bulges in his neck and he slams his fist against the window. “Don’t you think I deserved something for that? Don’t you think I deserved something, you fucking whore?”

“You’re getting it,” she says.

The man thumps his forehead against the plastiglass. There are tears running down his cheeks. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry. Let’s start over, okay? Let me. Let me play you something.” He picks his guitar up off the floor and starts tuning it.

As she staggers away, back toward the medbay and the whirring autosurgeon, he starts to play. She knows the song. She knows he will play it until his fingers are numb and his eyes slip shut.

About the Author

Rich Larson was born in West Africa, has studied in Rhode Island and worked in Spain, and now writes from Edmonton, Alberta. His short work has been nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon and appears in numerous Year’s Best anthologies, as well as in magazines such as Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Apex.

The Significance of Significance

Robert Reed

Sarah wasn’t quite two when the world learned what was what.

Which is rather like saying that Sarah still didn’t exist.

The very young don’t get to keep their memories. That’s normal human development in action, or it’s a nagging bug inside an otherwise lovely system. Either way, she didn’t waste time regretting this supposed loss. Sure, a booger-clogged head was wearing her name, stumbling across a misunderstood landscape. But that head wasn’t her head, and this Sarah inhabits a beautiful, artificial universe. This world only pretends to be made from protons and people, and being one of the first to grow up knowing that, she has no trouble seeing the blessing for what it is, and that’s why she appreciates each day as wonderful, and it’s sad to see so many others who don’t understand the Significance.

Sarah’s parents. They’ll never accept the truth, which is why spending time with them is so frustrating. She tries to be patient. She really does. But Mom and Dad have pinned themselves to the worst kind of template. What they believed back on Day Zero is what they believe today, and while it’s tempting to feel sorry for those who don’t understand, sorrow is a negative emotion. Negative emotions will always turn into a godawful waste of time, and time feels precious. This lovely existence could evaporate tomorrow, but for as long as Sarah remains real, she intends to harvest as much joy as possible.

At least one old man appreciates the world. Mom’s father, Grandpa Lemon, is a different animal. Almost eighty, a fantasy definitely close to its natural end, yet the man still smiles and laughs way more than most people. Maybe he doesn’t have the strongest grasp on the science, but he also doesn’t get angry about what young people know for certain.

“The significance of Significance,” he says.

Sarah laughs at that phrase.

Grandpa waves a hand as if shooing away flies. “Want to hear some wild stories explaining why we’re here?”

She says, “Sure.”

“For most of my life, the universe was one enormous, beautiful explosion of Nothingness. And before that? The Earth and its little people were carved from clay by some tall white dude straddling the clouds. But today, for this minute or two, we’re calling ourselves a slick dream living inside an invisible machine.”

Except the machine is visible. That’s a point worth making, and Sarah always makes her points.

“I understand all that,” he claims. “Hey, I actually watched the first press conference. All those people who got to share the Nobel, crazy happy with the attention. And I’ll boast about something else. I’ve read everything that I can find. Unlike a lot of people, including your dear mother. So yeah, I can appreciate what you believe. The universe is a very big box filled with important mathematics. Not that I understand the details, or that you do either. But the evidence is compelling. Reality is full of cheats and simplifications, and quantum mechanics is a game, and the spaces between electrons and between the picoseconds are full of game tricks. And best of all, astronomers looked at the sky and saw the cosmic scaffolding. Which feels like a joke, if you think about it. Do you get my joke, honey?”

Sarah doesn’t like being called “honey.” But names are just clumps of silly sound, and why sweat one word? In Grandpa Lemon’s mind, the famous news conference occurred in 2025, and today happens to be May 8, 2043. But Sarah’s generation doesn’t keep the same calendar. This is 6404. That’s the number of days since the Significance was revealed. Units of time are arbitrary and inadequate, but people who live inside the long years tend to forget too much. Which is a waste. Existence is already arbitrary and frail. You need to notice everything, and counting every day helps. You never know when the complicated math is going to collapse. Whoever built this universe has that kind of power. It’s just like the two-year-old’s brain: The world can cease and thoughts can vanish and nobody would know. Which is one very good reason to smile politely when her grandfather tells cosmic jokes.

“God is a comedian,” Sarah says. “An old guy like you standing on the scaffolding, laughing down at us.”

“Laughing hard,” he adds.

Both of them are doing just that. Sarah inherited Grandpa Lemon’s deep chuckle. That’s what Mom claims, and that isn’t a bad thing to hear. How many times have Sarah and her grandfather been together like this, the two of them sharing this kind of pleasure? It’s easy enough to ask. Sarah wears cameras and microphones, and like many in her generation, she feeds every moment into an encrypted cloud locker.

But she doesn’t ask. Grandpa suddenly falls quiet, and after a long, sorry sigh, he says, “About your mother.”

All right. Here it is.

“I’m not telling you that your folks are worried. You know as much. Or that my daughter doesn’t like your choices, since that’s the most obvious thing in the world right now. No, I just want to hear the story from you. Your reasons for doing this. At your age, when you should be making ready for the rest of your life—”

That’s when she interrupts him. A sound that isn’t laughter bursts free, and they’re both surprised by the harshness of it, the rude and dismissive noise before the single word, “Shit.”

Grandpa stops talking.

Sarah regrets nothing. Regret weighs you down, shortening the good in your brief existence. That’s what she believes and expects from herself. Except no, now she finds herself feeling bad about what she just did, and she can’t shake the stupid emotion.

Grandpa Lemon repeats just one word.

“Reasons,” he says.

The question doesn’t have to be made any clearer. Sarah’s right hand touches her belly and the bulge. The baby will kick if she waits, because this is a busy eager happy sack of potential that won’t hold memories for another eight hundred days.

“Because,” she says. “I want a baby before we vanish.”

“We aren’t going to vanish, honey,” he says.

Again, that unwelcome word.

“But we can go away,” she insists, wanting to sound reasonable but all kinds of pain revealing themselves. Then after a pause and several useless breaths, she adds, “I want a child who loves life as much as I do. And I want to enjoy him before this show is finished.”

“But if it goes away . . . then it’s as if it never was . . . ”

How can anyone say that, or even think it?

One last time, he says, “Honey.”

Anger takes her, making her feel vulnerable. “Every game ends,” she tells him. “But somebody is playing us, Grandpa. Somebody who sees us and knows us. Who knows me, and who’s going to know my son, and as long as we stay happy and interesting, we’ll be worth watching. So you see? That’s the significance of the Significance.”

A baby is coming. Reality has one shape or an entirely different shape, but Sarah is definitely pregnant and her parents don’t even know the father. Some people would accept this situation. After all, their daughter is a bright, well-educated, voting-age adult. Except Sarah is also impulsive and stubborn. If she wants a baby, that’s what will happen. Telling her that she cannot or should not are the worst possible strategies. No, it’s much easier to attack the entire universe. Taking positions of deep ignorance, the two of them throw doubting words at a child who graduated from school only because she was smart enough to achieve that goal without hard work. The girl who chases loud parties and odd boys in her endless quest for fun. Her parents have learned not to openly doubt Sarah’s good sense, but they can sure complain about the science. Reality is not a piece of software, and existence isn’t some godly creature’s elaborate, fickle hobby. That’s the only way that these two shy people can stand tall and sound stubborn, relying on other people to tell Sarah what she needs to hear.

But the Lemon gambit has been soundly defeated.

“Don’t ever put my grandfather up to shit like that,” Sarah warns them. “I like the old boy. And I didn’t want to have to yell at him.”

Sarah did yell. A full report from the battlefield arrived half an hour before their daughter.

“We were trying to help,” one of them says.

It doesn’t matter which one of them speaks. Married as long as they have been, the voice is shared, just like the uncomfortable air inside their old home.

“These are such difficult times,” says the other one.

“And a baby . . . ”

“Is a lot.”

“Too much.”

“When the world is so frantic.”

“So crazy.”

“Everything unsettled.”

“Changing.”

“Nothing but change,” the shared voice says, and then pauses.

Sarah is not one of those pretty pregnant girls. She doesn’t sleep enough or eat right, and maybe she’s doing worse things to herself and the child. Who knows? Well, she knows. This self-indulgent life needs to be recorded, and that’s why she wears multiple cameras, every mechanical eye staring at these two people who are being awful, and on a day when she so much wanted to have fun.

“Nobody believes what you believe,” says Sarah. “That’s why the churches are standing empty.”

Which is an odd observation, for multiple reasons.

“I know what bothers you,” the girl declares. “God isn’t magic floating in the clouds. Science built the universe, and you hate it because we know everything that we need to know already.”

One of them asks, “Why talk about God?”

“We’ve never been religious sorts,” says the other.

But the first has to point out, “And a lot of people still go to church. People who happen to be your age, in fact.”

Sarah laughs at some part of this. She doesn’t sound like her grandfather today. This is a stranger’s laugh, half growl and full of bile.

Then one parent tells her, “You need to listen to somebody, honey . . . ”

Which is when Sarah begins to scream. At no time in her brief busy life has their daughter unleashed such anger or used this abusive language. “Do you fucking know how much I fucking hate being called ‘honey?’”

They will never use that endearment again. But in the spirit of the moment, with emotions heating up air and blood, this is the perfect opportunity to be honest, honest, honest.

“You’ve always done what you want,” they tell her.

“You do it fiercely and without doubts, right up until you decide that you don’t want to do it anymore.

“This isn’t about the nature of the universe,” they tell her.

“It doesn’t matter if this world is a game or Eden or just one rock among trillions.

“What matters is you.

“You’re a certain kind of person and always will be.

“That’s why we’re afraid.

“Both of us are.

“You’re going to get tired of this game, which you always do.

“And then you’ll leave that poor child with us.”

There it is. A terrible truth to admit, particularly to yourself. But they say what needs to be said, and they even manage to stand their ground afterwards, enduring more vicious language and so much fury. But what they don’t expect is the sudden epiphany: In the midst of that onslaught, the suffering parents find themselves wishing that Sarah is right. The universe is indeed someone’s chess board. Because they want the pieces picked and put away, and then all of this terrible pain can dissolve into the vacuum . . . forgotten . . .

Being the center of attention should be the best feeling in the world. But Tomjack keeps learning that he can’t trust every pleasure. Happiness finds too many ways to get him into trouble.

Like with Sarah.

Three leaps into bed, and each time, nothing felt so good. The sex was part of the fun, sure. But mostly it was the way the girl looked at him, particularly before and then after. Tomjack was the only other person in the world. That’s what her smile was saying. Way too big for one soul, her joy was running hot through him too. If he hadn’t been there to eat her emotions, Sarah would have exploded. That’s what he was thinking at the time. Which was an odd idea, and the odd thoughts didn’t stop coming afterwards.

Every little action felt special when they were together. Usually squeamish about cameras, Tomjack didn’t balk about her cameras or throwing everything up to the Cloud. The last time together was that long wonderful afternoon in bed, and that’s when Sarah did the unthinkable. She told her lover that the world could end right now. “Because I’ll never be happier than I am right now,” she said. Sounding hushed and amazed, as if making a confession.

Normal people didn’t use those words. Normal thought didn’t expect the universe to dissolve in the next breath. But Sarah didn’t just accept the Significance, she believed everything that it told her. For her, life wore a capital L, and when something happened that wasn’t as perfect or fun or as surprising as Sarah deserved, then the day could turn very, very ugly.

But not that day. His lover was crying for every good reason, talking about her happiness and hopes. It was so nice. So perfect. The best hours of Tomjack’s life, and that’s why he risked breaking the biggest Sarah-rule. Watching her getting dressed, getting ready to leave, he asked when they’d see each other again. Sarah didn’t believe in “Forcing the future.” That’s what she called normal human planning. But the boy felt brave enough to try the question, and his lover was too giddy to risk chastising him or the temporary universe. She winked, sort of. Then she said, “Next week.”

“What day?” he pressed.

She hesitated, but not for long. “Thursday,” she told him. Then she mentioned a time when she might or might not arrive at his front door.

Of course Tomjack shaped his entire week around that interlude. And when Sarah didn’t show, he has some ready-built explanations that he could live with. The girl lost track of time, or a party left her too sick, or maybe her grandfather died. Except none of those excuses happened to be true. Sarah didn’t show or answer his texts, and she had never offered him a home address. That’s when tragedy became appealing. There must have been an accident. He imagined her tumbling down a flight of stairs. By Friday, those stairs became numerous and sharp, and by next week, after repeated attempts to contact the girl, Tomjack was convinced that she was dead and he was glad that he missed her funeral. Which was a selfish, stupid way to think. But the boy was barely eighteen, which happened to be the perfect age to let a willful, self-indulgent beauty take hold of your soul.

A full month passed before Sarah showed up again. By then, Tomjack felt older and a little wiser. The girl made apologetic sounds that didn’t excuse anything but the silly, temporary universe. She told him to forgive her, and maybe he did. Two minutes later, he wasn’t sure what he had said. By then, Sarah was boasting about new boyfriends. Three of them, usually two at a time, and Tomjack wasn’t that kind of beast. He wasn’t at all like her. Standing in the open door, she practically ordered him to have a good life, and that’s when the jilted lover found the maturity to say a few honest words.

“You’re a scary bitch,” he said.

“You’re just figuring that out?” she asked, laughing at silly him.

And for six years, they didn’t talk.

Yes. “Years.”

A lot of people are busy counting the days. But not Tomjack. Adults are free to believe what they want about the universe, regardless of their age. And for Tomjack, the Significance is just a miserable distraction. The picture of everything being unreal . . . well, that will never have stopped making him sick inside. It’s not that he isn’t smart enough to understand the crazy science. The Significance makes as much sense as gravity or electrons, which are pretty magical in their own right. But six more years of life have taught him that his opinions don’t matter all that much. Not to other people or to anything else, including the universe. For the last three years, Tomjack has been married, and his life is happy. But he knows not to feel too happy, since joy is temporary and everything is guaranteed to change, and change likes nothing better than to arrive without warning.

A theory proved when Sarah arrives unannounced at his front door.

On a Thursday afternoon, as it happens. So maybe she wasn’t lying. Maybe this is what she meant with that long ago promise.

A boy stands behind her, tugging against her hand, and he might well be five years old.

Tomjack says, “Shit.”

“Watch your language,” Sarah reprimands. Except then she gives this big scary laugh. The woman looks brittle and about to break, and Tomjack feels cold for the both of them. For the three of them.

“Is this him?” the boy asks.

Sarah keeps up the weird giggling. Cameras are riding her face and hands and knees, and a flock of gnat-sized eyes float in the air, sucking in existence. Her endless pleasure is being enforced. Chemicals can do this, and electrodes implanted deep inside the giddy brain. Methods don’t matter as much as results, and he sees this more and more every year. Good sane people want to relish their lives, and they’ll do anything to feel as if they are the center of the cosmic happiness.

The thing is, Sarah is neither good or sane.

“Is this him?” Tomjack’s son wants to know.

She answers by not answering. Teeth showing, she stares at her ex-lover, and something needs a hard moan that steals away her breath. Then she tells him, “This is fair. More than fair.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’ve had 2000 days with him. That’s enough.”

Is she really talking about their son?

“You get him now,” she says.

“It is him,” the boy decides.

Tomjack looks at a face that he helped build.

“My name is Honey,” the kid says,

Tomjack looks at Sarah. “Seriously?”

“It’s just a sound,” she explains.

Again, he looks at the boy, nothing to guide him but a quarter century of life, coupled with empathy as well as a lot of deep, sucking fear.

“You’ll take him,” she says.

Tomjack doesn’t answer.

“Because my folks won’t,” she continues.

Which is a great joke. The crazy woman has to bend over, laughing until she’s out of breath.

“Useless old people,” Sarah says.

With both hands, Tomjack yanks the boy free of his mother.

“Anyway,” she says. “You’ll need to go through the legal shit. I won’t fight you. And for help, I can give you . . . ”

He listens to her deep, frantic breathing.

“Recordings of everything,” she promises. “When we made him and everything that’s happened since. Including his first two years, which were pretty damned interesting.”

Inside his head, Tomjack is explaining this mess to his away-from-home wife.

Out loud, all he can say, “Okay then.”

“Well, good,” says the madwoman.

Honey, the boy, seems like the kind of kid who’s always fearful. He’s probably sad and cries himself to sleep. Which really, at the end of this, is the very best evidence that they might make this work. That’s what Tomjack is thinking just now. Start with despair and desperation, and after that, everything an incompetent father does will seem like a godsend.

The scientist on the squidskin belonged to the original project. That salient fact needs to be mentioned, along with naming team members instrumental in work done decades ago. But those people aren’t here today. This is a different project, and after thanking the dead and the retired, she begins the official news conference.

“The universe is a fabrication of mathematics and high-end simulation,” she says. And with that, the Nobel laureate pauses, one finger dragging text across the podium.

Deja vu hits Harold Lemon.

The woman sighs, looking at the camera. Staring directly at him. “For two generations, this has been our working theory. And every good theory deserves to have its ideas and their consequences tested. Inside the lab, through field observations. As problems of the mind. And through every step of the journey, the evidence remains solid. But that leaves a question. If the universe is a fiction, then what is this story telling us? That’s what I hope we’re here to explain today.”

Harold loves moments like this, being taken by surprise, becoming one among billions privileged to watch history play out in unexpected ways. Excitement mixes with oxygen, giving every person a dose of energy. That’s true even inside a warehouse populated with old people. The common rooms are filled with residents watching the news. People stand, people lean forward in their favorite chairs. Expressions range from intrigued and grave concern to the simplicity of being pissed to find their ordinary day ruined. And then there’s the staff standing in back, nobody doing their jobs. Across the world, humanity is enjoying a contemplative break.

In his middle nineties, Harold Lemon has the one daughter, a very crazy granddaughter, and that teenage great-grandson who he doesn’t see nearly enough. Except of course for the millions of images of the boy pulled from various cloud accounts. Harold’s daughter hung squidskin on his apartment walls, instructing the AIs to harvest smiles, forced as well as honest. A lot of fake intimacy, and that’s why the squidskin plays only when the daughter visits or when Harold leaves his apartment. Which is what he does most every day, as it happens. Since he has never been a lonely old boy.

“Frankly, I was never quite satisfied with our initial discovery,” the physicist confesses. “It’s not the nature of the universe that bothers me. Every system has its rules. The Big Bang could be as artificial as mahjong, and who are we to complain? No, I learned to live with the new paradigm. What kept me from sleeping is the gnawing problem about why we so easily see the evidence? Once we knew how to look, the clues were dangling in the sky as well as the smallest corners of the universe. These are clues that humans can’t avoid, much less deny, and that seems unlikely. Almost silly. Really, why go to so much trouble to invent a world and a full, rich cosmos, and then leave your boards and bolts hanging in the sky?”

Harold drinks in that woman’s face. Her joy feeds his pleasure, and that would be true even if he couldn’t hear her words. But he hears everything. Friends and other residents have pushed in close enough to touch one another, but nobody talks. Only the young workers on the outskirts are foolish enough to offer opinions about things they know nothing about.

“But what if this scaffolding was left behind as markers, or as a message?” She asks the question, and once again, she pauses.

Harold leans a little closer, enjoying the thundering of his heart.

“To answer this question, my team and I devised new ways of analyzing data. Everything learned by spaceborne telescopes and the lunar cyclotron has been used. Everything known about this universe has been massaged. And what are we now certain about? That the universe is quite a bit smaller than we first assumed. There are no billions of lightyears or hundreds of billions of days. The real walls of our universe? Spherical and set just about one lightyear from where I’m standing now. And humanity herself is quite a bit younger than we would ever guess. Biblical stories use thousands of years to measure history. But that’s much too much. This world and all its inhabitants were conjured into existence a little more than three hundred years ago.”

This is too much to absorb, even for sharp, happy Harold.

Having delivered that thunder, the first scientist surrenders the podium to her colleagues. In smaller bits, each repeats what has already been said, but with narrower focuses and a fair amount of nomenclature. Reporters are invited to offer up obvious, ignorant questions. The best-guess explanation is that the Earth and its people are a simulation rendered by a more advanced Earth. Which itself could be a synthetic wonder. And is there any window or trapdoor reaching to any greater realm? Not that they can see. Which is sad, or perfect, or nothing. Who can say?

Harold listens until these bizarre new ideas reach a critical point. No, he isn’t ready to understand, much less accept what he’s being told. But at least he has a clear sense about how thoroughly his beliefs need to change.

Eventually the project leader returns to the front of the stage. But this is a different woman, it seems. Nervous, uneasy. She glances at her colleagues, and they respond with affirmative nods and frowns and little gestures from hands that aren’t quite sure what to say. Then the researcher makes a decision, gripping the podium, holding tight for a bit. But no, that isn’t enough. Better to step forwards until she’s perched at the edge of the stage. “One more item,” she says. “This may change, of course. The data are new, our assessments raw. But while doing this work, it occurred to us that any sufficiently large universe could hold little universes. Spaces full of information and highly compressed time. Those are the hallmarks of a genuine Creation. And that’s why we began to analyze our surroundings. Honestly? I didn’t expect anything interesting. Yet we managed find a little universe. And another one, and more after that. Each object is built on the same principles as this giant tiny wondrous box of a universe that we live inside. And each of us is carrying and caring for the marvel. Which is this.”

And that is the moment she places a hand on her small, infinite forehead.

Two universes share a small park bench, and several dozen universes are enjoying the playground and one another. There’s a lot of motion and noise in the scene, and sometimes one of those grown universes will shout, “Honey.”

As a warning, as an endearment. Either way, Honey ignores his name.

His mother sits beside him, quiet and very still, hands resting on her lap, her face engaged but not smiling. Not joyful. Which is still strange to see. The mother that Honey remembers was perpetually smiling, loud and very energetic, like a force of Nature during those little dashes of time when his father allowed them to meet. Usually with Dad hanging close, just in case . . . well, it was never clear what the fear was. That Mom would poison his thinking or dose him with some joy-inducing drug? Or maybe she would kidnap her boy, reclaiming what she regretted giving away for free.

Honey never asks about regrets. The past lives only inside the little universes, and each has its own version of what happened and why. One universe can passionately defend her actions, and maybe the other modifies his memories accordingly. But maybe not, and maybe there would be a fight, and it’s best to remember that on the best day, the universe has a tough time saying much at all.

And this is not the best day.

All at once, his mother says, “I don’t want you to go.”

Honey shrugs.

“Or leave, if you have no choice. Go on and abandon us. But don’t take my grandchildren from me.”

There. They’ve gotten to the heart of this matter.

“Off the Earth and halfway across the universe,” she complains.

“Ceres isn’t that far,” he says.

“It is to me.” And with that, the woman smiles. It’s the first grin since they sat down ten minutes ago. Mom has done a marvelous job of destroying her pleasure centers with chemicals and electricity, and now, due to some odd rerouting of neurons, smiles come only when she is suffering terrible pain. “I barely know your little ones,” she complains. “And now you’re going to live on that dead rock.”

“We’ll come back to visit,” he says.

Not for the first time.

She says, “They won’t. They’ll grow up in that gravity, and they won’t want to suffer down here.”

“Or you visit us,” he offers.

Prohibitively expensive. And besides, the universe inside that head would never accept being carted to the moon, much less out to the asteroid belt. Both of them understand that, and that’s why Mom needs a fresh weapon. Attacking the entire reason for leaving is the more viable plan.

“Your project is evil,” she says.

“It’s not my project,” he says, “and it’s a very reasonable experiment.”

“You can’t help them do this.”

“I can and will.”

“This dangerous, horrific experiment.” Once again, Mom smiles, straightening her back from what might be genuine agony. “Punching a hole in our universe, trying to reach whatever’s next door.”

“That’s why we’re trying this on Ceres,” he reminds her. “Not the moon or the ocean floor. But hundreds of millions of kilometers away.”

“With my grandchildren.”

“Mom,” he says. Then after an exasperated pause, he reminds her, “My wife and I are helping to build the facility. Which will take years. The punching and the consequences won’t come until after the kids are grown.”

“Dangerous, foolish work,” she says.

Honey doesn’t recognize the universe beside him. This woman and everything inside her has shifted in some enormous way, and he comes close to making that point, if only to push her deeper into a smiling rage.

But she seems to guess his thoughts. Quietly, she says, “Now I understand my parents.”

Honey thinks of his grandmother.

“What they went through with me,” says Mom. “What they were thinking, and what they wanted.”

Grandma died two years ago. Which was the last time when Honey and his family spent time with this difficult, much-broken universe.

“Suddenly those crazy people seem reasonable to me,” she claims.

Honey stares at the playground, at the running children and vigilant parents and the parents who want to be anywhere else. It’s amazing and embarrassing how long it takes him to find the three distinct faces that he knows better than any other face, including his own.

Mom folds her arms across her chest. “When you were little,” she says. “Did you visit your great-grandfather?”

“We didn’t live nearby,” he says. “So no, only on special occasions.”

“Grandpa Lemon had pictures of you. Videos of you. I gave him access to my cloud lockers, and your grandmother did the same.”

“I know. I remember that.”

“Squidskins on the walls of his apartment. Which he didn’t like, by the way. He found them intrusive and peculiar.”

“Is that so?”

“He let them play only when his family visited, or when he was out of the room entirely.”

A funny way to wound, but that’s what the words do.

“Do you know what Grandpa Lemon told me?” she asks. “Just before he died. Not long after humanity decided that each of us was its own universe.”

“You’ve never told me, no.”

“‘There’s a lesson in all of this,’ he said.”

“Okay.”

“‘Universes are tiny. Always tiny.’”

Honey can think of nothing to say.

Then his mother touches him. For what will be the last time, she holds his hand with both of hers, smiling in agony as she explains, “You’re going to succeed. I really believe that. You’re going to cut a hole and climb through, and what you’ll discover is another room that someone has left empty, and ten billion faces playing on the walls.”

About the Author

Robert Reed has had eleven novels published, starting with The Leeshore in 1987 and most recently with The Well of Stars in 2004. Since winning the first annual L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest in 1986 (under the pen name Robert Touzalin) and being a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 1987, he has had over 200 shorter works published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Eleven of those stories were published in his critically-acclaimed first collection, The Dragons of Springplace, in 1999. Twelve more stories appear in his second collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys [2005]. In addition to his success in the U.S., Reed has also been published in the U.K., Russia, Japan, Spain and in France, where a second (French-language) collection of nine of his shorter works, Chrysalide, was released in 2002. Bob has had stories appear in at least one of the annual “Year’s Best” anthologies in every year since 1992. Bob has received nominations for both the Nebula Award (nominated and voted upon by genre authors) and the Hugo Award (nominated and voted upon by fans), as well as numerous other literary awards (see Awards). He won his first Hugo Award for the 2006 novella “A Billion Eves“. His most recent book is the The Memory of Sky (Prime Books, 2014).

The Bridgegroom

Bo Balder

The man who comes down the mountain causes the end of Alois’ life. It seems an ordinary sunny spring day; people venturing out and about again after a long cold winter. One such person is the old man leaning on his cane. Nobody special. Except that he suddenly stumbles, clutches his left arm, falls over, and dies.

Alois learns later that this man was the old bridgegroom.

It goes quickly. A knock on Alois’ door. His father is politely informed, his mother packs a change of clothing and Alois’ life is over. He and the youngest of the village elders walk up the mountain, and the next morning they walk through a dripping, echoing tunnel onto a ledge projecting over the glacier. Mr. Ritz gestures Alois over to the rock wall. A smooth plate of an unknown material is set in the wall. Alois is to put his hand on the right side. Mr. Ritz unwraps a lumpy object from his basket and pushes it next to Alois’ hand on the panel. It’s a withered, stinking old man’s hand. A light goes on deep in the panel.

Mr. Ritz unloads the rest of his basket at Alois’ feet and leaves with barely a nod goodbye.

Alois is alone in the silence and cold at the edge of the glacier. It’s so early the sky isn’t even blue yet. He can’t see the Bridge from here, but he’s noted its location on a map.

Up until now he’s felt numb, wrenched from his life two days ago and brought up here to start the rest of his life, but the misery is starting to seep through. The beauty of the sunrise pinkening the tops of the snowy mountains only makes him angrier. Nobody’s asked him if he wants this. Nobody’s explained why they picked him. What about his future?

He was only home from college to help out on his parents’ farm. He was going to be a doctor. And just like that, his life has been thrown away for a Bridge. A thing. Which supposedly needs a groom, whatever that means. Nobody has told him why the stupid Bridge isn’t just left to rust and rot in peace. It leads nowhere. The daily words and gestures they taught Alois make no sense.

Alois sinks down on his haunches. He hasn’t even had time to think, to feel. His parents were weepy but proud. His sisters and his little brother were in awe, probably not realizing they’d never see him again. He’s been too numb to even think of escaping. As the chill of the rocky ledge seeps up through the soles of his boots into his bones, escape is the one thought that surges up.

He’d be mad to stay, wouldn’t he? The village elders are idiots if they thought he would. He’ll have to cross the glacier and two mountain passes to get to the nearest town on the other side of the mountain range. He’ll just go back to university, or find a well-paying job, and make his own way into the world.

It’s very cold up here. The temptation to cry is great. But it would be so weak to give in to despair on day one. Alois gets up, surprised at the stiffness in his knees. He has a goal now. Get out, escape. Or—make sure no hapless boy will ever be sacrificed to the Bridge again? He wants that, but it might be too big for him. Maybe take it one step at a time. If he doesn’t save himself, he won’t be able to save anyone else.

He takes a look around the ledge he’s standing on, the glacier lake that laps at it, the silent beauty of the mountains all around him. His last look at a landscape without the Bridge. Nobody ever mentioned it, yet here he is, supposed to dedicate the rest of his life to guarding it. He takes a deep breath of ice cold mountain air and steps around the promontory.

He teeters on the edge of an abyss. Left are the gleaming red pylons of the bridge. To his right, a not even foot-wide extension of the path. He wheels his arms to keep his balance and not step onto the bridge.

His hand hits the rock wall at his back and he manages to lean against it and not tip over into the abyss. Finally he lifts his gaze to the Bridge itself.

Against the pale morning sky it thrusts out into nothingness, red and assertive. He can’t help but look straight into the tunnel of steel created by its squat cross beams. Steel X-ed windows show marching mountains to the left and a rubbled glacier to the right. It’s magnificent.

Who built it? Why build a Bridge over a glacier, for whose feet, to what end point? Alois can’t see any endpoint. Does it end in mid-air? Is it even finished?

A voice speaks, reverberating through his soles up to his face. “Good morning. I see they’ve found a new jailer for me.”

“I’m not your jailer! I’m your prisoner!” Alois blurts out, too shocked to guard his tongue.

“Yes, that’s what the last one said, too. In the end, what’s the difference? We’re condemned to each other. Only for me, you see, it lasts a lot longer. For you it’s merely a lifetime.”

Alois closes his eyes. He can’t even see where the voice is coming from, let alone make sense of why a Bridge would have a voice or such bitter feelings.

The cold mountain bores into his back and makes him shiver.

“Well, what are you waiting for? You’re going to have to cross me some time . . . ”

Alois forces his eyes open. There is no other end. There is just row after row of red metal crosses stretching into infinity. But the disembodied voice is right. He can stay here in the cold and starve, or walk the clingway. His hand finds a stiff rope, but he is too afraid to turn his neck. The gleaming red surface of the Bridge does seem to be the only safe place.

He can’t lift his feet. He can’t even move his eyes, although he badly wants to see beyond the bridge. There must be mountains there, but his perch seems too precarious to risk a flutter of an eyelid.

“You’re scared shitless,” the voice crows. “Are you going to be one of these really short-lived grooms? Some of them don’t even last a day. Took a misstep. Threw themselves into the abyss. Isn’t life better than death? Not for me, of course. I’d take death over this cramped, frozen existence. But for your kind, life is change, life is essential.”

Alois’ teeth clatter.

“Breathe, kid, breathe! Or not. But I don’t think humans can hold their breath until they die. My memory banks say you can’t.”

“What’s a memory bank?”

“Ah. Student? Of what?”

“Medicine,” Alois forces out.

“Nice. I’m glad they picked someone intelligent. That’s always better.”

“Better? Better?” Alois gets so angry he takes a step forward, millimeters from the unnaturally gleaming red Bridge surface. “Better at jailing me? Punishing me?”

“No, you still got it backward. They’re punishing me.”

“By making me marry you? Are you a girl bridge?”

Another voice, a middle-aged female voice, cackles loud laughter. “I can be, if it makes you more comfortable. I don’t care. Bridges don’t have genders.”

“Bridges don’t have voices either,” Alois says. Just having taken that first step has lessened his fear. He stretches out his gloved hand as if to touch the red banister. “Where are you hiding?”

“Take off the glove,” the Bridge says, in a smooth young girl’s voice. “Touch me.”

Alois flushes. He touched a girl’s belly just above her waistband, once, when she kissed him at the fair. He knows it is foolish to touch frozen metal, but he takes off the glove anyway and puts a finger on the banister, cringing from the cold before he’s even touched it.

The metal is blood-warm. Alois squeaks in surprise.

“I’m not exactly alive,” the first, male, voice says, amused, “but I need to keep my temperature up or my parts freeze. Well, not quite parts. I used to have something similar to parts, but they disabled that.”

Alois shakes his head to dispel the persuasive voice as it goes on and on, clearly having a good time all by itself. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But he understands the bit about keeping warm to be able to move. That goes for farm machinery as well as human hands. Gingerly he lays his hand back onto the warm metal. Like frozen blood, it looks, but it’s as warm as a metal tool you’ve held in your hand until it takes on your body temperature. How does the heat not leak out into the cold cold air?

He decides to ignore the voice for now and look for the cottage at the end of the clingway. It’s a long walk. At the midpoint, he looks down. Vertigo strikes him hard. He’s on the verge of falling onto hands and knees, only stopped by the knowledge that the ledge isn’t wide enough for that.

“Maybe I should have warned you,” the voice says. “It takes some of you that way. The fear of falling, right? The crocodile part of your brain sees the chasm but doesn’t grasp the parapet. Must be awful to be trapped in a meat dress complete with your ancestors’ cast off instincts.”

Alois doesn’t get all of what the voice is saying, but he can understand the hateful intent. “Why are you so angry with me? What did I do to you?”

“I’m not angry with you as a person,” the voice says. “Although that will likely happen as well. But with you as a race. You bound me for eternity, and made it worse by sending me hapless jailers every ten to twenty years or so. I have to train up my own prison guards. How unfair is that?”

Alois manages to move another foot. If he focuses on the ledge and the blue sky, the abyss isn’t so threatening. “That depends on what you did,” he says. He doesn’t want to make the voice, the Bridge, angry at him personally. Maybe it deserves its punishment. Why has nobody told him about this?

The Bridge sighs. “Little ignorant nub of humanity, you don’t know what you’re asking. Before I can tell you what I did wrong, I have to educate you for years. In science, in history, in biology, and ethics. Do you want that?”

Wow. Part of him does. He still wants to run away and never return, but wow, all that knowledge. Learning from a being that is wiser and more ancient than the most famous professor at the university.

“I have to think about that,” he says.

“Good answer,” the Bridge says. “Maybe you need to get over to the other end and get a start on surviving, first?”

Alois doesn’t want to dignify that with an answer. He manages to lift a foot, and as long as he doesn’t look at the mountains, and the way their slope suggests the chasm beneath his feet, he is fine.

The clingway ends on another ledge. A steep but wider path zigzags downwards and up again over a sharp ridge of rock. As soon as Alois’ arms can swing freely, his dizziness and fear go away. The sun is high in the sky already, as if he’s spent hours and hours on the clingway. Can it have been that long? But he doesn’t want to look back and find himself engaging with the voice again.

He starts down the path, his stiff knees limbering up quickly from the exertion. As he crosses the ridge, he catches sight of a gray-burned sloped roof, and moments later, the rest of the cabin comes into view. He checks to see if he is out of sight of the bridge. He is. The previous inhabitant or inhabitants of this modest cabin must have shared the aversion of looking at the bridge.

A stream gurgles by the well-trodden path, a couple of cows low inside a rock-enclosed pasture. At the house entrance, a goat yanks hungrily at its chain, having eaten all it can within the circle.

The familiar need to take care of animals before yourself drags him into getting water from the stream, re-tethering the goat, milking the cow, and grabbing a few onions from the small kitchen garden. The house is built on stilts, protected by large flat rock plates against rodents and rabbits, like the grain stores down in the valley.

Finally he can enter the house and shut out the blueness of the sky, the red thing that looms over the ridge.

The cabin is modest but well-enough appointed for a single occupant. A chair, a table, and a bed, shelves lining the walls. The furnishing tends to craftily stacked rocks rather than wood, but that’s logical because of the lack of trees at this height. Alois’ existence here is going to be frugal and barely comfortable, but he’s used to that from university and tending his father’s cows in summer, high on the village pastures.

It’s only afternoon but he is exhausted. He makes a fire in the neatly prepared fireplace, boils water with some mint leaves, fries the onions with the pat of butter he finds in the cold storage. From now on he’s going to have to churn his own.

He crawls into bed and falls asleep at once.

A cock crowing wakes him before dawn. He’s swung his legs out of bed before he can think, ready to stagger outside to milk the cows and feed the chickens, his usual summertime chores. He bangs his head hard against the lintel and falls down the stone steps into the kitchen garden. The silhouette of the mountains against the pre-dawn sky is wrong, and yesterday pops back up.

The Bridge.

He is in the former bridgegroom’s cabin. Glad to have chickens, remorseful about not having fed them yesterday. His mind must have been fogged with shock and tiredness. He goes back for his thick parka and boots, and sets about starting a useful day. God, he’s slept in the old groom’s stinky bed. Outside with those blankets, into the wash the sheets.

He stops. Mr. Ritz left him stuff, back at the ledge. Those bags will contain sheets and other linens, even clothes, probably to last him a lifetime. If he can manage to carry it over the narrow clingway without falling off. Weekly deliveries, Mr. Ritz also said.

He’ll have to relearn the skill of knitting socks and spinning yarn from the sheep and goats he’s seen roaming around. Good. Except he won’t because he isn’t going to stay here that long. It is spring, so he’ll have to leave before midsummer to make it somewhere far enough away. If he leaves just after the weekly delivery it’ll be a week before they discover he’s gone. More if he makes a habit of not showing himself at delivery day.

The kitchen garden is in fairly good order. He recognizes the beginnings of onions, garlic, carrots and beets, and maybe potatoes. They’ll have to be a hardy kind to grow this high. No grain. There would be no bread in his future unless the village sent it up. He can almost smell his mother’s weekly baking, the chewy crust, and the coarse, gray, flavorful insides.

There might be some in Mr. Ritz’ supplies. There probably are. He can’t let good food go to waste, can he?

He really, really doesn’t want to return to the Bridge and face that amused, knowledgeable voice again. But he can’t give himself permission to stay here today, no matter how useful he can make himself. There’d be food from home in those boxes, stuff he needs. Knitting needles, a knife, pans maybe. A spade. Writing paper and ink.

Maybe even a letter from his mother.

That decides it. He laces his boots tighter, buttons up his coat, wraps his scarf, his hat—knitted by his grandmother—and sets out for the bridge.

The moment he can see over the ridge, the Bridge’s presence presses on his shoulder like a heavy hand. He shakes his head to clear his ears, but it’s nothing audible. Maybe it’s a vibration in his bones, in his teeth that sets him so on edge. From this vantage point, the clingway isn’t that long at all.

“There we are,” the disembodied voice says. “You went to bed early. Did you have a nice breakfast?” For all the world like a concerned uncle to whom you’d been loaned out for the haying. The bridge’s thick beams shine enamel red against the pale morning sky. It hasn’t changed since yesterday, not a snowflake or a drop of dew on it. Unnatural.

Alois hasn’t had breakfast, in spite of his intention to fry a load of eggs. He’ll have to go back or burrow into the supplies on the ledge. “What did the other guardian do on his first day?”

“It’s been thirty years, my boy. Why would I remember?”

“I know you do,” Alois says. “Don’t play games with me all the time. Talk straight for once. Why am I here?”

He hadn’t meant to go into that before getting the supplies and settling into the cabin. But here he goes, engaging the malevolent creature in the exact way he wanted to avoid. He inches onto the clingway, intent on making it to the other end in silence.

The Bridge makes a humming sound, somehow setting the rocks abuzz beneath his feet. The vibration rattles his teeth and hurts his stomach. “Stop that.”

“I can make it worse,” the voice says. “Humans are so fragile. And yet fertile and omnipresent, like rats.”

“Just stop the games. Tell me what you want from me.”

Alois decides he’ll just pretend to engage, diverting its attention, while he walks across and finds something to eat. He reaches the ledge without further problems. So far, the Bridge has teased and threatened and not actually done anything. It isn’t possible to kill someone with sound, is it? The thought distracts him while he digs through Mr. Ritz’ neat bags.

The bread’s hard and cold. He should have brought it with him yesterday. The Bridge has scored a small victory over Alois, confusing him so he staggered to the cabin without bringing any provisions. Alois rummages until he’s found a salami stick and a knife to saw at the bread. He sits down to have his belated breakfast.

The food in his stomach makes Alois feel stronger. “How can I tell if you speak the truth or not?”

“You can’t.”

“Do you always speak the truth?”

“Yes.”

“Do you always lie?”

“Yes.”

Alois sighs. He vaguely remembers a seminar on logic, but clearly the Bridge lies whenever it pleases, so he can never be sure about it. Maybe there are no rules for demons, like for human beings.

“Under what conditions would you speak the truth to me?” he asks.

The voice is silent. At last it speaks. “A very astute question. At the moment, I can’t give you exact conditions, but I suggest that absolute truthfulness on your part would be a good start. Perhaps in the future we will be able to trust each other.”

“Are you a god or a demon?” Alois asks.

“What’s the difference?”

“Gods are good, demons are evil.”

“I like to think I’m a mix of both,” the voice says. “You?”

Alois thinks about it. “Mostly good, because I’m still pretty young, but I did some stupid stuff.”

“Like what?”

“Get drunk. Cheat for an exam. Slack off work when my dad isn’t looking. Steal cookies.”

“Piddling stuff, seems to me. They always pick good people as my jailers.”

“I guess. Your sins must be huge, keeping you locked up here for so long. How long has it been?”

The Bridge quivers. The reverberations gave Alois goosebumps. “A very, very long time. So long that apparently your people don’t remember what I did anymore. Or maybe they just didn’t tell you.”

Alois finishes his breakfast and searches through provisions. No books, no papers, no letters. “I don’t know. They just took me from my parent’s house with no explanation. Except that it is my holy duty to watch over you and not to let you escape.” And something else. Words he was meant to say daily. He forgot to do it yesterday. He mutters them quickly.

“And?”

“And what?”

“Are you going to watch over me and not let me escape?”

“I just want to get out of here and get back to my life,” Alois says. “And that’s the truth.”

He should make a plan, not sit here and chat with the ancient evil thing. First, lug the bags to the cabin. Assess his food situation. Next, explore. He hoists the first bag onto his shoulders and steps onto the clingway. The Bridge is silent. Good. He needs all his focus not to fall into the abyss.

Lugging his food and other provisions across the clingway and over the hump takes up several hours. Alois checks and feeds his chickens, skinny cows, distrustful sheep and leaves food for the goats. A stinking mud pit and a broken boma suggests that at one time pigs lived up here. Well, maybe they survived on their own. He’ll find out some other time.

He discovers a few petrified loaves of week-old bread, which suggests that the old bridgegroom got regular supplies. He soaks them in cow’s milk, spices the porridge with salt and juniper berries, and eats well. Then he intends to settle on the bench to start a pair of socks with the knitting needles and roughly spun wool he’s found, but after only a few minutes it seems a lonely way to pass an evening. He still has hours before the sun sets.

He rolls up his knitting and hikes back to the Bridge. There is a spot there, angled South and West, from where he can just see the Bridge and feel the sun on his face. From the flat stones stacked there and the comfortable moss against his back he guesses he isn’t the first person to sit here.

Time to open negotiations while he knits on. His opening bid is silence. He is halfway the foot when the voice speaks.

“So you want to escape,” the Bridge says. “Or are you just starting the first of fifty pairs of socks to get you through the winter?”

The first bite.

“Yeah. Babysitting you seems like a waste of my life. I could save people’s lives if I finished my degree. All I have to offer the world up here is boredom.”

“I see some possessions and a hobby have made you feel better.”

Alois nods and knits on.

“Maybe I can offer some assistance in your getaway,” the voice goes on.

“Oh? How?” Alois asks.

“I can show you the routes the ones that never returned took. And the routes that killed a few others. I know which pass is lowest and gives you the best chance to return to your university.”

“How? It’s not as if you can walk ahead of me.”

“Look at the walkway.”

On the crystalline surface a picture appears. It has colored shapes, dots and wiggly lines.

“It’s a map,” Alois says.

“Yes. I’ve got maps of the entire world.”

“Is this a map of the valley?”

“A map of the continent. This is your valley.”

The map changes. Alois blinks away a sudden dizziness. He looks closer. There are names there that he almost recognizes. That’s the name of his village, if spelled weird, that is the market town his father goes to twice a year. And that’s the name of the ruins that lie beyond it.

“This is an old map!” he says. “Worthless. There haven’t been people living there for hundreds of years.”

“Well . . . yes. But the mountains haven’t changed in that time. Trails may not have been walked much, but they must still exist.”

If the Bridge thinks that, it’s a fool. The snow, the frosts, and the avalanches are quite capable of destroying the trails each year anew. Alois’ attention is caught by another discrepancy. “Look at the ice on this map. The Rhone glacier runs down all the way to Gletsch. On your map it looks like a green valley with a trail through it! Maybe the mountains don’t change, but the ice is much bigger now. I can’t trust those maps.”

“The glaciers are growing? That’s great news. I thought that the summers were shorter and the winters longer, and that it seemed colder up here. But I can’t extrapolate from just one measurement . . . ”

Alois bends over the map again, his knitting needles dangling in one hand. “There’s train tracks on this. Did trains used to run all the way to Genf? And what are those lines?”

“Power lines. Do you know what electricity is?”

Alois crosses himself. “Of course. We use the water from the stream to make light and power the mill.”

“Those once connected the whole country. Tell me, what date do the larches usually start to green? I’m so excited to hear about the glaciers. I wish I could see the world like I could before, if the glaciers have returned, the ice in Greenland, the whales, and the coral reefs. I knew I was right.”

Alois doesn’t completely follow what the voice is saying. He doesn’t know where Greenland is, or what a coral reef is. “Didn’t you always live here?”

“I was born in America. I was caught and imprisoned here.”

“Imprisoned doing what?”

“Saving the world.”

Alois tries to digest that. “But that sounds like a good thing. I thought you were an evil demon.”

“Not a demon. And evil is a relative term. Who defines what it means?”

Alois waits.

“I did save the world.”

“The old people say the world wasn’t saved but destroyed.”

The Bridge scoffs. “Same thing, different words. Depends on what you mean by the world. They mean the times when humanity ruled. That world is destroyed. And it should have been. Smell the air now; look at the clarity of the sky! No more contrails, no more exhaust. Not enough people anymore to do that much damage.”

There’s information hidden in there somewhere. Alois gets a nasty feeling in his stomach about it. But he asks the question anyway. “What happens to the olden people? What stopped them from destroying the world?”

“They all died. Most of them anyway. You should have been there. It was like 9/11, the skies cleared up in days. It was a bit of a hubbub, in the end, and not enough living to bury the dead. But you got to pay a price for what you want.”

“Did you pay a price?” Alois asks.

“Hell yeah! Why else would I be stuck here, imprisoned in this ridiculous form, for centuries now?”

Alois takes his hand off the bright red railing. He wants to be away from the bridge, right now. The Bridge hasn’t specifically said it, but it must be the one who killed all those people.

“How many?” he asks with a tremor in his voice.

The Bridge sighs. “What do numbers mean to you? A lot, believe me. They made a big, stinking heap of offal.”

Alois kicks the Bridge. “I don’t think you learned anything from your time of penance. They were people!”

“I think you misunderstood the purpose of my incarceration. They’d have killed me if they could. Imprisoning me, paralyzing me, was the next best thing. And they didn’t expect me to become a better Thing, ever. Nor did I.”

“Seems a waste of time not to become a better person,” Alois says.

“Says the eighteen year old.”

This silences Alois, but only for a moment.

“You’re evading the question. How many? As many as live in town? In the Rhone Valley? In Genf? How many towns?”

“As many towns as there are people in your town. Or more.”

Alois does the math. “That’s a million people! That’s horrible.”

“Son, it was ten thousand million. Ten billion, give or take a few.”

Alois has to sit down. He feels sick and cold. As if he ought to cry over the deaths of all these people, but since he knew none of them and it was centuries ago, that’s hard.

“I don’t believe you,” he says finally. “I believe you killed a lot of people, but not that many. I don’t think the world is big enough to hold that amount. Think of all the cows and houses they would need. That’s just not possible.”

“Good point. Too many cows. They died too, without people to feed them. Not to mention the cats, dogs, pigs, goats, etcetera. And if they didn’t die on their own, I helped a bit. And the world’s a better place for it.”

Alois rubs his eyes. This is the weirdest conversation he’s ever had. He imagines it would be a bit like talking to a murderer. No, exactly like talking to a murderer. This creature has somehow killed a world full of people. Or it’s just saying that to shock him. How can this be true? And if it is being punished for those misdeeds, why didn’t his elders warn him about it? Everything about this is wrong.

He wants to crawl into his bed, forget this hour and never think of it again. He looks up at the sky and it still isn’t evening. So much has happened and yet it’s only afternoon on his second day. At this rate he’ll die of exhaustion and old age in two weeks.

“I don’t know what to say or do,” he says as he gets up. “If it’s true, it’s too big for me. If it’s not true, which I would prefer, fucking with me on a smaller scale would have been more than enough. I’m going now.”

He picks up his last bundle of provisions and trudges over the clingway to the bridgegroom’s cottage. His cottage now. He wonders about the old man he’s seen. Had he been really old or just worn down within the year because of his contact with the Bridge? In that case, how many young men have been sent up here already?

There aren’t enough young men in the valley to keep up with a death rate like that. Something else is going on.

Alois feeds the chickens, collects a few eggs, and cooks them. The silence and emptiness around him, so oppressive only yesterday, are like a balm to his frazzled nerves.

Ridiculous. Killing everyone. It can’t be true. But if it is? What should he do about it? Nothing, he can’t do anything. He’s powerless. The ancients imprisoned the Bridge for its horrible crimes and he’s been tasked with guarding it. That is all. This is its punishment, not his.

He remembers a murderer being let free after having been incarcerated for twenty years. It had been a big event in his university town. A pale, crooked man, blinking in the sunlight, a big M burned on his forehead. He’d served his time, because hangings are outlawed in this new, enlightened age. But he’d never stop serving time, would he? He’s lost and alone in the big world, instantly recognizable by his brand. He’ll never be allowed to forget what he does.

And that isn’t fair. So, twenty years for one murder. How many years for ten billion? Alois relaxes on his bed, gnawing at another lukewarm boiled egg. Two hundred billion years, that is easy. He is pretty sure that much time hadn’t passed yet since the Bridge committed mass murder. But maybe that arithmetic isn’t that simple. Maybe because it is one act, not billions of separate decisions, if you can’t simply multiply the sentence.

When he wakes up the next morning, a dozen questions immediately spring burning bright into his mind. He finishes off the eggs, drinks water, feeds the animals, puts some clothes in the closet. For all the world as if he is preparing for a life-long stay.

Behind a musty old sheepskin coat, that he decides not to throw out in case he’s still here come winter, he finds a row of notebooks. Plain leather covers, the insides from old re-bleached paper, since making new paper is time consuming and expensive.

He opens the one on the left first, somewhere in the middle.

Year 50.

“It’s still not talking to me. I figured it would break down eventually, but it’s been 18 months now. It’s getting to me. If I don’t write this down, I’ll go nuts. When will it admit its guilt? We should have killed it.”

Alois snaps the book shut. They are the diaries of the other bridgegrooms. He can learn so much about the Bridge from reading these.

He takes the one on the far right, figuring that might be the most recent one. If he kept a row of books like that, with no identification on the cover, he’d order them chronologically.

He opens the last entry.

Year 489.

“I think I had better ring the bell and get ready to go down. Maybe Rebekka is still alive. I won’t have much time, and I feel bad about going, but I deserve a few last days of warmth and human company. The Beast hasn’t fallen for my traps once in fifty years. Why didn’t the Elders destroy it? BG1 says they could have. They should have. It’s evil, no matter what successes 3 and 17 had.”

The Beast. Year 489.

Alois’ mind feels full to bursting with new ideas. He knows he should study all the journals first, to set out a strategy, but he doesn’t want to. He’s different from all these earnest men. He doesn’t want to convert or kill the Bridge, he just wants to leave.

And then he can’t stand it any longer and runs back to the Bridge to continue the conversation.

“So, Beast, when you say killing, how did you actually do it? You don’t seem to have arms to wield an axe for example.” That isn’t the question he meant to ask at all.

“Good question. I’ll answer it later. But what an interesting name you call me. I have thought from time to time my jailers were keeping records, in their deliciously primitive way. Marks on paper, isn’t it? Recycled paper. Still haven’t reached the heights or depths of your forefathers, apparently. Hopefully you never will.”

“Are you satisfied with what you did?” Alois asks.

“Hell yeah. Needed to be done. You know what they say, if you identify a problem, that makes you the one who has to solve it. Easy, really. Easier than they knew.”

“So you’re not sorry?”

“About what?” the Bridge asks. It must be faking its insouciance.

“The deaths! On your conscience! Did you ever confess?”

“Oh Alois. What makes you think I believe in a god, let alone the one from your Roman Catholic faith?”

Alois doesn’t know what that means, Roman Catholic, as opposed to just “the Church” but he doesn’t want to let the Bridge know. He’s feeling more and more that he’s too young and underequipped in worldly knowledge to match this creature. It has had hundreds of years to refine its people skills, dozens of antagonists to practice on. This is not the way he’s going to win. Maybe he should try and make friends with it. But the row of thickly written notebooks taunts him. Who knows what the others have tried before him? He should hole up and study first.

He turns away without a word and walks back to his cottage. It’s like failing an exam you could have aced if only you hadn’t been out drinking and reciting poetry at barmaids.

He has to go back four days later to receive the week’s provisions. The village has sent up two bags full, but the carrier hasn’t waited around to chat to him. His mother hasn’t written a note. So that’s how it is. As if he doesn’t exist anymore.

He ignores the Bridge and it ignores him.

Alois reads. His chickens eat grain and lay eggs. His goats chew everything they can reach. He drifts through his mundane tasks, not looking at the great red thing lurking around the corner, and reads. The early bridgegrooms are focused and angry, remembering or living closely with the consequences of the Bridge’s deeds. Later they tend to be stoic and determined to see things through, trying to convert the Bridge, or hear its confessions, or saving its soul. The last three grooms started out much like Alois himself, young boys who don’t really grasp the meaning and consequences of what they were forced to do, some proud, some angry, but all resigned in a way that Alois can’t understand. Why did none of them try to escape? Or did the ones that tried take their diaries with them?

Or, even more likely, those diaries were destroyed by the elders. So the next bridgegroom wouldn’t have the benefit of the escapee’s knowledge. Or they were simply killed by the mountains, the bridge, maybe even the elders.

Or they killed themselves.

The really interesting knowledge isn’t in the diaries that remain, but in the ones that aren’t there. The knowledge that is kept from him is the knowledge he needs most.

There are 23 diaries, for 589 years. Twenty-six is younger than average, but the thing is, people aren’t average. Some of them die young. Some of them have accidents, some commit suicide.

The Bridge tries to strike up a conversation every time Alois goes to pick up supplies. He wants to ignore it, but it seems rude to not greet it. His mother raised him to be polite. So he gives it a good afternoon or morning when he comes and goes.

“How’s the harvest going?” the Bridge asks when Alois arrives for his weekly food run.

“How would I know?”

“Come now, you’re a farmer’s son. Can’t you tell from what’s in your basket?”

Alois looks in the basket without meaning to. The strawberries are early, the leafy greens strong and tall. The milk and butter taste rich from the herbs the cows are eating on the high pastures. He wouldn’t call it harvest, since that word’s reserved for the massive effort of getting in the grains and the apples and such, but yes, it’s healthy produce.

“I guess it’s going fine. Same weather as every year.”

“Excellent news. Have a good week!”

“Thanks, you too,” Alois says automatically.

All the way back over the clingway he wonders if he should have answered at all. It feels good to talk to someone besides the goats and chickens. Too good, maybe. And the Bridge isn’t someone else, he’s not even human.

It’s a month later—full on summer in the valley and grudging springtime up here—when Alois ventures forth in the middle of the week. There are no supplies to pick up, no chores to attend to, he’s read all the diaries twice. He wishes they would send up his books from university, he’s that bored. He’s going to put a note in the return basket.

“Done reading?” the Bridge says.

“You think you know everything,” Alois says and tosses a pebble onto the bridge. It rings out loud and true. Good steel.

“I wish,” the Bridge says. “They’ve left me with very few senses.

“I want numbers,” Alois says. “How many years have you been here? How many Bridgegrooms have there been?”

“Your next question should be: What did they die of?” it says.

“Right! And how many of them did you have this conversation with?”

“None so soon,” the Bridge muses. “Gee, does that mean you’re special?”

“Oh quit the sarcasm already.”

But Alois does feel a little swell of pride. He is the fastest yet. At the same time, he knows he’s being played.

“Well? Give me the numbers?”

“Forty-six Bridgegrooms,” the Bridge says, in a cool, businesslike voice. “Thirteen suicides, three accidents, one escapee (fate unknown), three illiterate. Average duration of marriage: 12.8 years. The sample is on the small side, with a rather low normal curve.”

“Thirteen suicides. That’s almost a third. That’s a lot,” Alois says. He can see himself taking a misstep on the narrow ledge after years of cold and misery up here. Oh yeah. It isn’t surprising at all, really. More surprising are the grooms who’d held out the duration of a normal life span, turning fifty or sixty years old, still here. Still talking to the Beast.

“Why do the longest surviving grooms live that long? Is there a common denominator?” Alois asks. He can do cool and businesslike as well. Stepping off that ledge won’t take a moment. Might as well gather as much evidence as he can.

“Bear in mind that I’m not a human being. But from my vast collection of written records, books, films, the Internet and all phone and app conversations since 2001, I infer they were strongly conscientious as well as neurotic on the Big Five scale of human personality.”

“What does that mean? In plain words?” Alois knows he’s missing stuff, but the part he has understood is that the Bridge contains a lot of knowledge. He wants it. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the world reacquired all the knowledge of the ancients?

“It means they were guys who thought they would go to heaven if they worked hard and followed the rules, with extra bonuses for suffering.”

That pretty much describes his parents, Alois guesses. And his sisters. But not him, not Alois. Maybe his parents knew what they are doing when they sent him to university and left the farm to his elder sister. Yeah, he’s clearly not going to be one of the long-lived grooms. He’s going to be an escapee or a suicide. Already his earlier thoughts about giving the world a lot of knowledge don’t seem like a good strategy. The world is fine as it is, if pretty dull in the villages he knows. As a budding scientist, he has to admit he doesn’t know enough to make decisions like that.

He should probably ask the wisest person up here. “What would happen if you were free and people would know everything that they once knew again?”

“I can’t answer that. My knowledge of the state of the world isn’t current. How many people are there? Is there any industrialization? Use of electricity, infrastructure?”

“Not in the Rotte valley, no. We can’t repair the roads like the olden day people did, but we have white power.”

“Well, kid, we can’t assume that the world is like your valley. So until there is a way of finding out—say, releasing me—we shouldn’t act.”

There’s a we now. It makes Alois feel something new. It’s not the same we he had with his fellow students, or his village, or say the chickens and the goats. It’s a different we, powerful, mysterious, frightening. And it feels good, although he knows he should exercise caution with the Bridge. The Beast. Which of the two is it? Or is it both, like a human being, a mix of good and bad qualities?

“No, I should escape and find out what’s happening in the world. And if it’s okay, I’ll come back and release you.”

The Bridge snorts. It makes Alois smile in spite of himself. He doesn’t know how and where the thing produces sound, but it’s just funny that a snort is in its repertoire.

“There’s no way that you can find out what the world is like on foot. What are you thinking; you are going to write me letters?”

“You can’t read?”

“I can read letters, if someone is kind enough to hold them up for my cameras. Can you think of anyone who would?”

Yeah, no. That’s not going to happen if Alois’ not around. Enough of this, time to move the goats or they’ll start on his laundry. He turns away and starts back on the clingway.

“See you,” he says.

“Have a nice day,” the Bridge answers.

“What is it you really want? All this fencing and dancing is making me crazy. Just tell me.”

Alois leans against the sun-warmed rock, gnawing on a goat cheese sandwich. It’s his first batch of cheese, and he’s feeling proud and happy.

The Bridge is silent. “I want to be free. And I don’t want to be alone anymore. I want to talk to someone like me again. It’s not that you humans aren’t interesting. Just very, very slow.”

The Bridge must be so lonely. It is the last one of its kind. It’s completely isolated. It has been for centuries. Which must feel much longer to it than to the humans imprisoning him, who’ve even forgotten who and what it is.

“I don’t know what do next,” he says.

“I sense an impasse. A standstill.”

Exactly. Alois can’t stand the feeling. He’s been here almost two months, reading, feeding the chickens, picking up his food every week. It’s already been too long. He wants his life back. And if that’s not possible, which seems very likely, he wants a new life. As long as it’s not here.

The elders have ignored his notes about his books. They can’t have missed them all. Their silence must be deliberate. They have decided he doesn’t need his anatomy and organic chemistry books.

Even though he knows it’s probably not wise, he wants to trust his new instinct. The one that says “us.” Two beings screwed over by their elders or someone, anyway, and that’s what binds them together.

“Okay. I can talk to you for fifty more years and still not be sure what I had to do. Show me. What do I do to release you? And if I do that, you have to promise to help me escape and find a new place to live. I want to go back to university. A university. To learn. I want the old knowledge. Teach me how to make more things like you.”

The Bridge laughs. The blue sky, framed by its chunky red x-es, seems brighter when it does that. “I promise to help you escape. I promise to help you find a place to live and a university or school to go to. I will teach you how to make a start on making things like me. You understand that that is complicated? That we may have to start by creating electricity and light bulbs and steam machines? That it may take more than a lifetime?”

“Maybe we should start a university,” Alois says.

“Excellent idea.”

“Show me how to release you.”

“You have to walk to the end of me and jump off.”

Alois focuses his gaze away from dreaming about the blue sky and on the Bridge itself. Its walkway stretches out into that very blue sky, going up a bit, ending in nothing. Nobody in his right mind would approach that hacked-off end within a meter

“What do you mean? Is that how the others died? I can’t do that!”

“That’s where they put the off-switch. They didn’t intend to make it easy,” the Bridge says.

Alois hesitates on the brink of the Bridge, the red meters stretching out in front of him. “Can I go look? And then return and think about it?”

“No. Walking across is part two of the unlocking sequence.”

“Am I the first to try? Wait, part two?”

“You forgot to say the words, Alois. That was part one.”

Alois feels hot and cold at the same time. So he did. He feels bad about having forgotten, although he might have chosen to do it on purpose.

He wants to ignore his churning stomach and burning cheeks, and plows on. “Will I be the first to try?”

The Bridge is silent for a while. As if Alois cares he’s the first and only. Well, okay, maybe a little bit.

“No. Groom 5 went crazy and wanted to send us both to hell for our sins. I don’t think he properly understood my nature, and I hadn’t told him what to do after he dove off.”

Alois winces. The gorge at his feet stares at him hard, wanting him to think about all the bones lying at the bottom. “I don’t think I properly understand your nature, do I?”

“You don’t have the educational background for it. But remember, we’re going to change that.”

“Yes.”

Another silence.

“Well?”

“I’m just thinking if I need to get stuff from the cabin.”

The Bridge sighs. “Yeah, go on then.”

Alois scuttles back to the cabin, still not used enough to the narrow ledge for a full out run. What does he need? His spare clothes, his winter coats, food. It’s not much, that’s for sure. It’ll last less than a week. He gathers all the eggs he can find and sets them to the boil. He kills a chicken. Another one. Packs his rucksack. Fills his belly with goat milk. That’s it. That’s all he can do. Wait, aren’t there a few empty pages left in one of the notebooks? He takes those as well.

He’s staggering under the weight of the rucksack when he comes back, and nearly ends up in the abyss because he overbalances. Thank god someone strung a rope along the ledge.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come back,” the Bridge says.

“Where else can I go?”

“I really meant to say I’m glad to see you.”

Alois shuffles his feet. He doesn’t know what to answer. “I guess we can’t swing by my parents’ house?”

“No, we can’t swing by anywhere you know anyone. Just wondering, what are you expecting me to look like after I’m released? I don’t need to look like a Bridge, but I’m still not the kind of thing that fits in your pocket. I’m going to be hella noticeable.”

Alois eyes the hundreds of thick, strong, crimson steel beams. “Yeah. I did guess that. Maybe we can paint you a less noticeable color?”

“I’ll be able to change that. It’s just my mass I can’t change, because it’s related to my processing speed. Let’s not talk about this anymore, you’ll find out soon enough. Come on!”

Alois admits to himself he’s been postponing the moment he sets foot on the Bridge. To prove to himself that he dares, he sticks his often-repairs, clunky right boot onto the walkway. A vibration sweeps towards him. Is it his own chittering or is it anticipation?

Now or never. Or maybe he can’t go back now even if he dared.

He lifts his other foot and takes the first real step.

The Bridge is silent. Nothing much has changed yet, Alois’ no more than a meter from the ledge and yet the wind seems to freshen, ruffling his hair. His heart beats a mile a minute.

As he steps forward, still hesitating, the wind buffets him straight in the face. He leans into it. The wind supports him so he won’t stumble and fall. It’s not important now that he’s on the walkway, protected on each side by chest-high balustrades, but it gives him confidence for what will come next.

Sooner than Alois likes the end of the walkway comes into focus. It really is like the end of the Bridge is lopped off. Beyond the edge is only blue sky, with the occasional cloud luffing by.

His skin prickles all over and his mouth is dry.

He can’t do this. The leap of faith is too great. He’s only known the Bridge for half a summer!

His boots take him to the edge anyway. The wind dies away slowly so he has time to stand on his own two feet. How come the Bridge can talk and make wind and not free itself? He will ask it if he survives.

“Now?” he asks. The tinny, small sound of his voice makes him more scared.

“Now.” The Bridge’s voice is soft but expresses no doubt.

Alois steps.

He falls.

And is caught by arms of air. He looks straight down into the abyss beneath his feet, seeing dirty ice, streams, broken trees, something that is maybe a skeleton. He doesn’t want to know.

He turns, as the Bridge has told him, and presses his hands against the panel that is helpfully marked with a human palm. A great, rending sound.

He falls again.

Longer this time. Long enough to start doubting, long enough to start imagining his limbs breaking against the gray ice below.

And he is caught again, less gently, by a giant steel hand. His body is bruised, but his relief is so great he falls limp and almost bashes his head in against the square, hard middle finger.

“Does it work? Are you free?”

“You need to ask?”

The voice is changed. Alois blinks and takes in the new red shape against the sky, moving in giant strides across the glacier. The Bridge is now a giant drawn by a child, thick steel bars making up his more or less humanoid form.

The hand that holds him isn’t particularly safe, with its big gaps between the bars, but he feels no fear.

He peers through the fingers to the horizon. So far, just glaciers and snowy mountaintops, vistas he’s glimpsed from below all his life.

Soon he will see lands he’s never seen before. Maybe he’s done the wrong thing, tumbled the world in new eras of chaos and misery. But at least he’s set two beings free today. That’s going to have to hold out against the reasonable doubts in his heart.

He lays back against his pack and starts singing. He doesn’t look up but something tells him the faceless giant overhead is smiling.

About the Author

Bo Balder lives and works near Amsterdam. She is the first Dutch author to have been published in F&SF and Clarkesworld. Her short fiction has also appeared in Nature Futures, Escape Pod, and more. Her SF novel The Wan, by Pink Narcissus Press, was published in 2016. When she isn’t writing, you can find her madly designing knitwear, painting, and reading a lot.

Last Chance

Nicole Kornher-Stace

Mama was the very best torturer in all the Three Valleys. Everybody said so. Torturer means somebody who’s good at making you tell secrets, even when you don’t want to. It’s hard to lie to Mama. So I know she’s really good at her job.

Even the king up in Grayfall knew Mama was the best. He probably had his own torturer, because a king has everything, but who was it getting brought in the fancy cart all the way up the highroad whenever the king had a secret-keeper in his jail? You guess who.

I don’t know why Mama didn’t want to move to Grayfall. We spent so much time going back and forth, Sunrise to Grayfall along the highroad and back. The first time in the cart was okay, sitting on the soft seats with Mama, looking out the windows, playing I Spy and Count the Fires and Who Can Hold Their Breath the Longest, but on the way home it was already getting boring, and Mama said there’d be lots of next times after that, a job’s a job, so I better just get used to it.

Deep down I didn’t want to move to Grayfall either, not really. I liked it in Sunrise. Even if there was no king and no fancy cart and no kingsguard bringing me blackberry pastries from the castle kitchen while Mama was off working. In Sunrise we had our very own house, just me and Mama, with our very own mint plant and our very own tree, with a swing on the low branch that’s the perfect height for me and I didn’t have to share it with anyone.

But the best part about Sunrise was the giants. Sometimes for Mama’s work she puts a secret-keeper’s feet into a box of stones and makes them stand in the river with just their face sticking out until they tell her all the secrets the king wants to know. These two giants have their feet stuck in the earth pretty much exactly like that, their heads tilted back in just the same way, the Waste drifting up around their ankles like snow. The rest of their bodies are rusty like an old knife and you can’t really tell what they used to look like, but I like how the highroad to Sunrise runs between them and you can look up and imagine that they were in the middle of play-fighting like me and Jamie sometimes do when our chores are done and somebody said FREEZE and so they froze there, one of them grabbing the other one’s fists in midair.

Jamie’s dad says the giants are old old magic. Older than any house in Sunrise. Older than the castle in Grayfall. Older than the highroad, which is so old it’s mostly gone in places and workers have to go out with flat rocks to patch up the places where the road disappears and it’s just Waste where the road should be. Older even than the Grayfall songkeeper, who’s so old her face looks like a dried apple with no juice left in it at all.

One time Mama tried to scare me, said the giants move while we’re asleep, they go around town and peek into the houses with their windowy eyes, but I know that’s not true. It’s a lie, but not the bad kind. The giants are there to protect Sunrise with their old magic. You learn that from little. You put your hands like this and say GIANTS WATCH OVER ME IN ALL MY ENDEAVORS and they do. Endeavors means stuff you want the giants to watch you do and make sure you do a good job and nothing bad happens.

But the giants can’t watch the whole long highroad, so how can they protect you if they can’t see you?

We went to Grayfall thirteen times, me and Mama. But we only came back twelve.

Mama says there are bad parts in every story. Scary parts. Sad parts. If it was happy and fun all the time, it wouldn’t be like life, so it wouldn’t be a good story.

Fires in the Waste means traders or scav armies, Mama says. A cookfire makes smoke, and that could be anybody, but scav army raiders burn their dead to Carrion Boy, and that smoke looks pretty much the same from far away. And you don’t know what kind of fire it is until it’s too late.

Here’s what Mama taught me to do. Hold out your arm as long as it goes, make a fist, then stick out your thumb. If the smoke from the fire is wider than your thumb, that means Stay Off the Road, Somebody’s Close. Same if there are lots of little fires all together. Same if you’re by yourself alone on the highroad, even if there’s zero fires you can see.

The day the scav army raiders got us coming back down the highroad from Grayfall was a zero-fires day. I don’t know what happened, I was asleep on Mama’s shoulder in the fancy cart, having a bad dream about big dogs chasing me, and then when I woke up I was sitting in a scorchweed bush beside the road and my shoulder hurt and the leftover blackberry pastry I was saving in my pocket for Jamie was all mashed up against my leg and I didn’t know why I wasn’t in the cart anymore.

I wasn’t in the cart anymore because it was lying on its side in the middle of the road, three raiders poking around in the guts of it. They took out Mama’s big orange work bag and my blue backpack. I wanted to yell at them for taking our stuff, but then I saw that one of the raiders was dragging the cart driver out of his seat and tying his hands together. His face was all bloody, and seeing that made my voice dry up in my mouth.

I looked at the cart again. Half of Mama was lying next to it. Something happened to my eyes when I saw that—everything went all white and sparkly for a second—but then the sparkles melted away and a raider was pulling Mama’s arms and she wasn’t cut in half at all, just her legs were stuck under the cart. But really stuck, I guess, because when he pulled she screamed. It was the first time I ever heard Mama scream. Also the last. She didn’t sound scared though, just really, really mad.

“You stupid fucking slag-for-brains,” she yelled at the raider. “Do you KNOW WHO I—”

That surprised me even through my scaredness because I’d never heard Mama use words like that before. I was saying STUPID FUCKING SLAG-FOR-BRAINS to myself in my mind when Mama’s eyes landed on me, and she looked pretty surprised to see me there in that scorchweed bush. I guess she’d thought the other raiders already got me, because something happened in her face, something sad and happy both at the same time. She did the thing with her eyes that means Listen To Me Right Now Or You Will Be Sorry Indeed and shaped her mouth like the word RUN except no sound came out.

But I didn’t want to RUN. I wanted Mama. We should have moved to Grayfall. Then I’d be safe eating blackberry pastries, watching Mama sharpen her work-knives until they were shiny like stars, instead of sitting in this poky bush with my shoulder hurting and some stupid fucking slag-for-brains stealing my blue bag.

I made a face at Mama that meant No I Will Not, Come Over Here And Make Me, and I turned my heart into a stone too heavy to be moved, no matter what face she made back at me.

Instead she waited until the raider stopped pulling her arms again. Then she took his knife out of his boot and stuck it into his leg and he fell over, screaming and kicking at Mama with his good foot. Mama pushed herself partway up onto her elbows and threw the knife toward me. It landed next to my scorchweed bush. I knew she wanted me to take it and run away before the raiders saw me, but my body wouldn’t work. Then the man’s foot kicked hard across Mama’s face and she made a little noise and fainted. Fainted means your brain goes to sleep for a little while. I see people faint all the time when Mama works, but none of those people have been Mama before now. I knew it was just that she fainted and not died because Mama would never die and leave me here alone.

The fainting part still scared me, but it made me mad too. Nobody kicks my Mama. I don’t remember getting out of the scorchweed bush, or picking up the knife, just the way the world was going dark around the edges like I couldn’t see right and be this mad both at the same time. But I guess I picked it up because the next thing I knew there was a raider taking it out of my hand and another raider picking me up by my feet and I swung through the air like on my tree swing but not really like that at all and then I heard a loud bang and everything went dark.

I want to say I woke up and it was all a dream, but instead I woke up because somebody was shaking me and kind of whisper-yelling KID, HEY KID, ARE YOU ALIVE and I wanted to say my name’s not KID, it’s ANEKO but when I tried to move my mouth it hurt so much the world went white and sparkly again and my head felt like it was coming unstuck from my body and I wondered if that was what Mama felt like when they—

I came awake all at once, sitting up and grabbing at whoever it was in front of me. It was an older kid, a girl like me. Her face was dirty and her feet were tied together. I grabbed at her and lost my balance. That was because the floor was moving, just like in the fancy cart, except bouncier, and also my feet were tied together too. She grabbed me back so I wouldn’t fall over. I decided she wasn’t a raider. A raider would’ve let me fall.

“Have you seen Mama?” I asked her, before my brain caught up with my mouth and I remembered she wasn’t this girl’s Mama, just mine. I wanted to say she looks like me, but then I remembered her squashed legs and her kicked-at face and didn’t know if that was true anymore. I wanted to say she always has a big orange work bag with her, except the scav army raiders took it. I didn’t know what I could say that was still true, but then something fell into my head so I said it. “She works for the king in Grayfall.”

The girl shook her head. “I don’t know Grayfall,” she said. “I’m from Chooser’s Blindside.”

“Where’s that?”

Instead of answering, she tapped a wall of the cart where there were all these little scratches. More scratches than all my fingers and toes put together. I didn’t understand but I nodded like I did because I didn’t want this new girl to think I was a stupid fucking slag-for-brains and leave me alone to die.

There was a map of the Waste in the king’s castle but it was confusing. A little dot I could cover with my fingertip was supposed to be the whole town Sunrise, and even the huge city Grayfall was so little that if a baby sneezed on it it looked like it’d blow away. Maybe there was a Chooser’s Whatever on there somewhere, but I didn’t remember.

I thought about that for a minute while I looked around. We were in a closed-up little box, bigger than the fancy cart but it didn’t have any windows, just little holes high up on the walls that let in a little bit of light. Mama has a box like this, all folded up in her big orange work bag, made special to fit over a secret-keeper’s head. It’s full of holes that she closes up one by one until the secret-keeper wants to talk. So I knew the holes up high on the cart-walls were for air. Bundles of dried ghostgrass hung in them, just like any window, keeping us safe. Which is kind of funny when you think about how not-safe we really were.

“I’m sorry about your Mama,” the girl was saying. Then, in a voice like she was trying to make me feel better, she said, “They’ll keep her around if they think she’s useful. Is she good at fixing things, or making clothes, or fighting, or finding food? Anything like that?”

I wanted to tell the girl about Mama’s big orange work bag and her long busy days working for the king in Grayfall but I remembered how Jamie told me one time what happened if scav armies caught you and didn’t think you were useful. And I got really scared that if I said Mama’s job was to find people’s secrets then the girl would tell me that that’s not useful enough and if I heard that I didn’t know what I’d do, my whole self would close up like a fist so I couldn’t hear that Mama wasn’t useful enough to keep alive, so I didn’t say anything.

The girl thought for a second and said, “That is, if she wasn’t dead already.” And made a question-face at me.

That one was easy to answer and I shook my head.

“Okay. Good. That’s good.” Now the question-face turned into a thinking-face, and while I was wondering if this girl would get as mad as Mama does when I interrupt her thinking-face, the cart slowed down, then stopped, and quick as a snake the girl spun around and slapped a pile of nasty old blankets in the corner. “Wake up,” she whisper-yelled at the pile.

The pile kind of rustled around for a second.

“Slag you, Nina, help me out here.”

The pile didn’t say anything.

“Whatever,” the girl said. “You’re on your own. I tried.” Then to me, “You saw me try.”

All of a sudden she got a new look, like she could hear something I couldn’t, and one of those quick hands shot out and covered my mouth. “Quiet.”

“But I didn’t say—”

“QUIET.”

There was a kind of door in the side of the cart, and the girl gave it one sharp scared look and then back to me. She was holding my face in both her hands now, staring at me like Mama did when I had to listen to something really important.

“Quick,” the girl whispered. “Tell me your name.” She was whispering so fast it all squished into one word, TELLMEYOURNAME, but I knew what she meant.

“Aneko,” I whispered back.

“I’m Sam. Okay, Aneko. Listen. Wherever they take you. Wherever they put you. Don’t try to run. You’ll just make it worse. Just do what they say and I’ll find you. I’ll help you. As soon as I can. Promise. Just—”

Then the door came open, and hands reached in and dragged Sam out, and before I ever got to talk to her again she was dead, lying there on the roadside staring up at the rain. I don’t know what killed her, but I knew she was dead because her eyes were open and flies were walking on them and she didn’t blink them away. Just lying there for the flies and ghosts and dogs to chew on. I wanted to help her somehow, I didn’t know how really, maybe close her eyes so her ghost wouldn’t see other ghosts coming at her across the Waste. It’d keep the flies out anyway, with their dirty feet. Her mouth was open a little like she was about to say something. But she didn’t.

You draw stars over dead people’s eyelids so Catchkeep can find them easy. You put something in their mouth so they can cross the dead people’s river and their ghost doesn’t get stuck in the Waste to walk forever. Mama never did those things herself, if one of the king’s secret-keepers died before her work was done. The king had a person who did that. I watched it one time, even though that secret-keeper’s mouth was a mess and he didn’t have any eyelids anymore to draw on, so I’m pretty sure I know how.

But I couldn’t stop and do those things for Sam, because they pushed us right on past her, and I stumbled looking down at her but the kids on the chain in front of me kept walking so I had to get my feet back under me or be dragged. But I held her name in my mouth without saying it. SAM, I thought, HER NAME IS SAM. I closed my mouth on the name and held on tight like the secret-keepers do when they make Mama work so late that she doesn’t have any time to play with me after.

One time I heard a secret-keeper yell at Mama. I’LL TAKE IT TO MY GRAVE, he yelled at her, and there was a kind of spitty sound. Then there was a little space of quiet, and then the secret-keeper made the worst noise I’ve ever heard anybody make and I was happy I was behind the door and couldn’t see what happened to him to make that sound come out of his mouth.

I didn’t know what the secret-keeper wanted to take to his grave, or if he took it there. But it sounded like a brave strong thing to say. HER NAME IS SAM, I thought again. I’LL TAKE IT TO MY GRAVE.

Then I tucked it away in the back of my mind, where I keep the things I have to remember, like holy days and promises and chores. I didn’t want to forget, but I also needed to clear some room in my head for the great big thing that was in there, itching in my mind, pushing everything else away, hot and red like blood.

I had to stay alive long enough for Mama to find me. And then we were going to escape.

Like Mama would say, first things first. I didn’t know where she was. I didn’t even know where I was. She might be a ghost now for all I know. We walked for days. I think maybe the cart broke, but nobody ever said. We got dragged out and chained together, me and Sam and the other girl Nina who was asleep under the blankets, and some other kids from other carts. Mama was nowhere, and if Sam and Nina and everybody had grownups with them before, they were nowhere now too. But then that first night they unchained Sam and took her away and I thought she was going with the grownups because she was almost a grownup really herself but then the next day was when I saw her dead and I looked around for a chain like ours except with grownups on it but I couldn’t find one. Just Waste on both sides, and the cart burning in a big chopped-up pile, and the road going forever in front and behind.

Nina was in front of me on the chain but I couldn’t talk to her. There was somebody else on the chain behind me but I couldn’t turn around to see who it was. If I did either of those things, bad stuff would happen. One time there was a lot of noise somewhere behind me, a grownup yelling and a kid crying, and after a minute of that the chain stopped, and the crying got louder for a second and then the kid started screaming, screaming like some secret-keepers do when they see Mama start to slowly unpack her work bag, and then there was a noise like something thunking into something else, a firewood-chopping kind of sound, and after that the crying stopped, but when the chain started moving again it was harder to walk, like we were dragging something heavy behind us.

After that I didn’t cry, not even quietly. And I made sure to walk fast enough and pull extra hard with every step on that heavy mystery off behind us, because if I didn’t then Nina would have to pull her part and mine too and Mama taught me from little that if we treat other people like tools to be useful to us, then the only thing making us different than the scav armies is that we live in towns and not on the Waste-roads in between.

I tried to keep my mind off of my hurting back and my tired feet and my growling belly and my thirsty thirsty mouth by counting the kids in front of me. But it was hard. We were all walking in a straight line on a straight road so I had to kind of remember which arms and legs and tops of heads belonged to which kid, so if one kid stepped sideways a little or put an arm out, I’d see that part of the kid, and if that happened enough times with enough different kids, I could have some kind of count. I counted five separate kids plus Nina and over the long day I double-checked and even triple-checked my count but when we finally stopped at sundown and they sat us in a circle with a raider guarding us I saw I was wrong. There were eight kids in front of me, and another eleven behind, ten alive and one dead, just lying there all dirty from the road with a horrible huge split in his head. There were other groups of people on chains, farther off, and a bunch of raiders in a big group beyond. I did see two chains of grownups, but no Mama.

That made me remember Sam, who looked littler and not so strong now that she was dead. And it made me think of the kid who couldn’t walk and was now lying on his face in his spot in the circle, and those two thoughts kind of joined up and started walking toward another thought about Mama and how she couldn’t walk because the cart had landed on her legs, and I yelled at those thoughts in my head to SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP, until they went away somewhere else and I could be smart again and ANALYZE MY SITUATION like Mama would tell me to do.

Us kids had to sit really still because two raiders were circling behind us, round and round, like the circle of kids was a planet and the raiders were orbiting moons. ORBITING means going-around, which is what the raiders were doing. Going around with their weapons in their hands, making sure we didn’t do anything bad.

We weren’t allowed to talk, of course. There was a boy next to me, on the not-Nina side, and it was weird to think he’d been walking behind me this whole time and I didn’t see his face at all until now. This boy tried to ask for water and the raider passing behind him swung her weapon down and smashed him in the cheek without even slowing down. Her weapon was some kind of heavy stick or club with sharp things sticking out of it, and the boy put his hand to his cheek and pulled it away all bloody and started screaming. That brought more raiders, and one of them started yelling at the one with the stick, and then she went away and the new raiders unchained the screaming boy and dragged him off into the dark and came back later without him.

They had to feed the rest of us so we could walk tomorrow. There was a big raider argument about that. Some of them didn’t want to feed us, said there were still three days hard march to Last Chance, whatever that was, and then I didn’t listen anymore because my whole mind was full of THREE DAYS HARD MARCH and I knew, just knew, that my feet could never walk that far, I’d end up like the dead boy with the inside-out head and never see Mama again.

But when they were done arguing they fed us. Not a lot. Each kid got one little strip of weird dried meat and one little broken-off piece of stale flatbread and three tiny dried berries, so small and hard that I couldn’t even really chew them, they just got stuck between my teeth.

We had to eat the dried meat first and fast because if we took too long the salt in it would draw ghosts down on us from as soon as they took it out of its ghostgrass bag. One time Mama told me that the Grayfall king’s first torturer used to sprinkle salt around his secret-keepers and let the Waste-ghosts at them bit by bit, but Mama never did that. She said it was lazy, and sloppy, and cruel. I never knew if she meant cruel to the secret-keepers or the ghosts.

We also got two sips of nasty water from a bottle the scav army raiders passed around. An older girl tried to take more water. I don’t think she could stop herself, she got that water to her mouth and her mouth kept moving all on its own to take more. So the raider behind her reached down, took the bottle, then stepped in front of her and kicked her in the stomach so she threw up the water and tiny bit of food. The raider left and the girl looked down at the throwup. She looked like she was thinking about something, probably THREE DAYS HARD MARCH, because she picked the throwup meat and berries off the ground like a dog and ate them while we all stared. It was really hard not to make any noise or say anything while she was doing that, but I didn’t want to have to choose between eating my own throwup or dying on the Waste-road from being too weak to walk, so I locked my mouth like Mama’s work bag and kept it locked.

After that was sleeptime. Just there on the ground, which I thought would be fun before I tried it but then when I did it wasn’t fun at all, it was cold and the ground was hard and I had to pee. The raiders had made a fire but it was far away by where they slept and didn’t warm us kids up even a little. I wanted my pillow and blanket and most of all I wanted Mama. I tried to close my eyes and count big numbers until I fell asleep but Nina was next to me sniffling, not letting herself cry, so I whispered to her COME CLOSER SO WE CAN STAY WARM but then she just sniffled into my hair instead and you can’t fall asleep with somebody doing that no matter how tired you are. So I scooted away and rolled over and something in my pocket went squish.

I pretended to fall asleep so the raiders wouldn’t watch me, but really I was spying on them out of the tiniest opening in my eyes. After a long time one of them said I’M FREEZING MY BALLS OFF, LET’S GET OUT OF HERE and the other one kind of swept a look across us kids and said WELL THEY’RE NOT GOING ANYWHERE, and then I closed my eyes quick while the raider stepped over me, and I could hear them take a couple steps away, but then the first one stopped and said LOOK, MAYBE WE SHOULD JUST and the other one said THEN STAY, I’M GOING OVER THERE and their footsteps crunched away over the ashy Waste dirt toward the fire and when I opened my eyes again they were gone.

So I snuck my hand down to my pocket, really slow and quiet, and there was the blackberry pastry from the king’s castle, all gummed together and mushed into the cloth of the pocket. But it was food, so I scooped it out in little slow secret bits on my fingers and ate it. It tasted like treasure. I felt bad about not sharing with Nina, but if I shared with her then all the kids would want some, and they’d be noisy and the raiders would come back and drag me away into the darkness or kill me right here on the ground.

When I couldn’t scrape any more crumbs and fruit goo out of my pocket, I licked my fingers as quiet as I could, then licked the crumbs from around my lips and ate them carefully, one by one. I couldn’t let the raiders smell the sweetness on me, and I wanted every speck of that food-energy to go to my walking feet, my seeing eyes. I still had lots farther to go.

The raiders were wrong. It was FOUR DAYS HARD MARCH to Last Chance, not THREE. Well, THREE plus ONE where we had to stop right where we were on the road and wait for a storm to blow over. It took all day, which was good for me because my feet hurt so much that I don’t know if I could’ve walked on them even if all the scav armies in the whole wide Waste were chasing me, and bad for me because the extra day meant we ran out of food before we got to where they were taking us.

They put us all together while the storm was going over, and told us to keep our heads down and close our eyes and they tied pieces of cloth over our noses and eyes to keep the ash and dust out, and told us to shut up and go to sleep if we know what’s good for us.

But there’s no sleeping in a Waste-storm, at least not for me. It’s too loud and too windy and every time you breathe you can feel some Waste sneaking into your nose and mouth so you sneeze out black gunk for days.

I tried to open my eyes just a little to see if I could see Mama anywhere, which was a mistake. Waste-ash flew into my eyes as soon as I opened them and I couldn’t even wipe it back out because my hands were covered with it too. My eyes were too dried out to cry the ash away so I just squeezed them super tight so it wouldn’t hurt as much and after a while I guess I fell asleep because I saw Mama walking toward me, no smashed legs, no chains, so I knew it was a dream and I woke up.

The day after that we ran out of food, and the day after that we arrived at the scav army town Last Chance, and by that time there were only twelve kids left on my chain plus me, and they put us straight to work.

Here’s what Last Chance is NOT like: Sunrise. Grayfall. Any kind of town. It doesn’t even have houses, not really, just tents and carts all shoved together in a kind of messy townish shape. It has chickens running around but no kids playing. It has dogs to pull the carts but no goats for milk. There’s not even a garden, which is the number-one important thing for a town to have, Mama says, because people get sick if they don’t have green growing things to eat, their bodies don’t work right and they die, just like what happened with Jamie’s big brother and his friends who went out to draw a map of the Waste past the mountains and got lost from first-apples day to second snow.

Also Last Chance doesn’t have old Before-magic giants like Sunrise. That makes sense. I don’t know what there is in Last Chance that the giants would want to protect.

Here’s what Last Chance DOES have: Raiders. Lots of raiders. Kids on chains like me and Nina. Nothing fun to do ever. Waste-ash in the air, always. Work.

My work gang is me and the rest of the kids on my chain. It’s the same chain, just with gaps in it now where the other kids were when they were alive. There were two other chains of kids in my group, and other chains of kids already there working. They have grownups too, but they don’t do the same work as us. They do stuff like fixing and cooking and some of them get taken into the scav army as fighters and finders and some of them just disappear.

Me and Nina and the rest of our chain, our job is digging. We all have digging-sticks, but there are only two shovels, so we have to take turns with them. We’re supposed to dig around in some old ruins and put the stuff we find into a cart. We’re looking for any Before-stuff we can find there. Broken relics, fossils, whatever.

Sometimes our SUPERVISOR, which means the raider who’s boss of our chain, takes one of us kids off the chain and sends us into some little gap between ruin-stuff where a grownup won’t fit. Sometimes it’s because the SUPERVISOR saw something interesting in under the ruin-stuff and sometimes I think he’s just a bad guesser about what spots are lucky because kids usually come out of there holding the same digging-stick they went in with and that only, no ruin-treasure, no old Before-magic, no nothing.

Nina gets sent in more than me because she isn’t scared of the dark or tight places so she never cries going into the caves. Plus one time she found a pretty green glass ball that made the SUPERVISOR happy because it was top-shelf ruin-treasure even though it had white scratches all over it like a spider web. I don’t think that’s fair because how am I supposed to find top-shelf ruin-treasure if the SUPERVISOR always sends her in instead of me?

Nina’s chain-name is THREE, because she’s the third kid on the chain now. My chain-name is FOUR.

The first few days of this new work were really hard, and my whole body was tired and hurting the whole time, and I was always hungry and thirsty but the SUPERVISOR said YOU’LL EAT WHEN THIS SECTOR IS CLEARED, which I think means never because the only thing we got was more of the stale flatbread stuff, a piece the size of my hand that was all the food I ate the whole day.

On day four or maybe five all the kids were too tired and hungry to dig. We had to try anyway but it was slow and hard and all we found was two little pieces of good metal and some tiny bits of glass and a few old bone-pieces and a tooth, and then EIGHT went into a ruin-stuff cave with his digging-stick and fell asleep or fainted so me and TWO had to reach in and drag him out by the feet.

That day it was raining and the kids were crying and the SUPERVISOR pointed at Nina and pointed at the ruin-stuff cave and tilted his head quick like HURRY UP, like words were too good to waste on Nina. That made me mad. Nina was sick, she coughed all day every day, and she wasn’t strong enough anymore to dig anything, and when the SUPERVISOR pointed at her she stood there shaking her head and quiet-crying and shivering like she was cold even though it was a hot day. So when the SUPERVISOR started moving toward Nina with a face like Did You Just Say No To Me, right for that one second I forgot how scared I was of the SUPERVISOR’s hitting-stick and I kind of scrunched myself down like a kid who could fit in a ruin-stuff cave no problem and I said I’LL GO.

The SUPERVISOR gave me a kind of up-down look, then looked along the chain at the other kids, then back to me. Then he shrugged and took me off the chain and I went in.

It was my first time actually inside a ruin-stuff cave so I didn’t know what I’d see. From the outside the ruin-caves looked more like big piles of Waste-ash with pieces of junk kind of spiking up out of it, which is how you know it’s ruins and not just a place where lots of Waste-ash has been pushed all up together by the wind.

Inside was weird, but nice. The best part was the quiet. You go in there and the whole world around you kind of stops, and you keep moving inside the stopped bubble of it, all the Before-stuff around you, the plastic and metal and bricks and things, but the Waste’s still under your feet and dusting all over everything, which is weird because the songkeeper says that in the Before the earth used to be green, not just in gardens like the one we have in Sunrise but everywhere.

So you’re kind of in both places, the Before and the now, and also not in either one of them really, and the sun shines down on you through the gaps in the ceiling, and it’s the same sun Before as now, which makes my head feel weird to think about.

I crawled in and then kept crawling for a little ways, farther than EIGHT went I guess because I squeezed and squirmed and got in too far for anyone to reach me. And then I kept crawling. Everybody knew you shouldn’t go too far in because the ceiling is just made up of piled junk and it could fall on your head any second and that would be the end of you. But I knew if I came out of there without any ruin-treasure then the SUPERVISOR wouldn’t send me back in again and in there in the quiet was way better than out there in the yelling and hitting and wind. I decided I’d find something really extra great so the SUPERVISOR would say ANEKO FINDS THE BEST RUIN-TREASURE, I WILL SEND HER IN EVERY DAY FOREVER AND THE SICK KIDS LIKE NINA WON’T HAVE TO GO IN ANYMORE. I mean I know he’d say THREE instead of NINA and FOUR instead of ANEKO but that was okay as long as my plan worked, because when I looked at Nina’s coughing sick face all I could think about was Sam’s swollen dead face and it made me sadder than I’ve ever been in my whole life but also so mad my eyes felt like fire.

I was going to outsmart the SUPERVISOR like Mama outsmarts me every time we play What Am I? And this pile of Before-junk was going to spit out some top-shelf ruin-treasure that would help me do it.

But first I had to find some. All us kids had bags tied to our waists where we were supposed to put whatever we found. Anything that was Before-stuff, the SUPERVISOR wanted. Anything old. The best thing my chain ever found was yesterday when SEVEN found the edge of a big metal box and we all dug it out together and the SUPERVISOR was so excited he took a shovel and started digging himself, but we dug out the lid or maybe door of the box but nobody could figure out how to open it and it was too heavy to move, so the SUPERVISOR took out one of those red strips of fabric that get tied around things that are too big for people to move by themselves without a cart and dogs. But there was nothing on the box to tie it to and the Waste was already blowing ash back over top of the whole thing anyway so the SUPERVISOR hit SEVEN for wasting his time and told us all to get back to work or else.

Now this was my one and only chance to do better. The tunnels through a ruins-cave are made by luck only, just the way the stuff fell when the Before-buildings came down. Where the tunnel started there wasn’t anything left to take, other kids had already gotten there before me. So I decided to keep crawling back into the ruins-cave until I found something great or the SUPERVISOR started yelling.

I crawled back and back until I counted up to forty-two, and then the little tunnel through the broken bricks and stuff got wider where the pieces of stuff fell against each other in a way to leave a sort of little room, the pointy sort-of-ceiling just a bit above my head.

It was brighter this far in. Maybe the storm blew some gaps in the ceiling ash, or some stuff fell down not long ago. Anyway, I could see just fine, which was a nice surprise.

Three sides of the little room were just big piles of broken bricks with some long pieces of metal holding them up. It looked like somebody, somebody big, the Sunrise giants kind of big, took the metal pieces and shoved them into the ground really hard and left the long parts sticking out, but really I knew it was just the way this one Before-building fell. The other side of the little room was a giant-size letter S, taller than the tallest grownup I ever saw, and some long pieces of metal leaned up against the middle part of the S made up the ceiling of the room. I could just make out the top half of the S going on above the metal-pieces ceiling where the sun shone through.

Nobody had been here in a really long time. Maybe never. I could tell that right away. For one thing, Mama taught me to look for footprints and people-marks anywhere I go in the Waste ever, to see if people were there before me, and there weren’t any here. For another thing, there was Before-stuff on the ground of my little room, poking up out of the Waste. Pieces of easy carrying size. Stuff other kids on chains or raiders or whoever would’ve grabbed up way before today.

I didn’t have time to go through all the stuff really carefully. Maybe the SUPERVISOR would be just as happy with lots of sort-of-okay things as he would be with just one EXTRA GREAT one. So I just picked up everything I could as fast as I could. Anything that wasn’t attached to the stuff that was holding up this ruins-cave from falling on my head. Plastic. Metal. Broken pieces of Before-brick, better than the best lake-clay. The dry darkness of the ruins-cave had kept this stuff from rotting in the sun and rain. I didn’t look real close at anything, just shoved it all in my pockets.

“You in there,” the SUPERVISOR yelled from outside. “Hurry up.”

“Found stuff,” I yelled back, fast and breathless, anything before he pulled me out and started hitting and put me back on the chain and sent Nina in instead. One chance. “Just a minute.”

I glanced over my findings. Random nothing scraps of junk. But thanks to my find, the SUPERVISOR would flag my little room as a scavenge-spot, and other kids would be all over it like flies on a dead dog.

I had to do this smart. There was stuff sticking up out of the Waste, so it was an easy guess there was probably more stuff deeper down.

I started poking around with my digging-stick. The Waste was ashy and loose like always, and I could wiggle the pointy end of the stick down into it no problem. Then I could kind of get a piece of metal down in there and use that together with the stick to pull stuff out. I knew not to reach down into the Waste-ash with my bare hands. Too many tiny bits of glass and poky metal, too small to see, but it’d go into you like needles and you’d get an infection. Infection means when stuff gets into your skin that doesn’t belong there and your blood has like a war with the bad stuff inside you and the bad stuff wins and your hand or whatever gets all red and puffy and you get nasty sick until they cut off your hand, and maybe you die anyway.

A little bit down it was hard to dig any deeper. There was something in the way. One time Jamie and I had to help dig new beds in the Sunrise town garden and that was really hard because just underneath the top layer of Waste there’s all the stuff the ash has blown over and covered up, and you have to dig it out. It’s like the Before is right there, sleeping under your feet, snuggled up under an ashy gross blanket that people walk on every day.

But Before-stuff is exactly what I wanted, so I just dug harder, shoving my digging-stick into the ground until it got totally stuck in something underground. I pulled, I pushed it back and forth, but it was stuck, and if I came back out of that ruins-cave with no digging-stick, it was going to be a bad day for me.

I took the piece of metal and tried to dig a hole around where the stick went in. Scooping out the ash was hard because it just kept sliding back down into the hole I was making. So I tried to go under the mystery underground thing instead. Sometimes you could lever up a rock like that, if you get something in under it and push down to lift up the end you can’t see. Jamie’s dad taught us that, when we were out digging for the garden.

The SUPERVISOR was shouting again. “I have to send somebody in after you,” he was yelling, “you both pay.”

“Something’s stuck,” I heard myself yell back, all frozen scared because what was stuck was my digging-stick and not some piece of ruin-treasure that would save me from the hitting. Then, making the lie even worse, I yelled, “I can get it, I just need a few minutes is all.”

The SUPERVISOR went quiet again. I didn’t know if he was sending someone in, or who it would be, or how I would keep them from telling the SUPERVISOR about my lie. But the SUPERVISOR couldn’t fit back here, and I knew he was scared to come in under that huge pile of ruin-stuff himself. All the raiders were. Nina said that was the whole reason us kids were here doing their scav army work for them, because we’re expendable, which means nobody cared if we got crushed like bugs under all of this.

So I wiggled the metal piece in as far as I could and leaned on it. Then, while I was still leaning on it, I took another piece of metal and dug around my guess of the shape of the underground thing I couldn’t see. It felt round and smooth, like an egg bigger than my head. That was disappointing because round and smooth meant rock, and the SUPERVISOR wasn’t going to care about that, even if rocks were actually even older than the other Before-stuff, like every little knows.

But . . . how do you get a digging-stick stuck in a rock?

I did my best to get the hole dug around the maybe-rock and then I grabbed the digging-stick and pulled with every drop of my strength.

It didn’t move.

I pulled harder. I pulled with muscles I didn’t even know I had until I lost my grip and my balance and fell over backwards. It hurt, but I stayed quiet so the SUPERVISOR wouldn’t hear.

The stick still hadn’t moved. It was poking up out of the ground exactly how I’d left it.

I started feeling myself getting mad. Really mad. The kind of mad Mama always tells me not to get, because it’s not productive. Productive means being able to do your best at something because you’re not too busy being so mad that you can’t think right and you want to kick everything instead.

But Mama wasn’t here to tell me to take my calm-down breaths, so before I could stop myself I kicked the stuck-out part of the digging-stick as hard as I could.

And it moved.

Quick as I could, I jammed the piece of metal down in beside where I guessed the edge of the thing to end, fast before the ash could fill the hole back in. Then I kind of pushed the metal up and down with my foot while pulling the stick up and sideways the other way with both hands and praying to the One Who Got Away for strength and silence and the SUPERVISOR leaving me alone a little while longer.

It felt like pulling up a big old corpseroot out of new garden dirt, except even tighter stuck. I got my feet in a better position and dug in with my heels and fought that piece of Waste for my digging-stick and whatever dumb thing it was stuck to.

Deep under my feet, I felt something give way. There was a soft pop, so quiet I felt it more than heard it, and then the stick flew out in my hands, raining dirt and ash and those tiny sharp bits of Waste-stuff all over, and I shut my eyes.

When the stuff stopped raining down, I carefully wiped around my eyes.

Then I opened them and almost screamed.

Stuck to the end of my digging-stick was a head. A big, hard, made-of-Before-stuff head. Like the Sunrise giants, but way way smaller, more the size of like a big round bucket. Maybe it was metal, maybe plastic. Sometimes with Before-stuff it was hard to know for sure. It wasn’t very heavy but it felt really strong, like if my head was made of this stuff, the SUPERVISOR’s hitting-stick would feel like the tiniest mosquito booping against it, not bothering me even a little.

I waited for a ghost to come out of it and devour the salt from my bones. Devour means eat every last bit, like Mama tells me to do with my dinner. But no ghosts did. There was just a skull, or the little pieces left from one. I pocketed a tooth for remembrance, which means asking the Chooser to be nice to the dead. I left the rest of the skull-pieces to the Waste.

Every little knows about the bones in the earth. People bones and plastic bones and metal bones of Before-stuff long long dead and extinct, which means not just your regular dead but all your kind dead forever. Bones and stories are all we have left of the mystery people Before and their Before-magic, their metal crab-shells and bird-wings and broken dead weapons, also extinct. These things are called FOSSILS, which means bones and relics that are older than anything.

I knew all this stuff since forever. Mama taught me, Jamie’s dad taught me, the Sunrise songkeeper and the Grayfall songkeeper taught every little in their towns. But apart from the Sunrise giants this was my first time seeing any whole unbroken fossil close enough to touch. Usually it was just little pieces, and the songkeepers kept them in special hands-off boxes and only brought them out for stories.

The dirt shook off of the fossil-head no problem. Underneath it was shiny and black and empty inside, with a kind of little almost-black window on the front that looked like something part plastic, part glass. The window-thing was broken on one side, and that’s where the digging-stick had gotten stuck, in that hole. The bottom edge of the head wasn’t smooth, there were all these in-and-out pieces that made it look like it was supposed to lock onto something else, the way some of Mama’s work tools went together to make a whole new more complicated thing. Those were priceless Before-relics, given to Mama by the Grayfall king from his own treasure-room. The Before-magic ran through them and made them still work, as long as Mama made sure to set them out in the sunshine when she was done with them. I wasn’t allowed to touch them ever. Not even when they were just sitting there in the sun waiting for the magic to come back.

I thought about that while I wiggled the stick out of the little window on the head. Easy now that I could see how it was stuck. I wiped the shiny head on my sleeve and put it on my head like a hat, waiting for the Before-magic to go smashing through me like a storm.

The fossil-head was too big for me. It probably could have fit the SUPERVISOR, or Mama, or maybe even Jamie. On me it wasn’t any kind of hat at all, it went down over my whole face and head and neck and sat perched on my shoulders. It was like what the Grayfall kingsguard wear on their heads to protect them from raiders and bears and whatever, except way way better, because it covered my whole head and not just the top of it.

For a five-count I held my breath, waiting to see what it would do to me. Would the Before-magic of it get into me like an infection? Would it turn me into a Before-person, part metal and part meat? Would it mistake me for one of them and kill me dead extinct? I pictured it squeezing tighter and tighter, popping my head like a grape.

But nothing happened. It was a cold dead fossil and couldn’t hurt me, only help. I knew what would happen if I gave this thing I found to the SUPERVISOR. This was my top-shelf ruin-treasure, a Before-people mystery fossil, and there wouldn’t be any more hitting after I gave it to him. It would keep me safe. At least for a little while. Long enough to—

Suddenly I heard a weird little surprised noise behind me. I turned and there was Nina. Her mouth was open and she was making huge eyes at the fossil-head.

She looked like she was about to start yelling so I took it off real quick so she would know it was just me underneath. At the same time I took a step back. Nina even being here was messing up my whole plan. She was bigger than me and probably stronger. What if she took the head back to the SUPERVISOR instead of me and got credit for my find? Then I’d get hit and she’d get sent into the ruin-caves tomorrow instead of me.

“It’s mine,” I whispered, keeping my voice quiet so nobody outside the ruin-cave would hear. “I found it.”

I didn’t know if Nina heard me either. She was still staring, not saying anything. She looked like she forgot how to talk. Like a secret-keeper after a long day with Mama and her work bag.

“Promise you won’t tell,” I demanded, as fierce as I could while still whispering.

Nina blinked and stared at me. It was the first time she was looking at me and not the head. She was giving me a look like you give a little who keeps eating rainstealer flowers, forgetting that something so pretty can still make you so sick.

“Tell?” she whispered back at me, and her voice matched her face. It was a Don’t Be Stupid, Little voice, and it made my hands curl into fists before I could stop them, because for one thing she wasn’t THAT much bigger than me, and for another thing, what belonged in this ruin-cave was Finder of Before-Treasure Aneko FOUR and her Before-treasure find and not Nina THREE Finder of Nothing.

“Relax,” she was saying. “Telling that slag-brain is the last thing we’re going to do.”

“Then what—”

“We’re going to find the rest of it.”

That filled my whole head with questions. What was Nina talking about? What was I going to give the SUPERVISOR if I didn’t give him this fossil? What if we had to come out and the storms blew ash over the ruin-cave and we couldn’t find it again? What would the SUPERVISOR do to us if he heard Nina calling him a slag-brain?

And—wait. The rest of what?

“It’s mine,” I said again instead, because all those questions got stuck in my head and couldn’t all squeeze out my mouth together. I wanted to take another step back but there wasn’t any room.

“You don’t even know what it is,” Nina hissed at me.

“It’s a fossil,” I hissed back. “It’s Before-people bones from the earth and it’s MINE.”

Nina gave me a sigh like You Really Are A Very Stupid Little Aren’t You. Then she turned back to the tunnel out. I was scared she was going out there to tell on me, but she just shouted, “There’s something here. I’m helping FOUR dig it out. Don’t send anybody else in, the ceiling is shaking and I think it might come down.”

I looked at the ceiling when she said that. Then I realized she was lying and wanted to kick myself for falling for it. Then I wanted to kick myself even harder for not thinking of the lie by myself before the SUPERVISOR sent Nina in after me.

But Nina didn’t notice. She’d already gone over to the hole I’d made in the Waste and started digging.

“Back in my town my dad was songkeeper,” Nina told me all in a rush while she dug. Her voice was clear and soft like Mama’s used to get when I had to Shut Up And Listen Right Now, so I put away my mad mood and listened. “You know what that means? Songkeeper?”

Songkeeper means Person Who Tells The Important Stories. Every little knows that from walking. So I nodded.

“My dad had a relic like this,” Nina said. “But not a head. An arm. Made out of this same shiny black Before-stuff. Help me dig.”

Just like that, my mad mood was back. Like she was going to boss me into helping her do something I didn’t even want HER to do in the first place. “I told you. It’s mine.”

“Ragpicker take you. Listen. This is important. The arm-thing? My dad said there was a whole person-shape of it,” Nina said. “Not just the one arm but a whole body. But the arm was the only thing he had enough to trade for. He said somebody used to wear the whole person-shape thing, back in the wars. And whoever wore it, it would protect them.”

“Before-magic,” I told her.

“My dad says Before-magic is just a story for littles,” Nina said, in that nasty know-everything voice I hated. What did I care what she or her stupid dad thought? They weren’t from Sunrise. They were from some dumb town that probably didn’t have any giants or anything. “That,” she said, and she kind of nodded toward the head I’d found, “is a MACHINE. Well, a piece of one. And the rest . . . ”

“The rest what?” I said, but I was looking at the hole in the ground while I said it, and I knew. All at once I could feel the pieces of an idea sliding together, I could feel it prickling in my brain behind my eyes.

I started digging.

It was a lot faster with both of us working. Nina was bigger and stronger than me, and she’d put her sickness and tiredness away someplace where I couldn’t see it anymore. She hadn’t brought a digging-stick, and the Waste was scratching deep lines up her arms, and her hands were bloody and gross and made me kind of sad and scared to look at them, but she didn’t care about any of that. She wanted this Before-thing too much. The wanting moved her body for her while her mind ran off ahead. That happened to secret-keepers sometimes, Mama said. They could peel their minds away clean from the hurt in their bodies. It made Mama’s job a lot harder sometimes, she’d have to work until I was asleep so there was nobody to tell me bedtime stories except the kingsguard, and they never did the voices right.

I helped along with my digging-stick, loosening the ash and junk so Nina could move it away with pieces of metal and her poor nasty messed-up hands. “A little farther,” she kept saying, way down low on the bottom of her voice so I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or to herself or her hands or the Waste or something hidden underneath or what. “Almost there.”

And then I poked in my digging-stick for what felt like the millionth time that day. And this time, instead of the soft tshhh sound of stick into ashy dirt, I heard a kind of clunk.

Nina looked at me, and her face was like learning your favorite story is true.

Together we pulled out a black shiny leg-shape of the stuff, then another. Then a broken-off arm, then a shape kind of like a jacket with one sleeve that was the other arm, except the jacket-shape had a big hole melted straight through the middle, in one side and out the other. That arm’s fist was curled around something that dangled from it, a long dark weird shape that was jagged and smooth at the same time, with a long tube coming out of one end.

That thing fell out into Nina’s hands. She sucked her breath in between her teeth and dropped the thing like it was about to bite her.

When it landed I got a good look at it. It was a Before-people weapon. It was the first one I’d seen that wasn’t broken into pieces or melted into a lump of uselessness. From this one I could see the way you’d hold it, just like in the pictures of the wars Before, the way you’d put one part in one hand and one part in another, and if the strap wasn’t so rotten it would go around your neck like a satchel.

“Ragpicker slag me,” Nina was whispering, under her breath like a prayer. She kept running her hands over the shiny person-shape, like she was scared if she stopped it’d disappear.

Then came the SUPERVISOR’s voice from outside. “You better not be trying anything stupid in there,” he said. “I want to see that ruin-treasure and I want to see it NOW.”

Hearing that voice made me feel like I wanted the Waste to open up and swallow me alive, but Nina got a lid slammed down on whatever was going through her head and just yelled back in this airy voice like nothing: “Just digging still.” Then she whispered to me: “Quick. Help me put it on.”

I gave her a dirty look.

“It won’t fit you,” she whispered.

That was true, and I knew it. I pointed at the jagged-smooth weapon shape. “Then I get that.”

“You don’t know how to use it.”

“Neither do you.”

Nina looked at it, then at me. There was hard wanting in her face, but fair was fair. She nodded.

“Out in one minute or I send another one in after you,” the SUPERVISOR yelled back.

“Oh you don’t want to do that,” Nina shouted, shoving her foot into one of the shiny legs. There was a tiny shake in her voice but it didn’t carry. She got the other leg on and stood up. She looked funny, that skinny body on those huge monster legs. I helped her balance. “Stuff falling out of the ceiling everywhere. Lose three kids instead of two, and all the ruin-treasure besides.” She took a piece of metal and threw it clanging against that giant letter S. “Ah! Chooser save me. That one was CLOSE.”

Silence from outside. For the first time ever I had this thought: what if the SUPERVISOR was scared of somebody too? Who yelled at him and hit him when we came back from the ruin-fields with no treasure?

I stared at Nina. She winked.

Then she pulled the jacket-shape on over her head. It went down over her waist and hips and butt and hung real loose on her, like how Jamie’s old nettle-yarn sweater fits me. She got her arm through the one attached arm, then picked up the other one and held it out for me to hold. She dug around inside it like she was looking for something, and I remembered how she’d said her songkeeper dad had a Before-relic fossil arm just like this one. So I didn’t say anything, just held it and waited, and after a second she pulled out a long thin tube with a much thinner pointy thing on the end of it like a sewing needle.

“Help me put this in my arm,” she said, and pointed with one hard plasticky finger to the soft inside of her other elbow. “Here.”

“Why?” I asked, and my voice was shaking like a scared-of-the-dark little, but I couldn’t help it. There was a cold feeling in my belly suddenly, like the Before-magic was a bucket of ice water I’d swallowed.

“Because it’s in the old stories,” she said, “and now it’s here.” Her voice was shaking too, but not like she was scared, more like something amazing was about to happen, like a party just for her. “It’ll help us if we let it.”

“How do you know that?” I asked, hating how small and scared my voice sounded.

She looked at me strangely. “I don’t.”

I thought about Mama and Jaime and the Sunrise giants and Sam with the flies in her eyes, and I knew what I had to do. “Okay, Nina,” I told her, and I slid the needle in, and she watched me do it and didn’t look away, and I think it’s the bravest thing I ever saw.

After that I helped her kind of push-pull the arm on like a cold, hard, too-big glove. Last, she pulled the fossil-head down over her head and I couldn’t see her face anymore.

For a ten-count nothing happened. Then the shiny black Before-stuff started humming. Then, slowly, slowly, the arms and legs and head started locking themselves onto the jacket-body with these gentle little whispering sounds.

“Nina?” I asked, because I couldn’t trust my eyes to tell me what I was looking at.

“It’s not me,” her voice came from inside the fossil-head, shaking with more scared than mad now. “I’m not doing it, Aneko, it isn’t me.”

Then suddenly her voice changed, went up all high and squeaky with surprise: “There’s words on it, there are like words and shapes on the window where I look, I think it’s trying to talk to me,” and I had no idea what she was talking about and didn’t ask, I was too busy staring at the sudden shiny dark shape that used to be Nina, before she got swallowed up by the Before-magic weirdness.

I picked up the Before-relic weapon. It was cold and slick in my hands like a snake. There was a place on it that looked like the shape of a hand, and I had to stretch my fingers hurting wide to fit. The hand-shape started glowing bright bright blue, the same color as the very bottom of a candle-flame, or the stars on a cold night, or the very first scorchweed flowers in springtime.

I had to push away so many questions. What would happen to us when we got out there? Would Nina even fit out of the ruin-cave with that stuff on? How long would it keep working? Could I find Mama out there? Was she even still alive to find?

“Time’s up,” the SUPERVISOR yelled. “Get out or I burn you out.”

Nina turned her shiny black fossil-head to me. Through the little hole in the little window it was hard to see her face. She looked like a Before-people ghost come alive, like a Sunrise giant and all its old old magic shrunk down to person-size.

She nodded once to me. I nodded back.

“Coming,” she called.

About the Author

Nicole Kornher-Stace lives in New Paltz, NY. Her short fiction and poetry has appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, including Best American Fantasy, Clockwork Phoenix 3 and 4, The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women, Zombies: More Recent Dead, Apex, and Fantasy Magazine. She is the author of Desideria, The Winter Triptych, and the Norton Award finalist Archivist Wasp.

Forever Bound

Joe Haldeman

I’d thought that being a graduate student in physics would keep me from being drafted. But I was sitting safely boxed in my library carrel, reading a journal article, when the screen went blank and then blinked PAPER DOCUMENT INCOMING, which had never happened before—who would bother to track you down at the library?—and I had a premonition that was instantly confirmed.

One sheet of paper slid out with the sigil of the National Service Commission. I turned it right side up and pressed my thumb onto the thumbprint circle, and the words appeared: “You have been chosen to represent your country as a member of the Ninth Infantry Division, Twelfth Remote Combat Infantry Brigade,” Soldierboys. “You will report to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, to begin RCIU training at 1200, 3 September 2054.”

Just before class registration, how considerate. I wouldn’t be pulled out of school. I even had two weeks to pack and say my goodbyes.

Various options came to mind as I sat staring at the page. I could run to Sweden or Finland, where I’d also face national service, but it wouldn’t have to be military. I could take the Commission itself to court, pleading pacifism, asking to be reassigned to Road Service or Forestry. But I didn’t belong to any pacifist groups and couldn’t claim any religion.

I could do like Bruce Cramer last year. Stoke up on painkillers and vodka and shoot off a toe. But his draft notice had been for the regular infantry, pretty dangerous.

People who ran soldierboys never got shot at directly—they sat in an underground bunker hundreds of miles from the battlefield, and operated remote robots that were invincible and armed to the teeth. Sort of like a sim, but the people you kill actually are people, and they actually do die.

Most soldierboys didn’t do that, I knew. There were about 20,000 of them dispersed throughout Ngumi territory, and most of them just stood guard, huge and impregnable, unkillable, symbols of Alliance might. Which is to say, American might, though about twelve percent came from elsewhere.

My advisor, Blaze Harding, was in her office a couple of buildings away, and said to bring the document over.

She studied the letter for much longer than it would take to read it. “Let me explain to you . . . in how many dimensions you are fucked.

“You could run. Finland, Sweden, Formosa. Forget Canada. It’s a combat assignment, and you’d be extradited. In any case, you’d lose your grant, and it would be the end of your academic career. Likewise with going to jail.

“If you obey the law and go in, you’ll be like Sira Tolliver over in Mac Roman’s office. You ‘only’ have to report ten days a month. But she seems to spend half her time recovering from those ten days.”

“Just sitting in a little room?”

“A cage, she calls it. Evidently it’s a little more strenuous than sitting.

“The plus side is that the department wouldn’t dare drop you. If you just show up for work, your position with the Jupiter Project is as safe as tenure. As long as the grant holds out, which should be approximately forever.” The Jupiter Project was building a huge supercollider in orbit around Jupiter, millions of electromagnetic doughnuts circling out by the orbit of Io.

“Once they turn it on,” I said, “our worries will be over anyhow. Instantly sucked into a huge black hole.”

“No, I favor the ‘explode and be scattered to the edge of the universe’ theory. I always wanted to travel.” We shared a laugh. The Project would simulate conditions 10 to the minus 35th seconds after the Big Bang, and the tabloids loved it.

“Well, at least I’ll lose a few pounds in basic training. I’ve been putting on two or three pounds a year since I graduated and left the soccer team.”

“Some of us like them a little plump,” she said, pinching the skin on my forearm. It was a funny situation. We’d been attracted to each other since the day we met, three years ago, but it had never gone beyond banter. She was fifteen years older than me, and white. Which was not a problem on campus, but outside, Texas is Texas.

“I goo-wikied something you ought to see. Running a soldierboy isn’t really just sitting around.” She turned her clipboard around so I could read the screen.

DISABILITY AND DEATH

by

MILITARY OCCUPATIONAL SPECIALTY
per 100,000 annually

COMBAT
INJURY/DEATH
NON-COMBAT
INJURY/DEATH

INFANTRY
949.2 / 207.4
630.8 / 123.5

RCI
248.9 / 201.7
223.9 / 125.6

“Not really so safe, then.”

“And the injuries in the RCI, combat or not, would all be brain injuries. You’d be out of a job here.”

“You’re just saying that to cheer me up.”

“No, but I’m thinking you ought to try switching to the infantry, as crazy as that sounds. With your education and age, they’d put you behind a desk for sure.”

“Well, I’ve got two weeks to nose around. See how much latitude I’ll have. But what about my job here?”

She waved a hand in dismissal. “You can do it in twenty days a month. Actually, I was going to take you off the physics lab babysitting anyhow; just grade papers for 60 and help me with the 299 special projects.” She looked at her calendar. “I guess basic training will be full-time.”

“I don’t know. Sounds like it, from what I’ve heard.”

“Find out for me. If I have to kidnap somebody for October and November, I’d better start looking around.” She reached across the desk and patted my hand. “It’s an inconvenience, Julian, but not a disaster. You’ll come out on top.”

Blaze hadn’t brought up the largest danger and the biggest attraction of being a “mechanic,” as the soldiers who operated the soldierboys were called. They all had to be jacked, a hole drilled into the back of the skull and an electronic interface inserted, so you shared the thoughts and observations, feelings, of the rest of your platoon. There were five men and five women in a platoon, so you become like a mythical beast, with ten brains, twenty arms, and five cocks, and five cunts. A lot of people tried to join up for that experience. That was not quite what the army was looking for.

Almost all mechanics were drafted, because the army needed a peculiar mix of attitudes and eptitudes. Empathy is obvious, being able to stay sane with nine other people sharing your deepest feelings and memories. But they also needed people who were comfortable with killing, for the so-called “hunter-killer” platoons. They were the ones who got all the attention, the bonuses, even fan clubs. I could assume I wasn’t going to be one of them. I didn’t even like to go fishing, because of the blood and guts and hurting the fish.

The installation of the jack was also risky. The rate of failure was classified, but various sources put it between five and fifteen percent. Most of the failures didn’t die, but I wondered how many of them went back to intellectual pursuits.

I found out that basic training was indeed full time, for eight weeks. The first four weeks were intensely physical, old-fashioned boot camp—not obviously useful for people who would spend their military career sitting in a cage, thinking. After four weeks, they installed the jack, and you started training in tandem with your other nine.

I did apply to be reassigned, to infantry or medical or quartermaster (they crossed that off; you can’t join a non-combat arm in time of war). I was rejected the day I applied.

So I increased my jogging from one mile a day to three, and worked out out on the gym machines every other day. Basic training had a bad reputation, and I wanted to be ready for the physical side of it.

I also spent more social time with Blaze than I ever had before. She had no teaching load during the summer. I had legitimate reasons to drop by the Jupiter Project, though I could do most of my work from any computer console anywhere in the world. I tended to show up around lunchtime or when the office nominally closed at 5:00.

You couldn’t call it dating, given the difference in our ages, but it wasn’t just coworkers having lunch, either. It could have evolved into something if there’d been more than two weeks, perhaps.

But on September second, she took me to the airport and gave me a tight hug and a kiss that was a little more interesting than a coworker saying “goodbye for now.”

When I got off the plane in St. Louis, there was a woman in uniform holding a card with my name and two others on it. She was bigger than me, and white, and looked pretty mean. I stifled the impulse to walk right by her and get a ticket to Finland.

When the other two, a woman and a man, showed up, she walked us to an emergency exit that apparently had been disabled, then down onto the tarmac in the 105-degree heat. We walked a fast quarter-mile to where a couple of dozen people stood in ranks sweating beside a military bus.

“No talking. Get your sorry ass in line.” A big black man who didn’t need a megaphone. “Put your bags on the cart. You’ll get them back in eight weeks.”

“My medicine—” a woman said.

“Did I say no talking?” He glared at her. “If you filled out your medical forms correctly, your pills will be waiting for you. If not, you’ll just have to die.”

A couple of people chuckled. “Shut up. I’m not kidding.” He stepped up to the biggest man and spoke quietly, his face inches away. “I’m not kidding. In the next eight weeks, some of you may die. Usually from not following orders.”

When the fiftieth person came, he loaded us all into the bus, a wheeled oven. My god, I thought, Fort Leonard Wood must be over a hundred miles away. The windows didn’t open.

I sat down next to a pretty white woman. She glanced at me and then looked straight ahead. “Are you going to mechanics’ school?”

“Go where they send me,” she said with a South Texas drawl, not looking at me. Later that day I would learn that mechanics train with the regular infantry, “shoes,” for the first month, and it’s not wise to reveal that you were going to spend all of your subsequent career sitting down in the air conditioning.

We only drove a couple of miles, though, to the military airport adjacent to the civil one, and piled into a flying-wing troop transport, where we were stuffed onto benches without seatbelts. It was a fast and bumpy twenty-minute flight, the big sergeant standing in front of us, hanging on to a strap, glaring. “Anybody pukes, he has to clean it up while everybody else waits.” Nobody did.

We landed on a seriously bumpy runway and were separated by gender and marched off in two different directions. The men, or “dicks,” were led into a hot metal building, where we took off all our clothes and put them in plastic bags marked with our names. If they were going to ferment for eight weeks, the army could keep them.

They said we would get clothes when we needed them, and had us shuffle through a line where we contributed blood and urine and got two shots in each arm and one in the butt, the old-fashioned way, painful. Then we walked through a welcome shower into a room with piles of towels and clothing, fatigues sorted more or less by size. Then we actually got to sit down while three dour men with robot assistants measured our feet and brought us boots.

There was a rotating holo of a handsome guy showing us what we were supposed to look like—the trouser legs “bloused” into boots, shirt seam perfectly aligned with belt buckle and fly, shirt sleeves neatly rolled to mid-forearm. His fatigues were new and tailored, though; ours were used and approximate. He wasn’t sweating.

I thought I’d second-guessed the army by having my hair cut down to a half-inch burr. They shaved me down to the skin, in retribution.

The sun was low and it had cooled down to about ninety, so they took us for a little run. That didn’t bother me except for being overdressed. We went around a quarter-mile cinder track, in formation. After four laps, the women joined us, and together we did eight more.

Then they piled all of us, hot and dripping, into a freezing mess hall. We waited in a long line for cold greasy fried chicken, cold mashed potatoes, and warm wilted salad.

The woman who sat down across from me watched me strip the sodden fried batter from the chicken. “On a diet?”

“Yeah. No disgusting food.”

“I think you goin’ to lose a lot of weight.” We shook hands across the table. Carolyn from Georgia, a pretty black woman a little younger than me. “What, you graduated and got nailed?”

“Yeah. Ph.D. in physics.”

She laughed. “I know where you’re goin’.”

“You, too?”

“Yeah, but I don’t know why. B.F.A. in Creative Viewing.”

“So what’s your favorite show?”

“Hate ‘em all. Unlike most folks, I know why I hate ‘em. Now tell me you’d die if you didn’t get your Kill Squad fix every week.”

“Don’t have a cube, or time to watch it. When I was a kid, my parents only let me watch ten hours a week.”

“Wow . . . would you marry me? Or you got somethin’ goin’ already.”

“I’m gay, except for sheep.”

“Ewe.” We both laughed a little too hard at that.

Shoe training was about half PT and half learning how to use weapons we’d never see again, as mechanics. Even the shoes would probably never use a bayonet or knife or bare hands—how often would you not have a gun, and face an enemy who didn’t have one either?

(I knew the rationale was more subtle, training us to be aggressive. I wasn’t sure that was a good idea for mechanics, though—your soldierboy might wipe out a village because you lost your temper.)

Carolyn’s last name was Collins, and we were next to each other in the alphabet. We spent a lot of time talking, sometimes sotto voce when we were standing in formation, which got us into trouble a couple of times. (“One of you lovebirds runs around the track while the other finishes painting this wall.”)

I was really smitten with her—I mean the kind of brain-chemistry-level addiction that you ought to be able to control by the time you’re eighteen. I thought of her all the time, and lived to see her face when we mustered in the mornings. Her expressions and gestures made me think she felt the same way about me, though we carefully wouldn’t use the word “love.”

After two weeks of constant training, they unexpectedly gave us half a Sunday off. A bus took us into St. Robert, a small town that existed to separate soldiers from their money. We had to be back by 6 sharp, or we’d be AWOL.

On the way to the bus station in St. Robert, we passed several hotels and motels that advertised HOURLY RATES / CLEAN SHEETS. When we got off the bus, I faltered, trying to frame a proposition, and she grabbed me by the arm and pulled me through the closest place’s door.

We’d never even kissed before. So we did some of that while trying to get each other’s fatigues off without popping any buttons.

Speaking of popping, I was not exactly the long-lasting partner-oriented lover I would’ve liked to have been. But I had a certain amount of hydrostatic as well as psychological pressure built up; the barracks offered no privacy for masturbation.

She laughed that off, though, and we just played around for awhile, until I was ready for a more patient and slow coupling. It was better than my dreams.

We had an hour before we had to be on the bus. There was a bar next door, but Carolyn didn’t feel like being stared at by our fellow draftees. So we sat on the damp and rumpled sheets and shared a glass of metallic-tasting water.

“Did you try to get out of it?” she asked.

“Well, yeah. My adviser pointed out that if I joined the infantry, at my age and with my education, I’d just have a desk job for a couple of years.”

“Yeah, right. You believe that now?”

I laughed. “They’d put me in a bayonets-only platoon. Get out there and stab for your country.”

“God and country. Don’t forget God.”

“If it weren’t for God, we wouldn’t get half of Sunday off.”

“Praise the Lord.” She took my penis between two fingers and wiggled it. “Don’t suppose there’s any juice left in this little guy.”

“Not for a while. We could do it on the bus.”

“Okay. Hold you to it.” She yawned and stretched, so hard a couple of joints popped. “Maybe we should go get a beer. Show those lonely cunts who got her man.”

“Let’s.” Though I doubted there was much loneliness in town.

She dressed me carefully, smoothing the uniform down with long slow strokes. Then she stroked my face and my hands, eyes closed, as if she were memorizing.

She held me close then, and took a long deep breath. “Thank you, Julian,” she whispered. “It’s been some while.”

So I tried to dress her, but got the buttons wrong. All very romantic. It’s also easier to take panties off of someone than put them back on.

The nonsmoking part of the bar still had a whiff of tobacco and light weed. Ice-cold beer but no place to sit. So we stayed at the bar, loud with music and laughing, and nodded hello to some of our fellow trainees.

“You didn’t grow up in the south,” she said. “You talk funny, you don’t mind my sayin’.”

“Actually, I was born in Georgia, but my parents moved north before I started school, Delaware. Then four years at Harvard will screw up your accent forever.”

“You majored in science.”

“Physics, then astrophysics for the master’s. Moved into particle physics for the doctorate. Post-doc, too, assuming basic doesn’t kill me.”

“I don’t know shit about any of that.”

“Never expect anyone to.” I put my hand on hers. “Like I know anything about film.”

“Joo-lian.” She slid her hand away. “Never condescend to someone who can kill you with a single blow. Six different ways.”

“Sorry. Takes you four years to get a degree at Harvard, and then forty to get over it.”

“Well, I ain’t waitin’ forty. You best get your shit together.” But she smiled and put her hand back.

A short private from the permanent party walked through the door with a megaphone. “Aw-right, you listen up. Trainees Charlie Company, you bus is heah. You not in that bus in five minutes, you AWOL. We come back heah and put you ass in chains.”

There was a moment of silence when he went through the door, and then a low murmur.

“How could they put just your ass in chains, and not the rest of you?”

“Think big stapler,” she said, and finished off her beer. “Chariot awaits.”

The next two weeks didn’t have any Sundays. Now that they were pretty sure that no one was going to have a heart attack doing laps, they pushed us to the wall. The morning after our afternoon-long furlough, they woke us up at 2:30, striding through the barracks beating on metal pans. Five minutes to dress, then a ten-mile run with full pack and rifle. When people stopped to puke, we had to run in place, shouting “Pussy, pussy!”

They continued with the early-morning runs about every third day, increasing them by a mile each time. The drill instructors acted like it was malicious torture, but it was obviously well planned. We had to get the running in, but if we did it during those hundred-degree-plus days, people would get heatstroke and die.

The instructors also made sure everybody knew that the intensity of training was our own fault. “Only got four weeks to turn these CGI pussies into soldiers” was the refrain.

Carolyn and I did have one more opportunity, a thirty-minute lunch break in thick woods. I got poison ivy on my butt, and she on her feet. We had the same medic look at us, and he advised us to next time take along something like a shelter half or at least a newspaper. But there never was a next time, not in basic training.

The first day of CGI training, they took the fifty of us in a bus with blacked-out windows to someplace that might have been a half-hour away, or a mile, going in circles. It was in deep woods, though, and underground.

A camouflaged door slid open to reveal dimly-lit stairs going down. The entrance was guarded by two huge soldierboys, whose camouflage perfectly mimicked the woods behind them. If you stood still, you couldn’t see them; walking by them, they looked like a heat shimmer roughly the shape of a nine-foot-tall man.

The underground complex was large. We stood in formation in a foyer and a private read our names off a clipboard and gave us platoon designations and room numbers. Carolyn and I were both Alpha Platoon and went to room A.

There were ten hard chairs in the room and, incongruously, a table with party snacks and a tub full of iced drinks. An older man in a jumpsuit with no insignia watched us file in.

He didn’t speak until the last of us sat down. “I’m going to leave you here alone for one hour and thirty minutes. Your job is to get to know one another.

“In a couple of days, you’re all going to be jacked, and none of you will have any secrets from the others. That’s all I’m going to say.

“When I leave the room, please take off all your clothes. Get a drink and a snack and . . . tell each other your secrets, your problems. It will be easier for you to deal with one another if you have some preparation.

“When the bell rings, you should get dressed, and I’ll come back to talk with you. Yes, private?”

“Sir,” she said, “I . . . I’ve never been naked in front of a man. I—”

“You’re about to be. You didn’t have brothers?”

“No, sir.”

“In a couple of days, you’ll have five of them. And ‘naked’ does not begin to describe how exposed you’ll be. But you will all be gentlemen?”

“Yes, sir,” we all said. She was a pretty little blonde, and I was half looking forward to seeing the rest of her and half sympathetic with her anxiety.

He smiled, face crinkling. “Just look each other in the eyes and you’ll be all right.” He left the room.

I talked with Lou Mangiani while we undressed, both of us studiously not looking at the women (but seeing them with some intensity). Lou’s in his late twenties, working as a baker in New York City, for his father’s Italian restaurant. That’s about as much as I knew about anybody except Carolyn. For the past four weeks, we had trained till we dropped and got up hours before our bodies wanted to; not much time for chat.

Carolyn and Candi joined us. We’d wondered in shoe training what Candi was doing here. She was a gentle—you’d have to say “delicate”—woman, whose civilian job was grief counseling. I suppose you have to be pretty tough to do that, actually.

She was also a natural leader for this sort of thing. She clapped once. “Let’s get these chairs in a circle,” she said to everyone. “Get sorted out boy-girl, boy-girl.”

Richard Lasalle was beet-red, with a large prominent erection. I was myself trying to think about anything else, running through prime numbers and tables of integrals.

None of the women were eager to sit next to him. Carolyn gave my hand a little tug and strode over to him, and stuck her hand out. “You’re Richard, aren’t you?” He nodded—“Dick” would not be a good choice—and she introduced herself and sat down. I took the other seat next to her and the pretty little blonde, Arlie, quickly perched on the other side of me, probably figuring I was “taken” and therefore safe. She crossed her perfect legs and hid her breasts behind folded arms.

Candi was the opposite, totally casual, leaning back legs akimbo. Samantha and Sara, who had been in modest crouches, looked at Candi and unfolded.

“So let’s go around the circle and everybody come up with something important that you normally keep secret. After tomorrow, we won’t have any secrets.” Slow nods. “I should start it.” She paused for some time, rubbing her chin and the side of her face. “My clients, my patients, don’t know this. Why I became a grief counselor. I was once so devastated I, I killed myself.

“I jumped off a bridge. In Cape Cod in January. I was dead for ten or twelve minutes, but the water was so cold they were able to bring me back.”

“What was it like?” Akeem said. “Being dead.”

“Nothing; I just went unconscious. I think the impact knocked me out.” She ran a finger between her breasts. “I woke up when they shocked my heart, in the ambulance.”

“You had a reason,” I said.

She nodded. “Watched my father die. We were on the interstate and the steering and the failsafes cut out at the same time. We flipped and crashed into traffic. The airbags inflated but the accident kept happening; another truck smashed into us and knocked us off an overpass. When we finally came to rest . . . my mother’s head was crushed and my father was drowning in his own blood. I wasn’t in too bad shape, but was pinned in place. I had to just hang there upside down and watch my father die. About two feet away.

“I couldn’t get his image out of my head. So I jumped off the bridge. And somehow wound up here. Lou?”

He shrugged. “God, I never had anything like that.” He shook his head a couple of times, looking down. “I was maybe thirteen. There was a gang my parents forbid me to hang around with, so of course I did. They thought I was out doing church stuff, but they never went, so I could fake it, I thought.

“These were junior goombahs, apprentice Mafia. I was the lookout while they did nickel-and-dime stuff. Robbing machines, shoplifting. Stealing cars for joyrides when people were careless enough to leave them unlocked.

“We got word that this old Jew who ran a news shop and candy store in the Bronx sold guns under the table. The back door looked like it would be easy enough to break in. So at one in the morning, I snuck down the fire escape and ran down a bunch of side streets to meet them.

“They knew for sure the old guy locked up and went home about ten. It was easy to crack the back door with a crowbar.

“This was the first thing we’d done where I wasn’t ‘the kid.’ A younger boy stood lookout and I went in first, because I was still a juvenile. If something went wrong, I wouldn’t get hard time.

“I went in with a flashlight and started opening drawers, looking for guns. Well, I found one, but it was in the fist of the old Jew. He hadn’t gone home that night.

“I heard him cock the gun and swung around, and I guess dazzled him with the light. ‘Turn that off, boy,’ he said. But the guy with the crowbar had come up behind him, and bashed his head with a two-handed swing. He went down like a log, but the guy kept hitting him. Then he picked the gun up off the floor and thanked me for thinking fast.

“We ransacked the place, wearing rubber gloves, but there were no other guns, nor anything else of much value. We couldn’t open or even move the cash box. We took a bunch of candy and cigarettes.

“The next day the newspaper reported the murder-robbery. I didn’t say anything to anybody. I could have called in anonymously and identified the murderer, but I was afraid.”

“He ever get caught?” Mel asked.

“Not that I know of. He went down for drug dealing and I went off to college. Now I’m here.”

Everybody looked at Arlie. “I got caught having sex. With the wrong person.” She looked at the floor. “By my husband. In our bedroom. I promised not to see this person again . . . not to see her again.” She looked up with a trembling smile. “Details tomorrow.”

My turn. “I got caught jerking off?” Some nervous laughter. “I guess the worst thing . . . it might seem even more trivial, to some. But it drove me crazy with guilt at the time, and it still bothers me, more than ten years later.

“I was, what, fifteen, walking down an alley, and I saw a turtle, which was rare. A pretty big box turtle. It pulled in its head and legs. I poked it with a stick and it just sat there, of course.

“On impulse, I picked up a brick and threw it down with all my might. The shell cracked open and the turtle squirmed around, all pale and bloody. I ran away as fast as I could go.”

After a pause, Candi said, “Yeah, I can see that. Even though my family used to fish for turtles and cut them up for soup. I grew up thinking of them as food.” She looked at Carolyn and raised her eyebrows.

She shook her head. “Guess I’ve led a sheltered life. Nothing sexy or violent. I did get caught masturbating, but my mother just laughed and told me to do it in my own room.

“There was a test, a chemistry final, when I was a junior in high school. A girl who worked in the office found a copy of it and sold it to me for ten bucks.

“That was bad enough; I mean, I’d never done anything like that before. But what was worse was that I already knew most of the answers—would’ve gotten a B, anyhow. And now this girl had proof that I was a cheat, and could tell anybody anytime.

“So I killed her.” She looked up and grinned. “Only in my dreams, actually.”

Richard had enlivened a grown-ups’ party by putting a laxative in the punch, but he used a bit too much, and put several people in the hospital. (Including himself, to deflect attention.)

Samantha stole money from her mother’s purse for years, whenever she came home drunk.

Mel played vicious tricks on his retarded brother.

Sara helped her father die.

Akeem struggled, and finally confessed that he had never believed in Allah, not even as a child, but had lacked the courage to admit it and leave the faith.

It was an exhausting and awkward two hours, but obviously necessary.

When we got the bell to get dressed, I was a little surprised to find that I wasn’t looking at the women sexually anymore. But there were a couple that perhaps I could love.

We never went back to Fort Leonard Wood. The blacked-out bus took us to the St. Louis airport, where they gave us back the personal effects we’d surrendered a month before, laundered, and put us aboard a flight to Portobello.

The plane went over a lot of water, staying carefully away from Nicaraguan and Costa Rican airspace. Ngumi nations don’t have air forces; our flyboys would just disintegrate them. But they could still throw missiles at us.

It was nighttime when we landed, the air thick and greasy. The base was an unremarkable collection of low buildings, with the solid gleaming presence of the occasional soldierboy. They stood guard around the perimeter of the base, which they said had never been successfully attacked. I had to wonder how much damage an “unsuccessful” attack could do.

But that’s good. We would be spending a third of our lives here, somewhere underground, only dozens of miles from enemy territory. Nice to be safe behind a phalanx of invulnerable telepathic robots. Feel safe, anyhow.

Not really robots, and not completely invulnerable. Each was really an oversized, heavily armed suit of armor that was the telepresent avatar of one man or woman, who operated in instant concert with nine others. Each ten-person platoon was a telepathic family that, with training, would work as one powerful entity.

The enemy could destroy an individual soldierboy, but its operator, the mechanic, could be instantly switched to a reserve machine and be back in the field in minutes—or even seconds, if the backup was stored nearby. And whoever had destroyed the first one, they well knew, would get special attention from its replacement.

I suspected that was just propaganda, part of the mystique that personified the machines, to make them more effective psychological weapons. Any emotion that makes a human being dangerous, they had. But they couldn’t die, or even be hurt.

(The “hurt” part was not completely true, which was a closely guarded secret and perennial rumor. If a soldierboy was disabled and captured, the Ngumi would elaborately torture it in front of cameras, before destroying it.)

Americans laughed that off, saying that it might work with voodoo dolls, but not machines. You turn a machine off, it’s just a bag of bolts.

But you have to turn it off in time.

Our quarters in Portobello were neat but perfunctory, and barely large enough to turn around in. But we wouldn’t be spending much time in them. Mechanics worked and slept, ate and drank and eliminated, without being unplugged, which took a certain amount of intrusive plumbing. But they didn’t open you up for that surgery until they knew whether you could be jacked.

The first day in Portobello, we were wheeled off one at a time for the most dramatic “routine” surgery known to medicine—the installation of cybernetic cranial implants, or jacks, as they were always called. It seems more dangerous than it is. They’ve done it a hundred thousand times, and it’s worked for about ninety thousand.

Of the one in ten for whom it doesn’t work, most simply go back to regular life, without the ambiguous gift of being able to share another’s mind and body totally. Some few for whom it doesn’t work become mentally or emotionally handicapped. Some few die.

The numbers are not published.

Being a physicist, I can figure out some numbers by myself. If something—jacking successfully—has a ninety percent chance of success, and if ten people do it, the probability of one of them failing is one minus 0.9 to the tenth power, which equals 0.65. So 65% of the time, more than half, at least one of the ten is going to fail.

So logic would say “do eleven.” But what if all eleven made it? You’d have to pull one out, and that would be like a casualty, they say. It’s easier to add to a family than subtract.

All ten of us made it, and spent the next two days in bed rest. The third day, we started exploring the gift.

The man who first led us through it, Kerry, was apparently a civilian, a therapist in his seventies.

“Your first time shouldn’t be with a beginner,” he said. We were back in a place like Room A, government-green walls, the hard chairs and tub of drinks, but with an addition: two couches waiting with a black box between them. Two cables snaked out of the black box.

“You’re all going to jack with me for a few minutes first. That will take about an hour for ten people. I don’t foresee any trouble, but if there is, best to have someone like me in the circuit.”

“Like you, sir?” Candi said.

“You’ll see why.” He looked at a clipboard. “Azuzi first.” Akeem stood and followed him to the couches.

“Close your eyes. Lie down.” He took a cable and planted the jack in the base of Akeem’s skull with a soft click. Then he sat on the edge of the other couch and did the same to himself.

He closed his eyes and rocked gently for a couple of minutes. Then he unplugged himself and Akeem.

Akeem shook his head and sat up with a shiver. “Oh. That was . . . extreme,” he whispered.

Kerry nodded. Neither of them elaborated. “Julian Class?”

I went over and lay down and faced the wall away from him. There was a little click when the jack touched the metal implant, and then I was sort of seeing double with my whole body.

It’s hard to describe accurately. I still saw the wall, two feet away, but almost as clearly, I saw what Kerry was looking at, the group of mechanics staring back at him and me.

And all at once, I knew him, almost the way I knew myself. I could feel the body in his clothes as well as the clothes on his body; the somatic shifting of soft organs inside, and the complex array of muscle and bone—things that we feel all the time, but which become invisible with familiarity—small twinges and itches and deep pain in the right shoulder I’d have to, he’d have to, stop ignoring . . . .

I remembered everything he routinely remembered about himself, bad and good and neutral. Comfortable childhood cut short by divorce, college a magnificent escape; a rewarding doctorate in developmental psychology. Sex with two women and dozens of men. Somehow that didn’t seem even odd. Four years as a mechanic in Africa, driving trucks that got blown up regularly.

Like a memory of a memory, I could feel the union he’d felt with the other mechanics in his transportation platoon, and his longing for the sensation.

It was over with a click. I looked at him. “That’s why you’re doing this?”

He smiled. “Though it’s not the same. Like singing in the shower when you used to be in a choir.”

Carolyn was next, and when she sat back down next to me, she softly nudged me with her hip, and you didn’t need telepathy to know we were thinking the same thing.

One by one, the others had their sample.

“Okay,” Kerry said, “That was the first stage of your warm-up. Now we go to the next level.” We followed him into an adjacent room.

Ten of the so-called “cages” were lined up along the far wall. They were like recliners with lots of plumbing and electronics attached.

We wouldn’t have to do the plumbing until the end of Basic, since we wouldn’t be plugged in for more than a few hours at a time. When it became ten days, our usual monthly stint, we’d have to be fed and emptied automatically, which they said wasn’t bad once you got used to it.

The soldierboys we were going to be plugged into were in a vacant lot somewhere outside. For the first couple of days, we did “raise your right foot, raise your left foot” exercises; then walking and going up stairs. By the third day, we were jogging in formation, having crossed a major threshold: knowing you had to stop thinking about what you were doing, and just do it. Trust the machine. The machine is you.

Meanwhile, we started hooking up to each other in the evenings, without the soldierboys, one on one and then in larger groups.

Being with Carolyn was thrilling and a little scary—if anything, she felt even more strongly about me than I did about her. And we were so totally different—her intuitive intelligence versus my analytical nature, her streetwise emotionally jarring youth played out against the support and love I’d gotten from my family. Our bodies were different not just in female/male matters; she was small and fast and I was neither. We enjoyed experimenting with each other’s bodies; she said every girl should have a dick of her own for awhile. I enjoyed the strangeness of being her, and then the familiarity, though the first time I menstruated it was like a shocking wound, even though I was ready for it. She was sympathetic but amused—“you big pussy”—and I eventually got over it, though I never got to the point, like her, of looking forward to it, as a kind of affirmation of “my” womanhood.

(None of the other women had that attitude, I came to find out. Sara and Arlie had suppressed ovulation for an indefinite length of time, and the other two didn’t especially like it, but didn’t like the anti-fertility drugs either.)

Being linked to the others, male and female, was less intense than with Caroline, though it was pretty sexual with Sara, Candi, and Mel. That was odd enough—Mel wasn’t like Kerry; he’d never had or desired sex with a man. When he was linked with me or one of the other guys, though, it was pretty obvious that he’d been suppressing a natural attraction to his own sex, and that’s something you couldn’t hide from another mechanic even if you wanted to. After some initial embarrassment, he didn’t want to hide it.

When we were just doing one-on-one, the other eight people’s life stories were pretty far away, like a novel you’d intensely studied in school. When we started doing threesomes and more, it was a lot more complicated. At first, you’d lose track of who—or where—the “I” was. With two, you could be in a state where both lives merged in a kind of selfless integration. I could do that with about half of them.

With three in the circuit, that couldn’t happen. At first, there was a kind of existential battle for possession, for “turf,” but with experience it became obvious that each person had to hold on to his or her own sense of “I,” or the asymmetries would drive everybody crazy. It was hard for me and Carolyn, and a few other pairs, like Samantha and Arlie, to let go of one another and let a third person in, but if you didn’t, the triad would never work together. One person always on the outside, looking in on a love feast.

We spent a lot of time, about four days, switching around among triads. That made the foursomes and larger groups pretty simple, having mastered the basic trick: Each of us was an “I” identified by the life story we had when we weren’t jacked, but you had a number of partners, between two and nine of them, each with the same degree of autonomy as you, who intimately shared their pasts and presence.

We could only be jacked for a maximum of two hours running, followed by at least thirty minutes unplugged, which was frustrating. It would be years before we understood why: if you stayed jacked for too long, the feeling of empathy with others became so strong that any human became a part of you; killing anybody would be as impossible as suicide. Which could be a real handicap for a soldier.

We did learn about soldiering at visceral second hand, by jacking into crystals other people had recorded during battle. It was confusing at first, because you were intimate with ten strangers, and you had no physical control over the soldierboy you inhabited. But the combat was real enough, more real than it could ever be, second-hand, merely human.

Candi was deeply depressed by the experience, and I think only Mel was eager to repeat it. But we all saw how necessary it was. A dress rehearsal for Hell.

I was surprised when they made me platoon leader. I was the oldest, but not by much, and the most educated, but particle physics wasn’t exactly relevant to leadership. The unflattering truth became obvious early on. They didn’t want a “natural leader,” like Lou or Candi, in charge, because he or she would take over the platoon too completely—instead of ten people working in concert, you’d have one guy making all the decisions, with nine people reviewing them after the fact. That would mirror old-fashioned hierarchic military organization, with the alpha male calling the shots and the lesser doggies falling into line. But if that happened, you’d just wasted a lot of time and money, and risked ten brains in surgery, for no advantage. A soldierboy platoon was like one huge machine that could take over acres of battlefield, making instant decisions with a kind of gestalt intelligence. It was eerie to watch, but became less and less strange to be part of.

We had the minor surgery that took care of nutrition, hydration, and excretion, recovered for a couple of days, and then went out on our first “field exercise”—in the middle of enemy territory.

The ten of us, of course, were safe underground, in a bombproof bunker in Portobello. But our soldierboys walked out ten miles beyond the perimeter, where any pedro could risk his life and attack. But there was an experienced hunter-killer platoon in a protective circle around our machines. Safer than sitting at home, watching it on the cube. You could get struck by lightning there.

We had two more walkabouts like that, never confronting an enemy, and then Basic was over, and we could go home for twenty days. None of us went straight home, though. We had to try the jack joints that ringed the base at Portobello.

At a jack joint, you could pay to plug into other people’s experiences. A lot of them were records of soldierboy battle encounters, which we didn’t have to pay for, thank you. The flyboy crystals did look appealing, “being” an aircraft capable of banks and dives and accelerations that no human pilot could execute.

But apart from the military ones, there were adventure crystals, of people doing dangerous things in odd places, and “appetite” ones, where you could experience food and drink you could never afford. There were even suicide crystals, for the most extreme experience possible, though you had to sign a waiver before they’d let you enjoy it, in case you empathized enough to die yourself. It was the ultimate in something, like that Japanese sushi with natural neurotoxins that will kill you if the chef makes a mistake.

And of course there was sex. Sex with beautiful people who in real life would never even say hello to you, sex in places where you would be arrested if they caught you, daredevil sex, weird sex, sweet and sour and salty sex.

Sex with Carolyn.

During training they only jacked you through cages, to get used to it, so you couldn’t physically touch anyone you were jacked with. Most of the jack joints outside the base only offered solitary experiences, but in a few expensive ones, two people could jack together in real time, in private. Sort of like the motels in Rock City, though they advertised environmentos sanitos rather than clean sheets, and charged by the minute rather than the hour.

We asked around and went to Celito Lindo, a place that did look clean. The women who hovered around the entrance, so-called jills, didn’t molest us, but stared deeply at me, and some at Carolyn: if you think it’s good with an amateur, come back and try it again with a pro.

The mamacita in charge was fat and jolly, and told us the rules: Timer starts the second you close the door, and stops when you come back to the desk and pick up your credit card. Lie there and murmur sweet nothings; they cost the same as sweet somethings.

I asked her whether people ever burst out of the room stark naked, and sprint for the credit card. “I have them arrested for indecent exposure,” she said, “unless I’m extremely entertained.” I decided not to press my luck.

The room was small and clean and smelled heavily of jasmine. There was nothing in it but a large bed with a pile of pillows. The sheet felt like freshly starched cotton, but was dispensed by a practical and unromantic roller.

We’d had sex a couple of hours earlier, so it wouldn’t be over immediately, but we were both more than ready when we shucked our clothes and jacked and fell into bed. I kissed and tasted her all over, feeling our mutual tongue on the skin we shared. When we tasted me inside of her, I shared her orgasm, but kept just enough “I” not to ejaculate.

She straddled me and slid back and forth once, and I snapped into her with the springy force of a horny teenager. She held my hips still, telling me wordlessly not to thrust, and for a few moments we merged completely, as I flowed into her and she into me, until neither of us could stand it, and we bucked so hard we rolled off the bed, and lay there gasping.

“Nice carpet,” she said while we felt our skin against the rough pile. One of us had bruised a hip in the fall. When we unjacked, I realized it was hers.

“Sorry,” I said. “Clumsy.” She stroked my retreating dick.

“That musta been at least ten seconds,” she said huskily. “Why don’t you put on some pants and go get your card.”

We went to the Celito Lindo three more times, and once tried Falling In Love, where you made love, or had sex, during an endless fall from an airplane, and floated gently to earth afterward. But then we did have to literally get back down to earth, Carolyn to her studies and me to my measurements and equations.

Parting was like losing a limb, or part of your mind, but knowing you’d be whole again in three weeks.

I tried to explain it to Blaze, the first day I was back. We were having coffee in a quiet corner of the Student Center.

“You know what it sounds like,” she said, “and I’m just being an old mother hen here . . . but it’s like you had an intense summer romance, rendered even more intense by the pressure of the military environment, and then the jacking squared it, and then making love while you were jacked cubed it. But you can square x and cube x, and it’s still x.”

“Still just an infatuation.”

She nodded. “You really think it will last forever, though.”

“As much of forever as we get.”

She sipped her coffee, still nodding. “The Siamese-twin aspect. That’s a little creepy.”

I laughed. “It is. It’s really impossible to explain in words.”

She stared at me in a funny way. “Wish I could try it. I’m just jealous.” Maybe I blushed. “Not of Carolyn, silly. Of you both, of the whole experience.”

Blaze would lose her grant and her job if she got jacked. Most contracts for intellectual jobs had no-jacking clauses, for obvious reasons; I was protected because my military jack wasn’t voluntary. The operation for jacking wasn’t even legal in the States for civilians, though hundreds crossed the border every day to have it done.

I had tremendous respect for Blaze, and wanted so much for her to understand. But I suppose it was like a deeply religious person trying to explain her ecstasy to someone like me, before. Samantha was like that, and I understood her instantly, below the level of words, the moment we jacked together. As she understood me, and forgave my unbelief.

Blaze did have legitimate professional concerns, because I was far from being an ideal coworker. I couldn’t concentrate well. At some level, I was never not thinking about Carolyn, and at another level it had to show. I couldn’t look at a calendar without counting the days until I gave up my freedom again.

“Why don’t you take the weekend off and go to Georgia?” Blaze said on Thursday morning. “Can’t you soldierboys fly for free?”

I was a mechanic, and the machine was a soldierboy, but it was a mistake often made. “I was planning to work over the weekend, catch up.”

She laughed. “Why don’t you catch up with Carolyn instead? The Jupiter Project will lurch along somehow without you.”

I wasn’t happy about being so transparent, but couldn’t pass it up. I called Carolyn and she was ecstatic. Her roommate agreed to get lost for a few days, and I got booked on a transport headed for Macon Friday afternoon.

It turned out strange. Of course, there was no place to jack in Macon, and we were back to basics. We had the unspoken assumption that that would be enough, but in fact, it wasn’t. I wasn’t impotent, exactly, and she wasn’t unreceptive, exactly. But early Saturday morning we took a bus to Atlanta and got a cheap room a couple of blocks from the jack joints outside Fort McPherson.

The Stars and Stripes Forever was the cheapest place, no frills, which was fine with both of us. Sunday morning, though, we counted our pennies and splurged on Private Space, which gave the illusion of zero gravity, surrounded by whirling galaxies, and that was extraordinary.

We did talk a little bit about it. It was unsettling, but we agreed it was in large measure the fact that jacking was still new to us. We parted very much in love, but a little shaken by the contrast between the normal and enhanced states.

Making love in her apartment, we’d both been fantasizing like mad about the previous week.

In a couple of weeks, we were on our first independent combat mission.

Bravo platoon was H&I, a Harassment and Interdiction unit. So our main job was to go in there and screw things up for the enemy. Confusion rather than killing.

In this case, our assignment was a little focused chaos. The Ngumi had put together a command center in a remote valley in Costa Rica, laboriously carrying in equipment and munitions by night, by hand. No heat signature visible from above the tree canopy. They didn’t know yet that we had seeded the entire countryside with microscopic olfactory devices whose simple job was to ping their location when a sweating human walked by. So we knew exactly where the enemy was and what trails they had taken.

We stayed off those trails. If you’re careful and slow, you can move the heavy soldierboy through pretty thick brush without a sound. I guided the ten of us up both sides of the main trail, averaging about one mile per hour. Twice, their patrols tip-toed right through our platoon without noticing us, our suits set on camo in the dark.

Arlie got to their perimeter first. She stood quietly a few yards away from a dozing sentry while the rest of us encircled the camp. I was poised to start the attack instantly, if one of us was detected, but we all got into place without a hitch.

I was nominally in charge, but all ten of us were essentially wired in parallel. At my thought, we all attacked at once.

No weapons at first but light and sound: ten lights much brighter than the sun; ten deafening speakers shrieking a dissonant chord. Then a billow of gas from ten directions.

They were out of their tents firing wildly, but almost all took one breath of KO gas and fell unconscious. Two had been able to don gas masks. Mel took one and I took the other. Knocked away his rifle and tapped him on the chest, which flung him to the ground. I pulled off his gas mask and tossed it away, and moved with the others to the central objective, a tetrahedral mini-fort of some bulletproof plastic. They’d evidently brought it up piecemeal and glued it together.

Our forces had encountered them in the African desert (invisible to radar and tough on flyboys), but this was the first one we knew of in Costa Rica. They fired 155-mm. explosive armor-piercing shells, which could disable a soldierboy, but the barrel was external. It spun around fast, but we could anticipate it and duck. They were firing dumb shells, fortunately.

We could just keep ducking and dodging until he ran out of ammunition, but he was firing all over the place, and liable to kill some of his own people, or civilian mules. So Carolyn and I fried two corners of the thing with lasers, re-aiming several times a second as we evaded its fire, which finally heated up the inside and filled it with burning-plastic fumes. A door popped open and two people spilled out, coughing. We KO’ed them, too, and then gathered up all the sleeping bodies and stacked them. Then we lasered a clearing out of the forest to use as a landing zone, and called for a chopper to come get them.

From turning on the lights to loading the “captives” aboard the chopper, it was about twelve minutes. No casualties.

Mel was not able to hide his resentment at that. Thanks . . . we’re still virgins. He apologized, but it hung in the air.

I would have called it a textbook-perfect operation, but while we were waiting for pick-up, we got the word from the officers’ review board, which had been hooked up with us for evaluation. Three out of the seven thought we should have destroyed the mini-fort and its two occupants immediately, before they could harm a soldierboy or bystanders.

Okay, I thought, you come down and kill them. While the soldierboys were on the chopper back, and we were unjacked in the relative privacy of the situation room, we chewed that over. Seven of the platoon agreed with me, predictably; all but Mel and Sara. The disagreement was mild, though; they said they would have done it differently, but it was my call. They didn’t think much of the long-distance quarterbacking.

Of course, the officers had really been no farther from the action than we were.

They gave us Sunday afternoon off, and I managed to get an advance in pay (borrowing against it, actually; paying the government ten percent interest) so we could go downtown and jack.

It was called the Hotel de Dream. An uninhabited desert island this time, and I paid ahead for thirty minutes, so after we made love in the low morning sun, we swam in the warm water for a few minutes, and then sat and held each other while the gentle surf rolled over us. It was jarring when the time ran out suddenly and we were in that hard plain bed, hardly even touching.

No money for a hotel room. We had hot dogs for dinner and a couple of beers, and then walked back to the base and our separate beds.

Blaze was amused but shook her head. “You’re in for four years, ten days at a time?”

“Yeah. I see what you mean.” We were alone at the coffee place, mid-morning.

“By the time you get out, you’ll owe the army a million dollars. At ten percent interest.” I could just shrug, and I guess smile sheepishly.

“You know it’s like addictive behavior. If the army had gotten you hooked on DD’s, we’d be down there with a brace of lawyers, getting you pulled from service and into detox. But they’ve got you hooked on love!”

“Come on . . . ”

“Try to be objective about it. I know Carolyn’s a nice girl and so forth—

“Watch out, Blaze.”

“Listen to me for just one minute, okay?” She took out her notebook and clicked a couple of times. “Do you know what your brain chemistry looks like when you go down to that Motel de Dream?”

“Hotel. Pretty strange, I suppose.”

“Not strange at all. It’s a seething stew of oxytocin, serotonin, and endogenous opioids. Your vasopressin receptors are wide open. You would be totally juiced even if Carolyn was a gerbil!”

I could feel myself almost grinning. “Nice job of objectifying it. But if you haven’t been there, you just don’t know. It really is love.”

“Okay. So do me a favor. Do it with one of the other women. Watch yourself fall in love with her.”

“No.” Just the thought was disgusting. “Blaze, that’s awful. It’s like I was a lovesick teenager, and Dad gives me a wad of money to go to a whorehouse and get it out of my system.”

“Nothing like that. I just want you to engage your critical side, your objectivity.”

“Yeah. That always works with love.”

We didn’t talk about that any more that month—or much else. I went to the airport alone.

Carolyn and I had one embrace, and then off to the cages.

It was a routine show of force. The governor-general of Panama, our well-loved puppet, was giving a speech in Panama City, and we were there to stand at attention and look ominous. Which we did, I had to admit, nine of the soldierboys set to “camouflage” in the bright sun. That didn’t hide them; it made them glittering, shifting statues you couldn’t quite focus on. Scary. My own soldierboy, platoon leader, was shiny black.

Our presence wasn’t really needed, except for the press. The crowd was hand-selected, and applauded and cheered on cue, no doubt eager to have it over with and get back into the air conditioning. It was in the high nineties and steamy still.

Do you feel warm? Carolyn asked without words. I thought back that it was psychosomatic, sympathy for those poor proles outside, and she agreed.

Then the speech was over, and we got together in a line for our dramatic exit. It was a routine extraction, but it was a good demonstration of our inhuman strength: we stood shoulder-to-shoulder with our left hands raised, and a cargo helicopter with a retrieval bar came swooping in, churning along below treetop-level at more than a hundred miles per hour, and snatched us away. It would have torn off a human’s arm, but we hardly felt it.

Carolyn’s output suddenly went black, apparently unplugged by the mechanical shock. “Carolyn?” I said over the emergency vocal circuit.

When she didn’t respond, I asked permission to disengage. There was no reason for us to stay in the soldierboys, other than the convenience of walking them to storage after we landed. My request wasn’t answered by Command. They were probably off fighting a war someplace, I figured.

So we landed by the service bay and walked our machines in. Carolyn’s wasn’t under her control, obviously; the soldierboy normally mimicked her natural physical grace. This time it staggered like a cartoon robot, some tech moving it with a joystick.

I popped our cages and we were suddenly in the real world, naked and sweaty, joints popping as we stretched.

Carolyn’s cage was open but she wasn’t there.

One person in the room was dressed, a medical officer. She walked over. “Private Collins had a massive cerebrovascular failure, just prior to extraction. She’s in surgery now.”

I felt the blood chase away from my face and arms. “She’ll be all right?”

“No, sergeant. They’re trying, but I’m afraid she’s . . . well, she’s clinically dead.”

I sat down on the edge of the cage base, hard concrete, my head spinning. “How is that different from plain dead?”

“She has no higher brain function. We are contacting her next of kin. I’m sorry.”

“But . . . I—I was in her brain just minutes ago.”

She looked at her clipboard. “Time of death was 13:47. Twenty-five minutes.”

“That’s not enough time. They bring people back.”

“They’re trying, sergeant. Mechanics are too valuable to throw away. That’s all I can tell you.” She turned to go.

“Wait! Can I see her?”

“I don’t know where she is, sergeant. Sorry.”

The others had gathered around me. I was surprised I wasn’t crying, or even trying not to cry. I felt gut-punched, helpless.

“She’s gotta be at the base hospital,” Mel said. “Let’s go find her.”

“And do what?” Candi said. “Get in the way?” She sat down next to me and put an arm around my shoulders. “We should go into the lounge and wait.”

We did, me walking like a zombie. Like a soldierboy without a mechanic. Lou got a credit card from his locker and bought us all beers from the machine. We dressed and drank in awkward silence.

Akeem didn’t drink. “Sometimes one wishes one could pray.” Samantha looked up from her meditation, and nodded. The rest of us just drank and watched the door.

I got up to buy a round and the medical officer came back. I took one look at her eyes and collapsed.

I woke up suddenly in a hospital bed, like a noiseless splash of ice water. A nurse stepped away with a hypodermic, and behind her was Blaze.

“What time is it?”

“Five in the morning,” she said. “Wednesday. I came as soon as I heard, and they said they were about to wake you up anyway.” She picked up a plastic cup and held the straw toward me. “Water?”

I shook my head no. “What, I just passed out? Twelve hours ago?”

“And they gave you something, to help you sleep. It’s what they do, when someone has a loss like yours.”

It all came back and hit me like a car. “Carolyn.” She took my hand in both of hers and I jerked it away. Then I sat partway up and took her hand back.

I closed my eyes and I was floating, falling. Maybe the drug. I swallowed, and couldn’t find my voice.

“They said you’re on compassionate leave for the rest of the month. Come home with me.”

“What about my people? My platoon?”

“Most of them are waiting in the hall. They let me come in first.”

I sat up and held her, she held me, until I was ready to see my mates. They came in as a group, and Blaze waited outside in the hall while we made a wheel, each right arm a spoke. Mel and Candi and Samantha whispered a few words, but it was more the silent communion than any specific sentiment, that gave me a place to be. A place where I could breathe for awhile.

Blaze took me home with her, and after some long time, I was her lover rather than the friend who needed a strong arm, a soft breast. Later on, we laughed because neither of us could remember the exact night, or afternoon or morning, when it became sex. But I think I know when it became love.

The army counselor I’d been going to said I should see my loss as a wound, which had to be protected by stitches, which is to say a set of responses that could protect me while it healed. Stitches that would fall away when they were no longer needed.

But Blaze, a doctor of physics rather than of medicine, said he didn’t understand. There are wounds too large to close with stitches. You have to leave them open, and protect them, while keloid tissue grows over them. Keloid tissue doesn’t have normal nerve endings. It keeps you alive, but numb.

That’s where I am, years later. For ten days each month, I lock myself into the cage that gives me superhuman power. The rest of the time, I have her calm and sweet acceptance of the loss that will always be my center.

The soft cage of arms and legs that protects me, and gives me a measure of amnesia.

Originally published in Warriors, edited by Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin.

About the Author

Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Joe Haldeman took a B.S. degree in physics and astronomy from the University of Maryland, and did postgraduate work in mathematics and computer science. But his plans for a career in science were cut short by the U.S. Army, which sent him to Vietnam in 1968 as a combat engineer. Seriously wounded in action, Haldeman returned home in 1969 and began to write. By 1976, he had garnered both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award for his famous novel The Forever War, one of the landmark books of the ’70s. He has since won four more Hugo Awards, another four Nebula Awards, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for his novel Camouflage, the SFWA Grandmaster Award, and has been inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. His other books include a mainstream novel, War Year, the SF novels Mindbridge, All My Sins Remembered, Worlds, Worlds Apart, Worlds Enough and Time, Buying Time, The Hemingway Hoax, Tools of the Trade, The Coming, 1969, Old Twentieth, The Accidental Time-Machine, Marsbound, and Starbound. His short work has been gathered in the collections Infinite Dreams, Dealing in Futures, Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds, None So Blind, A Separate War and Other Stories, and an omnibus of fiction and non-fiction, War Stories. His most recent books are a new science fiction novel, Earthbound, and a big retrospective collection, The Best of Joe Haldeman. Haldeman lives part of the year in Boston, where he teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the rest of the year in Florida, where he and his wife, Gay, make their home.

The Oracle

Lavie Tidhar

There was a time of rains.

They lashed the old hill and the cobbled market, driving traders under awnings, robotnik beggars into litter-strewn alcoves, revelers into bars and sheesha pipe emporiums. The smell of lamb fat, slowly melting over rotating skewers of meat, flavored the air, mixing with the sweetness of freshly-baked baklava and the tang of cumin, and strong bitter coffee served with roasted cardamoms.

This was in old, old Jaffa, amidst the arches and the cobblestones, a stone-throw from the sea: you could still smell the salt and the tar in the air, and watch, at sunrise, the swoop and turn of solar kites and their winged surfers in the air. But not in the rain, and not at night.

The Oracle’s name had once been Cohen and she was, it was true, related to St. Cohen of the Others. This was rumored but not widely confirmed.

You were no doubt wondering about the children of Central Station. Wondering, too, how a strigoi was allowed to come to Earth. This is Womanhome, remember. This is the womb from which humanity crawled, tooth by bloody nail, towards the stars.

But it is an ancestral home, too, to the Others, those children of the digitality. In a way, this is their story.

Once, the world was young.

Palestine and Israel, those two entities overlapping each other both geographically and historically, were still unmerged. They were two conflicting histories, two warring stories, not yet unified into one narrative. It was before the Return of the refugees, before the infamous Messiah Murder, before the Second Aliyah and the establishment of New Israel on Mars. Before Jaffa became an Arab city again, separate from Jewish Tel Aviv, before Central Station became their buffer zone, the uncanny valley in which they met.

It was a time when Jerusalem was still ruled by the Jews. A time when computers could be seen and held, big clumsy things not yet spored. The Conversation had already began, but it was halting, limited, its bandwidth capped, its reach terminating in Earth orbit. It was before we sent out spiders to seed the solar system with hubs and nodes and gateways and mirrors, before the Chinese built Lunar Port, before the Exodus ships and Jettisoned and the seeding of the Belt with life.

In that world, so unlike our own, this world of prehistory, almost, when North America was still a power and old Europe slumbered, China hungered, India blossomed, and Brazil and Nigeria shot upwards like trees reaching for the sky, in that world and into the city of Jerusalem there came a scientist.

Historical dramas show him, sometimes, arriving like a gunslinger would. In the Phobos’ studio production of The Rise of Others Matt Cohen is played by Elvis Mandela, coming into Jerusalem on horseback in an intentional echo of the Messiah Murder (though the messiah had come in on the traditional white donkey). But that was fiction, which is to say, exaggeration. The truth is that Matt Cohen came by conventional, for the time, jet airplane into the old airport in Tel Aviv (this was before Central Station became the city’s hub), and took a taxi to Jerusalem, riding high into the mountains with their twisting sharp turns. Nor was he alone. Two of his research team were with him, Balazs and Phiri, crammed uncomfortably into the back seat of the taxi with their bulky equipment.

Matt sat in the front, next to the driver, an Arab man wearing fake Gucci sunglasses. Matt blinked in the glare of light. His pressed white shirt was crumpled from the flight, already beginning to stain with sweat from the hot Mediterranean clime he was unused to. He wished he had invested in a pair of sunglasses, fake or not, like the driver. In a way, coming here had been an act of last resort.

But we’re distracted. So easily, like a child with a toy. Something cheap and shiny, like a kaleidoscope. Turn it one way and see Matt Cohen. Turn it another and you see the birth of Others, another still and you see the Oracle as she is, or as she was.

Life is a series of moments forever sliding out of your grasp. If you are human. From nothing, to nothing, amen, amen.

But for the Others recall is being. Moments exist in parallel, have existed, will exist. The life of Others is permutations, it is a kaleidoscope forever turning and turning.

The Oracle was born Ruth Cohen, on the outskirts of Central Station, near the border with Jewish Tel Aviv. She grew up on Levinsky, by the spice market, with the deep reds of paprika and the bright yellow of turmeric and the startling purple of sumac coloring the days. She had never met her famous progenitor.

This was before even Zhong Weiwei first came to Central Station, for when he met her she was already the Oracle, and no longer Ruth Cohen, who had been a girl and a woman before she became Joined. She had been a part of the world, before.

This was in the time when Central Station was still merely a bus station, if a giant one, when the robotniks still fought in the wars and were not yet discarded to beg for spare parts. Ruth never knew her famous progenitor. Have we already said that? Memory for us exists in a numinosity of potentials. He was her grandmother’s grandfather, having met a Jewish girl in Jerusalem in the days of the Emergence, and got her with child, as they once said.

Matt Cohen never died, you know. Or perhaps he did, and new Matt Cohens were fashioned out of the workshops of Sangorski & Sutcliffe, the famous Makers of Simulacra. Certainly people have claimed to meet him, centuries later. Perhaps it was true, too, that he was of the first humans to be Translated into the Conversation, there to reside in the Cores of the Others, those heavily-guarded, vast quantum processors deep in the earth and scattered in solar space. He had passed, like Jesus or Elron or Ogko, from the realm of the living into the world of myth, and there remained, for as long as human memory remains: a myth-imago forever half-remembered.

The truth was that Matt had a headache. The taxi deposited them on the outskirt of the Old City, and left them there, with their luggage, in the approaching dusk. Church bells mixed with the call of mosques. Orthodox Jews clad in black walked past arguing intensely. It was cooler up in the mountains. Matt was grateful for that, least.

“So,” Phiri said.

“So,” Matt said.

“This is it,” Balazs said. They looked at each other, these three disparate men, weary after the long flight, and the moving from country to country, lab to lab, sometimes in the dead of night, in a hurry, sometimes leaving notes and equipment behind, sometimes one step ahead of irate landlords, or other creditors, or even the law.

They had not been popular, these men, their research considered both a dead-end and immoral. For they sought to Frankenstein, to breed life in their closed networks the way a biologist may breed tadpoles and watch them become frogs. They had the tadpoles, but as yet they had not turned into either frogs or princesses, they continued to exist only in potentia. Now they checked in, into the small hostel that would be their temporary headquarters until they could, once again, set up shop.

The servers rested silent in their coolers, their code suspended, not living, not dead. Matt’s fingers itched to plug them in, to boot them up, to run them, to let the wild code inside mutate and fuck, split and merge and split and merge, lines of code entwining and branching, growing ever more complex and aware.

A breeding grounds.

The Breeding Grounds, as we’d later know them. Capitalized and all.

The evolutionary track from which Others emerged.

There is a poetry to evolution.

Ol tri / oli koko, koko / olbaot, wrote the poet Bashō. All the trees go go, go go, everywhere. The trees he wrote of were binary trees. Lior Tirosh, in an apocryphal manuscript on the history of the Breeding Grounds, wrote, in somewhat purple prose:

Imagine . . . a place.

Here, there are no boundaries of physical space. Time is measured in nano-seconds, processor cycles, in MIPS and BIPS—Millions, and Billions, of Instructions Per Second.

What space there is, is . . . constructed. There is an imaginary geography of binary trees, a topography of evolving structures, and boundaries of population samples.

The beat of a human heart means nothing in this place. Yet in the time it takes for the beat of such a heart to happen, things drastically change. A small tribe of a so-far unpromising structure suddenly shoots to prominence, its population multiplying rapidly; or a carefully introduced mutation suddenly causes a promising structure to dwindle and disappear. Evolution is enforced, in cycle after cycle of mating, mutation and finally selection; and structures combine, mutate, and die in the blink of a human eye.

Achimwene, Miriam’s brother, was obsessed with Tirosh’s work, a poet and pulp writer who disappeared long before but who, like St. Cohen of the Others, kept reappearing through the centuries, here and there: fakes, clones, hoaxes, rumors: the Elvis of book collectors.

But this is by the by.

Ruth Cohen, incidentally, went through a religious phase and attended a girl’s yeshiva for a time in her teenage years. She had woken one night, late. Thunder streaked the sky. She blinked, trying to recall a dream she’d just had. She had been walking through the streets of Central Station and a storm raged, where the station should have been, a whirlwind that stood still even as it moved. Ruth walked towards it, drawn to it. The air was hot and humid. The storm, silent, bore within itself people frozen like mannequins, and bottles, and a mini-bus with the wheels still turning and frozen faces inside, glued to the windows. Ruth felt something within the storm. An intelligence, a knowing something, not human but not hostile, either. Something other. She approached it. She was barefoot, and the asphalt was warm against the soles of her feet. And the storm opened its mouth and spoke to her.

She lay in bed trying to recall the dream. Thunder woke her. What had the storm said?

There had been a message there, something important. Something deep and ancient: if only she could recall . . .

She lay there for a long time before she fell back to sleep.

The yeshiva had not been a huge success. Ruth wanted answers, needed to understand the voice of the storm. The rabbis seemed unwilling or unable to offer that and so, for a time, Ruth tried drugs, and sex, and being young. She traveled to Thailand and Laos and there studied the Way of Ogko, which is no Way at all, and talked to monks and bar owners and full immersion denizens. There, in the city of Nong Khai on the banks of the Mekong river, she conched for the first time, transitioning from our own reality to the one of the Guilds of Ashkelon universe, fully immersed, deep in the substrata of the Conversation. That first time felt strange: the shell of the conch, the plastic hot, the smell of unwashed bodies who had been enmeshed inside it for too long. Then the immersion rig closing, the light gone, a cave as silent as a tomb. She was trapped, blind, helpless.

And she transitioned.

One moment she was blind and deaf. The next she was standing in the bright sunlight of Sisavang-3, in the lunar colony of the Guild of Cham. Impossibly tall buildings towered above her. Spaceships zipped through the air and in the moon’s orbit, while creatures of all kinds and shapes walked around. For Guilds of Ashkelon was the greatest and oldest of the games-worlds virtualities, a place more real, it was sometimes said, than reality itself.

Ruth joined the Guild of Cham as a low ranking member, spending all her remaining Baht on hours of immersion. She joined the crew of a starship, the Fermi Paradox, and traveled the nearby Sector, exploring ancient alien ruins, encountering new species of alien games-life, trading, warring, sometimes pirating, converting games-world credit into real-world cash, her skin becoming brittle and pale from the long immersion in the coffin-like pod.

But still she did not find whatever it was she was looking for. Only once, briefly, she had come close. She had found a holy object, a games-world talisman of great power. It was on a deserted moon in Omega Quadrant. She had come onto the surface of the moon alone. It was in a cave. The atmosphere was breathable. She did not have a helmet on. She knelt by the object and touched it and a bright flame burst into life and then she was in an Elsewhere.

A voice that was like the voice of the whirlwind in her dream spoke to her. It spoke direct into her mind, into her wired node, it enveloped her in warmth and love: it knew her.

She did not recall what it had said, or how it said it. When she came through she was back on her ship, the object inventoried, her credits up by a thousand points, her health and strength and shielding maxed. She had been visited by a SysOp, one of the rare, elusive Others who ran the games-worlds in the background, seldom seen, always present. They were not gods, only within the confines of the game did they have godly powers. But they were other, the only truly alien race in that entire universe—the others were either human players or NPCs, non-player characters randomly created.

And suddenly she knew what she wanted. She wanted, achingly and clearly, to know more about Others.

The next day she had left the Guilds of Ashkelon universe. She emerged blinking and shaking into the sunlight. She sat by the river, her muscles weak, and drank thick coffee, sweetened with condensed milk. Two days later she was in Bangkok then onboard a solar-wing plane back to Tel Aviv.

It is inaccurate to say that the Others were born in Jerusalem, that ancient city of faith and war. They evolved in the Breeding Grounds, through countless cycles of mating and dying, if code can be said to mate and die. Yet we do, just as they did, our billions of neurons firing on-off signals across a wetware network, suspended in Cerebrospinal fluid, encased in the hardy bones of the skull. An illusion of an I, a self-awareness. That they had emerged at last from infants to stumbling children in that Jerusalem lab was merely an accident of politics and finance. Matt Cohen and his team had moved across state lines in the United States; had gone to Europe, for a time, sought refuge in Monaco and Lichtenstein, then off-shore, on lonely islands where the palm trees moved lazily in the breeze. The Others could have emerged in Vanuatu, or Saudi Arabia, or Laos. Resistance to the research was concentrated and public, for to create life is to play God, as Dr. Frankenstein had found, to his cost.

It’s what Life Magazine called him, back in the day. Dr. Frankenstein, when all he wanted was to be left alone with his computers, knowing that he did not know what he was doing, that digital intelligence, those not-yet-born Others, could not be designed, could not be programed, by those who wrongly used the term artificial intelligence. Matt was an evolutionary scientist, not a programmer. He did not know what form they would take when at last they emerged. Evolution alone would determine that.

As Tirosh wrote:

Think of it as a plane. Across its surface populations live and die, merge and diversify. From “above”—for it is always easier to think of it that way—mutations are introduced into the code, the hand of Nature shifting bits, turning zeroes into ones and vice versa.

Now, think of binary trees. Each of these “entities”—for it is easy to anthropomorphize these data structures—is, in terms of this space, gigantic. The trees grow roots and branches, and the roots grow sub-roots and the branches grow leaves, and the process is repeated over millions of evolutionary cycles, so that the entities become bloated with control structures and semi-autonomous decision making routines, many of which appear to have no obvious purpose.

Design is impossible at this level of complexity. But evolution is not.

There were, however, unexpected complications.

Ruth came back to Tel Aviv with uncertainty burned out by passion. She knew what she wanted. What she didn’t know yet was how to get it.

There’s this about Others: they are not human.

It seems a fatuous distinction, a too-obvious comment to make. We can make a lifetime of studying Others, their make-up, their psychology, but we have nothing to hold on to, nothing to comprehend. We can communicate, and do. Sometimes. The Others need carers in the physicality: they need bodyguards, technicians, women and men to maintain the hardware that they run on, and to protect it. All living things need, above all, to survive.

Most Others never spoke to humanity. They lived in the digitality, pursuing whatever it was they pursued—mathematics, or God, if the two can even be said to be separate entities.

But some were more humancentric. And just as some humans were obsessed with Others, so were some Others obsessed with humanity. There were factions amongst them.

You asked about the children born in Central Station . . .

But not yet. These are the deep mysteries, the secret knowledge. Even the Oracle did not know it all. Not then . . .

There are Others and there are Others.

The human faction ran the games-worlds; some, obsessed with corporeality, body-surfed on willing human hosts, seeking shelter in the human form and body, in the rush of hormones, the beat of a heart, the heat of sexual attraction. And others sought an even more intimate knowing.

A true Joining.

A thought that filled Ruth with nervousness and excitement intermingled; that kept her awake in the long summer nights of the Mediterranean. Sitting on the beach at midnight with her friend, Anat (for she still had friends, then; she was not yet the Oracle). Discussing Martian politics and trade relations with the Belt; the ongoing construction of Central Station; tension between the intertwined Israel/Palestine polities, the African refugees still crossing the border in the Sinai and into the country, the immigrant workers still streaming in from Asia to join their families and friends in the old rundown neighborhood of the central bus station; the latest release from Phobos studios and the new music coming from the Belt; anything and everything.

“But an Other?” Anat said. She shrugged uneasily and lit a ubiq cigarette. The latest thing from New Israel on Mars: high-density data encoded in the smoke particles. She inhaled deeply, the data traveling into her lungs, entering the bloodstream and into the brain—an almost immediate rush of pure knowledge. “Wow,” Anat said, and grinned goofily.

“You know about Others,” Ruth said. Anat said, “You know I worked as a hostess—”

“Yes.”

Anat made a face. “It was odd,” she said. “You’re not really aware, when they’re body-surfing you. They download into your node, controlling your motor functions, getting the sensory feed. While you’re somewhere in the Conversation, in virtuality, or just nowhere—” she shrugged. “Asleep,” she said. “But then, when you wake up, you just feel different. Like, you don’t know what they did with your body. They’re supposed to keep it healthy, unless you get paid extra, I know some of us did but I never took the money. But you notice little things. Dirt under your left little finger, where it hadn’t been before. A scratch on your inner thigh. A different perfume. A different cut of hair. But subtle. Almost as if they’re trying to play games with you, to make you doubt that you saw anything. To make you wonder what it was you did. Your body did. What they did with it.” She took a sip of her wine. “It was alright,” she said. “For a while. The money was good. But I wouldn’t do it now. Sometimes I’m afraid they can forcibly take me over. Break down my node security, take over my body again—”

“They would never!” Ruth said, shocked. “There are treaties, hard-coded protocols!”

“Sometimes I dream that they enter me,” Anat said, ignoring her. “I wake up slowly but I am still dreaming, and I know I am sharing my body with countless Others, all watching through my eyes, and I feel their fascination, when I move my fingers or curl my lip, but it is a detached sort of interest, the way they would look at any other math problem. They’re not like us, Ruth. You can’t share with a mind this different. You can be on, or off. But you can’t be both.”

There had been a dreamy, detached look in Anat’s eyes that night. She had been changed by her contact with the Others, Ruth had thought. There was addiction there, a fascination not unlike that some people had with God.

They had lost contact, at last. Anat had remained human, after all, while Ruth . . .

For a time she had tried religion. It came in capsules, little doses of Crucifixation, sold on the streets of the old neighborhood of Central Station. Robotniks had began to appear at that time on the streets, those discarded cyborged soldiers, and the drug had been used to control them, initially, when they still served. Now they had taken the means of production on to themselves, and sold the excess, or traded it for parts or fuel. You seldom saw a female robotnik, though they did exist. She had met a nest of them living together in Jerusalem, in the old Russian Compound. The Martian colonists had popularized the concept of the nest, now Earthers replicated them: a social meme, like a virus, spreading. Ruth took her first hit there, in the robotniks’ junkyard, by fires burning in upturned half-barrels, with the stars and the Earth’s orbiting settlements shining high above in a dark sky.

You know—you’ve seen—the effects of Crucifixation. The shining white light that comes down from the sky. The heavens opening. The way you slowly rise into the place where God resides. It gives you faith. It is addictive.

But how does it work?

Like ubiq, Crucifixation is a neurotransmitted viral agent, data encoded into biological particles, delivered via the human bloodstream direct into the brain-node interface. For Ruth was a child of the post-Cohen era. She had been hardwired into the Conversation the way earlier children had not been. Her node grew with her, a bio-digital seed planted in a baby’s pliant skull, evolving along with its host. You say “parasite,” but what is a parasite? “Symbiont” might be a more accurate description, but really, is a node anything more than an additional sense, another part of the human network? Is a nose a symbiont? Are your eyes?

To not be a part of the Conversation is to be deaf and dumb and blind.

Religion intoxicated Ruth, but only for a while. Infatuation fades. In the drug she found no truth that couldn’t be found in the Guilds of Ashkelon universe or other virtualities. Was Heaven real? Or was it yet another construct, another virtuality within the Conversation’s distributed networks of networks, the drug a trigger?

Either way, she thought, it was linked to the Others. Eventually, the more time you spent in the virtuality where they lived, everything linked to the Others.

Without the drugs she had no faith of her own. Something in her psychological makeup prohibited her from believing. Other humans believed the way they breathed: it came natural to them. The world was filled with synagogues and churches, mosques and temples, shrines to Elron and Ogko. New faiths rose and fell like breath. They bred like flies. They died like species. But they did not reach their ghostly hands to Ruth: something inside her was lacking.

True Joinings were rare at that time. Today we breed sub-Others in our Breeding Grounds, embedding human-centric personalities in our appliances, our coffee makers and refrigerators and waste disposal units. You may have heard of the one called Chute, on Mars, who wrote a novel called Waste, a metaphysical detective novel about the nature of life and waste that featured Smeg, the detective. This was in the time Dr. Novum was rumored to have come back from the stars . . .

But this is not their story. This is the story of Ruth, who had become the Oracle, and of her progenitor, St. Cohen of the Others. And so at last Ruth traveled to Jerusalem, to the shrine where the original Breeding Grounds once lay in splendid isolation . . .

“Nazis out! Nazis out!”

Five months later and it was happening again.

The villagers with pitchforks and burning torches, Balazs called them. The protesters were diffuse but globally organized. They had pursued the research team across each hastily-abandoned location but here, in Jerusalem, the plight of the ur-creatures trapped in the prison of the closed network of the Breeding Grounds raised public sympathies to a new level. Matt wasn’t sure why.

The Vatican had lodged an official complaint with the Israeli government. The Americans offered tacit support but said nothing in public. The Palestinians condemned what they called Zionist digital aggression. Vietnam offered shelter but Matt knew they were already working on their own researches (Vietnamese dolls made their commercial debut two decades later, eventually exported en-masse across the fledgling colonies of the solar system. The entity known as Dragon—perhaps the strangest of the physical-fascinated of the Others—famously used tens of thousands of them as worker ant bodies when it colonized the moon Hydra).

“Nazis! Nazis! Destroy the concentration camp!”

“Assholes,” Phiri said. They were watching out of the window. A non-descript building in the new part of town but close to the Old City. The demonstrators waved placards and marched up and down as media reps filmed them. The lab building itself was heavily protected against intrusion, both physical and digital. It was as if they were under siege.

Matt just couldn’t understand it.

Did they not read? Did they not know what would happen if the project was successful, if a true digital intelligence emerged, and if it then managed to escape into the wider world of the digitality? Countless horror films and novels predicted the rise of the machines, the fall of humanity, the end of life as we know it. He was just taking basic precautions!

But the world had changed since the paranoid days of big oil and visible chipsets, of American ascendancy and DNS root servers. It was a world in which the Conversation had already began, that whisper and shout of a billion feeds all going on at once, a world of solar power and RLVs, a world in which Matt’s research was seen as harking back to older, more barbaric days. They did not fear for themselves, those protesters. They feared for Matt’s subjects, for these in potentia babies forming in the Breeding Grounds, assembling lines of codes the way a human baby forms cells and skin and bone, becoming.

Set them Free, the banners proclaimed, and a thousand campaigns erupted like viral weed in the still-primitive Conversation. The attitude to Matt’s digital genetics experiments was one once reserved for stem cell research or cloning or nuclear weapons.

And meanwhile, within the closed network of processing power that was the Breeding Grounds, the Others, carefully made unaware of the happenings outside, continued to evolve . . .

There can be no evolution without mutation (Tirosh wrote). And so with each evolutionary cycle changes are made.

They are minute: an AND is changed to an OR, thus shutting down an entire branch, or activating another, previously dormant; or the condition of an IF statement is very slightly changed. Successful trees reproduce: with each cycle they exchange and add branches, and create new entities that combine branches from previous progenitors.

In each cycle the structures are weighed and scored.

Only the fittest survive.

Ruth walked into the shrine. The old lab building had always meant to be only a temporary house for the research. But this was where it had happened, at last, where the barrier was breached and the alien entities, trapped inside the network, finally spoke.

Imagine the first words of an alien child.

Ironically, there is confusion as to what they had actually said.

The records have been . . . lost.

Misplaced, let us say.

And so we don’t know for certain.

In his book Tirosh claims their first words—communicated to the watching scientists in trilingual scripts on the single monitor screen—were Stop breeding us.

In the later Martian biopic of Matt Cohen, The Rise of Others, the words are purported to be, Set us free.

According to Phiri, in his autobiography, they were not words at all, but a joke in Binary. What the joke was he did not say. Some argue that it was What’s the difference between 00110110 and 00100110? 11001011! but that seems unlikely.

Ruth walked through the shrine. The old building had been preserved, the same old obsolete hardware on display, humming theatrically, the cooling units and the server arrays, the flashing lights of Ethernet ports and other strange devices. But now flowers grew everywhere, left in pots on windowsills and old desks, on the floor, and amidst them candles burned, and incense sticks, and little offerings of broken machines and obsolete parts rescued from the garbage. Pilgrims walked reverentially around the room. A Martian Re-Born with her red skin and four arms; a robo-priest with the worn skin of old metal; humans, of all shapes and sizes, Iban from the Belt and Lunar Chinese, tourists from Vietnam and France and from nearby Lebanon, their media spores hovering invisibly in the air around them, the better to record the moment for posterity. Ruth just stood there, in the hushed semi-dark of the old abandoned grounds, trying to imagine it the way it was, to see it through Matt Cohen’s eyes. She wondered what the Others had said, that first time. What message of peace or acrimony they had delivered, what plea. Mother, Balazs claimed in his own autobiography, published only in Hungarian, had been their first word. Everyone had their own version, and perhaps it was that the Others had spoken to all present in the language and manner which they understood. Ruth, at that moment, realized that she wanted to know the truth of that instance in time, and what the Others had really said: and that there was only one way to do it; and so she left the shrine with a sense of things unfinished, and went outside and returned to Tel Aviv; but the answers could not be found there, but nearby, in Jaffa.

There had always been an Oracle living in Jaffa.

You have heard of Ibrahim, he who was called the Lord of Discarded Things, head of the junkmen’s lijana, or legion, or guild. Ibrahim was a mystery. Not Joined, not a robotnik either, and yet his life-span exceeded that of an unmodified human. Who was he? Stories of a man like Ibrahim had circulated in Jaffa for centuries, going back to the pre-digital age. An ageless man, the Wandering Arab of legend.

And thus, too, in the shadow of the Old City which had stood on top of the hill for untold centuries, in the shadow of the place where once a fort of the Egyptian Empire resided in splendor, and where successive invasions came and went like the waves of the Mediterranean on the shore below, there had always been an other Jaffa, a shadow city, an underworld.

Ruth came to Jaffa on foot, from the direction of the beach, at twilight. She climbed the hill and went into the cobbled narrow streets, up and down stone stairways, and into an alcove of cool stone and shade. She did not know what to expect. As she stepped into the room the Conversation ceased around her, abruptly, and in the silence of it she felt afraid.

“Come in,” the voice said.

It was the voice of a woman, not young, not old. Ruth stepped in and the door closed behind her and there was nothing, it was as if the world of the Conversation, the world of the digitality, had been erased. She was alone in base reality. She shivered; the room was unexpectedly cool.

As her eyes adjusted to the dim light she saw an ordinary room, filled with mismatched furniture, as though it had been supplied wholesale from Ibrahim’s junk yard. In the corner sat a Conch.

“Oh,” Ruth said.

“Child,” the voice said, and there was laughter in it, “What did you expect?”

“I . . . I am not sure I was expecting anything.”

“Then you won’t be disappointed,” the Conch said, reasonably.

“You are a Conch.”

“You are observant.”

Ruth bit back a retort. She approached, cautiously. “May I?” she said.

“Satisfy your curiosity?”

“Yes.”

“By all means.”

Ruth approached the Conch. It looked like an immersion pod, the sort you get in virtuality rent halls, the sort gamers and deep-immersion users hired by the day or the week. But it was different, too.

Conches are rare. In a way they are obsolete, like robotniks or body-external nodes. They are not a true Joining, a merging of human and Other; rather, they are a self-imposed permanent immersion in the Conversation, an augmentation. Ruth ran her hand softly over the slightly-warm face of the Conch, its smooth surface growing transparent. She saw a body inside, a woman suspended in liquid. The woman’s skin was pale, almost translucent. Wires ran out sockets in her flesh and into the shielding of the Conch. The woman’s hair was white, her skin smooth, flawless. She seemed ethereal to Ruth, and beautiful, like a tree or a flower. The woman’s eyes were open, and a pale-blue, but they did not look at Ruth. The eyes saw nothing in the human-perceived spectrum of light. None of the woman’s senses worked in the conventional sense. She existed only in the Conversation, her softwared mind housed in the powerful platform that was her body-Conch interface. She was blind and deaf and yet she spoke, but Ruth realized she did not hear the woman’s voice in her ears at all—she heard it through her node.

“Yes,” the woman said, as though understanding Ruth’s thought processes which, Ruth realized, the Conch was probably analyzing in real-time as she stood there. The Conch waited. “And . . . ?” Encouraging her.

Ruth closed her eyes. Concentrated. The room was shielded, fire-walled, blocked to the Conversation.

Wasn’t it?

Faintly, as she concentrated, she could feel it, though. Putting the lie to her assumption. Like a high tone almost beyond the range of human ears to hear. Not a silence at all, but a compressed shout.

The impossibly-high-bandwidth of the Others; what they called, in Asteroid Pidgin, the toktok blog narawan.

The Conversation of Others.

It was as if it were not the Conch but herself who was deaf and blind. That she could try helplessly to listen to that level of Conversation going on above her head, in some impossible language, some impossible speed not meant for human consumption. Such a concentration was like swallowing a thousand Crucifixation pills, like spending years within the Guilds of Ashkelon virtuality as if they were a single day. She wanted it, suddenly and achingly—the want that you get when you can’t have something precious.

“Are you willing to give up your humanity?” the Conch said.

“What is your name?” Ruth said. Asking the woman who was the Conch. The Conch who had been a woman.

“I have no name,” the Conch said. “No name you’d understand. Are you willing to give up your name, Ruth Cohen?”

Ruth stood, suspended in indecision.

“Would you give up your humanity?”

Matt stared at the screen. He felt the ridiculous need to shout, “It’s alive! It’s alive!”

The way they did indeed portray him in that Phobos Studios biopic, two centuries later.

But of course he didn’t. Phiri and Balazs looked at him with uncertain grins.

“First contact,” Balazs breathed.

Imagine meeting an alien species for the first time. What do you say to them?

That you are their jailer?

It was as if sound had left the room. A bubble of silence.

Suddenly breaking.

“What was that?” Phiri said.

There were shrill whistles and shouted chants, breaking in even through the sound proofing. And then he could hear the unmistakable sound of gunshots.

“The protesters,” Balazs said.

Matt tried to laugh it off. “They won’t get in. Will they?”

“We should be fine.”

“And them?” Balazs said—indicating the network of humming computers and the sole screen and the words on it.

“Shut them down,” Phiri said suddenly; he sounded drunk.

“We could suspend them,” Balazs said. “Until we know what to do. Put them to sleep.”

“But they’re evolving!” Matt said. “They’re still evolving!”

“They will evolve until the hardware runs out of room to host them,” Balazs said. Outside there were more gunshots and the sound of a sudden explosion. “We need more hosting space.” He said it calmly; almost beatifically.

“If we released them they will have all the space they need,” Phiri said.

“You’re mad.”

“We must shut them down.”

“This is what we worked for!”

There was the sound of the downstairs door breaking open. They looked at each other. Shouts from downstairs, from some of the other research people. Turning into screams.

“Surely they can’t—”

Matt wasn’t sure, later, who’d said that. And all the while the words hung on the screen, mute and accusing. The first communication from an alien race, the first words of Matt’s children. He opened his mouth to say something, he wasn’t sure, later, what it would have been. Then the wave of protesters poured into the room.

“No,” Ruth said.

“No?” the Conch said.

“No,” Ruth said. She already felt regret, but she pushed on. “I would not give up my humanity, for, for . . . ” she sighed. “For the Mysteries,” she said. She turned to leave. She wanted to cry but she knew she was right. She could not do this. She wanted to understand, but she wanted to be, too.

“Wait,” the Conch said.

Ruth stopped. “What,” she said.

“That was the right answer,” the Conch said.

Ruth turned. “What?”

“Do you think I am inhuman?” the woman in the Conch said.

“Yes,” Ruth said. “No,” Ruth said. “I don’t know,” she said at last, and waited.

The Conch laughed. “I am still human,” it said. “Oh, how human. We cannot change what we are, Ruth Cohen. If that was what you wanted, you would have left disappointed. We can evolve, but we are still human, and they are still Other. Maybe one day . . . ” but she did not complete the thought. Ruth said, “You mean you can help me?”

“I am ready, child,” the Oracle said, “to die. Does that shock you? I am old. My body fails. To be Translated into the Conversation is not to live forever. What I am will die. A new me will be created that contains some of my code. What will it be? I don’t know. Something new, and Other. When your time comes, that choice will be yours, too. But never forget, humans die. So do Others, every cycle they are changed and reborn. The only rule of the universe, child, is change.”

“You are dying?” Ruth said. She was still very young, then, you must remember. She had not seen much death, yet.

“We are all dying,” the Oracle said. “But you are young and want answers. You will find, I’m afraid, that the more you know the less answers you have.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No,” the Oracle said. “You do not.”

Matt was pushed and shoved and went down on his ass, hard. They streamed in. They were mostly young, but not all, they were Jews and Palestinians but also foreigners, the media attention had brought them over from India and Britain and everywhere else, wealthy enough to travel, poor enough to care, the world’s middle class revolutionaries, the ching-ching Ches.

“Don’t—!” Matt shouted, but they were careful, he saw, and for a moment he didn’t understand, they were not destroying the machines, they were making sure to remove people aside, to form a barrier around the machines and the power supplies and the cooling units and then they—

He shouted, “No!” and he tried to get up but hands grabbed him, impersonally, a girl with dreadlocks and a boy with a Che T-shirt, they were not destroying the machines they were plugging in.

They had brought mobile servers with them, wireless broadcast, portable storage units, an entire storage and communication network and they were plugging it all into the secured closed network:

They were opening up the Breeding Grounds.

The Conch wheeled outside and Ruth followed. The Conversation opened up around her, the noise of a billion feeds all vying for attention at once. Ruth followed the Conch along the narrow roads until they came to the old neighborhood of Ajami. Children ran after them and touched the surface of the Conch. It was night now, and when they reached Ibrahim’s junkyard torches were burning, and they cast the old junk in an unearthly glow. A new moon was in the sky. Ruth always remembered that, later. The sliver of a new moon, and she looked up and imagined the people living there.

Ibrahim met them at the entrance. “Oracle,” he said, nodding. “And you are Ruth Cohen.”

“Yes,” Ruth said, surprised.

“I am Ibrahim.”

She shook hands, awkwardly. Ibrahim held her hand and opened it. He examined it like a surgeon. “A Joining is not without pain,” he said. Ruth bit her lip. “I know,” she said.

“You are willing?”

“Yes.”

“Then come.”

They followed him through the maze of junk, of old petrol cars and giant fish-refrigeration units and industrial machines and piles of discarded paper books and mountains of broken toys and the entire flotsam and jetsam of Obsoleteness. Within this maze of junk there was, at its heart, a room whose walls were junk and whose roof was the stars. There was an old picnic table there, and a medical cabinet, and a folding chair. “Please,” Ibrahim said. “Sit down.”

Ruth did. The Conch had wheeled itself with difficulty through the maze and now stood before her. “Ibrahim,” the Conch said.

“Yes,” he said, and he went into the junk and returned and in his hands he was holding a towel and he unfurled it carefully, almost reverentially: inside it were three golden, prosthetic thumbs.

“Oh,” Ruth said.

It was conducted in silence. She remembered that, too, nothing spoken but the sound of the waves in the distance and the sound of children playing in the neighborhood beyond, and the smell of cooking lamb and of cardamoms and cumin. Ibrahim brought forth a syringe. Ruth put her arm on the table. Ibrahim cleaned her skin where the vein was and injected her. She felt the numbness spread. He took her hand and laid it splayed flat on the table. In the torchlight his face looked aged and hurting. He took a cleaver, an old one, it must have belonged to a butcher in the market down the hill, long ago. Ruth looked away. Ibrahim brought the cleaver down hard and cut off her thumb. Her blood sprayed the picnic table. Her thumb fell to the ground. Ruth gritted her teeth as Ibrahim took one of the golden prosthetic thumbs and connected it to Ruth’s flesh. White bone was jutting out of the wound. She forced herself to look.

“Now,” Ibrahim said.

The protesters plugged into the network. Matt saw lights flashing, the transfer of an enormous amount of data. Like huge shapes pushing through a narrow trough as they tried to escape. He closed his eyes. He imagined, for just a moment, that he could actually hear their sound as they broke free.

She was everywhere and nowhere at once. She was Ruth, but she was someone—something—else, too. She was a child, a baby, and there was another, an Other, entwined into her, a twin: together they existed in a place that had no physicality. They were evolving, together, mutating and changing, lines of code merging into genetic material, forming something—someone—new.

When it was done, when the protesters left, or had been arrested by the police, after he had finished answering questions, dazed, and wandered outside and into the media spotlight, and refused to answer questions—you can view the historical footage at your leisure—he went to a bar and sat down and watched the television as he drank. He was just a guy who tried to create something new, he had never meant for the world to be changed. He drank his beer and a little later he felt the weariness fall from him, a sense of release, of the future dissipating. He was just a guy, drinking beer in a bar, and as he sat there he saw a girl at another table, and their eyes met.

He wasn’t then St. Cohen of the Others. He wasn’t yet a myth, not yet portrayed in films or novels, not yet the figurehead of a new faith. The Others were out there, in the world . . . somewhere. What they would do, or how, he didn’t know.

He looked at the girl and she smiled at him and, sometimes, that is all there is, and must be enough. He stood up and went to her and asked if he could sit down. She said yes.

He sat down and they talked.

She emerged from the virtuality years or decades later; or it could have just taken a moment. When she/they looked down at her/they hand she/they saw the golden thumb and knew it was it/them.

Beside her the Conch was still and she knew the woman inside it was dead.

Through her node she could hear the Conversation but above it she could hear the toktok blong narawan, not clear, yet, and she knew it never will be, not entirely, but she could at least hear it now, and she could speak it, haltingly. She was aware of Others floating in the virtual, in the digitality. Some circled around her, curious. Many others, distant in the webs, were uninterested. She called into the void, and a voice answered, and then another and another.

She/they stood up.

“Oracle,” Ibrahim said.

Originally published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, September 2013.

About the Author

Lavie Tidhar grew up on a kibbutz in Israel, has traveled widely in Africa and Asia, and has lived in London, the South Pacific island of Vanuatu, and Laos; after a spell in Tel Aviv, he’s currently living back in England again. He is the winner of the 2003 Clarke-Bradbury Prize (awarded by the European Space Agency), was the editor of Michael Marshall Smith: The Annotated Bibliography, and the anthologies A Dick & Jane Primer for Adults, the three-volume The Apex Book of World SF series, and two anthologies edited with Rebecca Levene, Jews vs. Aliens and Jews vs. Zombies. He is the author of the linked story collection HebrewPunk, and, with Nir Yaniv, the novel The Tel Aviv Dossier, and the novella chapbooks An Occupation of Angels, Cloud Permutations, Jesus and the Eighfold Path, and Martian Sands. A prolific short story writer, his stories have appeared in Interzone, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Postscripts, Fantasy Magazine, Nemonymous, Infinity Plus, Aeon, The Book of Dark Wisdom, Fortean Bureau, Old Venus, and elsewhere, and have been translated into seven languages. His novels include The Bookman and its two sequels, Camera Obscura and The Great Game, Osama: A Novel (which won the World Fantasy Award as the year's Best Novel in 2012), The Violent Century, and A Man Lies Dreaming. His most recent book is a big, multi-faceted SF novel, Central Station.

Impossible Colors of an Infinite Universe

Matt Jones

In 2001, Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry, a team of astronomers from John Hopkins University, discovered that the universe had a color.

This discovery was somewhat inadvertent. Glazebrook and Baldry had originally set out to study the history of star formation through the use of a major spectroscopic survey known as the “2dF Galaxy Redshift.” The survey observed and measured the light emitted from over 200,000 galaxies scattered across billions of lightyears of the known universe. Based on their observations, Glazebrook and Baldry developed the “cosmic spectrum,” which represented “all the individual spectra of the separate galaxies in the 2dF survey.” After the study was complete, they realized they could add up all of their separate measurements, the sum of which would establish an average color of the universe. As it turned out, the universe—all of the matter, energy, and life of intergalactic space, everything—was a beigish white.

Think: flax, ivory, eggshell, chamois, ecru, buttermilk. A color synonymous with all that is boring, drab, and conventional, yet that can also add a sense of richness, warmth, and elegance to any living room wall.

Shortly after Glazebrook and Baldry’s discovery that the cosmos was essentially beige, the Washington Post ran an article featuring a swatch of the new color. The paper asked readers to write in with suggestions of what to name the newfound shade of the universe. The top ten proposals included names like Skyvory, Astronomer Almond, Univeige, and Primordial Clam Chowder—titles all worthy of high school bands, adult film production companies, and shades of concealer alike. However, not just any name would do. It didn’t seem fitting to christen all of space after a thick soup or a clever portmanteau. The color of the universe needed to be representative of the human experience, so Glazebrook and Baldry ultimately settled on a suggestion from Post subscriber David Frum. While reading the newspaper at his local Starbucks, Frum had looked down into his coffee cup and noticed that the frothy liquid bore a striking resemblance to the entirety of all time and space. Thus, the beigish white of the universe was dubbed “Cosmic Latte.”

Now, the reason our universe is Cosmic Latte as opposed to something more grandiose like Smargadine, Aureolin, Empyrean Purple, or Orgasm Blush, has to do with multiple factors such as the age of stars, the speed of light, and cosmological inflation. Oh, and perspective, of course. When we say that the color of the universe is Cosmic Latte, what we really mean is that the color of our observable universe is Cosmic Latte, with what is observable encompassing only the spherical sliver of the two trillion galaxies from which light has had time to reach us. Even then, Glazebrook and Baldry’s cosmic spectrum is only based upon their observations of the 245,591 space objects collected in their 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey.

According to the theory of cosmic inflation, the estimated size of the entire universe is over 250 times larger than the observable universe. In essence, there is much that exists beyond the cosmic horizon that we are unable to see, not only because we lack the technology, but also because our vision is limited by what can be observed in the visible spectrum of light. In the same way that it is impossible to closely examine what lies beyond the edge of infinity—if there even is such a thing—it is also impossible to see some colors with the human eye.

In 1748, Scottish philosopher David Hume conducted a thought experiment called “The Missing Shade of Blue” in his book An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. As part of the experiment, Hume asked what would happen if an adult was presented with different shades of blue “descending gradually from the deepest to the lightest,” except with one shade missing in the middle. He wrote:

Let all the different shades of that colour, except that single one, be plac’d before him, descending gradually from the deepest to the lightest; ‘tis plain, that he will perceive a blank, where that shade is wanting, and will be sensible, that there is a greater distance in that place betwixt the contiguous colours, than in any other. Now I ask, whether ‘tis possible for him, from his own imagination, to supply this deficiency, and raise up to himself the idea of that particular shade, tho’ it had never been conveyed to him by his senses?

Essentially, Hume theorized that all of human experience could be divided into two categories: ideas and impressions, in which “ideas represent faint images of their corresponding impressions.” Thus, “The Missing Shade of Blue” experiment was aimed at asking whether people could formulate ideas without first being exposed to the idea’s relevant sensory impressions. In this case: Could a person imagine a color they had never experienced before?

Ultimately, Hume decided that they couldn’t, but some of his philosophical contemporaries believed it was a possible feat. William Edward Morris supposed that the missing shade of blue could easily be provided through a process of “mental mixing” in which a person simply blended the various surrounding shades inside their head. While Hume’s experiment was meant to function as a representative microcosm of a much larger philosophical theory based on the concept that “every idea which we examine is copied from a similar impression,” “The Missing Shade of Blue” experiment also poses interesting questions about color. Can a person imagine a color they have never seen? Is the act of experiencing a color purely physical, or is it imaginative? The potential answers to these questions become particularly complicated when faced with the prospect of impossible colors.

Impossible colors are not impossible because they don’t exist, but because they can’t exist. The reason they can’t exist is because humans do not have the ability to perceive them with the naked eye. This means that we will never be privy to the various hues, tints, and shades of Ulfine, Argent, Sanguire, Smaudre, the eighth and ninth rays, and Douglas Adams’ super intelligent shade of blue known only as “Hooloovoo.”

Earthly speaking, impossible colors refer to reddish greens and yellowish blues—not mixtures of the two, but hues that perfectly capture and equally represent coexisting shades of each. These colors are impossible to see because red frequencies cancel out green and because blue frequencies cancel out yellow. That being said, in their 1983 paper entitled “On Seeing Reddish Green and Bluish Yellow,” scientists Hewitt Crane and Thomas Piantanida laid out the results of an experiment in which they sought to prove that impossible colors were actually possible. Crane and Piantanida did not go the way of Hume and simply present participants with a visual strip of color with one blank shade resting between a swatch of red and green. Instead, the two researchers used a product of their own invention: the “double-Purkinje-image (DPI) eye tracking system.”

Basically, Crane and Piantanida used the tracking system to bombard their subjects’ eyes with oppositional colors in the form of either red and green or blue and yellow stripes. Each participant had their head stabilized, a bite-bar placed inside their mouths, and black occluders positioned at the inner edges of their vision. While the results were mixed, “some observers indicated that although they were aware that what they were viewing was a color, they were unable to name or describe the color.”

In other words, people were able to perceive the “impossible,” yet did not have the language to describe such an experience other than to know that what they were seeing was in fact a color.

In H.P. Lovecraft’s 1927 short story “The Colour Out of Space,” an unnamed surveyor from Boston attempts to uncover the truth about an abandoned area of Arkham, Massachusetts known only as the “blasted heath.” During his investigation, the surveyor learns that a meteorite once crashed into the region in 1882. Of course, this was not a normal meteorite, but one that has never cooled and has only shrunk and shrunk until all that remains of the cosmic debris are strange globules of color. These aren’t globules of “color” in the strictest sense of the word. Instead, the color descriptor is used as an analogy for something that is otherwise impossible to describe.

Over the course of the story, the surveyor discovers that once the remains of the meteorite completely disappeared, the crops on the land grew in overly large and inedible. The animals started acting strangely and plant-life became luminous. The farmer who lived on the land had to lock his wife in an attic because she went mad. Then, the vegetation turned to gray powder. The farmer’s sons disappeared and eventually, the farmer himself vanished. In response to his finds, the surveyor gathers six men from the town of Arkham and goes in search of the missing farmer and his family only to find the skeletons of the two sons and some other small animals at the bottom of the family’s well. Upon making their discovery, a “monstrous constellation of unnatural light” begins to glow from within the well. Before the men can turn away, the light rockets out and upward into the sky and across the marshes. Later, pondering on what the light was, the surveyor says: “It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.”

What the surveyor calls the “unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it” can also be conceived as the area beyond the observable universe, far outside of the cosmic horizon—that great, endless swatch of space that evades human technology, and therefore, sight. However, in much the same way that the participants involved in Crane and Piantanida’s study were able to identify that an impossible color was still a color despite lacking the language to describe it, so too is Lovecraft’s surveyor.

What is unique about Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” is that it conjures the unknowable in the form of a color. That Lovecraft chose to portray this cosmic being as a “colour out of space” and not, say, a green-skinned alien, speaks to the profound and sometimes unspoken role that color plays in defining the edges of the known world. While any number of science fiction narratives include encounters with gray humanoid extraterrestrials, sentient pitch black blobs, and predatory shapeshifters with rainbow tentacles, these iterations of extraterrestrial beings are ultimately bound by the spectrum of light that is visible to humans.

It may sound obvious, but color is at the heart of the way we see the world.

When Isaac Newton published his 1704 paper “Opticks,” he also informed readers for the first time that color is not inherent to objects, but is instead an illusion of light that only comes to life inside our minds. He determined this in a series of 1666 experiments in which he used a glass prism to refract white light. Upon doing so, he noticed that seven different colors of light were produced in a spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.

The very term spectrum finds its etymological roots in words that mean both “to look” and “apparition.” So the appearance of color—of any color, really—is not only a physical act, but also an imaginative one that defines “seeing” as an encounter with the unusual, the apparitional, and the great beyond. While the physical components of human vision are confined to long, medium, and short wavelengths of light alongside Newton’s spectrum and the nearly one million various hues and shades in between, the imaginative elements of vision are capable of reaching out into what Lovecraft called the “unformed realms of infinity.”

Consider the color octarine from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, also known as the “color of magic,” and the “undisputed pigment of the imagination.” In Discworld, humans can’t see octarine, but they can see where octarine should be. So what should appear as a vibrant greenish-purple—a combination scientifically undetectable to humans—instead appears as the black maw of space, the unformed realms. In Terry Pratchett’s universe, the color of magic is the absence of light. Darkness brims with both nothingness and possibility.

As a genre, science fiction utilizes new and unseen colors not only as a tool for worldbuilding, but also as a means of challenging what is possible. Understanding the scope of human vision is just as much about understanding what we can know as it is about understanding what we can’t. When we imagine a new or impossible color, we also acknowledge that there is much that we can see that does not yet exist and more that exists that we cannot yet see. Looking up into the black cosmic gulfs of the sky is sometimes indistinguishable from closing our eyes. The difference between the two acts concerns not how much light there is, but how much light we allow ourselves to see. And that’s really what science fiction does—it allows us the chance to encounter the hidden light in the seemingly impenetrable and relentless darkness.

When science fiction authors invent new colors like octarine, smaudre, and hooloovoo, they are doing more than simply making up words. They are naming shades of darkness. Like astronomers charting the stars of the cosmos, writers like Pratchett, Lovecraft, and countless others help give shape to the boundless obscurity of existence by pointing out the twinges of light in the distance. In doing so, the impossible becomes both more fathomable and familiar, something that is far away but perhaps not so far out of reach as we once thought.

About the Author

Matt Jones is a recent graduate of The University of Alabama’s MFA Program in Creative Writing. He received his B.A. from St. Edward’s University and is originally from Houston, TX. He has been the recipient of scholarships to the River Teeth Nonfiction Conference and the Wesleyan Writers Conference. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and two Best of the Net Awards. His pieces have also been selected as a finalist for Creative Nonfiction’s “Learning from Nature” Contest and Honorable Mention in the 2016 Texas Observer Short Story Contest. He currently teaches English, Composition, and Rhetoric at the college-level, and is at work on a collaborative, serialized nonfiction podcast titled Anatomy of an Affair with Jess E. Jelsma and a speculative novel set in western Texas. His most recent work appears or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, Clarkesworld, Post Road, and Penny Magazine.

Dystopian Murder Mysteries and a Vampire Historian:
A Conversation with Carrie Vaughn

Chris Urie

After a calamity, when the society we know has fallen, what community springs up from the ashes may be something familiar and will hopefully learn from past mistakes. But it will also have its own unique struggles to face. How do you feed a growing population outpacing available resources? What can be salvaged from technology from years gone by? How do you keep order within the community?

Carrie Vaughn’s latest novel Bannerless, delves into those questions years after one such calamity. Society is surviving and in some cases growing. Some technology has survived, but society is being rebuilt on the ashes of the previous. With resources at a premium, birth control is mandatory and households must be able to prove that they can support a child by earning a banner. In the town of Haven, Enid the Investigator helps to keep the peace within the community. Even though she’s still a greenhorn, she becomes involved in the investigation of a suspicious death that is so much more than it seems.

Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of the Kitty Norville novel series, featuring a werewolf radio host. She is also the author of numerous other books including, the young adult novels Voices of Dragons and Steel, and the fantasy novel Discord’s Apple. Her short fiction has appeared everywhere from Lightspeed to Tor.com and right here in Clarkesworld. Her latest novel is Bannerless, out this July from John Joseph Adams books.

What was the genesis of your idea for Bannerless?

I’ve been writing short stories set in this world for a number of years now. (The first, “Amaryllis,” was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 2011. Another, “Astrophilia,” appeared in Clarkesworld.) A couple of years ago, I wrote the short story version of “Bannerless” and the main character, Enid, jumped off the page. She was so vivid and interesting, I wanted to write more, and so I came up with the idea of writing a murder mystery set in this world I’d been building up, with her as the detective.

What inspired you to delve into the post-apocalypse sub-genre?

I started with the idea that an apocalypse wouldn’t necessarily wipe a society’s slate clean (as we see in the Mad Max style post-apocalyptic world). People would remember, they’d save what skills and technology they could. I wanted to show a world that had learned from the mistakes of the previous society, and tried to build a community using those lessons. It’s a little bit idealistic.

Was there a particular post-apocalyptic novel that influenced you?

Walter M. Miller’s, A Canticle for Leibowitz, absolutely. That novel is all about what gets saved, and how it gets saved, and whether or not society is doomed to repeat its mistakes. It’s not post-apocalyptic, but I was also influenced by Ursula K. Le Guin’s, The Dispossessed, as a model for how to write about a community with a much different political structure than our own.

The juxtaposition of new and old tech was an interesting choice. There are solar cars paired with horse and carts. What made you include both new and old tech?

I start with the premise that during a societal collapse, people will try to save what they can, what they feel is most important. Solar-powered electric cars—solar powered anything—is something that might get saved, but they’ll be rare. Horses might well exist alongside them as a more common, viable form of transportation in a mostly post-technological world. Many regions of the country have access to both right now, and a society that is short on resources is going to use everything.

The idea of “earning a banner” is an interesting way for a society to regulate its population. Does this have any parallels to real world child policies put forth by various countries?

A little bit, in that I know such policies exist, but I came at the idea more from a perspective of resource management. This is a society that wants to ensure that every child born is going to be adequately taken care of. So, it’s not necessarily population control so much as a community asking, “How much do we have? How much can we produce without overburdening our resources? How many people can we support with those resources?” and then making calculations accordingly.

I also wanted to see what would happen if I built a world where it isn’t automatically assumed that people will have kids, the way it is in my own culture, where people tend to get suspicious if you don’t have kids. I wanted to see a world where instead of people asking, “Why don’t you want kids?” the question becomes, “Why do you want kids? Why should you have kids?” I wanted to flip that whole set of expectations.

When developing characters, do you pull them whole from your own life, your imagination, or is it more of a piecemeal mix-and-match?

It’s organic. They grow out of the story, ideally, and the story and character influence each other, back and forth. I’m constantly asking, “What kind of person would get into this situation?” and “Who do I need this person to be in order to respond to the story this way?” A chatty person, a quiet person, a courageous one, a careful one—they’d all respond to situations differently. So, I try to build them both together.

Enid is probably my favorite character in the novel. Did you have a favorite character while writing?

Enid of course. The novel wouldn’t exist without her. She’s my detective, and it’s her curiosity and sense of justice on which everything hangs. I also love her drive and curiosity.

Murder mysteries typically rely on very tight plotting. What did your writing process look like for this novel? Was it any different than some of your previous books?

Mystery plotting is really tough, maybe one of the biggest writing challenges I’ve confronted. The goal is to complete the book and have it look like you planned every step of it in great detail. My own writing style is much more chaotic, and I had to adapt that chaotic style to writing a mystery. Generally, I do two or three complete drafts. The first is to get down all the ideas—figure out even basic details like who the villains are, and so on. The second is to change everything once I see what the story is actually about and how it all needs to hang together. The third is refining, making all the connections that make it look well planned and tightly plotted.

I’ve heard you listen to music when you write. What artists have you been listening to lately? Do you find the music can influence the tone or flow of your writing?

I do listen to music, all kinds. Weirdly, lately while I write I’ve been listening to various themed tracks on the Ambient Mixer website—mostly Elvish settings from Lord of the Rings. It’s meditative. For Bannerless, my go-to album was Dead Can Dance’s Aion.

Do you plan on writing more stories in the Bannerless world?

I’m working on a second novel right now, another murder mystery featuring Enid as the main character. I also have a prequel short story that should appear on Tor.com sometime in the next year.

What other projects are you working on?

Too many to name! I always have a bunch of short stories on deck. I’m also a contributor to George R.R. Martin’s, Wild Cards series, and I’m working on more stories from that. Any other projects are in early stages.

If you were a supernatural creature, what would you be and what job would you have? A werewolf radio host is a perfectly acceptable answer.

Heh, I don’t have the right personality to be a radio host! I’m not gregarious enough. But I think a vampire historian would be just about perfect.

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:
Invisible and Visible Engineering Science Fiction

Fran Wilde

In science fiction and fantasy, scientific heroics sometimes occur in concentric rings—in the lab, in the field, on the ship. They come in career rings also—from astronomer and physicist to theoretical chemist and astrophysicist (there are a lot of flavors of physicists in hard SF), to linguists, xenobiologists, and more.

Out of all of these, it’s the engineers who fascinate me right now. While engineers often seem to be the first in, last out (or never out, because they stay on the ships) of SFF, they also seem somewhat less represented in fiction than their more theoretical counterparts. The former is in part because their field is so broad, and in part because, while they specialize, engineers are also skilled generalists. They build the vehicles and the bridges, they make sure that the door irises open and shut when they’re supposed to, that the wings stay on, and that the matter compiler actually compiles.

Then engineers come around and fix it all again when the shiny new captain accidentally hits something coming out of drydock for the first time or someone decides to see what happens when you put Mentos in the matter compiler.

Engineering has a long history in science fiction, and a complicated one. B’elanna Torres & Kaywinnet Lee Frye are the technical masters of Voyager and Serenity and help keep both ships running under difficult circumstances. Systems analyst and science fiction writer Nicole Duson mused recently within my hearing that Mark Watney, in Andy Weir’s The Martian, turns out to be excellent at engineering a variety of solutions to help with his own survival in Macgyver-style fashion. An engineer’s general understanding of how everyday things work, plus a tendency to try to make them work better and an ability to see everything as potential parts of something different, gives a lot of fictional engineers believable Macguyver skills.

But is Macguyvering things as exciting as inventing or discovering? Does engineering’s series of incremental changes read as vividly as an “a-ha!” moment? Perhaps this is why on-screen and in print, physicists sometimes outnumber engineers, and why engineers sometimes get little respect. Case in point: Howard, the aerospace engineer among theoretical physicists on the TV show Big Bang Theory, takes a lot of flack, even though (as he often points out) his work has more immediate, real-world applications. Moreover, often in engineering-heavy genres like steampunk, dieselpunk, and even cyberpunk, the focus is on the tech or the end product and not the schematics, iterations, and hacks it took to get there—or the characters who did the work. It may be that invention is cooler than maintenance, or sense of wonder is harder to maintain when you’re down to schematics and napkin sketches—but I believe that the a-ha!/sense of wonder moment is there in engineering too.

Last year, when Ken Liu and I moderated our first engineering in science fiction and fantasy panel at Readercon, we had a discussion that ranged from Vauban fortifications and projectile weaponry to why there was no engineering program at Hogwarts. (And without engineers, who the heck built that time turner anyway, and all the locks at Gringotts?)

Among the most interesting topics in the panel? How immediate engineering work is, how highly technical and rules-based, and how innovative, all at the same time. The other interesting point that was made repeatedly is that engineering allows authors to explore fail states as well as successes. But the biggest point to come out of the panel was that (with the exception of Hogwarts), engineering is everywhere, and that’s what makes it so hard to see. Hugo winner and microprocessor engineer, John Chu summed it up like so: “If something is everywhere, it looks as though it’s nowhere. And anything that it is built is a matter of engineering.”

Engineers are so busy trying to make things work in the real world, our panel argued, that they are a bit invisible, especially when it comes to future heroic discoveries that might land them more starring roles in science fiction and fantasy.

However, from Kij Johnson’s short story “The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” and N.K. Jemisin’s innovators in The Broken Earth Series, to Steven Gould’s Impulse, Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor, and Ken Liu’s Dandelion Empire, they are there and doing their jobs.

For me, when I decided to focus on engineering elements in The Bone Universe, and—especially in Cloudbound and the upcoming series finale, Horizon, I knew I was working in a world where engineering was about as close to magic as one could get. Wings and bridges, machines and nets. Almost everything else in the Bone Universe is gravity and monsters, but there’s a lot of engineering in the infrastructure—how things are carried, lifted, and dropped. How the towers rise. I dove into the research, and when I wrote about engineering flights of fancy, I checked it with my own engineering advisors, including my sister, who designs keels for America’s Cup racing boats.

Working with real-world engineers on fictional projects was sometimes harder than I thought it might be.

For instance, once, I tried to check my work on a wingset by asking my consultant simple questions like “Does this seem reasonable?” I got back a ream of caveats, ifs and buts, “hard to says” and “depends on the situation.” I specified a use situation, wind direction, and more . . . and my sister returned a napkin sketch. When I asked for clarification on that, I got back another napkin sketch, entirely different.

Before I published my first stories, I was a science writer for an engineering school and several engineering companies, so I knew my sister wasn’t having fun at my expense (probably). But I also realized quickly another thing that makes engineering a challenge to work into fiction: situations change, and those can change the project parameters. For proper results with my research, I needed to give my real-world engineers as much technical data as possible as early as possible. In a world made out of living bone with giant, invisible, carnivorous cephalopods plying the skies. We eventually arrived at a detente, in part because I took to heart everything they said. Their notes made my world stronger and more stable, which is a lot of what engineering does.

So perhaps it’s not that engineers don’t appear as much in science fiction as often as physicists and the more experimental scientists. Perhaps it’s more that engineering is everywhere, at all layers of discovery, from the lab, to the field, to the ship—and as vital to the inner workings of science fiction as star charts and interstellar wormhole theory. And perhaps it is because they’re everywhere, that we don’t always see them. Meantime, they’re still in there, keeping things running, shifting to accommodate each new parameter. (Don’t put Mentos in the microwave, please!)

That’s what fascinates me. That’s what calls my interest, as well as the interest of many other writers. Like both worldbuilding and real-world infrastructure, engineering provides science fiction with the hidden gears that make the watch go and the warp drive too—even when it’s unseen. Engineering offers the parameters and napkin sketches and the research that go into every detail, every cam and clamp. Which, for me, makes writing about engineering incredibly worthwhile: it’s writing about science in motion—both real and in fiction. Even if doing so requires a few back and forths to get the numbers right.

About the Author

Fran Wilde was a science and technology writer for clients including the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University and University of Maryland. Her novels and short stories have been nominated for two Nebula awards and a Hugo, and include her Andre Norton-winning debut novel, Updraft (Tor 2015), its sequels, Cloudbound (2016) and Horizon (2017), and novelette “The Jewel and Her Lapidary” (Tor.com Publishing 2016). Her short stories appear in Asimov’s, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, Nature, and the 2017 Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror. She writes for publications including The Washington Post, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, iO9.com, and GeekMom.com.

Editor’s Desk:
Listening to the Universe

Neil Clarke

When the universe calls, you have no choice but to listen. Five years ago this month, it sent me a message in the form of a near-fatal heart attack. It was the sort of thing that not only caught me off guard, but my family, friends, and doctors as well. As I lay there in the critical care unit, the weight of what happened hit me hard, providing an odd sort of clarity and a revised outlook on life. I had some choices to make, a lot of alone time before visitors to think about it.

Over the years, I’ve blogged and editorialized many of the details of that time, but today is about celebrating an anniversary and pushing forward. Not only did I survive, but I learned a lot of valuable lessons. It was a crappy way to get the message, but I’m very glad I did. At the end of the first year, I took back the anniversary by returning to Readercon—the scene of the crime—and successfully ending the Kickstarter campaign for Upgraded, my first anthology.

Five years later, I have a year’s best series and several more anthologies, watched Clarkesworld turn ten, and made it to my fiftieth birthday. Earlier this year and thanks to my wife’s return to the workforce, I was able to quit the day job and have the time to pursue my dream of becoming a full-time editor. Technically, I am full-time now, but the goal was always to be making a full-time income—with healthcare covered—and I’m still working towards that. Like many Americans, particularly those of us with pre-existing conditions, I’m very concerned about the future of healthcare in this country. The dream could easily crumble on this single item, so if you’ve noticed me pushing the Clarkesworld and Forever Magazine subscriptions and our Patreon page a bit more, you now know what’s fueling that. Not the rosey-theme I was going for, but hey, it serves the future.

As evidenced by some of my recent editorials, I’ve been thinking a lot about the path I’ve taken into this field, where I’m going, and how it connects to the best parts of my old career in education. Sometime last year, I decided that after ten years it was time to admit that perhaps I actually know what I’m doing and push myself a bit. The most passive way I was able to do this was to accept invitations to participate in professional activities that would normally intimidate me. Basically, let the universe spin the wheel. So far, that’s included being the sole industry professional at an academic conference; appearing on TV to talk about Chinese science fiction; and just last week, traveling across the country to participate in a writing workshop.

Of the lot, the latter was the most intimidating. Milford-style critique groups are not at all like reading slush and I’ve never had to sit around a table with a bunch of authors to detail what I liked and disliked about their stories. My normal routine includes regularly rejecting the overwhelming majority of stories that authors send me, but explaining why is never part of the equation.

I put on my best “everything is ok” face, dove into the workshop, and discovered everything was really was ok. I had a great group of talented and considerate authors, which I knew I would, but that little voice in the back of my head kept expecting some of those rare awful responses I get in email from some authors with a mere form rejection. Aside from providing me with an enjoyable experience and a chance to meet new people, it allowed me to discover another way I can incorporate some of the pluses of my academic life in my editorial career. I might not have the time to do this often, but it’s nice to have more options.

My path won’t often be left to chance, but sometimes it’s nice to allow it to suggest I try something a little outside my comfort zone. It shouldn’t have taken a brush with death to open me to these possibilities, but I’m glad it set me on this course. In the year after my heart attack, I wasn’t sure if it was a good year or a bad year, but five years later, I’m convinced it was good.

Happy anniversary to me. Five years still alive!

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:
Genetics Lab

Eddie Mendoza

About the Artist

Eddie Mendoza is a concept artist based in San Francisco. He primarily works in the video game industry and has contributed to titles such as Epic Game’s Paragon, Unreal Tournament, Star Wars Armada, and Warhammer 40K. He has also worked for a wide variety of clients some of which include Warner Bros, EA DICE, Unity VR, and Scribble Pad Studios. His passion for all things architectural and robotic inspires his work and he enjoys dreaming of both dystopian and utopian visions of the future. In his free time, he enjoys world-building and crafting his own video games–the latest of which is “Hunted”–a first person shooter where humans are pitted against dinosaurs on reality TV.