The Lori

Fiona Moore

The problem with sentient battle tanks is their drivers.

Realizing this after (unfortunately not before) the Battle of Kuching, the military quietly shifted their AI strategies toward botnets and other nonsocial intelligents that can take down the utilities and welfare systems of entire regions without worrying too much about the consequences. Sentient battle tanks quietly joined ornithopters and weather control in the listicles of the thirty strangest technological propositions of the past two centuries. And that, for most people, was the end of it.

Except for Corporal Atticus Cooper, the driver of Kursk 118-200.

Cooper grew up liking any kind of story involving magic swords or horses or dragons that choose brave heroes and take them on adventures. He went through a long phase of secretly pretending he was Elric of Melniboné. He had owned a Staffordshire terrier, or something that looked like one anyway.

But after a few weeks he had carefully packed up the dog’s food, encouraged the dog into her crate, put both dog and food into his father’s pickup and driven to the local shelter, leaving her there with no explanation.

At the age of eighteen he’d done something similar, enlisting and putting as many miles between himself and the place where he grew up as possible. He signed up as a driver, because he liked machines, and because it was a necessary job that was fun and interesting, but not likely to get him killed.

He’d tried to improve himself and do better than what was expected of him. But his lovers never stayed long, and usually described him as “obsessive.” He never managed to form close friendships with his squad mates either, for all that he would buy them rounds, go out of his way to do favors for any one of them that he so much as thought needed a helping hand. Cooper didn’t seem to care.

All of which added up to the sort of profile that gets people recruited as drivers for the battle tank program.

But, as Clausewitz or Sun Tzu or one of the other writers that the sort of people who develop battle tank programs are fond of selectively quoting said, no plan survives contact with the enemy.

And when Cooper woke up in a hospital in Manila, six weeks after the Battle of Kuching, the first thing on his mind was finding Kursk.

Cooper managed to curb his first impulse, to check himself out of the hospital immediately. Mostly because it turned out comas don’t work like they do in the movies, and he had to learn to walk properly again. But he put the enforced recovery time to good use, finding out what had happened to Kursk.

By an immense stroke of luck, Kursk was on the missing list. So, he hadn’t been destroyed at Kuching, nor had he, like most of the survivors, been quietly retired, his processor removed and consciousness transferred to storage until someone figured out what to do with them. A further stroke of luck was that the authorities were not looking for any of the small number of missing tanks. A lack of resources, perhaps, or a desire to sweep the whole thing under the rug.

Nobody seemed to be in too much of a hurry to get Cooper back either.

Making a few educated guesses—he was Kursk’s driver, and nobody knew Kursk better—Cooper began checking maps of the area around Kuching, and, through local news services, looking for any items that might be a sighting of a lone battle tank. He traced a path in-country, heading southeast from the city into territory that looked, on the map, to be mostly filled with palm oil plantations, national parks, farms, kampungs, and just plain jungle. As to what was going on: the UN forces had all left and the civil war had been officially declared over, but that statement was disputed by both the local terrorists/activists/revolutionaries/freedom fighters, and the owners and workers for the agribusiness conglomerates who were still their main targets.

Which, Cooper decided, was another good reason to go there.

Cooper ended his period as a cooperative patient in the hospital and officially went out to have two further weeks of medical leave before rejoining his unit, which had been shipped off to Louisiana. That meant it would be at least three weeks, and probably a lot longer, before someone considered him AWOL.

He caught a commercial flight to Brunei, and then persuaded an NCO in the RMAF to put him on a plane to Kuching (commercial flights suspended, of course, except those to do with the agribusinesses). Might have been safer to take a boat along the coast, but would have definitely taken longer, and Cooper didn’t want to risk losing track of Kursk.

Not after that last heartbreaking moment of consciousness, fire all around him, orders screaming in his ear to abort mission and abandon the tank. Gritting his teeth and ploughing forward, over the crunch of flesh and bone, because no way he was going to leave Kursk. Not ever.

Once on the ground, Cooper activated long-neglected skills. He hitched rides in-country with the trucks carrying laborers and managers out to the plantations (though not with the occasional military vehicles, where he might get asked hard questions) or hiked along the road. He camped out in the jungle or accepted hospitality in kampungs, sleeping in storage huts in exchange for money or labor.

His linguistic abilities were limited at first, but they got better with practice, and he also discovered that he would get the answers he wanted if he just asked if they’d seen the Lori.

For the people of Sarawak, thanks to a long period of British colonial activity, a lori is what Cooper would normally have called a truck. Kursk didn’t look much like one. But then, he didn’t look much like a conventional tank either: needing only a single human operator and being intended for use in unconventional, principally urban, combat situations, he was small, little enough to fit in a goods elevator or trundle down a narrow alley, and roughly trapezoidal. Someone who’d never seen a sentient battle tank before might not realize what he was, and, even if they did, might not have the vocabulary to cover it. So, for lack of a better word, Kursk was the Lori.

And the Lori, Cooper discovered, was a legend. He might be glimpsed between the trees, or the crunch of tracks over dead twigs might be heard. More rarely, there were stories: Of children and teenagers saved from kidnap or assault by a tank bursting from the trees at the right moment, of a baby saved from drowning after falling into a rice paddy. Of a farmer’s pigs being driven off into the forest for some unknown reason, the whole community turning out to find them in a cheerfully grumbling mob.

Then there were the other ones.

Huts burned to the waterline, the exits guarded so the inhabitants couldn’t get out. A group of plantation workers who’d come over from New Guinea, attacked and slaughtered on the road before they reached their destination. Random disappearances of managers, agribusiness developers, tax collectors: the people who’d told Cooper that one hadn’t been entirely able to resist a grim joke about that last category of victim.

Cooper didn’t judge.

Kursk’s basic impulse was to protect his friends against his enemies. So, Cooper thought as he sheltered in the back of a rattling sentient truck that was stoically ploughing through the rain, Kursk needed him. Needed someone to show him the right people to protect, and the right ones to attack.

The magic sword always needs a guy to wield it.

Cooper felt his world settle into a kind of balance.

“I’m coming to join you, Kursk,” he said aloud. Him and Kursk, the knight and his steed. Living in a hut on the edge of town, waiting to be called into action when danger threatened. Or traveling. Living off the land, going where they were needed.

Then everything would be all right between them.

“I’ll make it up to you for what happened,” he said. “We’re a team. We’ll be okay.”

Cooper got off the truck when it slowed at a plantation checkpoint, hiked down the road to the nearest kampung. Chickens and pigs scattering, old ladies carrying bundles of firewood, a group of teenagers looking up from the motorbike they were disassembling. Cooper greeted them in his imperfect Malay, got taken by a volunteer—a boy-band-handsome kid with full lips and long dark lashes, Cooper bet he was popular—to the religious building. Which turned out to be a church, of the evangelical variety, where the preacher spoke better English than Cooper’s Malay.

Yes, he could stay the night in exchange for fixing the church’s sound system. Yes, there was also curry to be had, courtesy of the handsome kid’s family. The Lori?

Why did he want to know about the Lori?

Cooper rolled with it. No reason, just an interest in local folklore. He’d heard a lot of stories wandering through the area, wondered if there were some here. Tried hard to project an image of being a half-crazed foreign mythology junkie looking for weird legends to put in a book or something.

The villagers settled down and began talking instead about crops and weather and the agribusiness conglomerate’s failure to deliver on their promise that the palm oil plantation would boost the local economy. After a brief muttered aside about how non-Christians would believe any old nonsense, the preacher also dropped the subject of the Lori and joined in.

That evening, after Cooper had ostentatiously turned in for the night, he snuck out of the church building and crept to the edge of town, under cover of darkness. Settled down under a tree with big roots to wait.

He was prepared to do that for a few nights, if necessary, but either he struck lucky, or the tank knew something he didn’t.

After a couple of hours of dozing among the roots, he woke and sprang into a crouch, hearing the noise of the caterpillar tracks on the vegetation, seeing a dim square shape against the rising moon.

“Kursk,” he half-laughed, half-sobbed, overwhelmed with emotions he couldn’t name. “Kursk, boy. It’s me, Coop.”

He ran toward the shape, his hands finding the rough, dented bodywork, caressing the pattern of rivets and bolts, moved upward, found the hatch, wrestled with it briefly. The lock still recognized his palm-print.

With a triumphant yell, he fell inside, closed the door, swearing and shouting in delight as the familiar jolting motion in the padded operator seat engaged him. Like those training runs, bouncing along rough terrain, firing on targets in movie-set fake city streets, seeing his score racking up at the bottom of the monitor.

They were a team again. They were like the Magnificent Seven, the Lori and the Lori’s driver, and . . .

The tank stopped, like a dog scenting the wind.

Cooper held his breath, waiting to see where Kursk went.

The tank started forward again, heading for the road to the plantation.

After a minute, the logic resolved. On the monitors, Cooper could make out a small group of figures, their heads muffled in scarves, carrying something awkward. Turning up the gain on the night vision suggested the scarves were red and black—the colors of the anti-capitalist faction—and, while he couldn’t make out what they were carrying, his money was on an IED.

“Way to go, Kursk,” Cooper said, as the tank bore down on the group.

And then, drove on past it.

“What the hell?”

But Kursk wasn’t listening. He was picking up speed, rumbling into the plantation. Cooper fiddled with the monitor settings.

Kursk was signaling to him that this was the enemy, that Cooper needed to fire the guns.

With horror, Cooper realized what the target was. A group of people: from their clean clothes, ethnic mix, and the sentient jeep idling nearby, Cooper guessed they were researchers or expat managers. They were doing something with the trees, rigging up monitors, breaking branches, cutting saplings.

Kursk burst in on them with a roar, still signaling to his driver to fire.

The team scattered, leaping into the jeep or dashing into the undergrowth.

Kursk pursued the jeep for a while, then gave up. Trundled slowly along the roadside at patrolling pace.

Cooper processed the incident.

Finally, he said, “I think we need to talk about what’s an enemy.”

Maybe the tank was defending the village. If that were true, foreign R&D teams might seem like a threat. It was overcompensation, but within parameters.

Cooper could work with that.

“How ’bout we go back for those Reds, then?”

He wasn’t sure if the tank was going in the right direction, but he was willing to trust him. Kursk might have got a little confused about his mission, but he was a good tank.

Kursk stopped, that scenting-processing routine clearly in action again. He made a decision, trundled into the jungle.

Cooper checked the guns. Not much left. He wondered how difficult it would be to find, or make, or commission, proper ammo. Still, Kursk seemed to be getting on OK without it. The rush of battle was coming back to him, the thrill of anticipating the clash. Primordial memories of hunting trips, stalking deer in the scrubby forests with a cousin or two. But Kursk was better. Stronger. Someone he could trust.

The Reds wouldn’t stand a chance.

Kursk found his target and began a sudden downward run, putting his lights on full, the servos and the crunch of the treads and the shrieks of wildlife combining to a Wagner roar. And in the bright lights, on the monitor, Cooper could see—

An old lady.

A thin, wiry old lady, with a long blue-black braid, staring up frightened from the small fire she’d kindled.

Cooper shouted at Kursk, slammed the control board, yelled at him to stop. Pounded the hatch.

Kursk wasn’t listening.

The lady was a surprisingly fast runner, but Kursk didn’t have to go around obstacles.

At the very last minute, Cooper managed to hit the manual.

Felt a lurch as the tank hit the root system of a tree.

The tank stopped.

Cooper wrenched the hatch open, tumbled out, gasping. Saw the flicker of the long black braid receding.

Kursk was backing off.

“Oh, no you don’t, you bastard,” Cooper said. He ran after the tank, pulled at the open hatch, swung in. Switched the controls to manual. “We’re going after the Reds.”

The tank groaned in protest, tried to retake control, but Cooper held firm. “You picked up some weird notions out here,” he said. “That’s why you have a driver. To keep you straight. We’re a team.” He upshifted, hard.

Unwillingly, and still keeping a servo-straining tension on the brakes, the tank chugged out along the roadside, back to where they’d last seen the Reds.

Cooper switched to the heat-seeking vision, tracked into the jungle.

“There’s the sons of bitches,” he said. Kursk began to speed up, clearly getting back into it now.

“Attaboy!” Cooper cheered. “Go on, get them!”

The tank’s lights came on as it crashed, roaring, on the clearing where the muffled figures were gathered, training a flashlight on the awkwardly sized thing they’d been carrying.

Cooper heard shouts in indistinct Malay, saw them beginning to run.

“No, you don’t,” he said, taking control of the guns and firing. Kursk, meanwhile, was running down the others, twisting and turning with his surprising agility in the trees.

In the end there was nothing but smoke and twisted bodies, and Kursk’s blazing lights, and the hum of his engine.

Cooper wrestled with the hatch again, flung it open, pushed himself out into the clearing. Staggered a bit.

“We did it, boy,” he said to Kursk. “We got ’em.”

He went over to look at the IED. Pulled back the smoking, singed burlap.

An electric motorcycle engine.

Blinking, he pulled it all off. It was still an engine.

Backing up, his heel connected with a limp body. Mechanically, he made himself turn, look at it closely. Wound back the scarf.

Saw the face of a teenage boy. Impossibly handsome in a boy-band way, strong chin and full, parted lips, dark lashes resting on his cheek as if he was sleeping.

The boy who’d taken him to the church that afternoon.

Cooper looked at the scarf. Realized it wasn’t a revolutionary one. Wasn’t even red and black; just a faded brown-on-brown pattern.

He didn’t know what made him think it was terrorists.

Made himself look at the other bodies, torn up with gunfire.

“Kids,” he muttered. “Just kids. Working late on a project.”

He staggered back to Kursk, dropped back in, and closed the hatch. “Get us out of here,” he muttered.

The tank turned, went slowly crunching through the trees. Cooper watched the display with half an eye, slumped in the chair. Feeling sick, sick like he hadn’t done since . . .

 . . . since Kuching.

It had all gone according to plan. Kursk rolling forward, Cooper working the monitor and the guns. The lead tank tripped an IED, or possibly an actual mine, not that it really mattered, and they kept going.

And then, something hit the third tank in the line.

Lucky shot, certainly; some kind of mortar fire. Enough to blow out the guns, the driver, and most of the hardware, leaving a burning shell.

Cooper was only briefly aware of it, though, because Kursk surged into battle, picking up speed, signaling at him to use the guns. Numb, Cooper did.

Before he saw the UN flashes on the arms of the soldiers falling in front of them . . .

He pulled his hands off the triggers, hammered at the dash. Shouted at Kursk to stop. Then let go, breathed, checked the monitor, swung it around.

Saw the tanks on the advance, rolling over everyone. Rebel, government forces, UN forces.

Voices in his ear. Urging the drivers to regain control. Stop them before they got to HQ, or something just as bad. Reports of tanks attacking a supply chain, an ambulance, a rebel sniper nest.

Heard the other drivers, the surviving ones anyway, trying to report, to regain order.

Heard his own voice, begging Kursk to stop.

Cooper hit the manual, wrestled for control. Heard the voices in his ear screaming at him to abort mission and abandon tank, but no way he was going to leave Kursk.

He finally gained control, turned the tank, drove him protesting toward a green space, a small park or highway reservation or something, just a small stand of decorative palm trees and some tall grasses.

And then a sound lanced through his earphones, a tone, rising, all-encompassing, filling his head, he struggled to fight against it and remain conscious, but—

Sitting against the tank in the cool of the night, looking up at the stars and the faint glow from the agribusiness on the horizon, Cooper remembered.

“Trees,” he said. “That’s what you’re defending. It’s the trees.”

Cooper found himself thinking of all the angry articles about how the army was just there to protect the multinational agribusinesses and the palm plantations.

“Guess that’s true, hey Lori?” He glanced up at the impassive metal body.

“Maybe from your perspective, there’s not much difference between one big organic thing and another one?”

It occurred to him that he didn’t really know how the Lori thought. How he saw the world.

He wondered what would happen if he just let the Lori run free, driverless, in the jungle. More glimpses of the strange vehicle through the trees. More legends about bandits thwarted, children saved from drowning.

Huts burned to the ground. Plantation workers slaughtered.

The Lori didn’t seem to want to go anywhere right now, seemed content to just idle there with Cooper.

Cooper sat listening to the rustles and chirps of the jungle, the occasional distant sound of machinery, hiss of wheels from the road. Watching the sky get lighter.

Remembering the dogs back home. Angry, conflicted animals, with hair-trigger tempers. Beaten, punished, hurt, and yet, with that ingrown canine loyalty, unable to leave the person doing the hurting.

He’d loved his dog.

Loved her enough to give her up, if it meant she didn’t go down that same road, trusting his father despite all he did.

Then his thoughts drifted to the village. Stayed there for a long while.

Finally, Cooper got up. Opened the hatch again. Got out his driver’s utilitool, popped the screwdriver, and got to work.

Although he knew battle tanks had defensive measures they could take against this, nothing happened.

At some point, the engine shut down.

Cooper reemerged from the hatch just as the sun was approaching its zenith. He rummaged in his backpack, found a clean cloth bag. Normally, in autonomous vehicles, the intelligence is distributed throughout the processing systems, but whoever designed battle tanks was expecting them to run through body-shells pretty quickly.

Cooper walked up the road, walking toward the plantation. He’d seen an automated parcel receive-and-drop point not far from the vehicular access gate.

He chose a locker at random, put the bag with the processor in. Closed the locker.

Thought about saying something, but that seemed too much like a funeral, so he didn’t.

But he made a wish, for the Lori.

Cooper stood for a few minutes more. Trying hard to fix that moment in his mind, the yellow of the locker doors, the shafts of light through the leaves, the hum of animal life, the heat in the air.

Then Cooper turned and began his long walk back to the village.

About the Author

Fiona Moore is a London-based writer and academic whose first novel, Driving Ambition, is available from Bundoran Press. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in Asimov’s, Interzone, and Mad Scientist Journal, with reprints in Forever Magazine and Best of British SF; her story “Jolene” was shortlisted for the 2019 BSFA Award. She has co-written three stage and four audio plays and a number of guidebooks to cult TV series, as well as non-fiction articles for numerous print and online SF publications.

Drawing Lines Between the Stars

Frank Smith

Ambient lights dimmed throughout the starship. The arbitrary definition of nighttime on the Bakunawa. Buried within a confusion of workstation alerts was a flashing red distress beacon. Transitioning from mimetic, eye-sensor controls to standard, manual controls gave me a headache. I left the beacon for Captain Onome to find.

We were on our usual route home, coasting outside the belt, loaded up with a cargo of silicate rocks and water from Europa.

Captain Onome finally noticed the distress beacon and said, “Well, that’s odd.”

“The worrying kind?” I said, enjoying the feel of my feet on the floorboards as I rolled out the kinks in my shoulders. After being pressed flat against my chair for a few hours, the Baku now ran at about 1-g but would continue to lose momentum until reaching a complete stop at our distribution hub on Luna.

Our stations sat three across on the bridge. Including the captain and me, there was also Mike, with all the personality of a peeled prawn, off rotation in his cabin. The Baku’s AI bots managed our more tedious and time-consuming processes in the background.

“Hard to say,” Onome said, moving like a mantis angling its way around a leaf as she opened the comms. “We’re being hailed by a solar sail—an astronomical solar glider.”

“Ugh, I hate those,” I said. I shook up an aerosolized cocktail of tranquilizers and melatonin to come down from the last little boost of Alertec that had kept me going during the jump. During our last job, I headed down planetfall on Europa to manage a few software and hardware installations for a body hacker running on the moon’s eighty-five-hour day cycle. He wore me down to the bone. No matter where I am in ’verse, I need my eight hours, man.

“Solar glider,” Onome said into the comms, “This is Captain Onome of the transport hauler the Bakunawa. Reading you loud and clear. Over.”

We weren’t in range for live communication, creating a short delay in response. I imagined the solar sail out there in the darkness, chasing cosmic winds, following astrological currents, waiting for a message in a bottle.

“Ever been on one of those, Bex?” the cap said. My name is Bexar, pronounced “bear,” but the cap liked to call me “Bex,” which sounds like how it’s spelled. I don’t know. We have a lot of time to kill.

“Not a fan,” I said. “The stories of astronomicals wandering into transit lanes are grisly. I’ve seen the vids of what happens when a hauler smashes into one at a full jump. The astronomicals follow the byways and frontage lanes these days—but I still don’t trust them.”

An audio-only message arrived. “Bakunawa, I am requesting assistance,” said a reedy feminine voice buried in static. “My ship the Aldebaran has sustained damage from a passing comet, and I am unable to make repairs. I am on my way to meet with the flotilla for the solar opposition. Can you assist? Over.”

“Flotilla?” I said. “Solar opposition?”

“The nomads meet every few years during specific astrological positions of the stars,” Onome said. “This ship must be on its way to one of their gatherings.”

Onome expanded a holographic orrery of the solar system tracking the current position of the planets and the Baku. If Earth was a palm-sized rock, the solar sail was a grain of sand. Onome plucked the grain of sand away from the orrery, expanded it, and turned it over so we could get a look at its fat body and thin solar wings. Nothing had smashed into the thing, which was good.

We ran models of a rescue mission with the navigational AI.

“At our current trajectory, we’ll pass each other in a few hours. What do you think, Bex?”

“Rules of the road, right,” I said. “Pull the ship in before anyone gets hurt.”

I shook off my desire for a nap with another Alertec, as well as a GABA supplement to keep my spirits up, chased with Echinacea.

Onome responded to the astronomical: “Copy that, Aldebaran. I’m transmitting coordinates for pickup. Based on our current positions, we can pull you into orbit with the Bakunawa and bring you in. I’m starting a countdown and expect we’ll sync up just under 0300 hours from now. Over.”

“Careful on those time commitments, Cap,” I said, strapping into my station.

Starship time is weird. Somehow moving between our outer-Earth outpost and one of the space stations beyond the belt, days and weeks get lost. Everyone’s happy when we’re early and pissed when we’re late. On the Baku, we’re always rumbling along the same transit lanes between the same rocks—and, shit, I don’t know where the lost time goes. Maybe I’ll get it back in the end.

And now we’d created a time commitment for ourselves. A job requiring a bit of precision.

All we could do was refine the rescue model and wait. The hard work would fall on the nomad. Hopefully time would be on all our sides. And like I said, starship time is weird.

Space is really just a bunch of stuff circling bigger stuff in 3-D. So that informed our idea with the astronomical. Our trajectory was fixed—a long orbit around Jupiter and Earth. The astronomical could move around a bit more, and if the pilot was halfway decent, drift right up to our ship and catch an orbit around us.

The right timing.

A little luck.

That was the plan anyway.

Mike joined us on the bridge to help with the job, though it would have been better if he was out on the hull. “Man, I just don’t feel like dragging my ass into an EVA suit today,” he said, poking at the rescue mission model on my screen.

“Your plan looks all right,” he added. “I’ll fix a few things.”

I wiped the screen with my sleeve after he’d tucked himself into his station. The model was fine, and all Mike did was move a few things around and put them back where they were.

“Whatever you two are going to do, do it fast,” Onome said.

“Why are we doing this again, Cap?” Mike said.

“The ship asked for help.”

“Everybody needs something. What if it’s a scam?”

While I thought Mike had a decent point, I didn’t think voicing my agreement was in the captain’s best interests.

“I have faith in all of us to handle the unexpected,” Onome said.

Mike eyeballed me and shook his head. I gave him the finger.

As it came into view, the astronomical called to mind the boats our seafaring ancestors piloted across Earth oceans. With its patched-together hull, the ship was a mishmash of steel alloys and chrome, pitted by interstellar dust and cosmic radiation. Piloting that thing must have been lonely.

“She’s gonna miss us,” Onome said.

We were in real-time, chitter-chatter range. The captain hailed the hitchhiker: “Fold your wings and slow your engines now, Aldebaran.”

Silver sails folded and retracted against the small ship’s hull. As it came up on the low point of the Baku’s orbit, bursts of gas from its aerobrakes slowed the craft. Shaking like mad, the astronomical created enough drag to fall into an elongated orbit with us.

“The ship’s too fragile to match our speed,” Onome said.

Mike grabbed at the solar sail with the robotic arms we use to load and unload cargo.

“Missed, dammit,” he said.

“We won’t get another chance,” Onome said.

The AI spat out a bunch of recommendations, but none made sense in the heat of the moment. Though I trust the bots to keep us from hitting any of the big rocks we’ve forgotten about because we’ve been popping Alertec for three or four days straight, there are still jobs only humans can do.

I switched to the workstation’s manual controls. Working two joysticks, I maneuvered the arms wide and brought them in slow—the arms were on a track that could rotate around the hull of the bulbous and birdlike Baku—timing it so the astronomical would pass on its next rotation through the arms while they were wide open. I snagged the ship. Hooks at the ends of the arms created a magnetic seal against the astronomical’s fragile hull, tethering us together.

Here was the Baku, the biggest rock around, and here was the astronomical, circling around us as we pulled the ship in closer.

“Slow and steady,” Onome said.

I dragged the astronomical up to the cargo hold and locked the ship in place with the Baku. We extended a docking module, creating an airlock between us.

“Let’s meet our new passenger,” Onome said, her boots clunking across the floorboards.

I took a beta-Sitosterol to come down from the stress, as well as my daily multivitamin. “Sure,” I said, transferring controls back to the AI.

Mike slumped in his chair. He was the last to leave.

Traversing the Baku’s interior decks was like one of those children’s puzzles where you guide a metal ball through a maze. When you’re weightless, you coast seamlessly along a series of platforms set on top of each other connected by one continuous corridor. Under gravity, it’s a downhill trudge to the cargo hold and a trudge uphill to the bridge.

Onome and I clomped down the corridor. I paused at the door to the cargo hold to straighten my jumpsuit. The captain insisted we maintain a daily exercise regimen to keep bone and muscle strength up, and while I did my best, the jumpsuit accentuated my gut.

“Suck it in, Bex,” Onome said.

“It’s not too late for me to hit up the gun safe,” Mike said.

The Baku is supplied with a small number of Gauss guns—service revolvers and a rifle. I guess in the event we’re attacked by a xenomorph we’ll be able to forestall the inevitable by three or four extra minutes. In his downtime, Mike likes to clean all the guns and dream about shooting a pirate. I’m afraid of pirates, too, but unlike Mike, I know that if the shit went down, I’d be the guy offering to make coffee while they pilfer our cargo hold. Or I’d be dead. First to die in a pirate invasion. First to be eaten during a zombie infestation. First to be impregnated by a xenomorph. This guy right here.

“Save it,” Onome said. “Here she comes.”

We greeted our guest.

The hitchhiker was like an evolved idea of humanity. Her face and hair were streaked with a blue clay that smelled like earth and exotic oils. She wore a gray poncho that hung off her shoulders and a standard-issue flight jumpsuit, weathered by hard work.

Onome shaped her hands into a triangle formed by her thumbs and forefingers. She pushed the triangle away from her heart toward our guest. Captains always seem to know this kinda junk. Unsure what it meant, I repeated the movement. The hitchhiker clenched her right hand into a fist with the tip of her thumb protruding out between her index and middle finger. Holding her fist against her heart chakra, she nodded, never letting her dark eyes off us.

“Welcome to the Bakunawa,” Onome said, introducing us.

Our hitchhiker said her name was Adena. “I was on my way to join my family for the opposition of Earth and Mars when I passed too close to a comet and one of my solar collectors started malfunctioning,” she said, breathing hard. Adena clutched the handrails to stay upright. Astronomical solar gliders are too small to grab significant Gs, so you’re just out there—slow and meandering, weightless inside a tin can. The Baku was early in its deceleration sequence. Being near Earth-standard gravity must have been beating the shit out of her. She didn’t complain.

“We can assist with repairs,” Onome said.

“I don’t want to be any trouble. I can manage on my own,” Adena said. “I just need a safe place to dock.”

“It’s no trouble,” Onome said. “Bex is one of the best engineers in the system.”

“If the problem is with one of your solar collectors,” I said, nudging around Mike, “chances are it’s the lines running from the sails to your batteries. I can take a look and print up replacement parts on my next shift. These are basic maintenance tasks you should really be on top of yourself, though.”

“What about a full diagnostic there, Bex?” Mike said.

“It’d take a few hours,” I said. “The astronomical is pretty beat up, so there’s probably a thousand different problems.”

“Yeah, but a full diagnostic will tell you what to prioritize,” Mike said. “Problems tend to be holistic.”

“I’d rather hit the obvious ones and get this thing space-worthy quick.”

“A full diagnostic, chief,” Onome said. “If it takes a few hours, best to start on now.”

“Right,” I said, retreating into the pointlessness of my rank. “I’ll have the Baku’s AI run a full diagnostic.”

Adena pressed her fist against her heart chakra and nodded. “My ship is in your capable hands,” she said.

Onome, desperate for a conversation with anyone other than me or Mike, clomped away, chatting with a blissed-out Adena, holding her arm for support. Personally, I don’t know if I’d be so trusting of a stranger fixing my ship. I’d also keep my rig in better repair.

Before I could enlist his help, Mike saluted me and took off for the bridge.

My eyes twitched. I wanted to crash out in my bunk.

Patchouli scented the corridor. Adena had left a touchscreen control panel on the hatch of her astronomical unlocked. I used my reckoner, a handheld computer, to do a quick handshake and sync with the astronomical’s diagnostic tools. The astronomical ran ancient software with a UI I hadn’t seen since I was an apprentice. I asked the Baku’s AI to push out software updates.

There was a little strangeness in the oxygen recyclers, which I dismissed in the moment, focusing instead on the solar battery system. All things in time.

I inhaled another dose of Alertec with a chaser of gentian root to calm my eye spasms, and I did my job because even if it’s a shit job that’s the job you do.

After a long shift, gardening settles my mind. While the Baku’s AI automated the initial repair sequence I’d programmed, I hunkered down to pull some carrots in the biome where we grow produce in soil collected from Earth. Well, the whole ship is a biome, if you think about it. But the original starship engineers decided our gardens, arboretums, or green spaces were the ship’s “biomes” and the other areas on our ships were work or living spaces.

Each carrot was a thumb-sized knob of expensive water, sugars, proteins, and fibers grown in soil collected from Earth. I chucked each nubbin into a bucket to be rinsed off, packed into a compostable container, and delivered to the galley. The captain lent a hand in our little garden biome when it occurred to her, and Mike, who only ate stuff formed out of plankton paste, never did.

We grow fruits and veggies, aloe vera, sansevierias and other oxygen-cleansing ferns, flowers, legumes and similar nitrogen-fixing plants. And we have a few live oak trees planted in a soil bed I designed that allows the tree’s root system to spread beneath the floorboards of the biome. On Earth, live oaks seem to defy gravity with their heavy, horizontal branches, and it was no different on our ship where tree branches embraced the room.

I rustled around the base of the largest live oak like a sleepy elemental woodland spirit, ready to take a well-deserved nap, when I discovered the hitchhiker resting against a tree trunk, legs splayed out in front of her body. She’d been so quiet.

“Am I in your spot?” Adena said. Removing her cap, silvery braids spilled around her face. “Onome said it was okay for me to be here.”

“Yeah, it’s a good spot.”

“I haven’t seen anything like this in years,” she said. “It’s very peaceful.”

Adena had a pretty chill vibe. The blue clay had stained most of her skin turquoise, which complemented her dark purple eyes. You can get purple contacts, but these were real. Like, a genetic mod, for sure. Mellow aura. Visionary. Healing. Super mystical. If Adena ever left her zero gravity existence permanently, her body would crack like an egg.

“Things with your ship are coming along,” I said. “My hunch about the lines running from your solar collectors was right. Not that I’m bragging. I’ve seen it all by now. You’ve probably experienced a lot of loss for a while. We’re printing replacement parts.”

“It’s very kind of you to share your resources.”

“We don’t have much,” I said. “But we share what we can. That’s the code of the road.”

“If there’s anything I can do, please let me know.”

“I am wondering about the gathering. The captain mentioned an opposition. I’m curious.”

“An opposition between Earth, Mars, and the Sun occurs around about every two years. Due to all of their orbits, some oppositions bring them closer than others. The coming perihelic opposition is the closest the planets will have ever been in two hundred and eighty-four years—for the largest gathering of solar gliders ever. We’ll worship together at a point beyond Mars. The alignment of the planets with the Sun creates a cone of healing—we’re inside the cone now. Can you feel it?”

“I want to, but I don’t think I know how,” I said. Heading into hour seventy-ninety-twelve of awaked-ness, I wasn’t experiencing anything healthy or conical. I’d been running the same route a long time, and I was sensitive enough in that moment, safe beneath the branches of the live oak, to recognize how physically and emotionally worn out I was, sure, but I was also tired all the time; tired of the life I’d been leading, and I wanted to change. I’d washed out years ago. Anyway. That’s some angst to drop on a friendly stranger.

“Have you visited my ship?” Adena said, reading my aura.

“Only as far as the airlock.”

“I’ll give you the tour,” she said, hooking her arm through mine.

Repair drones circled the exterior of Adena’s ship. Much of the golden-brown paint on the ship’s hull had been scraped away, revealing gray chrome panels, scuffs from docking clamps, and pounded-out dents.

A whoosh of strange air hit me in the face as I opened the airlock—a familiar, chemical smell, soon consumed by the oils Adena favored. I let it go. By the end of a long haul, the Baku’s air can take on the tang of halitosis, too.

Adena said she’d named her solar glider astronomical the Aldebaran, after the red dwarf star that followed after the Pleiades. “I follow where the stars lead,” she said.

That kinda talk usually turned me right off. Hanging out with this floating blue woman in her solar-powered starship that smelled of Nag Champa and sweat, my third eye was open.

The Aldebaran was cramped yet tidy. Beyond the airlock was a small utility room, odds and ends strapped to the walls. The watering system clucked on in a biome with shelves and glow lights, overflowing with whatnots. Beads of water glimmered weightless in the air.

Adena’s cabin was across the hall. The top bunk was unmade with a heavy blanket strapped to a mattress. Out of respect, I only gave the room a glance.

At the end of the corridor was the cockpit, a narrow space with two jump chairs and an expansive view of the stars. The bridge of the Baku was fully enclosed with all of its navigational systems automated when not being operated by Mike, smearing his greasy fingerprints on the screens.

The cosmos through an opened shield viewer set off a dormant case of agoraphobia in me. I know that sounds strange. I’ve spent most of my life on a starship. Even on Earth, how often do you get an opportunity to look out on a view of nothing and everything at the same time?

“Makes you feel small,” Adena said, between breaths. “During the opposition, we’ll gather our ships and commune with each other. We’ll be one large community. I miss that.”

Adena settled into her chair.

I moved a book from the seat to join her in the copilot’s station. “Is this a logbook?” I said.

“Everything is in there.”

My eyes crossed as I thumbed through the pages.

Air recyclers whooshed and clunked as repair drones clanked against the hull.

A twinkling star.

Adena said it was Aldebaran.

There and here.

Sure, any star can be anything you want.

If there are lifeforms living near it maybe they have their own name for their Sun.

I closed my eyes and drifted asleep.

“Bex.”

An oxygen mask hugged my mouth and chin. I was on the Baku, strapped into a medical station. My jumpsuit was unzipped to my waist, gizmos plugged against my chest. An IV in my right arm kept me from bending it at the elbow. The last thing I remembered was a sweet, narcoleptic sensation washing over me. I’d been inside the deep sleep, the stuff beyond REM and dreams where our minds do the heavy work of maintaining and negotiating our existence.

“Where’s Adena?” I said, my tongue too stiff to form the words clearly. A great rumbling in my chest exploded, and I coughed hard exhalations of air.

Adena’s body rested in the med station next to me. Straps held her body against the cushions. Adena’s purple eyes were fixed at a point beyond consciousness. The captain closed them. Flakes of blue clay danced around her face. Her bunched-up poncho floated in a corner of the room before crumbling against the floor. We were deep into the deceleration cycle now.

I’d been dead for three minutes.

The captain explained what she knew. The diagnostic of the Aldebaran found that the ship’s atmosphere system was failing; that an excess of carbon monoxide, entering via a small series of leaks in different systems, had mixed with the oxygen.

“You know how common CO is in space, Bex,” Mike said. His fat nose sucked in all of the blood in his body. A purple vein in his bald head pulsed. “Why didn’t you check the diagnostic before boarding the ship?”

“How long was I asleep, Cap?” I didn’t answer to Mike.

“I don’t know,” Onome said, her face a furrowed mess of lines. “It wasn’t until an alert went off on the Baku that there was a CO leak that we thought to look for you. We followed it to the airlock, which was open to the Aldebaran. That’s how we saved your life, Bex.”

The logbook from the Aldebaran was still in my hands. Tears danced in the air around my face, catching the light, sparkling with the bokeh of distant stars.

In the time that followed, I went over the Baku’s logs, trying to justify my mistake.

I couldn’t.

The diagnostic turned up the interstellar CO during its initial scan, and I’d overridden the AI to put off cleaning the oxygen recyclers and atmosphere system until after the solar batteries were repaired. CO is very common in space; Mike was correct on that point. I must have taken it for granted because there was no reason why the repairs couldn’t have run in parallel. It was a dumb, random mistake. One I don’t think I would have allowed to happen if I’d been keeping my shit together.

Adena had been breathing in small amounts of CO for days if not weeks. I could have fixed it without any effort or consequence. I failed her.

Not wanting to prolong the investigation, I laid it all bare in the incident report, breaking everything down for thorough examination. I produced a strong, competent report and took ownership of my failures, which is what you do. But I still didn’t expect it to end my career.

Onome waited to visit until after she’d heard back from corporate. Humiliated and depressed, I hadn’t left my cabin since Adena died. Mike left me alone, and I don’t think it was done out of empathy. Maybe it scared him. The fragility of starship life. I like to think that if the situation were reversed, I’d have reached out to him. I like to think that.

“Bex, I have bad news,” Onome said.

“I’m fired, aren’t I?”

Onome tried to hold my hand. “We’re calling it an early retirement. But effective immediately, you are relieved of your duties.”

“Is that it then for the investigation?”

“We have to be self-sufficient out here, and the insurance adjusters use an algorithm in these cases to determine risk. Adena wasn’t a member of our crew, and to the best of anyone’s knowledge, she wasn’t registered to her ship or with the space agencies or guilds. Her ship was compromised already, and in trying to help her with repairs, you almost died with her. Not to sound cold—we work in a very high-risk environment. You produced a very thorough, very honest report. That went a long way in your favor.”

“So you’re saying I should be grateful my career is over?”

“You’re still alive. I’m sorry, Bex. I share a bit of the responsibility for what happened,” she said. “I should have forced you to go off duty. You were way overtime—that’s on me to monitor.”

“What did they hit you with?”

“Don’t worry about me,” Onome said.

“If we share any of this responsibility, why am I the one out on his ass?”

“Bex. I spoke up for you.”

“I’m sure you did.”

“I really tried to keep you with us. You have more years on this ship than anyone, but . . . ”

“Do you still trust me?”

Onome squeezed my shoulder. “We’ve got a few weeks before we get back to the station. I’ll set up counseling when you return to Earth. For now, the worst of it is over.”

“Sure,” I said.

I didn’t want to return to Earth, where I’d have to rehash why I’d been forced to retire for the rest of my life. Even with the pension, I’d need to make ends meet. What happens when no one trusts you to do the only job you know how to do? What happens when you don’t trust yourself?

Going home wasn’t an option.

I took a quarter dose of Alertec with a new cocktail of supplements I’d started on during my recovery. Resveratrol for my immune system; phosphatidylcholine to help repair the cellular damage from, well, dying; ubiquinol to charge up my regenerating cells; GABA to avoid the brain farts; melatonin so I knew when to sleep; and a bunch of other stuff to detox from the CO poison and antibiotics, as well as my regular dosage of vitamins and nutraceuticals.

And I read Adena’s logbook.

The book was an analog history of the Aldebaran, documenting the ship’s progress as it drifted through the cosmos: a physical, leather-bound book object, its pages filled with mileage and fuel ratios, supply inventories, and the ship’s daily position.

Adena had drawn lines around the stars where she’d traveled, forming words that she shaped like how living without gravity had shaped her body. Each letter flowed and curled, looped and dashed. The straightforward journaling of facts and figures transcended the page, creating a shape of her life that made sense to me. The ship drifted under the power of solar radiation, yes, but it was never lost in space. Adena knew where she was going, even when she had no urgency to be anywhere. She had been on her way to the gathering for years, patiently channeling the orbit of the Aldebaran to go where it needed to be. She lived her life in the time between destinations.

The kind of time I misplaced.

Burials in space are as dramatic as you want them to be. Either your last will requests your body be fired out to the depths or you’re fed to the ship’s recycler system to be broken down into raw elements, usable to the ship’s needs.

With the magnetic locks in her boots keeping our feet pressed against the floorboards, Onome met me under the flat, sterile lights of the medbay. We’d pass Mars soon. I hadn’t asked Onome to meet me so much as demanded. We needed to decide what to do with Adena’s body—we two who were responsible.

Adena was stored in a sealed capsule, a coffin. I’d moved the capsule to the center of the medbay, near the station where I’d recovered.

“What can I help you with, Bex?” Onome said.

“Well,” I said, placing my hands on the cold metal container. “I’ve searched the Aldebaran’s logs for a will, and I’m almost certain Adena didn’t leave one. I can’t track down any relations back on Earth, either. I don’t know what she would have wanted done with her . . . her remains.”

“I want to be respectful, of course,” Onome said. “What are your feelings?”

“It’s not too late for her. We’re still on the right course. I’ve run the calculations.”

“I’m not following you.”

“The Aldebaran is clean. It’s good. Fully repaired. If I leave tomorrow, I can make it to the gathering. The solar sail nomads will know what Adena would have wanted—what’s respectful to her wishes.”

“I don’t know that I can let you take the Aldebaran. Technically, it might be owned by the corporation now,” Onome said. “There’s also your pension to consider. It’s all yours to lose right now, chief.”

“This is my responsibility.”

“It doesn’t have to be. Stop right now and you can walk away with everything you’ve worked for all these years.”

“Cap, if I go home, even with my pension, I’m going to be working on a loading dock until I drop dead. If I could afford to live on Earth, I never would have left. It’s why we’re up here instead of down there. I’m not asking for your help or your permission. All I need is for you to look away for a little bit.”

“Bex, you’re making this so much more difficult.”

“No, it’s so simple. We fix a lot of problems this way. If we were going to say some words over her, we would have done that by now. Instead, we’re treating Adena like cargo. You spoke to her, too, Cap. You knew her as well as I did, which is not at all, sure, but you were with her when she was still alive. What does that mean to you? Things happen for a reason. Adena understood that. When was the last time you actually looked at the stars outside this ship?”

“We’re not having this conversation,” Onome said.

“I think we are having this conversation.”

“Bex, no, this conversation didn’t happen.”

Captain Onome created a triangle with her thumbs and forefinger. She pushed the triangle away from her chest, toward me. I remembered Adena and clenched my right hand into a fist with the tip of my thumb extending from between my index and middle fingers—catching the energy the captain sent me.

All eyes were elsewhere.

If you’ve done a good job, your garden will live on without you.

Adena’s body rested in the now-empty biome of the Aldebaran, along with a collection of plants and seeds I’d harvested from the Baku, and a live oak cutting. I’d start a new garden. Until then, Adena could be amongst nature or something like it.

During repairs, I’d flushed the solar glider’s entire atmosphere system. Upgraded all of the ship’s software, starting from its factory settings. I repaired the hull. Fixed the solar sails and batteries. I made the ship new. I made it mine. And now it was time to go.

After its overhaul, the Aldebaran’s OS andUI were simplified versions of the Baku’s systems. As I settled into some familiar routines onboard my new home, I kept my eyes on the controls instead of the stars outside the cockpit.

My nerves getting the better of me, I turned the controls over to the ship for the launch. When the countdown clock hit zero, the astronomical solar glider—my solar sail—refused to detach from the Baku’s airlock.

We were stuck. The Baku refused to cut us loose.

I unstrapped from my jump chair and pulled my weightless body through the small craft back to the Baku.

Goddamn Mike was waiting for me. He’d engaged the manual override.

Mike’s smug, ruddy face filled the viewer between our airlocks. He was geared up for an armed insurrection, like a military cosplayer. I gave the glass between us a good pounding. Mike didn’t flinch.

The comm clicked on: “Can’t let you steal company property, chief,” Mike said.

“What did I ever do you, Mike?” I said.

“It’s what you could have done,” he said. “Come on out and we can talk about it.”

I closed the viewer and killed the comms. Engaged the door seals on the Aldebaran. This was not good.

Time was running out. For the Aldebaran to use the Baku’s orbital velocity and spin out toward the solar glider gathering, I needed to get a move on like now. Or that’s what I thought. Starship time, like I said, is weird.

My reckoner was still connected to both ships’ systems. Back in the cockpit of the Aldebaran, I set to work.Visualizations of the Baku’s systems blipped up from the face of my reckoner. As they did, I plucked the necessary system visualizations and tossed them at the Aldebaran’s control panel. When I had everything I needed, I hailed the Baku.

“Bex, what’s going on?” Onome said, her voice shaky.

“Ask Mike,” I said. “I thought we had a deal.”

“I guess neither of us thought to loop Mike in. What are you doing, Bex? We have systems prepped for a space walk?”

“Yeah, I’m going up top to unlock all the clamps and shit.”

Gotta love a good EVA suit, and the EVA suits on the Aldebaran were forgiving to my physique. The nylon and spandex material, reinforced with nickel-titanium shape alloys, hugged the bod, while providing protection from the cold, radioactive, vacuum of space.

“Bex, you haven’t done a space walk in years.”

“I used to do this kind of thing all the time, Cap. I’ve got my reckoner synced with the Baku and the Aldebaran. This’ll be a cinch.”

“We’re still decelerating, Bex! You could be thrown from the hull before you can get back inside your ship. I’m ordering you back to the Baku. Mike can help you.”

“No, I can’t go back. Not now,” I said. “Do you trust me?” I floated near a maintenance hatch, reckoner ready to pop the lid on this thing. I took an Alertec cut with B12 and creatine.

Static blasted through the comms for a precious stretch of time.

Clunks and clanks banged around the outside of the Aldebaran as the Baku released the solar glider astronomical from its grasp. My ship fell free, cast off from the Baku, tumbling away.

The captain said, “Bex, listen—”

Strapping into my station, I killed the comms, as well as the connection between my reckoner and the Baku, giving up all of my control, and probably any chance of collecting on my pension, too.

The Baku turned its back to me, and I turned my back on it.

Time to go. Time to transcend.

Banking left, I folded forward in my jump chair to adjust the navigation controls. Silver Mylar solar-collecting sails extended from the glider. Solar photons goosed the ship’s sail, while the solar cells on the astronomical’s hull soaked up the necessary energy to keep the batteries full and the air recyclers running at one hundred percent purity. I adjusted the course while I could. Ultimately, the ship had to find its own way.

I updated the logbook. The book was Adena’s will. She’d want to continue her journey to the end.

Some of the time I’d lost came back. Weird how that works.

Beyond the curvature of Mars, deep in the eclipsing shadow of the Sun, paper lanterns floated toward the heavens. The flotilla of solar sails twinkled, greeting me with quiet bursts of light. Beyond the rafts, Earth hid behind Mars’ eccentric orbit.

We moved into alignment, following the off-beaten paths, worshipping the planets.

About the Author

Frank Smith is a writer living in Austin, Texas where he maintains a love-hate relationship with agave plants. He has an MFA in creative writing from the New School and is a member of SFWA. His stories have appeared in Asimov’s and Analog, as well as other fine publications. You can find him at frank-smith.com and follow his toy photography on Instagram at @frankphotowerks.

The Plague

Yan Leisheng, translated by Andy Dudak

I knew I was mad. It had to be so. No one would volunteer to do what I did. I wore a biohazard suit every day, sealed tight from head to foot, and it didn’t bother me at all. Actually, I was quite at ease suited up. A normal person wouldn’t be so calm. No sane person, even someone fated to die, would be willing to do what I did. And yet, every day I dumped truckloads of corpses, like so much garbage, into the incinerator. Furthermore, I took a certain delight in it.

I knew I was a madman.

It’s hard to say when the Plague began to spread.

When the first cases were announced, people didn’t comprehend the gravity of the situation. Some foolish biologists even celebrated. They’d finally discovered a new form of life. The virus that gave rise to the Plague was indeed novel, with silicon, rather than carbon, bonding with hydrogen and oxygen in molecular chains.

All was well during the early stage of infection, apart from a slight stiffness in the joints. But two weeks in, the victim was suddenly unable to move. The skin became silicon dioxide—silica, stone. But the victim was not dead. The eyes could still blink and move. The victim could still force their body to stir, but the skin would crack like wax. I’ve seen many petrified corpses with jagged, bloodstained flesh. Soon after the skin, the internal organs began to turn. By week six, the body was thoroughly petrified. In other words, it took forty days or so for a living person to become a stone statue.

No one knew how a virus like this could come into being. Antivirals and other pharmaceuticals were only effective against viruses made of protein. They were useless against our silicon-based Plague.

Scarier still, it was highly infectious. Just breathing air could infect you, and in the early stages, because there were no symptoms, it was nearly impossible to detect. You could emerge from a crowd and already be infected, doomed.

The only effective medicine was alcohol.

It could postpone viral activity, but only bought you a week at best—even if you soaked yourself in it. Scientists said petrification resulted from infection by-products—inactive virus and viral debris—accumulating in cells. Alcohol didn’t kill the virus, but rather kept it active. So, alcohol was not a medicine per se, but more like a narcotic. In layman’s terms, keeping viruses active meant they “lived” longer, raising the level of active virus in the body. Thus, there would eventually be more infection by-product, and the body would petrify faster in the terminal stage.

Regardless, people believed alcohol was some kind of miracle drug. Consumption went up exponentially.

Of course, the Bureau of Statistics had been shuttered. The world no longer had countries as such. In the early days, some nations had not yet detected the virus, by whatever chance of fate. These took pleasure in the misfortune of infected countries, maligning them, even accusing them of creating the Plague. When the virus reached these accuser nations, they aggressively denounced the containment measures of their rivals, claiming not enough had been done. But when the Plague attained the force of a prairie fire, people no longer wasted breath on superfluous words. Ideologies didn’t matter. State systems and national prestige didn’t matter. Before the Plague, everyone was equal.

Under these circumstances, a great, global harmony formed, an ideal Confucian society, marvelous to behold.

The Emergency Management Institution was established. And for this sort of emergency, there was only one countermeasure: isolate the infected and issue protective gear to the uninfected. Luckily, this virus could not pass through a graphite filter, otherwise humanity would have nowhere to hide.

When someone was discovered to be infected, their suit was immediately seized. A carrier was tantamount to a dangerous beast of prey, as far as uninfected humanity was concerned. The infected were quickly forsaken, excluded and exiled. The wealthy binge drank, regardless of their ability to handle liquor. Everywhere, the poor robbed and looted. They didn’t really need to, since two of three residences were already abandoned. These could be entered at leisure, the property within used as one pleased.

My duty was dealing with the aftermath. To put it bluntly, I traveled around and collected stone statue corpses and transported them to municipal outskirts for burning. There was no pharmaceutical solution, so this was all we could do to wipe out the virus. Such work increased my risk of exposure, but more terribly, those we gathered were, as a rule, not yet fully petrified. Pitching these into the crematory oven, there often followed a heartrending scream. Two of my coworkers killed themselves, unable to bear the censure of conscience.

It was not pleasant work, but somehow we got it done.

I say I was mad because I did not fear their bloodcurdling screams. On the contrary, every time I threw a statue in the fire, I yearned for a desperate cry. After all, not all statues sing at sunrise like the Colossi of Memnon.

That day, I sped through deserted streets in my truck, having collected just seven corpses, none of them knowing they could still scream as they died in the oven. When I pulled up to a kindergarten, an unmasked man carrying a bundle of cloth ran out.

The virus acted on children faster due to their smaller size, so there’d been no children for some time. But there was no white sign on the building, which would’ve meant “unoccupied,” and no red sign signaling “infected within,” so that meant there could be people in there—uninfected, normal people.

It was legal for the infected to loot unoccupied residences. Perhaps this kindergarten was vacant, but without the white sign, the fleeing man was technically a criminal. I was warranted to summarily execute him.

I jumped out of the truck and drew my gun. “Halt!”

He froze, watching me, clutching a heap of women’s clothing.

“This is not an unoccupied domicile,” I said. “You’ve violated Article Eight of the Emergency Laws, and the penalty is death.”

His face twisted stiffly with desperation. Still capable of such expression, he would be a moving, shedding viral vector for another week at least. “I didn’t know,” he said. “I’m new to the area.”

“You don’t need to explain yourself. Just accept the penalty.”

His face contorted further, by twitching degrees. Obscenities poured from his mouth.

I fired. His skull detonated, painting radial gore on the wall behind. His body, now a true corpse, fell backward. Article 8 of the Emergency Laws stated that any infected person entering a residence of the uninfected, for whatever reason, was to be executed on sight. No exceptions.

The uninfected had supported this inhumane law overwhelmingly, and so it passed.

I entered the kindergarten.

Life and death were trifles in those days. I’d just killed someone, and my heart hadn’t skipped a beat. My mind was on the job. The man had been in here and the residents, if any, might already be dead. Or they were infected. Either way, I had to know.

“Hello? Anyone?”

I found a long, awkward child’s painting in a classroom, titled “My Family.” In those painted scenes of exaggerated, ridiculous figures, the innocence of adorable children was discernible. The brushstrokes were clumsy, but at least the people depicted were healthy, free of infection.

I found no one in the kindergarten. There were simple character lessons on a blackboard, not erased, but no sign of recent human presence. Perhaps this really was an uninhabited dwelling, and I had wrongly executed that man. But I felt no trace of guilt. He had merely died a few weeks early, nothing more.

I went through several more classrooms. Behind was a row of dorm rooms, but no people. The place was uninhabited, apparently. I still had several signs in my truck. I would nail up a white one at the gate.

Thinking to leave, I heard something stir beneath the corridor.

I didn’t know what could be down there but a utility room. Certainly not people. But what had I heard? There were no rats anymore. They’d all petrified before humans, due to their size. Besides us, only elephants remained in the world, the longest-lived of the infected.

I found a basement. I pushed the door but it didn’t budge. I retreated a step and kicked, and it came open with a bang.

Down there was a toy workshop.

At least it seemed so, since there were no less than thirty stone figures of children in all sorts of postures, even one seated on a chamber pot. All of them petrified.

I smiled bitterly. Each child would weigh close to 60 jin, and thirty of them together would be at least 1800 jin. This would be some real physical labor. I lifted a boy who still grasped a toy car and got him on my shoulder, preparing to leave the basement.

“You must not take him.”

Someone emerged from a well-hidden door, a woman in a thick biohazard suit.

“So, there’s someone here after all,” I said. “Why were you hiding?”

She glared at me from behind her mask, as though to penetrate the base shamelessness she read on my face. “You’re a Crow?” she asked, unimpressed.

I couldn’t restrain a bitter laugh. “Crow” was the vulgar name common people gave us. Our biohazard suits were black instead of the normal white, and we were harbingers of death, like crows.

“Some would say.”

“And you mean to take them away?”

I looked at the statue in my hands, so much like a big toy figurine. “They are not handicrafts, after all.”

“And you’ll have them burned?”

“Got a better idea? By all means, contact Emergency Management, phone number zero one zero, eight nine four.”

“I won’t have this conversation with you,” she said, growing impatient, “and you’ll not have these children.”

“Look Miss, let’s not get sentimental. The ancients said, ‘Amputate the poisoned hand to save warrior.’ That’s the principle here. They’re lifeless, but as dangerous as time bombs. And you’re hiding them here. How can you ensure you won’t get infected?”

“You’re wrong,” she said indignantly. “They’re not dead.”

This was laughable. I’d come across many of these sentimentalists. If they had been allowed to create unrest, humanity’s extinction would have been nigh. “A person becomes a stone statue,” I said, “and you think they’re not dead?”

“Correct. They are not dead, Crow, not at all. They’ve merely become another form of life. We humans don’t have much in the way of cellulose in our bodies, do we? But we cannot suppose plants, made overwhelmingly of cellulose, are not alive.”

My temper rose. Was she really so impervious to reason? The government authorized us to use extreme measures when dealing with purposeful troublemakers, but I really didn’t want to draw my gun. “Miss, you say they’re alive, but where is their life activity? Plants cannot move, but they grow.”

“They don’t seem to move,” she said, “because they’ve become this new form of life, sensing time differently from us. A second for them might take one of our days, or months or years. We cannot deprive them of the right to exist because they move slow.”

I laughed. “Miss, scientists have certified that the petrified are no longer alive. They’re no different than statuary in a park. And if you want to become a Louvre exhibit, it’s all too easy.”

“They’re liars!” she said, taking my hand. “Come see. I’ll prove it to you.”

Through our gloves, I felt her hand, slender yet oddly hard. Surprised, I said, “You’re infected?”

She forced a brief smile. “Two days now. Judging by average infection speed, I have about five days, so you must come and see.”

She wanted me to have a closer look at the girl sitting on the chamber pot. The child’s expression was familiar to me, a universally human expression, that of anyone, young or old, post-defecation. She was lifting her skirt, and I saw now that her bottom was not quite touching the pot.

“This child has been petrified two years,” the woman said. “Two years ago, not yet fully petrified, she sat on this chamber pot. Yet look at her today. What would you say she means to do?”

“God, she’s standing up!”

Eyes on the girl, the woman said, “That’s right. She knows she’s done her number two, and she knows she should stand. It’s just that she has slowed down, drastically. From her perspective, these past two years might just be a moment on a chamber pot. I doubt she even knows what has happened around her. We move so fast relative to her I doubt she sees us clearly. Throw her in the oven and she’ll be gone before the pain reaches her brain, granted, but it’s still murder. So tell me, are you ready to commit murder?”

I felt dizzy. I’d been burning about two hundred people a day. By that reckoning, I’d murdered one hundred and forty thousand people in just over two years.

Perhaps she was lying, but it was hard to convince myself of this. Petrification wasn’t quick as lightning. The boundary time between mobility and immobility was about thirty minutes. I’d seen many people force themselves to move during those thirty minutes, causing their original skin to crack. This little girl could not have maintained her just-off-the-pot, bottom-up position for thirty minutes, motionless. She would have moved. Her flesh would have split. It was smooth now, like a mirror. She must have risen after petrifying.

But how could I believe a person turned to stone may still think, still move, and do these things thousands or millions of times slower than flesh and blood? It was hard to fathom. I was not an intellectual, not learned. I couldn’t believe another person’s mere words, no matter how dreadful, how tempting. I believed what I could see.

My hand crept toward my holstered gun. When it came to things I didn’t want to understand, a gunshot was the best answer.

But I didn’t fire.

I saw her eyes. Behind her mask, they were pitying and unyielding, like I was nothing but a primitive reptile. I averted my gaze and said, “You should remove your suit and hand it over. You’re no longer qualified to wear it.”

The next morning, I gathered a squad of petrified soldiers from a military camp. Then I returned to the kindergarten.

She was outside, drying clothes in the sun. I parked the truck at the entrance, grabbed a bundle of food, and walked toward her.

Her gaze was still rather unfriendly. “What have you come here to do?”

“You have no food rations. I fetched some for you.”

Food rationing was also an Emergency Management measure. Plants and animals alike had petrified, so food was scarce. Normal people got 18 kilograms each per month. Crows like us were rewarded for our hard work with an extra ten kilograms per month. The infected got nothing. They were left to their doom.

She watched me. “Is this pity?”

I couldn’t meet her gaze. “It’s respect.”

“If that’s true, then promise me something.”

“What?”

“After I am stone, don’t burn those children.”

I looked up, seeing the expectation in her eyes, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth. I lowered my gaze again and said, “I promise.” I couldn’t tell her that it didn’t matter if they were a new form of life, if they could still feel or not. My duty was to burn them regardless. So, I had promised, to give her a little comfort in the time left to her. I didn’t know what I was doing. I’d given her some of my precious food, a possibly idiotic move. But I felt I had to. I couldn’t become a martyr, so I was stuck with being a spectator.

I went back to the kindergarten a few days later. Her clothes were still drying outside. Probably she could no longer move. I went downstairs, and she was in the doorway, arms extended forward, hands up, like she was blocking my way. But she had indeed become stone. Even if she was still conscious, she didn’t know what I was doing. Perhaps she would be dust and ash before she could realize I’d broken my promise.

I moved her aside.

I hauled out the little statues first. When I finally got to her, I saw loathing and disdain in her eyes. Even then I dared not face her gaze as I carefully moved her into the truck. I had always been rough and incautious with statues, sometimes breaking off an arm or leg, but now I worked as if with fine porcelain that might shatter from the slightest bump. I prepared the truck bed with layers of her old clothes, then gingerly laid her down.

I put up a white sign at the kindergarten gate.

I returned to my residence and unloaded the children. I did not burn them. Moved by shame, I stood the woman at my entryway.

Amid drifting white ash from the overworked oven, she stood at the threshold, hands out before her. The gesture seemed to embody an expectation, or a warding protection. Her surfaces were smooth. Her clothes were torn here and there but in no way reduced her dignity.

But her gaze was full of loathing.

Eyes petrified late. As petrification progressed, even if the victim couldn’t move, the eyes sometimes still did. But after another two days, she was completely stone. My shame persisted, and I began to seriously wonder if I was a bad person. She had become a statue, and I was using her as an ornament. As for burning the children, I’d convinced myself I was only waiting for her transformation to be complete.

I took the other dozen or so statues I’d collected to the oven. I heard plaintive cries when I threw them in, but it didn’t satisfy me like before. My heart felt like it would burst.

Even if there was no life after petrification, surely they were still alive now, just not as soft and pliable as the uninfected. Did we have the right to deprive them of existence?

I returned to my quarters despondent. The children lay scattered in disorder. I carefully bypassed them and went inside.

I went out in my truck the next day and encountered a security inspector on the road. With great approbation, he added a star to my loyalty card. I was now at the four-star level. One more and I’d be eligible for Emergency Management as a security official myself. He told me there were just five million or so uninfected left in the world, but due to efficient measures, there were now several infection-free regions.

It seemed thorough eradication was not impossible after all.

The bad news was of the ten thousand Crows in the world, a dozen on average killed themselves every month.

The good and bad news both gave me a heavy heart.

I threw my daily take of a few dozen into the fire. Perhaps they really were still alive, as she said. I’d disagreed verbally, but deep down I was wavering. As I threw the statues into the oven, I felt like an executioner.

I returned to my residence and encountered her gaze at the threshold. It had changed. Maybe it was my imagination, but I no longer found loathing in her eyes—if stone eyes could emote anything at all.

Was it because I had spared the children?

I looked at the little statues piled carelessly on the ground. The little girl lay on her side, still in her chamber pot posture, completely ridiculous. I set about arranging each statue according to my memory, returning them to their original poses. I had no chamber pot, but due to her center of gravity, the girl could lift her bottom while standing.

I came and stood before their stone guardian, and very slowly said, “If you can still hear words . . . know this, I am keeping my promise.”

Of course, she didn’t respond.

I entered my residence. UV radiation soaked my body in the disinfection lock.

What is life? Something so fragile, anyway. Stone was sturdier than my flesh and blood, but if statues were still alive, they were also just heavy rubbish I could destroy at will.

But did I have the authority to do so?

Twenty-three days later, I was noticing the steady diminishment of my harvests, getting a dozen per day at best. Then again, if I was a murderer, killing one per day or two hundred made no essential difference.

I ran into the security inspector again thirty days later. He’d been looking for me this time. Oddly, he hadn’t dared to come calling at my residence. Perhaps he’d once been a Crow like me and did not wish to trigger grim memories.

“Congratulations,” he said, extending his hand. Taking it, I felt reassuringly soft muscle beneath the glove. “After some discussion, it has been unanimously agreed you should join security. You’ve done very well. Your sort of work has more or less eradicated the Plague.”

I would have been overjoyed to hear this news a month before. Now I felt very little. “Really? Thank you.”

“Let’s you and I head up to Emergency Management headquarters.”

This was in a city to the north. Originally a metropolis of ten million souls, now it was home to just a few thousand. Emergency Management’s multistoried building was covered in immense, transparent shielding, completely separated from the external world. The shield was a layer of ionized air. Maintaining it consumed a lot of energy per day.

The security inspector and I passed through strict sterilization protocols and finally went inside.

The vast structure was two million square meters, like a small town. There was no need of biohazard suits within, so people wore a sense of superiority. This was not surprising. Most had been upper level figures in the institutions of the old nation.

I was given a bit of a tour. People seemed to live and work in peace and contentment. Food was abundant, no different than pre-Plague times.

“As of now, the virus has not been detected within two hundred square kilometers of here. It is estimated the shield can come down in five months.”

I spotted the statue of a woman in a public square. She’d been a film star, famous just a few years before, and one of the first to get petrified. It was said she’d caught the virus overseas and brought it back with her.

The statue was meticulously carved, so lifelike.

“Are her films shown here?” I asked.

“Yes, the Director General loves them.”

I got closer for a better look and couldn’t help a chuckle. “Why not sculpt her clothes instead of dressing her in real ones? Kind of a waste for a bit more realism . . . ” Suddenly I understood, and in shock I said, “But . . . isn’t she contaminated?”

“Not at all. According to rigorous inspection, after seven months, the petrified no longer carry virus. She’s been here over a year.”

I laughed in disbelief. “But . . . then isn’t what we do . . . totally useless work? We could just keep them well apart, and wait, to eradicate the virus.”

“It wouldn’t be the same. Burning the recently petrified has controlled proliferation to a great degree. You have made a huge contribution to humanity. So, let’s go have a look at the food processing base, shall we?”

I followed him to Emergency Management’s core. Food from outside was unavoidably contaminated, so it was only here, completely sealed off from the external world, that safe food production could be assured. Currently, all food rations came from here, via null-gravity passages sent to various regions.

Having gained a shallow impression from this brief tour, I was led back to the public square. We sat beside a fountain, and the security inspector said in a low voice, “The Director General will receive you this afternoon. He will speak with you, and you must be agreeable, and conformable, acceding to his wishes.”

“Why?”

“The Director General has supreme authority these days. No one may contradict him.”

“But what will he say?”

“Things that may be hard for you to accept. You must exercise self-restraint. You have a rare chance here. Value it, don’t blow it.”

Something flashed through my mind. “Are the petrified still alive?”

His expression darkened. “Who told you that?”

“Don’t tell me it’s true.”

He let that go and asked again who told me, adding, “It’s Category A classified.”

“Is it true?” I said, this time with more force.

We sat there staring at each other, and he looked away first. “Yes, it’s true. And lower your damn voice. There are lots of people around.”

I stood and gestured at the film star. “And she’s still alive, and moving and thinking in slow motion?”

“That’s right,” he said, standing, keeping his voice low. “A year ago, her hand was still raised above shoulder level. Now it’s below, as you can see. And her feet have also moved.”

“So you’re saying I’ve been a murderer for the past two years?”

“No need to be so coarse about it,” he said. “Rats are living things, but you used to catch and drown them without hesitation.”

“They’re not rats! They’re people!”

Suddenly resolute, he said, “Incorrect. They are no longer people. They’ve become a new form of life, a different species really, and when they threaten us, we have the right to annihilate them.”

“The right?” A hollow laugh emerged from my throat. I recalled that woman’s words. What was authority, in the end? Nothing but a synonym for audacity. I was just one small screw in the meat grinder of authority. I could revolt, merely obliging the machine’s owner to change out a tiny, insignificant part.

“I’ve changed my mind,” I said. “I wish to forgo my security qualification.”

He looked at me in amazement. “Are you crazy? Do you realize that, although a Crow’s chance of infection is low, there’s still close to a hundred cases per year? Only security personnel—”

“I appreciate your good intentions, but unfortunately I’m still troubled by this superfluous thing called ‘a conscience.’”

He put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Listen, I get it. I came up from the Crows too. But there are many points of view from which to see this issue. Why not take some time to think it over?”

I seized his hand and moved it away. “No need. I’ve done plenty of thinking.”

“You’re being impetuous. The next batch of security qualification bids is in three months. Think about it, and hopefully change your mind by then.” He walked off several steps, then turned and added, “You know, this won’t change anything. When egg meets stone, the stone doesn’t even notice. Think about it.”

I watched him head for the disinfection locks. I suppressed the impulse to call after him, stop him, tell him I’d been silly and swayed by personal feelings.

Dusk was purpling the sky when I returned to my residence. At the entrance, I saw her gaze seemed to have softened. I snorted at this. For the sake of my worthless little conviction, was I passing on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? I wasn’t so noble. Only now did I truly admire my colleagues who had committed suicide.

These days, it was impossible to live with an entirely clear conscience.

The next day I went back out in my truck. Taking a detour from my usual route, I heard someone wailing in an abandoned shop. I parked and jumped out to have a look.

Two burly, un-suited men were holding down someone in a suit—a woman, by the sound of her cries.

I drew my gun and said, “Stop!”

One of the big men looked up. With a breathless laugh, he said, “Crow, this is none of your business. Now beat it. Us guys only have a few days left. Why not let us have a little fun?”

Their intended victim was a thirty-something woman. Through her faceplate I could see she wore earrings—unusual these days. I leveled my weapon. “Get out of here. Don’t have much time left? All the more reason not to harm anyone.”

The speaker drew a knife from his waist, sneering. “Sermons from a stinking goddamn Crow. Do you really think I give a shit? Look what I’ve become. Beat it or shoot, if you have the guts.”

I released the safety. A few months before, I would’ve fired without hesitation.

He threw his knife. I dodged and the blade grazed my arm as it flew past. It stuck in the wall behind me. I fired. His body jerked, then collapsed with an odd grace. Blood flowed along the floor like a small serpent.

The other man got up, looking repentant and terrified. I waved my gun and said, “Go. The farther the better.”

The woman rose, in vain covering a tear in her suit, and fell to kicking the man. “Fire! Hurry! Kill him! Kill him!”

I drew back from her and said to the man, “Go now! Or do you want me to fire?”

He ran out.

The woman turned to kicking me. “Why did you let him go? My dad used to be governor of this province, you know!”

I pushed her away. “Miss, please take off your biohazard suit. You’re no longer qualified to wear it.”

“No longer qualified?” she wailed. “How about you?”

That was when I understood. The knife had cut open my suit. Not only that, it had opened my flesh, and blood flowed. It didn’t really matter, but I knew that millions of viruses had already poured into the wound. I began removing the suit. “Yes Miss, you’re right.”

She watched in horror. With the suit off, I felt more than a little relaxed. “Go on, you next.”

Back at my residence, I didn’t go inside. The sterilization lock was meaningless to me now. Because the virus had entered my bloodstream directly, via my wound, the infection would proceed quickly. The flesh around the cut was already solidifying. I lay down on the ground and watched the star-studded heavens.

I hadn’t done this for ages. The vast, twinkling field of stars, thousands strong, was beautiful. The stars had existed since remote antiquity. Maybe some hosted planets with life, beings that had known all sorts of joys and sorrows, vicissitudes, partings, and reunions.

I smiled bitterly, knowing I didn’t have much longer to appreciate the stars. What was the scope of a human life? Measured against ocean depths, Mount Sumeru was no different than a grain of corn. And compared to the boundless cosmos, what was an ocean? What was the arrogance of the King of Yelang? Laughable. Yelang had been a small barbarian kingdom in southern China during the Han Dynasty, insignificant, the conceit of its monarch parochial at best. But what about the Han Dynasty in the scheme of things? What right did it have to ridicule others?

I slept in warm ash. As though still imbued with life, it floated and fell like fireflies. The moonlight was gentle and soft, and her gaze seemed to flow like a liquid. But I wasn’t dreaming.

The security inspector must have come while I slept. He’d left me a big bundle of rations, enough for two months.

I still went out every day, gathering statues and throwing them in the flames. Life is ever-changing and impermanent. But I was determined not to burn her, no matter what.

Now, I am more or less immobile. The virus has done its work thoroughly, causing my body to petrify fast. Although my eyes retain their sight, I don’t know if that will continue. Will I be able to see when I’m completely stone?

If I exert myself, it’s still possible to force movement. Under petrified skin, muscle tissue retains some power and flexibility. It is sufficient to move my body, but bound to cause skin fissuring. This doesn’t hurt, of course, though it’s appalling to behold. My nerve endings petrified long ago and cannot convey pain signals. Or they can, but it will take a long time. A year perhaps, or two, or a century or a millennium.

I don’t want to leave too many gaping wounds on my body. I exert myself enough to cautiously move my feet, to make my body advance. How much a day? A micron? A nanometer? The meter I must travel is like an odyssey. But in a thousand years, or two thousand, I will embrace her, and my lips may touch hers.

Calmly and quietly, I wait.

“Students,” the professor on the stage said, “as you’ve probably learned in previous lessons, human civilization six thousand years ago was rudimentary. We used to believe this era was quite primitive, with nothing much beyond fire use, tech wise, but the recent excavation of two sculptures could render these ideas obsolete.”

He drew back a white cloth and revealed two statues.

“Everyone note how lifelike they are. Despite the excessive realism, their expressions are a bit flawed. The man’s passion is too fierce, the woman’s cold detachment overdone. But you can all see the anatomical proportions are masterfully balanced. They could almost model for art students.”

After this joke, he said, “Problems of artistic expression don’t concern us, of course. Our research focus is elsewhere. In this class, I will lecture on that era’s technological level. We used to believe they didn’t produce ironware, but now there’s proof we could be wrong. Without iron tools, how could they have managed this? Look . . . ” He took a sheet of paper from the lectern and placed it between the two stone faces. “Take note. That’s just two millimeters between their lips!”

Originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, October 2002.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Yan Leisheng lives in Zhejiang. He has had a special interest in science fiction since an early age, but it wasn’t until his thirties that he was first published. Since then, he has published twenty books, including novels, short story collections, essays, and poetry.

An Important Failure

Rebecca Campbell

It’s 1607 (according to some calendars) and a falling cone from an elderly Pinaceae sitchensis catches on the rotting bark of a nurse log that sprouted while Al-Ma’mun founded the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. On this particular north Pacific island, the days are cold, and the water in Kaatza—the big lake near where this cone has fallen—freezes thick enough that one can walk out from the villages at the southeast end and look down to see cutthroat trout flickering underfoot. On the other side of the world, the Thames has also frozen, and stout winter children play across the canvasses of lowland painters, who preserve in oil the white-stained landscapes of northern Europe. In il Bosco Che Suona—the Valley of Song, the singing forest in the Alps north of Cremona where luthiers go to find their violins hidden in the trunks of trees—the winter is bitter, slowing the growth of Picea abies until its rings are infinitesimal, a dense tonewood unlike any material before or since.

Ninety years after the cone drops near Kaatza, Antonio Stradivari travels to il Bosco Che Suona on the old road from Cremona to select wood for his workshop. He rests his head against one trunk and listens to its cold history. This is the Little Ice Age as written in the rings of a spruce tree. It sounds like a violin.

Jacob woke Mason after midnight. Ten minutes later, they walked out to the old truck, gassed up for the occasion, stale with multigenerational BO, since it had belonged to their grandfather before it was Jake’s. The dusty fug relieved by Sophie’s botanicals: nasturtium; wood rose; one of her cash crops, a strain of CBD-rich indica she had been nurturing for years, called Nepenthe. They drove along the empty street, from the deeply green lakeshore to the old firebreak, gouged out of stone and clay twenty years before. Along disintegrating logging roads to the old burns where Mason could still see char. As kids, they had hiked here to secret rivers and campsites out of cell phone range.

Jacob drove in silence. Mason stared out the window at the ghost forest. Twice they got out to clear the road and Mason looked up into the low bush—blackened Douglas fir still towering over the blackberries and alder. Recovery plants, fast growing opportunists emerging from the last wildfire.

“Cougars?” he asked.

“A lot of them lately,” Jacob said. “They’ve followed the deer. It’s good news. But makes working at night a bit more exciting.”

He thought he spotted its silhouette in the darkness above them and wondered what it saw, in turn—competitors or prey in the disorienting headlights. The eagles had come back, nesting in the ghost trees. So had white-tailed deer and robins. The microclimates had changed as the forests began their slow return, though, a prefigure of what the coast would be in a hundred years: arbutus further inland, outside its original ranges; Garry oak farther west and north as the coast dried out. In a thousand years, it would be another sort of forest. If it was still there.

In two hours they made it to the edge of the surviving rain forest, which—on the west coast of the island’s mountains—had dodged the wildfires that destroyed most of everything else in the last twenty years. Twenty minutes on a rutted track, until they pulled over and met a guy, silent, nodding to Jacob as he climbed into the cab, directing them to an even narrower dirt track.

“This’s Chris,” Jacob said.

Mason-Chris nodded. So did the guy.

They weren’t far from the tree, which stood in what was still a provincial park, technically, though the trails were rarely maintained, and what boot prints he could see were probably other poachers. This was the largest surviving Sitka spruce in the world, and maybe people still wanted to see it, even if the busloads of school kids were rare, and the marine biology station at Bamfield had been shuttered for years.

Three more men waiting. A few gestures indicated the direction they’d drop it. The time it would take. Mason-Chris hung back, watching the wiry old faller put on his helmet, his chainsaw beside him. They waited for the breeze to still. There was a kind of quiet he never felt in Vancouver, even now when it was marred by shuffling men. Or cougars. Then the chainsaw flooded them and he heard nothing but its whine as it cut through the trunk, kindred to the kind that grew in La Fiemme, the Valley of Song in the Italian Alps where—it was rumored—a skilled lumberman could hear a violin hiding in the trunk.

He’d heard there might be another ancient Sitka in Kitimat, but that was too far to travel, even for something as precious as old-growth tonewood. This one, though, he’d remembered visiting as a kid. Its size; the unlikely fact of its survival after two centuries of logging and wildfires.

It didn’t take that long. A deep cut on either side in the direction of one of the other available roads, where a big truck probably waited. Then the wedges. The high, sweet note of the hammer. Waiting. Waiting. Until something inside it tore, and it fell, bounced, a thrash of branches like tendriled ocean creatures, or waves, like hair, like a body in spasm. Then it was still. Silence held for a moment longer, before they got to work limbing and bucking it.

Mason-Chris watched all the wiry, furtive men from—where? Port Alberni? Or maybe one of the transient camps, to which resource officers and RCMP turned temporary blind eyes because even they weren’t assholes enough to burn down a five-year camp that had organized showers and a septic system built of old truck tires. As long as the outsiders kept their problems—opioids, smuggling—out of town.

“Deal with the stump,” Jacob said.

Mason-Chris didn’t know what it meant, so Jacob repeated, “Stump. Cover it over with whatever you can find on the ground.”

“Is that really a problem? We’re pretty deep in.”

“They still send drones through.”

“Why would they even—anyway, I need to—”

“—I’ll get you when it’s time.”

Behind him, the stump was brightly pale in the darkness, sweet and resinous. He dropped branches over three meters of open wound, admiring the heartwood, which was surprisingly free of infestation, whether beetle or fungus. Behind him the tree grew steadily simpler, its branches tossed away, its trunk straight and handsome and more than four hundred years old. A baby compared to the ancient ones, the bristlecone or the big Norway spruce that had lived for nearly ten thousand years. But what would a bristlecone sound like? Sitka spruce, though, he had heard often and loved.

“—Chris.”

He’d get to Cremona and apprentice to Aldo, because Eddie knew him and could write a letter. He’d visit the Valley of Song and see what survived of the European spruce, and he would tell the master luthiers this story of poaching old growth in a provincial park. They would laugh and clap him on the back and—

“—Chris. Come on.”

Dragged away from his plans for Cremona and back to the immediate problem of sourcing old growth for a perfect violin, he saw that the tired, sweaty men had begun stripping their gear in the darkness, lit by phones and helmets. He didn’t actually know what he was looking for, but he worked his way down the long, straight sections nearest the base, running his hands over the rough bark to look at the interiors by the light of his phone.

“This is it, Jake.” he said without thinking. The group hushed. Ignored it. “This is the one.”

The other guys melted into the darkness. It was close to daylight by then, and while the forest floor was still dark, Mason could see the sky for the first time since the clouds overtook the stars.

Jake squatted by the section.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

Mason tried to listen to it. Before the tree fell, he had felt alive to the world around him—the shudder of leaves, and the faintly padding feet of the cougar—but now the wood was inert. Whatever he thought he had heard—the thin high notes of a violin he had not yet built—had evaporated.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m sure.”

It took them two hours to get it to the truck. Then another three to get to home.

“What’ll happen to the rest of it?” Mason asked.

“Firewood went for thousand bucks a cord last winter. That tree could keep a lot of people warm. There’s pulp, still. Mills will buy it up without asking too many questions. You don’t get the same kind of cash, but it’s safer and less work. And you know. Fentanyl. Or oxy.”

Behind them, the quarter of old-growth spruce remained silent, except where the truck creaked in resistance to its enormous weight.

“There are luthiers around the world who would kill for that, in a few years.”

“Sure. Or it’ll heat someone’s house this winter.”

They made it home late that morning, their eyes gritty with exhaustion. Jake sat in the cab for a long moment, then said, “I’m going to grab a swim, then get to work in the greenhouse.”

Mason knew he should help, but he found himself following the old route through the house to the bedroom he still thought of as his: the dark kitchen, past the bunches of garlic, the bookshelves in the living room piled with National Geographics from the twentieth century. Past the windowsills that still held grandma’s things: Beach glass and thunder eggs. Feathers. Stained glass that caught no light in a window shrouded by bush.

He lay in the cool, stale room where the carpet had been discolored by water seeping through the wall forty years before. It smelled like being ten, like summer, like his mother. Like the thousands of nights his family had passed between the wood-paneled walls, the narrow window facing south toward Cowichan Lake—or Kaatza, as Sophie called it in keeping with her friends in the local band—out which they had all stared and wondered what would happen next.

During the Little Ice Age, global temperatures dropped about 1°C, on average. There are debates regarding the causes of these aberrant winters. At least one trigger may have been the mass death of people in North and South America, with ninety percent of the population, by some estimates, dead after contact with Europeans.

Lost languages and cities; toddlers and great grandmothers and handsome young men and dreamy girls; villages and trade routes and favorite jokes. After so many deaths, an area of agricultural land the size of France returned to forest. This regreening sequestered enough carbon from the preindustrial atmosphere that temperatures took centuries to recover and begin their steady rise to the present day. The wild and empty continent of later explorers was—in part—a sepulcher, a monument inscribed with languages they could not speak, full of witnesses to that terrible loss.

From the cold and darkness of a hundred million deaths, to the chilly woodsmen of the Valley of Song, to Paganini playing il Cannone Guarnerius, it is a long and terrible history.

At Kaatza, the disaster is slow, despite temporary changes in climate, because the smallpox that will ravage the coast has not yet arrived. People go about their business on the water and in the forest, from the Pacific coast to the Salish Sea. Children are born. Songs are composed. The nurse log disintegrates. The little spruce rooted there rises toward the light, its heartwood formed in an apocalypse.

In addition to Nepenthe, Jake and Sophie grew a THC-rich sativa, which Mason disliked because it made him paranoid, but which sold steadily as far away as Seattle, and kept—in Jake’s words—the old homestead together. Sophie raised it hydroponically in Grandpa’s old workshop, while Nepenthe grew in the market garden by the lake, catching southern exposure on a warm brick wall with the espaliered peaches and lemongrass.

Later that afternoon, Mason visited the piece under a tarp in a corner of the workshop. Mason had been greedy, and there was material for two-dozen violins, assuming he found within it the billets he needed. He tried to remember what Eddie had done the last time they toured the mills for legal maple, willow, and spruce. Eddie could hear a violin in a slab of big-leaf maple, could feel willow’s sonic geometries as he tested its spring with his hands. If Eddie were here, the quarter would speak. He was still listening when Sophie shouldered through the door, a watering can in either hand.

“There are two more,” she said, gesturing toward the door.

He grabbed them, warm with sunlight. Together they watered the market garden. Potatoes and tomatoes. Chili peppers and mint. And Nepenthe, the deep botanical fug of its leaves rising in the heat of the afternoon. Mason took cannabis oil away every visit, dropping onto his tongue in a resinous burn, applying the ointment to his right wrist where the tendons ached. More effective than anything he could afford legally.

“You ever going legit?”

Sophie shrugged. “If it hasn’t happened by now, I doubt we’ll ever get licensed. I applied again last year but never heard anything. Jacob said you got what you needed?”

Mason nodded, the tree crashed again through his mind. “He’s helping someone cut firewood. He said you should sleep while you can. How long do we sit on it, anyway?”

“It’s got to season. A decade, probably. Ideally a century, but you know.”

She nodded, then led him through the hydroponics to a tiny room full of geranium slips and tomatoes. “Lots to do, Mason. Keep watering.”

In the third decade of the twenty-first century, a girl is born in Surrey Memorial Hospital. The labor is six hours. The child—magnificently named Masami Lucretia Delgado—has tiny, pointed fingers and strong hands that are precise in their movements, as though waiting for the fingerboard of a violin even in the moment of her birth. When she is three years old, an ad interrupts her cartoon, and she waits first in irritation, then in fascination, jabbing at the corner of the screen where the skip button should appear, but does not. Instead of a cartoon cloud who sings about rainbows and unicorns, she watches an ad for life insurance that features a little girl so like Masami, she seems to be a mirror, or a twin, with bright black hair and curious brown eyes. This little girl—the other Masami—holds a violin to her chin and plays something that makes Masami’s heart rise in her chest. A white cloud drifting higher and higher among the rainbows.

Masami is too small to name what she hears, and though it marks her forever, she soon forgets this first encounter with destiny. Something of it must remain with her, however, because a year later she hears the sound of a violin and asks her mother, that, that, was is that?

She’s four. Her father shows her violin videos. Outside the air is opaque with smoke from the fires on the north shore, which systematically destroy the huge houses overlooking Burrard Inlet. The pipeline that terminated in Burnaby has cracked again, somewhere up-country, who knows where, and spilled two thousand barrels of diluted bitumen into a lake. But Masami is too small to understand, and when she hears the sound of Marguerite Fell playing the ex-Kajnaco violin—from a quartet made by Guadagnini in Milan in 1780—she is transported, and some portion of her soul will never return from that transport. Her future is, at that moment, fixed. Her tiny hands will grow into her violin, the instrument less an exterior object than an extension of her body. She is, neurologically, emotionally, and psychologically, part violin. It’s in her heart, in her muscle memory. By the time she’s fourteen she’ll have cubital tunnel syndrome and need regular physio to deal with nerve compression. Her body has grown up around the violin the way a tree grows over a nurse log.

Masami Delgado was the reason Mason poached the last of the ancient Sitka spruce. But it wasn’t her fault.

Actually, maybe Eddie started it with one of those offhand comments about sourcing tonewood. Shuffling through the workshop in old jeans, pockets sagging with pencils and calipers, a finger plane. He stopped at Mason’s bench, where Mason was mending a violin they got cheap from someone leaving town. He was still surprised to find Eddie trusted him to touch instruments. For a long time he’d just swept the shop floor, drove the van, tended the glue pot. He still did those things, but he also got to replace a split tuning peg on a student violin, and it felt good to hold it in his hands, feeling the thin shell of its body, saying to it “Come on, little guy, let’s get you sorted.”

“It’s never going to sound the same,” Eddie said.

He listened to the long bow draw. “Yeah. It’s not great. But it’s solid for a student—”

“No.” Eddie said, in the abrupt way that always left Mason feeling like he’d said something stupid. “No. It’s the wood.”

He ran his finger down the bright spruce face. “This is pretty young stuff. More carbon in the atmosphere changes the density of the wood. We’re never going to see the same kind of old growth again, even if the forests recover. You need to drop the G.”

Mason listened. Eddie was right.

That night Eddie took him along to hear Delgado play at the Chan Center, a rare treat, like the time early in his apprenticeship when he accompanied Eddie to hear Alu Vila playing Bach on the ex-Norfolk, darkly redolent of 1805. Delgado had just received—for a three-year loan from the Canada Council for the Arts—the Plaisir violin of 1689, and had invited Eddie backstage to celebrate her first concert. Eddie, world-renowned luthier and representative of the CC, had been appointed its custodian for Delgado’s term. She was thirteen. She played the Kreutzer Sonata.

“We’re going to go check out the saddle,” he said during the intermission.

“Why?”

Eddie shrugged, and the lights dimmed again.

Backstage, Delgado’s parents hovered. Mason—still disoriented by the evening’s performance—couldn’t speak.

“May I?” Eddie said. She nodded. Her eyes never left the violin.

Mason screwed up his courage, “You have it for three years?” She nodded. “And then that’s it?”

Her mother answered. “You don’t get it twice.”

It hurt him that something that fit so perfectly onto her shoulder should be lost. She should have it for the rest of her life, on international tours, and in recording studios. It should be hers by some right of genius.

“I wish,” Mason said, “you could have it forever.” But then Eddie was finished and her parents were shepherding her away, and he realized he hadn’t heard her voice, not once.

As they waited for an Uber, Eddie said, “It’s not going to last.” Wildfires were burning on the north shore, and the sunset was an angry smudge. Mason thought about dying trees, and the sound of old growth leaving the world.

“What do we do?”

“Nothing we can do. The saddle’s been wearing noticeably for decades now. Could be a split forming, though I didn’t seen anything on the last CT scan. Maybe it’ll show in the next twenty years. Or maybe it’ll be longer than that. I don’t know.”

“We can’t replace it?”

“We can. But we won’t. They aren’t immortal. Eventually it will be unplayable, and then it will go to sleep.”

That night Mason walked down Granville Street past the shuttered theaters that had once been full of music. He circled back to Hastings, and walked out toward his little room in a building on Gore, where the rent was almost decent. Then he searched through Eddie’s database and found the transcendental geometries of the Plaisir violin, emissary of the seventeenth century, where in the workshops of Cremona luthiers made instruments so perfect they seemed not to have been built, but grown. Alien seashells. The seedpods of strange flowers. He had touched one today, felt its lightness against his palm, patinated by centuries of sweat, the oil of many hands and faces, rich with life. All that alchemy of tree and climate, genius and history. She would have it for three years. Then the saddle would split, and it would be lost forever.

That was the day he formed the plan: a violin made as purely and patiently as he could manage, following the guidance of long-dead luthiers, passed down to him through Eddie. And when it was finished, he would got to the Po Valley and join the Scuola Internazionale di Liuteria Cremona, where he would tell a dozen old Italian masters the story of his accomplishment.

But the materials he’d need weren’t just expensive, they were nonexistent. Trees of the five hundred ppm present wouldn’t do. He needed old growth, with heartwood grown in the last climate minimum, when Kaatza froze and the last Viking settlement on Greenland disappeared under the ice. He needed Gaboon ebony, nearly extinct, smuggled out of Nigeria or Cameroon.

“Everything I can afford,” he told Eddie the next day, “is ugly.” Unspoken: too ugly for Delgado, who deserved more than the world could offer these days.

“Not ugly,” Eddie said, “Different. But not ugly.” He picked up the violin Mason had assembled from salvaged materials Eddie had discarded. Then he seemed to think, and he said, “Let me show you something,” before disappearing up the stairs and into the shop, returning with a fiddle Mason had often looked at, a rough old thing, a curiosity.

“Some guy made this out of a post from a longhouse like a hundred and fifty years ago. If he can do that, you can figure something out.”

The longhouse had stood in a long-gone Musqueam village way down on southwest Marine Drive. The violin had a cedar front, a maple neck and back that Eddie insisted had come from a stack of firewood. He’d had some dendrochronologist look at it, dating the woods to the seventeen hundreds. Maybe some fiddler lost his on the crossing, or gambled it away, like in a song, but he’d landed on the edge of nowhere, and built something new from what he’d found. Not well built by many rules, and the sound was drowsy, sure, but deep, Mason could hear that just bowing the strings. He wondered what it would sound like in Delgado’s hands. Something by de Sarasate. A Bach violin concerto. Or maybe it would be some dance number, once played in a small front room while the rain fell outside, and Vancouver wasn’t even a city yet, a song interrupted, escaping from the violin when her fingers touched it. Maybe, he thought, it would be earlier sounds from an equally rainy night, a longhouse on the south slope toward the river, a rainy hillside that had not yet thought of becoming Vancouver. Voices. Laughter. A language he didn’t know, and a moment captured in the reverberating matrices of the wood itself.

A few weeks after he returned from poaching the giant spruce, and had begun to accumulate the necessary components for his violin, wildfires scoured the Fraser Valley and the north shore, and the smell of smoke brimmed his eyes with love and dread so he had to call them, just to make sure.

“Still here.” Jake said. “You okay?”

Mason could not answer that, because who was okay? No one was okay. Everyone was fine. “It smells like smoke here,” he said. “Eddie’s not doing too good with the COPD.”

“Yeah?”

The world had smelled like this when he and Mom had arrived, grubby with two months in the emergency camp on Nanaimo’s waterfront, waiting for the highways to reopen so they could go home. That’s what Mom had said to him every night: we’ll go home, soon. Not to the house in Cobble Hill, which was gone now, but out to the lake. To Grandma.

“Sophie wants to bring in trembling aspen for the other side of the firebreak, to slow the burn—” here Jake went on at length about the plans to bring in a colony, borrowed from a stand downriver. Mason couldn’t concentrate on what he said, but it was good to hear his voice and know that around him the house was darkening as the sun set, and outside you could, if you were lucky, hear the resident barn owl’s nightly call. Sophie still at work in the garden, hauling wheelbarrows to the compost. In his smoky room, Mason’s eyes ached until, finally, he wept.

Then, suddenly, Delgado was fifteen, an intensely silent teenager in heavy black eyeliner who wore combat boots in summer and rarely spoke when she came in for strings. Then she was sixteen and her time with the Plaisir nearly over, her parents joking tensely about how much it all cost—the travel, the extra tuition, the time.

Meanwhile, Mason made violins from the salvaged spruce and maple of a demolished bungalow on East Tenth, where he did some day labor for extra cash. In the evenings, he listened to each piece he’d nicked from the job, knocking it with a knuckle and wondering about its strengths, its provenance. He broke down a chest of drawers from Goodwill, scraping away the paint to show flamed maple. Oak flooring coated in decades of grime. A cricket bat made of willow, deeply scarred, might have provided the blocks he needed, but it was worm-eaten to the core.

He searched Stanley Park and found a shining willow near Beaver Lake, unusually straight. Salix lucida lasiandra, not the Salix alba preferred by the old Cremonese luthiers, but similarly easy to carve, and stable enough if he could find a straight length of trunk and season it properly. Resting his head against the trunk, he once again listened for the violin hiding within it, some sonic quality in the way it responded to his heartbeat, or his hand upon the bark.

He returned on a rainy night in January, alone, his backpack damp and heavy with gear: A hacksaw. Rope. More than anyone in the world, he missed Jacob, who had always—even when they were both kids orphaned by fire and pandemic—been cleverer and stronger than he was.

He’d have to top it, which was a ludicrous endeavor, and he could hear Jake laughing, and their grandfather’s anxious snort—the snort that meant, don’t do it, kiddo. Despite the snort, Mason persisted. Willow was essential, and if he could snare vacant lot rabbits and skin them for glue, he could climb and top a willow, then walk back across town to Eddie’s, where the wood might begin its secret transformation into something useable.

He’d climbed trees a lot as a kid. Higher even than Jake, who had a longer reach, but who was afraid of heights. It made them equals, according to Grandma. When he and Mom had arrived from the temporary camp in Nanaimo, after the rain hit in October and the fires down the coast died for the season, Jake was already there. He was waiting for his Dad to come back from the interior, where he’d gone to fight the big fire outside Princeton, when the dead pines went up like matches in the scorched afternoons. But he died by smoke inhalation on the side of a crowded road along with a hundred others, and Jake stayed, and later—when Mom left to look for work and caught the flu and died—the two of them lived like brothers.

Jake never talked about it, like Mason never talked about his mom, dying in the third wave of a new pandemic when he was seven, a few years after they’d landed back on the homestead. They all worked on the hydroponics in the workshop and the market garden on the south slope toward the lake. Weed was legal in the province back then, but the Cowichan Valley’s economy was—by conservative estimates—still more than half dark, and mostly driven by small operations like Grandma’s. And while he and Jake were orphans in a grow-op, Sophie was somewhere south of them in Langford, learning to garden with her grandfather. Eddie had just finished his years in Italy with Aldo, and was about to set up his own shop in Vancouver. Sophie studied horticulture on the mainland, then returned to Langford with a lot of knowledge and nowhere to turn it, until Jake found her on a beach in Sooke. Eddie won double gold at the Violin Society of America. Mason left school early for a cabinetry apprenticeship until a festival, where he picked up the unfinished body of a fiddle—spruce, maple, willow—and found the thing he was made to do.

All those people—those accidents—led him here, after midnight in the shivering wet of a rain forest park in November, and he was older than he liked to admit. Nevertheless, he pulled himself up to the lowest branch, then struggled from handhold to foothold until he was high enough to cut, relieved when the unusually straight center fell with a sound that was both troubling and familiar, the tree swaying in response to the dropped weight. He descended, limbed it, bucked it in convenient lengths, and packed five of them in his truck. Then, looking up, he saw a straight branch just below his cut, and he could not resist it. He remembered Jake’s wrinkled look of dread when they climbed too high, his warnings, “Do you know what could happen?”

“I know,” Mason said, and swung up into the willow. He was a couple of meters up when the branch on which he stood—one hand snaking around to grab his hacksaw—snapped. Willow is a brittle, fast-growing tree, splendid in its youth, but soon senescent. This one, more than fifty years old, could not support a man’s weight a second time that night.

The ground was wet and spinning and he said, as though someone might be there, “Help me, help me,” and he thought of his mother, standing just behind his shoulder, about to answer him, pick him up, carry him home. But she wasn’t, of course, so he lay still until the ground righted itself, and the pain steadied: not faded, but no longer in crescendo. He could still move his toes. Then he found he could stand. His left shoulder screamed, but his left fingers could move. He hauled himself fifty meters to Pipeline Road and called an Uber. It was nearly a week’s wages to get back home.

His shoulder never healed properly: a new MRSA at the hospital, one without a name that hung out in the linens. Not one of the virulent kinds that kills you in two days, but the other ones, that persist under the skin. There was an open sinus that ran from the outer edge of his shoulder, right above where the bone had cracked. It was three months before he could work again, but Eddie kept his place, and emergency disability got him through, though he didn’t eat much once his savings ran out.

When he told Jake the story—a joke, look what I did, what would Grandpa say—Sophie threatened to come over and look after him, and when he refused she just sent him Nepenthe. A few weeks out of the hospital and he could move his left arm enough to dress himself, and Eddie helped him put Sophie’s ointment on his left shoulder. He smoked it, too, in the basement in front of his workbench, the deep, slow breaths easing his shoulders out of their hunch, until he felt almost okay. By then Delgado’s term with the Plaisir had ended, and she celebrated those three glorious years with a last concert at the Chan Center, for which Mason had a ticket, and which he missed because he was still in the hospital.

“Don’t worry,” Eddie told him. “There’s a recording.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I think it’s going to Prefontaine. A kid in Saskatoon. He’s good.”

“But what’s she going to play?”

Eddie shrugged. “There are a lot of beautiful violins.”

“No.” Mason said, in rare disagreement. “There aren’t.”

He ran into Delgado’s father on the street, once. “She won’t touch a violin. It’s been six months.”

“She’s probably—”

“—all she does is play video games. She’s staying out. She’s so angry.”

He went on, then he had to be somewhere and he left Mason on the sidewalk. He stood for a moment blocking traffic, thinking of Delgado speaking bitterly and at length about the globe’s many failed revolutions, her rapidly narrowing future, and he wanted to tell her: please wait, just a little longer, for me to finish it.

A year later she received the extraordinarily fine ex-Jiang violin from an anonymous donor. He went to hear her play Bach at the Orpheum Theatre, with the Vancouver philharmonic accompanying. She was eighteen. When she came into the shop, she smiled through the eyeliner, and he asked her, “Where next? Buenos Aires?”

“I haven’t seen you in weeks. What happened to your shoulder?”

“I fell weird. Not Buenos Aires? Singapore?”

“Oh. Yeah, it’s hard to rationalize unless you’ve got a lot of work. I might be playing a gig in Toronto next year. And I was down in Seattle.”

“Recording, then?”

“Maybe. I’m working on early childhood education,”

“Oh,” he said, surprised. “Oh. Cool.”

“Eventually it’ll be music therapy. Gives me something to do with the lessons Mom and Dad paid for.”

It hurt him to hear that, though he didn’t know if that was some pain she felt but did not speak, or whether it was his own hope, which he did not like to acknowledge, for fear of smashing it. That she’d get another term with the Plaisir. That when she was finished with it, he’d present her with his own creation, and her career would be transformed as the violin opened up, becoming something new as she played it. He had not imagined her in a classroom with toddlers, playing “Pop Goes the Weasel” while they marched in circles around a bright orange carpet. But neither had he imagined himself working for Eddie for his entire adult life, and here he was.

For a few years after the fall he made nothing new, just ran the shop and stirred the glue pot, and made sure that Eddie took his meds and saw his doctor. But as his arm recovered, sort of, and he no longer dreamed of falling, he could stand to look at the willow again. He could even look at the old Jack Daniels box in a corner of the storage room, which held the violin in its constituent parks. You could mistake it for kindling, if you didn’t know.

It still took him three years to open the box and begin work on the forms, slowly because his left shoulder remained weak and sometimes his left hand failed. But for an hour sometimes, in the evenings, he worked ribs and blocks of willow in the basement workshop at night, where he often stayed on a cot in case Eddie needed help.

It took another five years of austerity to pay black market prices for Gaboon ebony from Nigeria, the whole time worrying the trees would all be dead before he could save the money. In the end, the wood he needed for the fingerboard, tailpiece, and saddle cleaned out what was left of his Cremona account. But he saved money on the tuning pegs, which were boxwood poached from Queen Elizabeth Park and stained a fine black.

By then, Mason had moved into the shop—temporarily they said—to keep an eye on Eddie, because he’d got old. He’d always been old, in Mason’s mind, fifty when Mason joined the firm at twenty-two, but not old old. Now he shuffled around the workshop, skinnier every year, quieter. Pretty soon he stopped going down to the basement because of the stairs, so Mason set his workbench up in what had been a dining room. Eddie could still watch the till, but he hardly spoke to customers, and he was happiest at the bench in his dressing gown, working on some delicate job, listening to the grubby speakers that sat on the kitchen counter.

Once while they were having coffee, Eddie reached across the table for a spoon and his wrist emerged from the ragged cuff of his hoody. Mason was transfixed by how thin it was, how the skin had begun to pucker and spot, the careful way he picked up the spoon, as though every action required some calculation.

“What are you now, seventy?” he said without thinking.

“Dude. I’m seventy-six.”

“Oh,” Mason said. Thought. “Then I must be—shit.”

Eddie laughed. Coughed. “Yeah. Exactly.”

The January he began shaping big-leaf maple (from an antique dresser) into the violin’s neck, a king tide rolled over the flats by the hospital and the science center. That restarted talk about a sea gate at the mouth of False Creek, though debate continued about how much of the original coastline should be preserved. The old beaches flooded now, water creeping up over the grass below the planetarium. Once Mason saw a river otter slip across a concrete path and into False Creek. The river otter seemed untroubled by his new home, just like the seagull or the ducks.

He went back to the shop to tell Eddie about the first finger of floodwaters sliding across Main Street like a prefigure. Fifty cm rise as predicted, then another half-meter from a king tide, and here we were, in the future, watching mussels grow over the bases of pillars that had once upheld shades over the park benches of wealthy Yaletown residents. He wanted to say to the walls that had once contained False Creek: turn it back.

He got home to find Eddie listening to Melchior play the Bach exercises on the Bourbon viola. Mason stowed the billets in the basement workshop. He could hear Melchior upstairs while he did it, louder than Eddie usually did, so some of the low notes rattled the door to the workshop.

Up the stairs, eyes still full of the floodwaters engulfing Main Street, he stopped in the doorway about to spill his news and said, “What’s wrong?”

Wildfires in the Po Valley, burning farms and groves left dry by a five-year drought. Cremona engulfed, and at least a thousand people dead. The Museo del Violino lost, and a pietà, a portrait of St. Sebastian from a small town. An altar piece and a collection of fine instruments stored in Torino.

“No more Cremona,” Eddie said. “I should have asked Aldo last week—”

Melchior filled the tired silence.

“I wish,” Eddie said in the torn voice of a night spent coughing in the lumpy old futon chair in the corner of his room, which bore the dark marks of his hands where he had been resting them for forty years. “I wish I’d enjoyed it all more.”

“I don’t—”

“—I mean, sure I should have done more to change things and been a proper revolutionary or whatever the fuck. But actually I just wish I’d spent less time thinking about it, and more—I miss coffee, you know? Really good coffee and drinking it in a coffee shop. I miss knowing I could get on an airplane at any time and go to Cremona and see Aldo, just to see him. I don’t think I enjoyed it enough. And here we are. And it’s too late.”

“It’s not too late,” Mason said.

“No more elephants. No more ebony trees. No more Cremona. No more Aldo.”

“It’s not.” He thought of the silence after the chainsaw, and the men who waited as the spruce fell, cougars moving soundlessly in the tinderbox woods around them. He thought of the storm of its branches hitting the ground, and the way it shuddered under his feet, and how he had found it, the core pieces, the heartwood of his violin, which had been alive in the seventeenth century, and which had waited on a hillside until now.

First Eddie laughed, “Oh, dude,” he said, and coughed.

Mason thumped the old man’s back with his good arm, still saying, “It’s not too late.”

He couldn’t explain it because they had arranged a silence regarding the violin, and the things he did to build it. He couldn’t explain, but it wasn’t too late because under a tarp in a shed, in that bit of land between the lake and the ghost forest, the spruce had been seasoning for fifteen years. In a box under his workbench he had black market Gaboon ebony for the fingerboard, one of the last shipments smuggled out of Nigeria: fine-pored, dense, deeply black ebony. He had glue made from the skins of rabbits he had trapped at night. He had carved the geometrically perfect scroll of its neck from a piece of two hundred year old big-leaf maple. And soon, soon, he would bring them together into something miraculous.

It must happen soon, though, looking down at the old man, his lips and chin slick with sputum coughed up in the last paroxysm.

“You look like your dad,” was the first thing Jacob said to him when, late on the third day of travel, he reached the house by the lake, slack-jawed and greasy-haired (once that trip had been measured in hours, you could be there and back in a day). It had been fifteen years since his last visit. His shoulder—numb with the weight of his backpack—twitched in its socket, swollen and tender. He was limping, too, by the time he made it to their gate.

“I feel like I got old like, suddenly. How’s Sophie?”

“Great,” she answered. Mason started. In his exhaustion he had not realized that the frizzle-haired figure in the doorway was Sophie, the greenish light of the lantern casting her face in craggy shadows and lines. “Yeah, we age hard now,” she said. “But that’s everyone. And your shoulder’s still bad. I’ll look at it.”

They lifted his backpack, then helped him with his shirt. Sophie’s sweet, botanical scent and her fingers overtook him, then a hot cloth washing away the dried fluids that had seeped from the open wound in his shoulder.

“It’s an abscess.” she said. “But I imagine you know that. Do you still have a doctor? Are they giving you anything? I don’t like the smell.”

He no longer had a doctor, but the guy at the clinic helped sometimes. “Nothing to do except surgery.”

Then the heavy skunk of Nepenthe overtook the ache, a scent that reminded him of his grandmother’s garden on a hot day, penetrating and astringent beneath the peppermint and lemon balm.

“It smells like—” he said in a voice that seemed to come from far away, but he couldn’t tell them, exactly, what it smelled like. Like home, maybe. Like his mother, when he had a mother. Then they helped him to the old back bedroom. He didn’t remember anything after that.

When he woke shortly before noon, Sophie was gone but Jake was there on the porch outside the kitchen, drinking something sort of like coffee made out of toasted barley.

“She’s been working with the Forestry Lab at UVic on some trees. Someone she knew in undergrad got ahold of her and they’ve been working together. Genetic mods. Fast growing. Carbon sinks. Drought resistant. It’s promising.”

It was the first good news Mason had heard in a long time. Together they walked up to the gardens she’d been building on old house sites. The street still showed traces of tarmac, if he kept his eyes fixed on the remaining yellow street paint. If he looked between his feet and listened to Jacob talk, and felt the lake breeze, the town could be as it was when he was a kid. Maybe. Or when his mother lived here before the fires. Or before that, when their grandparents built this homestead at the edge of nowhere and Ts’uubaa-asatx kids played in the lake.

But then, Ts’uubaa-asatx kids still played in the lake, and white kids, and the Sikh kids had returned to Paldi when the village grew up around the temple again. Kids climbed through the alders that grew in the path of old fires, picking blackberries rich with the heat of a new world. Kids fishing and weeding garden plots where the houses had been demolished. Kids singing songs he didn’t recognize.

Jacob was limping slightly now. They stopped when they saw Sophie in the middle of a garden near the water, her hair a frizz of gray in the sunlight, and a couple of boys and girls nearby, their arms full of green. Her hands were dirty, right up to the elbows, and when she saw them walking toward her, she waved the carrot tops she held.

“Rajinder brought some Jersey cows from up-island,” she explained. “They like the carrot tops. It’s our turn to get a couple of liters. The butter is ah-fucking-mayzing.”

That evening they ate a soft farmer’s cheese from Rajinder’s herd, and she talked about the trees, the plantation on the old townsite, about more plans with Ts’uubaa-asatx Nation, a gang of kids replanting the burned-out subdivisions from twenty years before. You couldn’t see the old roads in some places, she said. It’s like they’re gone.

“Where?”

“Everywhere,” she said. “It’s the regreening. We lost what, ninety percent of our population to the mainland? So why not give it all back? Some of the Cowichan kids started it in the subdivisions nearer the coast, torching the houses last winter. Give it a couple of hundred years, and people will be making violins from the trees we’re planting.”

He didn’t want to say it, but her newly wild world—without roads, without houses—filled him with a terrible bitterness he could not describe. “They won’t sound the same,” he said.

“Nope,” Jacob said. “Not at all the same.”

That night he lay a long time in the half-sleep of pain and painkillers, his shoulder numb from Sophie’s ministrations that evening. He could not escape the crash of the old Sitka spruce hitting the ground, the crunch of five hundred years of upward growth giving in, finally, to gravity. He wondered if it would still be standing if he hadn’t mentioned it to Jake fifteen years ago, in the middle of the night, when he was going to demolition sites looking for old spruce and wild with ambition for Delgado, who would play Moscow and Barcelona and Singapore. Jake had asked where it was: Did he remember how to get there? Could he find it on a map?

Mason did remember, and said I’d like to be there. I’d like to listen to it. A couple of months later, Jake had mentioned it again, and here we are, he thought, his shoulder throbbing dully on the other side of Nepenthe.

The day Mason returned from the island, Eddie woke him up just before midnight, when it was still hot and airless.

“I gotta. Go. In.” he said.

“Where?” Mason asked, stupidly, then realized what Eddie meant, found his shoes and helped the old man down to the curb, where they waited for an Uber, then waited at the hospital for seven hours, Eddie silent, breathing roughly in, and raggedly out again, while other patients paced, sometimes shouted, and a fluorescent tube above their heads flickered and hissed.

They kept him in for a couple of days. When Mason visited him with things from home—his tablet, a sweater, a newly refurbished violin for inspection—he was a shrunken, cranky man, complaining to the nurse in a small, petulant voice. It was so hot. Could they do something about it? The heat.

Mason sat with him while he ate, then walked an hour back to the shop, where he had set up a bed in the basement, the nearly-cool room that smelled of wood shavings and resin and glue, which was comforting while—on the other side of the peninsula—Eddie struggled with each breath in turn. Here it was almost quiet. Just Mason and the remaining problem: the sound post. Properly speaking, it should be made of spruce, like the front, but he wanted something that had seasoned longer than fifteen years. Something precious to hide away, something only he would know about.

There was the old fiddle, the one some frontiersman made out of wood salvaged from the skids that once ran through Gastown and the beams of longhouse. Once, shortly after he met her, Delgado came into the shop for an order of strings and Eddie brought it out. She played “Where Does That River Run?” and he had laughed, and asked her to play again, anything, to wake the violin up and keep it alive a little longer. She had played at length and with wild generosity: sweet old waltzes; the Québécois “Reel de Napoleon”; a Cape Breton lament.

Humming, he climbed the stairs. He let himself into the shop and opened the display case that held the old fiddle.

It was another crime. Nevertheless, he carried it downstairs to his bench. He did not want to think too much, so he worked quickly: pulling the old sound post out and adding a new one, returning the violin to the store’s display case. Downstairs, the old bit of dowel was rough against his fingers. Cedar, maybe from the same post in the longhouse on the Fraser, light and ancient and marked by the original luthier’s rough knife. Fragrant when he warmed it with his hands, but no potent aromatics, just a deep and redolent dust.

Then he fitted it, and it hid so perfectly in his violin, maybe no one would know the terrible thing he had done, the secret history he had stolen like all the other secret histories that constituted his violin. He knew, though, all the courses that materials took, from Nigeria, from the islands, from demolished bungalows in east Van, from vacant lot rabbits, and from Stanley Park.

Even from his bed, even on oxygen, Eddie was critical when Mason brought it upstairs, examining it with an eyeglass until he conceded that the sound was as fine, in its own way, as any number of other violins he’d seen. Finer, even, than the composites he’d started to use for his own work (when he could work), corene and carbon fiber.

“You made something, kid.” It had been a long time since anyone had called him kid, even Eddie. “Does it have a name?” Eddie asked.

“Does it need one?” If it had to be named it should be something elegant and sonorous. Kiidk’yaas. “I don’t know. The Vancouver violin.”

“Better than that.”

Eddie wouldn’t play it, and neither would Mason. Delgado was swamped at the center, and had a toddler, so while the violin—Spruce Goose?—was finished in September, they didn’t hear it until the New Year.

She was late. That was okay. The toddler was with her, which was slightly disturbing, but Mason figured they could keep her away from the detritus of the apartment, which was mostly workshop. And there were dry little cookies, at least, to feed her, at the back of a kitchen cupboard.

“I meant to leave her at home, but you know Johnny got a last minute shift—”

“No worries,” Eddie said, quietly because he could only speak quietly now. “We’re just happy to see you.”

“This is it?”

Mason’s throat was unaccountably closed, so he just—Delgado juggled Belinda from one arm to the other. “Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

“Mommy?” Belinda murmured, sleepy.

“I’m going to put you down for a sec.”

She rubbed her hands on her jeans, Belinda now squatting at her feet, leaning on her knee.

“Oh,” she said. He thought he saw a tremor. Her face dropped into her neck, so her hair fell forward and she looked as she had when she was fourteen and coming into the shop for new strings special-ordered from Berlin, talking about Bach.

Then the bow drawn across the open E, and he heard it, the sweetly deep, the brightly clear reverberation. Delgado made a wild little laugh and ran a scale, another scale, then interlocking arpeggios. Ševčík.

At her feet, Belinda spoke to a little blue bear, patting her threadbare ears.

Delgado dropped the violin from her neck, cradled it. Her eyes were bright, as though with tears, but her voice was warm.

“It is—oh, Mason!”

“Will you play something?”

She played Beethoven. The Kreutzer Sonata, as though she remembered the night that had stuck forever in Mason’s heart: the Chan Center, and the Plaisir violin, and Delgado. Eddie leaned to the left side of his wheelchair, his eyes closed, the oxygen tank hissing faintly, the sound of people at the window, Belinda’s murmurs to Bear. All these interruptions should be maddening, but they were not, and only seemed to complement the room’s fragile magic.

When she was finished she sat heavily on the remaining chair.

“How long have you been working on it?”

“A while,” Mason said and saw her as she had been, fifteen and brilliant with an actual future stretching all the way to Paris. He had imagined hearing it for the first time in some acoustically perfect opera house, because the world would have recovered by then. He knew it was foolish, but it hurt to think Delgado would never carry it away from this provincial little corner.

“What will you do with it now,” she asked, a wobble in her voice, the harmonics of longing. “Who’ll play it?”

It was strange to him that she needed to ask.

“No.” she said when she understood. “Oh no. No.”

Belinda looked up from Bear. “Mommy. Mommy?”

“You can use it in your classroom, can’t you? I think it’ll age okay. It’ll open up.”

She didn’t respond for a minute, but crouched down to where Belinda sat with Bear, her brow furrowed with worry for her mother. Then she stood and asked, “Does it have a name?”

“See? It should have a name,” Eddie said.

Mason heard the oceanic crash of falling spruce, his own cry as he hit the dirt at the base of a shining willow in Stanley Park. The market garden and the homestead, the lake, the abandoned subdivisions and the burn lines that still showed through the underbrush, the ghost forests, the dead black teeth of what had once—a long time ago—been a rainforest. And among them, Jacob still cutting lumber and helping out at the garage when he could, fishing and hunting. Sophie in the greenhouses and the gardens, with her new Garry oak trees and her transfigured arbutus, the beetle-resistant spruce that would never, ever, be the kind of tonewood he wanted. The firebreaks of trembling aspen, the return of cougars. The steady erosion of human shapes: foundations and roads all lost to the burgeoning forest.

“Nepenthe?”

As he said it, he wasn’t sure what it meant: a physick that would make the end easier; a draft of healing medicine.

“Nepenthe.” Eddie said. “There it is.”

“Remember,” Sophie had said before he left. “You’re going to come back here for good, eventually. It’s still home.”

Unspoken: come back when Eddie has died and you’re ready to give up on global dreams and figure out how to live out the rest of your days in this shopworn future.

He had just nodded through the ache of disappointment that had accompanied him for decades, now. But a tiny, exhausted part of him almost liked imagining it, how he’d go back to work in the garden, raising saplings for the new forest that even now overtook the old world, watching kids disappear into the wild.

Masami Lucretia Delgado plays the Nepenthe violin daily for forty-five years, even if it’s only ten minutes when she gets home from work, her kids playing noisily outside the bedroom. Five minutes before everyone else is awake, Belinda fourteen and saying Mom are you seriously playing right now? she plays it on the day they leave their apartment because the seawall at the mouth of False Creek has failed. She plays it in the back of a car as they drive inland, toward interim housing in which they’ll live for five years. Nepenthe is a fixture in the temporary-but-actually-permanent school she establishes in a slipshod village on the Fraser River. Together, she and Nepenthe accompany Belinda’s wedding, and Masami’s grandchildren fall asleep to lullabies from those strings. Despite her daily practice, she will never hear its most perfect expression: the violin will be its best long after the maker is dead, and the first hands that played it are too crippled by arthritis to make more than sighs. But she will play on while she can, because the violin must not go to sleep, and the longer she plays it, the more the alchemy of sound—the resin, perhaps, the glue, the cellular acoustics of the wood itself—will transform the object, preparing it for its ultimate player. Maybe her youngest daughter—the finest musician of all her children—or her granddaughter, will first hear the violin open up into its richest, fullest tone. Maybe it will be someone a hundred years in the future, who lives in a different world than we do, but who will pick up the instrument and draw her bow across the strings, releasing the reverberations of a thousand thousand crimes and accidents into the singing air.

About the Author

Rebecca Campbell is a Canadian writer and teacher. Her work has appeared in The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, Tor.com. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Interzone. NeWest Press published her first novel, The Paradise Engine, in 2013. She mostly uses her PhD in Canadian literature to make up sad futures and weird fictions.

The Immolation of Kev Magee

L.X. Beckett

“Ogua-Lik is Kevinsberg’s true name.” Breeze Frame panned their cameras up from the beach, capturing a scaffold of industrial build clamped to the rough-hewn island cliffs. The tide was in, obscuring the submarine roots of the settlement’s forest of upthrust pipes, power mains, and chimneys climbing to the plateau. Following them to the top, Breeze kept the shot moving, zooming in on the air cannons, which were even now firing packets known as lily pads out to the Labrador Current.

Phut! Fire one! Phut! Fire two. Each thirty-seed barrage sent ice and liquid oxygen fizzing skyward, slicing a glittering parabola into dawn skies, then splashing down over two klicks away. Breeze adjusted their goggs, taking in the process as one lily pad inflated into a bright white disk and began sending out tendrils of slush-laced cobweb to entangle with its kin. The quilts thus formed would reflect sunlight, preventing uptake by the North Atlantic, while simultaneously creating a platform for accumulating real snow and ice.

Perfect!

One of the other shooters jostled them, but Breeze was big, and solidly planted. They held the shot despite the bump, taking the view wide-angle and tracking it out to the sunrise purpling the horizon.

Snagging the primo spot on the cliff had meant showing up before dawn, when it was still pitch freezing dark, thereby beating out fifteen other videographers who’d had the same great idea. Breeze scanned the periphery, weighing the competition . . . and caught a glimpse of one outlier who had apparently come to take in the view for its own sake. A police-looking type, muscly and scarred. Below the eyes, her skin was basically hamburger. Burgerface locked gazes with Breeze without moving, seeming to sense the attention.

“Um. According to others, Ogua-Lik is unceded territory. Which means—”

“Good morning!” A ping from the Kevinsberg city manager interrupted the sputtering history flow. “There is a gig opp in freshwater loading. Accept or decline?”

Breeze saved their capture and let the gig specs fill their augmented field of vision. The offer was for an outdoor shift, but a sheltered one. Better than spraying slush onto the lily pads from the deck of an icemaker. And there’d be time, after, to try to get on a sim shoot.

“Accept. Be there in twenty.” Pretty pics of sun on the water and spieling about old land ownership grudges weren’t going to boost them up any leaderboards anyway. Breeze needed unique footage, not stuff every other simmaker wannabe could pick up here on the cliff. “Earmark my pay stub to club dues, Moil.”

“Of course,” the app said, posting a status bar for the payout.

Resetting the goggs, Breeze turned from the rail and the rising sun. Another would-be auteur barged into their spot, narrating a take of their own: “ . . . tidal generators and the facility constructed around them are the core of a massive geoengineering project, life support for a planet in trouble. It’s a big give for the common good, courtesy of a CEO who escaped the US with his billions intact!”

Good technique, Breeze thought. Better than mine.

Keisha, who pretended to cynicism, said megaphilanthropy was a survival strategy. That the richies were fending off governments who’d otherwise straight-up seize their money. Maybe there was truth in that.

Still, Kev Magee’s version of saving the world had a scale that appealed to the imagination. Making icebergs on an industrial scale, just to draw heat out of the oceans? Several legit sciencers had noped the idea, but Magee fought back with flotillas of in-house researchers, a veritable publishing industry devoted to Kevinsberg success metrics.

He’d expanded beyond icebergs, too. The embroidery project laced hectares of highly reflective sheet ice across ocean spaces that used to freeze over, all on their own, decades ago. Perimeter expansion of the winter freeze, they called it. And a wildly popular innovation team, deep in the Arctic, was even now rolling out ice barges meant to somehow boost polar bear survivability.

Could all these hundreds of thousands of tons of man-made ice, literal drops in a literal ocean, truly make a dent in the ongoing global overheat? Perhaps not. But Magee was a billionaire, and as long as he was creating gigs and homing refugees, that meant something. Breeze figured—knew—that serfing for a megaphilanthropist was as close as it came to getting a fresh start. It certainly beat trying to scrape by in the cross-continental shooting gallery south of the Great Lakes.

And Kevinsberg had a simmaker community.

They took a heat lock out of the cold, back into the steady eighteen Celsius degrees that was the city ambient. Popping up their goggs as they steamed over, Breeze stripped off parka, gloves, hat, and scarf, leaving the gear in the club’s communal cloak room. Aiming for a pace that would warm the body, without building up a lethally chilling sweat by the time they got to the docks, they strode from the viewpoint. They racked their brain all the way to the harbor, trying to come up with a capture nobody else would’ve uploaded a thousand times over.

The rhythms of physical labor beat the day out swiftly. Hitch up a watership, connect hoses, check seals. Pump the tanks, next: bilge out to compost facilities, desalinized potable in. Watch the readings, ping safety checks to the dock foreperson, then unhitch the whole thing and move on to the next ship. Faster you worked, more you got for bonus.

“A bot could do this in good conditions!” the dock supervisor bellowed, over clanking equipment and the howl of wind, as Breeze clumped into the reports shed at the end of the day.

“Be glad conditions are bad, then,” Breeze said. Bots were scarce and pricey, and the docks could be slick. Nobody had yet written an algorithm more sophisticated than that trickster ice, with its tendency to foul gauges and metal joints, to shatter water hoses.

“Thanks for that, you big Pollyanna.”

“Freshwater loading’s not a bad gig!” Breeze insisted.

One of the other loaders slammed in behind them, gusting cold through the shed. “Hey’d you hear? Magee’s moving to monetize the desal operation!”

“For-profit freshwater?” The supervisor scoffed. “From fuckin’ Labrador? How they gonna ship?”

“They’re not, exactly. They’re talking to the JobBezos foundation about pipelining it cross-continent.”

“Beyond!” Breeze said, earning a withering look, in stereo. “How, though?”

“Steam her, pump her, spurt-spray-splash it goes west. Outflow pipes can dump the flow into all the half-dried rivers and they’ll charge dams downstream for the give to their reservoirs. They call it . . . ” He flourished, like a magician, mittens dripping. “ . . . hydrotransfusion!”

“They’re just laying a big-ass pipe dream on Global Oversight before someone claws back their cash balance for tree planting,” said the supervisor.

“But if it worked!” Breeze couldn’t help speaking up. “That’s amazing—the scale of that!”

“It means we’re desperate, kid.” The supervisor snorted. “You are a Pollyanna.”

“Whatever.” The city manager app, Moil, completed their pay stub and punched them out. “I’m gonna go chase my dreams now.”

“You mean you’re going to work a double,” said the other guy, “Just like every other putz in this sardine can.”

“You say poh tay toh.” Waving a jaunty goodbye, Breeze made for Ashevak Park.

The Kevinsberg town square was a domed quarry running the length of three football fields, surrounded by thirty-story greentowers and tasked to providing city residents with a perpetual illusion of springtime. Roofed in crystal-clear nanoglass that never iced over, it was warmed by heat the city extracted from the sea. The park’s lawns and flower gardens drank desalinized seawater and battened on local compost. Meadows, waterfalls, rhododendrons, scent of honeysuckle, and buzzing honeybees—the whole dome was supported by steel-core pillars designed and printed by the Dorset Fine Arts Collective on Baffin Island.

The carvings had elevated the dome from greenhouse to temple—Parthenon of the North, some called it. The Inuit pillars spoke a visual language Breeze couldn’t quite decode. Rising asymmetrical columns featured smooth gray seals, ptarmigan, sleek arctic foxes morphing into albatross. Sculpted hunters paddled kayaks twenty feet up, flying amid flocks of geese and owls.

At ground level, the gray scale accumulation of stone depicted large-mouthed bipedal hunters on foot, rising out of clematis vines and stands of daisy to pose with harpoons. Here and there, misshapen, half-human deities seemed to climb out of the hedges. Alice screamed whenever she caught a glimpse of the monument-scale walrus woman overwatching the mint gardens.

The central pillar was Qilalugag, a pod of narwhals cut into porous layers of printed whalebone. The pod tapered at top and bottom, so that the whole column balanced, at its base, on a single curving horn. Looking up, viewers could see the apex of the Ashevak Park dome resting on the red-stained tail flukes of a narwhal calf.

Three points of contact, holding up a glass house. That was the noper take on it. But actual tourists came to see Qilalugag. Came to ooh and ahh, in the flesh, at the vision of swirling monodon monceros under the stars, under the whirl of northern lights.

Its immensity, many points of interest, and the variety of artificially cultivated environments within the quarry also meant that Ashevak Park was where most of the local sim shoots took place.

Punched out, dues paid, Breeze picked up a pair of cannabis-laced curry skewers, printed meat with deep-fried crunchy rice packaging. Munching, they found the Orphan’s Club reserved pavilion, conveniently near the casting tent. They stretched out on a patch of lawn, bumping fists with some other off-shift teens, feeling muscle-sore but pleasantly tired.

Unlike on the docks, the chatter here stayed upbeat and hopeful. Rumor had it the current VR feature would be capturing a police foot chase. The crew would be looking for real bodies, maybe lots of them, for crowd shots.

“Take off your goggs.” Tenor voice, unfamiliar accent.

Breeze jumped. Burgerface, from this morning, was crouching in a spot Breeze had saved for Keisha. Tall, fit, with close-cropped white-blonde hair and that shiny-pink ruin of skin below the eyes, she had a twist to her speech patterns that sounded . . . Brit maybe?

“What?” Breeze said. “Why?”

“Want to get noticed, let them see your face.”

“I’m widecasting headshots.”

“So’s everyone else. Go on. They’ll snag on me and look away. Staring’s rude after all—”

Breeze redirected their eyes hastily.

“—they’ll land on you. You got good cheekbones, Blossom, nice big eyes . . . ”

“Which you’re seeing, in my headshot.” Reluctantly—unaugmented reality was superboring—Breeze pushed their goggs up. The woman fluffed a few wisps of their hair around their temples.

“Hey! Mitts off! I don’t know you!”

“I’m Zero. Pronouns she/her. I’m your Orphan Club mentor and we’re roommates.”

“Since when?”

“Since I just took the spare bed in your pop-in.”

Breeze was crunching feels about this revelation when two things happened at once: Keisha came striding up the path, looking almost animated, and the casting agent for the crowd scene emerged from the production tent.

Excitement surged through the gathered aspirants. Breeze refluffed the hair; Zero barely twitched her scar tissue and still managed to look smug.

“Did you hear?” Keisha said breathlessly, plopping down in the nonexistent space between them and accepting the other skewer from Breeze. “Someone beheaded the EXOshell CEO in Paris!”

“Calling fakenews,” Breeze said, automatically.

“Hi, Zero. Noping you back, Breeze—there’s footage.”

“They caught the killer?”

“Footage of the body.”

“Don’t you dare share,” Breeze said. Keisha seemed to think leaning into the stuff of nightmare would somehow make it easier to forget what things had been like before they got out of Detroit. Like filling their heads with new horrible garbage would crowd out the past

Before Keisha could respond, the casting agent pinged them—actually pinged them! “You three—step up!”

“Told you,” Zero said. As one they rose, obedient and eager, to get their bodies into the capture.

Everyone wanted to be in sims, of course, so the work paid minimum gig rate. After six hours of playing crowd members while Breeze tried to take in every single thing the crew was doing to pull the shot together, the three of them punched out and trudged off, barely richer, making for the Orphans Club.

Zero, inexplicably, had energy for chitchat. “How’d you two meet?”

“Partnered up for a school project.”

“I assumed you were lovers. Or family.”

“Ha! We were practically strangers.” Keisha pinged Club Receiving, summoning a baggy-eyed twelve year old with a baby carriage, who verified Alice’s dependent status.

Practically strangers. Stung, Breeze forced cheer into their voice. “Yeah, school. Keisha’s aces for math and chemistry, and I had a few levels on her in reading-writing-rhetoric. The club’s StuddyBuddy app matched us when our school went kaboom.”

“All hail the mighty Orphan’s Club.” Keisha lifted Alice out of the carriage, settling her into a sling. Then, abruptly, she stepped behind Breeze, blocking the gaze of the two oil-stained male machinists who liked to watch from across the way, stickily zooming views of every young who came and went.

“They bother you?” Zero asked.

“The zoomers? What do you think—” Keisha said.

“All they can do is look,” Breeze said. “Cameras everywhere, right? Supposedly the walls are laced with tasers.”

“Don’t mind Breeze, Zero,” Keisha said. “They’re hoping if they bury their head deep enough, they’ll rediscover their innocence in the sand.”

Breeze turned away, breathing out hurt. Zero moved into a pool of light, hands on hips, catching one zoomer’s eye. His leer broke on the terrain of her face, or possibly on some threat in her expression.

Maybe rooming with a muscly type would have unexpected perks.

“Let’s shift,” she said.

They shuffled off through the corridors to Magenta block. Breeze held the door for the women as they trooped inside their pop-in. “Home sweet home.”

“Very posh,” Zero said, tone appreciative. It was, too: four bunks, private toilet with a change station and thrice-running water—cold tap, warm tap, and a locked spigot for boiled.

Alice was the reason for the upscale accommodations—and also the reason most of their allotted roommates requested new quarters after a day or two.

But Keisha got the baby into her crib without waking her, doing an immediate collapse onto her own bunk. Breeze pulled blankets over them both, then mixed up a bottle of printed formula for the baby, setting it in the warmer. They dug out a cube of mint tea. “Want a cup?”

Zero shook her head: “You take the childcare in shifts?”

“No. I pay top-ups to Orphan’s Club to give Keisha breaks. And she gigs there, helping the smalls with starter math.”

“Kid doesn’t resemble either of you.”

Oblique way of pointing out that the two of them sucked at parenting? Breeze decided they were being oversensitive. “We’re just fostering. Keisha was doing a nanny gig when Alice’s mom vanished.”

“Where?”

“Detroit.” Before this could turn in to a heartfelt round of I’ll show you mine if you show me yours, Breeze took a too-hot gulp of partially diffused mint tea and gave Zero a stroke for her social capital. “Thanks for getting us onto the shoot today.”

“Stick with me, kid. Club’s appointed me your fairy godmentor, what?”

“Mother, yeah. You’ve got to be close to aging out—” Breeze shut up then, averting their gaze as Zero stripped off her fitted vest and body armor, revealing a torso that belonged on a classical Greek statue, with full breasts and hard-looking coral-colored nipples. Cat-light and silent, she vaulted into the bunk above Keisha.

If she lasts, we’ll have to talk about boundaries. Breeze settled, spider delicate, into the lower bunk. They took another sip of mint, checked the laces on their boots, and shut off their hearing aids.

In the resulting blessed silence, they primed their goggs with a text-only scan of the latest headlines. Nothing about murdered CEOs on the official channels, but Kevinsberg censored that kind of thing, and Breeze ran a heavy-duty app, Can’t Unsee, that kept things like decapitated bodies—real or deepfaked—off their feeds.

They read one aspirational squib about the proposed desalination pipeline. Engineering wet dream, said the commenters. The lingo got technical pretty fast—stuff about gravity generators, forced steam at designated choke points. Lots of blahblahblah about power recovery in a closed system, and kickbacks from dams.

It looked good in sim, and Kevinsberg sciencers had a total #bigdreamer brand. Why not try it? The seas were overfull, and the continents were parching up.

Closing the newsflow, Breeze brought up their lullaby app, Hayride.

The view of their bunk dissolved, morphing into a cart. The pop-in apartment became a sea of hypnotically waving, silent canola blossoms. Breeze fished a fauxfur-lined mitten from under their pillow, wrapping their fingers in softness. They cued the program to add in a dog.

They were asleep before it loaded into the picture.

Quick haptic jolts, just above the ears, brought them out of dreams. The rig was programmed to wake Breeze every time they started trying to run, or if rate-of-breath or heartbeat stats suggested they were sinking into nightmare. Preemptively noping out of whatever horrors their subconscious was cooking up kept Breeze from whiting out entirely.

Unhappily awake, they inhaled on a four-count, then unclenched their eyelids, feeling fight-or-flighty. The Hayride app on their goggs was deep into cornfields now. The dog of the day was a stunningly beautiful Irish setter, silky to the touch.

Programmed illusion warred briefly with a hint of dream memory. Something about thick wool socks—their only socks—grinding against their toes, steeped in something sticky . . .

Pet the dog, pet the dog, pet the dog . . .

Breeze cleared the sim from their goggs. Zero was sitting up in bed, tits mercifully draped under a blanket, watching Keisha walk Alice back and forth. No sound for Breeze, but they could see baby screaming the walls red.

Zero’s mouth moved. Breeze stayed still, faking sleep. Badly, apparently, because their fairy godmentor finger-spelled. “You need better headshots.”

A kick of insult. Breeze rebooted their rig.

“I’m doing on-camera gigs to make contacts,” they said. “I want to get on a crew and work my way up to directing.”

Both hearing aids engaged midway through this declaration, filling the already close room with baby wails and the sound of their own voice.

“Good, you’re up!” Keisha handed Alice over.

“Awww. How’s our little hot potato?”

“Don’t say our.” Keisha vanished into the bathroom.

“Sorry.” One-armed, Breeze shook themselves out of bed, digging in the pantry box for fish broth cubes and dried dumplings. Unlocking the boil tap, they topped up three metal cups. The baby arched and wailed.

“So the reason you were gawping at the pretty sunrise yesterday,” Zero said, as if there’d been no interruption. “Is you want to craft sims proper.”

“Practice, yeah. Until I can take a capture course.”

“You and every other glamor hound in the city, I’ll wager,” Zero hopped off their bunk and dropped into a push-up. “You’re not in the scholarship queue.”

“Gotta get Alice adopted first,” Breeze said, keeping their voice light. “I’m learning what I can on the job.”

“And when you’re a big shot director, you’re going to . . . what?”

“Show the world rising from the ashes,” Breeze said promptly.

“On a front of man-made ice?”

“People need to see what we’re building here. How hard everyone’s trying!”

“That is a genuinely heartwarming take.”

“Sarcasm’s antisocial, Zero.” Dumplings began plumping up in the three cups. Keisha had exhaustion as an excuse. If Breeze had to live with two neggers . . . their vision blurred. Alice slapped at their goggs, almost dislodging a hearing aid.

“Relax, Blossom. My point is you don’t have to wait out the slow queue of wannabes. You must know you’re bloody gorgeous. Those wide-eyed peepers, the cheekbones . . . add to that to your apparent faith in humanity and the rare sense—”

“Trade on my looks? Don’t you feel like that’s kind of—”

“—rare sense of fair play,” Zero overrode them. “Get that idealism out where people can see it! I promise you, they will eat it up. Sweet-tempered giants are trending.”

“It sounds like cheating.”

“Or maybe you’re not serious about your ambitions,” Zero said.

Breeze was starting to wish they’d never given Zero that stroke. “Of course I’m serious! We picked Kevinsberg because of the sim studio.”

“Yet you’re pumping bilge water, eight to six.”

By now Alice’s wails had reached rock-shattering volume: the Club’s social worker app was probably tallying complaints against them, and downvoting her adoptability stats. Again. Breeze bounced her. “What do you suggest, oh exalted godmentor?”

“Fix your headshots,” Zero said implacably. “Get better clothes.”

“Like any of that is affordable,” Keisha came out of the bathroom, sighing over the dumplings before taking a cup.

Breeze thought of the crowds at the sunrise yesterday. “Zero may have a point.”

Keisha slammed the cup onto their stub of a counter, startling Alice to silence, for a breath, anyway. Broth sloshed her fingers. She started the cold tap, thrusting the burned skin into the flow.

“One day’s wages, Blossoms.” Zero finished up her round of push-ups, tested her weight on a ceiling pipe, and transitioned into chin-ups. “Two at most. I’ll haggle a photographer for the shots—”

“And branding,” Keisha interrupted. “I’m not rocking cradles all day so Breeze can start trending on the deepfake porn sites.”

“How’s she supposed to pull off a brand?” Breeze objected, although the thought of being the VR fucktoy of the month made their stomach go queasy. They burped—fish—and thought of the neighborhood zoomers.

“I can haggle a brand,” Zero agreed, not breaking rhythm. Up, down, up like a machine.

Breeze gave Keisha the wide-eyes. She seemed to deflate. “Fine.”

In the end it was three days without childcare. Three shifts Breeze spent on a midsize icemaker, tethered to the deck as waves whiplashed the crew, freezing in a moldy-smelling extra-large life jacket as part of a crew spraying fine mist on the artificial icebergs anchored at the edge of the Current. Three days of hazard-grade wages, all vanished into Zero’s growing shopping list. Hairstyle and makeup first, then a set of fashionable VR goggs that didn’t quite sync with their hearing aids.

The final buy was a temp brand, complicated aurora spray above their left eyebrow, inked in emerald using something called Slowfade.

“It gives you a whiff of the exotic,” Zero said, as Breeze looked it over.

“It gives me a recurring monthly expense,” Breeze countered.

“We’ll get it tattooed when we can.”

Three days of Keisha deteriorating into zombie, in the twenty-four-seven yellscape.

Breeze did what they could. Came home after the photo shoot and cajoled her out of the apartment. Spent their last on a stroller booking, collecting the wagon under the ever-present leer of the zoomers, then adjusting its settings to extra jouncy. That, and a white noise app, was one of the few things sure to lull Alice into quiescence.

“So, the park?” Keisha said, as the baby quieted and a two-hour countdown popped up in their peripherals.

“Let’s take her outside,” Breeze said. “Change of pace, right?”

Keisha signed agreement. Bundling up with things from the Club’s communal cloakroom, they sealed the stroller, cycled through a heat lock, and stepped out onto the island’s cliffside walk.

Rough winter fingers poked the gaps in their ill-fitted coats and mittens. Hunching as they walked, looking east at slate-gray seas and waves like rolling pumice, the two teens let the crash of water against the shore render them insensate for a while. The day shift was over, and the Club had got up a tobogganing opp for the under-fourteens, building an artificial mound of snow and staffing a hot cider fountain at its base. Further on, ice sculptors were taking advantage of the day’s remaining light. Wannabe simmakers were out collecting action shots. They looked to Breeze, suddenly, like hungry gulls snatching at a scantness of crumbs.

Everyone froze as rotors sounded, audible even over the sputter of the ice cannons at the cliff. People paused, craning necks, tracking a trio of black helicopters making for Head Office, the tallest tower, at the heart of the island settlement.

“Guess Kev Magee’s back in residence,” Breeze rasped. They were tired enough that reporting the obvious was as close to conversation as they could manage. “Didn’t know he was gone.”

“To Paris, for the funeral.” Keisha said. “That EXOshell CEO who got beheaded.”

Breeze flinched.

A passing tobogganer, kid of about thirteen with a prosthetic for a left arm and a cheap print job for teeth, chimed in: “They still haven’t found the head!”

“I don’t want to know,” Breeze said.

“#Eattherich!” the kid screeched, giving the choppers the finger. Up on the tower roof, black-clad figures were taking up positions around the building perimeter.

“I’ll eat you, you wake our baby,” Keisha said.

The kid made lip-smacking noises. Breeze took a step closer, reluctantly using their bigness as threat. The kid bounded away like an ape.

“Don’t think about newscycle, Breeze.” Keisha said. “It’s just noise.”

Breeze watched the kids. A couple of the ten-and-unders were helping load five year olds into sleds. The barely teens were helping smalls pull their toboggans up the hill. They might all have been decades younger, instead of just a couple years. “How many you think there are, like that?”

“Like what?”

“#Eattherich kid. Think Magee has a list? People he’s brought to town who’d just as soon shank him as thank him—”

“Thank what? His abundant generosity?” Keisha kicked a pebble at the pram. “Magee’s not doing this out of the goodness of his heart.”

“He could just restrict himself to making ice. He doesn’t have to fund sims and sculptures and ski hills. That concert hall’s opening soon—”

“He’s got to live here too, doesn’t he?”

“People can help themselves and do good,” Breeze insisted.

Her eye fell on Alice. Remembering their own devil’s bargain?

One of the sculptors was putting the claws on a dancing bear, sending ice dust into the breeze as they chainsawed form into frost.

“Almighty Magee’s got nothing to fear.” Keisha indicated the toboggan pack. “Not from the likes of them.”

“No? What about your EXOshell guy?”

She zoomed to a close view of the helipad, with its black-clad muscly contingent. “Anyone getting through that kind of security? Has got to be another one of them.”

“Right. Billionaires preying on each other.”

She blew a plume of foggy air out at the disturbingly colorless ocean, losing interest. “You’ll get Alice back into care tomorrow?”

“I promise,” Breeze said. “I’m sorry it’s been so—”

“Don’t. You work more doubles, we can start buying Alice up the adoption queue. It’s all win.”

The guilt lessened, but didn’t go entirely. But then Keisha leaned in, blocking out a flag of wind with the warmth of her body, and one of the tobogganers did a flip that made them both gasp. They watched the sculptors spray crystalline grit into the breeze until they couldn’t feel their feet for the cold, until the stroller pinged a warning—fifteen minutes until its next rental, its next hot date with another throwaway baby.

“Get up, Blossom, there’s a rumor of a morning shoot.” Zero made this impossible to ignore by tugging on their boots, as if she meant to remove them.

Breeze yanked both legs away, blinking away views from Hayride—poppy fields and a springer spaniel. “Go away. Don’t touch me! I can’t today.”

“There’s speaking parts. An actual director. You want to make contacts, don’t you?”

They did, but . . . “Keisha needs a break.”

“It’s not your kid.”

“Alice,” Breeze signed. “Is our responsibility.”

Flat look, like Zero was sifting them. Then: “I’ll gig for the childcare.”

“Really?” The promise felt sticky.

Zero made an almost ostentatious show of taking a bag-searching shift at the boat docks, then tasking their stub to the household account. “Happy now? Run some varnish over your eyebrow brand and wear this.”

“This” was a navy blue coat, well worn, but a far cut above their drab weather-stained work sheath.

“Fancy!”

“We’ll raise your standards yet.”

Breeze bit their lip. “You’re trying to get in as my manager, right? That’s what this is?”

“I’m not after sex, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“No, no!” A blush that went through their whole body.

“Come on, it totally was. You think shaking down people at Customs is all I want out of life? You and me, Blossom, we’re going all the way to what passes for the top of this desperate scrape of an ice-encrusted fucking anthill.”

“Language,” Breeze managed. “The baby.”

“I’m trying to help you, Breeze. Don’t you want help?”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

Zero clamped her hands over her cheeks, making the scars look fake, almost plasticky, and shoved her nose right up to the edge of Breeze’s new, improved goggles. Well past their consent barrier, but somehow they didn’t feel like they could say so. “You got your ears turned on? You capturing footage?”

“Why would I?”

“I want to review your audition later. Unless you prefer to debrief me verbally?”

“Noping that!”

“Cams on then. They’ve got those nice new lenses; you should be practicing your captures. Do your hair like I showed you.”

Speaking part. Breeze powered up, fluffed hair, checked their emerald-branded aurora, and plunged out into the city.

They hadn’t realized how early it was. Wee hours, really. With the timing offset from the usual commuter flows, the passages were deserted. Excess hot air from submarine ice condensers gusted warmly, creating an artificial wind laced with antibacterial measures and a smell of stale potato. Nobody was around.

Breeze found themself tagging security cameras as they passed.

I’m on that one, I’m on that one. Nothing to fear! I’m probably the most interesting thing on the security feeds. There could even be live eyes on me . . .

Silly litany, maybe, but it kept them from running home.

“Zero, where’s this gig?” They texted, turning a slow three-sixty to pan Ashevak Park. Ground-level lights beckoned, colors programmed to simulate sunrise in March. The dome above was black and star-sprung. Silhouettes of geese and kayaks blacked out the constellations.

Breeze bent to check their boot laces. And then, straightening up, jumped as a shadow melted out of the central pillar.

Someone was trying to climb Qilalugag, the narwhal pod.

“Shouldn’t that be . . . not allowed?” Breeze muttered. “Moil?”

They zoomed, bringing in facial features. It was one of the two pervy machinists. The zoomer was dressed for deep winter, bundled in a thick coat that made him look lumpy, and sporting an extravagantly rolled-up toque with a smeary looking pompom. As Breeze watched, he lost his grip on a narwhal fluke. Teetering, he lost ground, not quite falling to the base of the statue. Rebalancing before he landed flat on his butt, he tottered, kicked the pillar’s base, and then hunched in on himself.

Was he . . . crying?

The hearing aids glitched back into sync with the gogg view, bringing muttered monologue: “Oh no, oh no, no no, oh no nuh no . . . ”

Breeze flashed on Zero, saying Alice wasn’t their problem. Tried to vanish behind a carved sea lion. Speaking part, come on Breeze, just find the casting tent . . .

“Hey,” they said instead. “Hi? Bonjour? Hola?”

“Nuh Nuh oh no oh no no no . . . ”

Breeze felt acid burning in the back of their throat. “Moil!”

“Good morning Breeze! You’re up early!”

“Can you Whooz this guy for a name?” Breeze put up both hands, waving to get the zoomer’s attention. “Hey . . . neighbor! Hi, it’s me. Breeze? I live in Magenta—”

OMG, why am I telling him that?

Come on, he must know.

“My friend and I are the ones with the baby. Remember?”

Moil spoke up. “That individual is named Douglas Farrow. Pronouns he/him.”

“Douglas, right? Or Doug, maybe? Hey, Doug! What are you doing out here?”

“Nuh nuh nuh no, no oh—” Dirty hands with ripped, bloodied nails fisted into the oily weave of the toque. His nose was squashy and red, like he’d banged it.

Breeze murmured: “Moil, you’ve called someone, right? A social worker. An ambulance?”

“Douglas does not appear to be in grave physical distress—”

“He’s melting down!”

“I can place him in the voluntary psychiatric services queue. If he refuses and you authorize a medical call that is later tagged as #falsealarm, you may be expected to compensate City Services—”

They’d never be able to start moving Alice up the adoption boards if they had an outstanding ticket to pay. Breeze took another reluctant step toward Doug, who was yanking the toque and making nuhnuh noises. “Listen. Can I help? Um, friend—”

Doug’s head whipped up. “Friend? Friend?”

Dragging the hat down over his face, he charged.

If a toque had eyeholes, did that make it a balaclava? It was the last thing Breeze remembered thinking before a wash of white light and the sound of static carried them away.

Breeze came out of the static on their back, lying in beyond-fancy accommodations. Sage-green sheets, whiff of honeysuckle. A flawless nanoglass window overlooked the very first Kevinsberg ice shop, ten stories below.

They flexed their toes. Their boots were still on; Keisha must have told them.

Tiny damp fingers brushed their nose. Alice was tucked under Breeze’s arm. She had managed to extract one arm from the cocoon of a clean and shockingly soft yellow swaddle. She drew her fingers back from Breeze’s nose, shoving them into her gob.

They ran a cheek over her head, self-soothing by drinking in baby smell, and for good measure focused on the view, rhythmic descent and splash of buoy-shaped cones of ice, big as houses, sliding off the assembly line. Hitting sea, the baby bergs tangled into nets of faux spidersilk that caught, spooled, and strung them in long lines hitched to towboats bound for the Current. The ships would draw them into temporary anchorage, hunting big winter storms that might be expected to dump ice rain and snow onto surfaces already configured to maximize droplet catch.

Breeze realized their hands were bagged in cotton. Burned?

They peeked sideways. Keisha was nearby in a rocking chair, watching the ice cones too—the hypnotic rhythm of them rolling off the line into the bay.

“Where’s Zero?” Breeze texted, so the baby wouldn’t hear.

“You’re back!” Keisha lit up.

Breeze felt tears threatening. Instead of asking how long they’d blipped out for, they signed: “Zero?”

She frowned. “Inola—the nurse—spooked her, I think.”

“Didn’t know anything could.”

“You don’t get a face like that without getting a few triggers too, right?”

“Guess not.” The idea of Zero having trauma rang . . . false somehow.

“She said she’d go scare up some interview gigs.” Breeze must have looked puzzled, because Keisha added: “You’re a sensation. Like, locally famous.”

“Why?”

“Hashtag hero,” she shared a capture.

Breeze fumbled down their goggs. The footage came in, record of a memory that felt all of five minutes old. Lumpy upset Doug, refusing to be talked down. Moil saying an ambulance would cost.

On the views as the zoomer rushed closer, yelling, an ice chisel dropped out of his sleeve. Short chopping blade. Probably not all that dangerous?

Breeze put a protective hand on the baby. The angle of the shot made it obvious they’d scrambled backward. They heard their own voice, kind of crooning: “Doug, Doug, you’re okay, you’re okay! Calm down—”

“We’re not friends!”

Suddenly a pair of beanbag cannons deployed, emerging from gaps in the nearest walrus statue. Fire one, fire two, fire three—

The footage paused as the bags hit the zoomer. The image pixelated.

Moil said: “This content is rated high-risk by your Can’t Unsee application. To view—”

“Decline.” Breeze put their nose on the baby’s head, nuzzling her silky, white-blonde hair. A ping from their biofeedback augments showed their pulse verging to ninety beats. “So I’m a #hero for . . . what?”

“For trying, I guess.” Keisha said. “Those lumps in Doug’s coat? When the beanbags hit, they exploded.”

Breeze focused on the now. “And he—”

“Went splat, yeah,” Keisha climbed into the treatment bed, on the no-baby side. Leaned in, a comforting weight. “Bob—the other one—is missing.”

Pet the baby, pet the baby. Breeze remembered the three of them, cuddled up like this back in Detroit. Only six months ago? Seemed like longer.

That day of waiting, endlessly waiting, on Alice’s mom. They’d sat it out in rising hunger, because of the heat and the rat-a-tat of drone platforms nearby, too near. They’d reported Cynthia missing and waited some more, this time on police and child welfare agents who never came.

On the third day, they’d widecast a WTF do we do? They didn’t get many commenters, though, just a couple chatbots who said it was illegal to abandon an infant.

But there wouldn’t have been any consequences. City systems were overwhelmed. Any adult who might arrest or help them was busy taking care of themselves.

Leaving one option: the Orphan’s Club. Upgrade their membership from casual. Formally join the chain of elders helping youngers, gigging childcare until someone found new mommies for the baby.

No choice at all, really.

Breeze had headed out to find formula, leaving Keisha to fill out the forms. They were loading up milk and diapers when they saw a bright new thousand-pack of bullet drones, deploying from the roof of One Detroit Center, making straight for the safe zone.

Next thing Breeze knew they were back in the basement, bloody-footed, shaking Keisha, or being shaken by her. Arguing about something. Breeze remembered shouting, over the rat-a-tat: “But she can get us out! Babies top the queue for evacuation!”

So Alice had become their ticket to Kevinsberg. To a pretty great house, and most of all not getting shot at. Pretty good deal, even if neither of them could have known she’d score so low within the queue of adoptable infants.

She hadn’t refused to be cute before her mother went AWOL.

Keisha tapped their goggles with a finger. “Still with me?”

“Who is this child in my arms and what have they done with our portable scream machine?”

“Don’t say our.”

“Sorry.”

“Nurse thinks maybe there’s some kind of lack . . . lacto thing she’s got? Tummy ache from printed milk.”

“But,” Breeze said. “You asked about that.”

“Over and over!” They were allowed to log into the pediatric care queue every time Alice cried for six hours straight.

“We could’ve been . . . are you saying she could’ve—”

“You better not be blaming me.” Keisha pulled away, jolting Alice. Instead of shrieking, baby blew a for-real spit bubble.

“Jeez. If all we’d needed was fancy milk . . . ” Breeze reached up to rub the spot above their branded eyebrow. Gauze-wrapped fingers dragged on yet more bandage.

They got a ping from Zero.

“What is it?”

“Call from the fairy godmentor,” Breeze shared the specs. “Zero’s put together an interview opp, just like you said.”

“Great!”

“Yeah . . . ” Breeze rubbed their bandaged palms together.

“But?”

Ridiculous, to be whispering. Still. “Keish. I don’t know if Zero’s got our best interests at heart.”

“No. You don’t get to do that.” Keisha practically snapped to attention. “You don’t get to decide now, for the first time in your life, that you don’t trust someone.”

“No, I know, but—somehow I end up—Zero decides things, and—”

A strangled laugh. “Like you deciding we should form a refugee threesome and fly off to the North Fucking Pole?”

Breeze blinked. “That’s not fair.”

“You said there’d be people here who’d want Alice, Breeze. Who’d love her, or at least know what the fuck they were doing—”

A chime. Strike for them both—social worker app, flagging the profanity.

She rolled off the bed, pacing. “We got clear of the shooting. You were right about that, it was good. It is good. I don’t mean to be a . . . but Breeze, we can’t hand Alice off to a playgroup until she’s four!”

“We’d never put her in one of those feral—”

“For fuck’s sake!” Keisha spun, pressing both fists against the nanoglass, then smacking her head against it once, twice. “Would you stop assuming I’m as good of a person as you!”

Within the circle of their arm, the baby shivered.

“Stop! I’m sorry, okay?” Breeze felt white edges forming on the periphery of their vision. “I’m taking the gig! Interview, accept. I’m sorry!”

Keisha deflated, curling up against the window. Sweat smudges from her forehead and hands were already cleaning themselves off the nanoglass. “Fuck.”

Social worker gave them another strike for profanity.

“You’re right,” Breeze said. “She needs . . . good parents. Permanence. We’ll home her, we will.”

Eyes dull, she nodded.

“We will!” Breeze cast about for something else they could say. “We’ll lose the place on Magenta, when Alice goes. If we want to stay together . . . ”

They left room for an of course we’ll stay together  . . .

Instead, Keisha said “Just keep godmentor happy until we’ve homed the baby. Will you? Please?”

“I accepted the interview, all right?” Breeze said. “It’s a done deal.”

Alice blew another bubble. She let out a toothless half smile and then, fists clamping, filled her diaper, extravagantly, with a sound like a French horn tuning.

“Yeah, done deal,” Keisha echoed. She picked herself up, scooped the baby, and made for the door. “No one’s gonna be able to resist her.”

Breeze picked at their hand bandages. Cool air caressed the space on their chest where Alice had been.

If we want to stay together . . .

Keisha didn’t owe them anything.

Doesn’t she? I could’ve left her holding that baby. Goddamnit, I just went over there to study and flirt a little—

A woman knocked on the door just then, softly, waiting on an invite to enter.

Breeze motioned consent. Tried wiping their face with the backs of their gauzy hands and smeared their goggs.

The woman asked. “Feel like getting those bandages off?”

Breeze nodded. Looking sharp, a little like a mom, she plopped her seat down on the edge of the bed, waiting. Like she had forever.

They said. “You know those days where everything’s terrible?”

“I hate those days,” she said. “I’m Inola, by the way.”

“She/her?”

“Sure.”

Tears slipped down their face.“Breeze, they/them. Did you put our baby on the allergy list?”

“And gave a strike to the intake nurse who told you Alice didn’t have a sensitivity.”

“Thank you.”

“Orphan’s Club will strike ’em too. I’m not usually punitive, but . . . ” She looked over their readings—pulse, blood pressure, whatever. “So. From the footage, it looks like you tuned out when you were attacked.”

The query probably meant Inola was a psychiatric nurse. Breeze bonked the bandages on their hands together, trying to choose their words. “Flight, fight, freeze, right?”

“You freeze up often?”

“Not since Detroit.”

Flicker of a memory. Arriving back at the Detroit basement with formula, to find Keisha packing up some of the family valuables, and none of the baby stuff.

“Breeze?” Inola said.

They signed, both bandaged hands moving clumsily, to indicate general unwillingness to talk about it. “I need to be able to work dock shifts.”

“I’m not going to ban you,” Inola said. “You’re not being punished. It was a good thing, son, trying to talk that man down.”

Breeze shrugged. “He still died.”

“Not alone.”

“Does that matter?”

“It would to me.” Another sharp look. “People abandon each other all the time, don’t they?”

Definitely a psych nurse. Breeze stared at the production line of icebergs—grind down the slide, splash in the water, tangle into towline—as Inola unwrapped the bandages on their hands. The palms were a little raw, but there was no real damage.

“Is my face okay?”

“Let’s see.” She shared her own view, sending footage from her goggles as she pulled off the tape bandage. The emerald aurora in the swirl above Breeze’s brow had crisped to a purple-tinted burn, edged with white. It looked surprisingly good.

“Battle scar,” she said, handing them a wipe for their goggs. “Almost like someone planned it that way.”

Breeze swallowed. I think our fairy godmentor made Doug do the firebomb, they wanted to say.

“Good morning, Breeze!” Moil pinged them. A new offer popped up in their sked.

It was VIP invites to the Kevinsberg Concert Hall grand opening the next evening. For Keisha and Alice too, plus a childcare worker. During intermission, there’d be a photo opp with Kevin Magee and two sim directors.

“Accept or Decline?”

A pop-up sweetened the opp: Alice would be the evening’s Featured Adoptable.

“Breeze?” Inola moved right into their line of sight, using hospital overrides to minimize the offer, so she could compel eye contact. “Something you want to tell me?”

Breeze blew out what little breath remained in their lungs. “Everything’s great,” they mouthed, airlessly, and added—to Moil—“Accept.”

Zero turned up in the flesh early the next morning, while Breeze was waiting on discharge from the hospital. She inspected the burned-in brand on Breeze’s eyebrow, looking satisfied as she settled them onto a stool in a white-walled corner of the room and set up a remote interview with a journo.

“This won’t take long. We’ve prefabbed most of the content,” the journo said. “Zero will capture your answers. Just look at her and, you know, speak from the heart.”

“About what?”

Zero shared text. “These are the questions.”

Breeze took a quick scan. “There’s nothing here about the baby.”

“Already backgrounded. We talked to Keisha about your determination to rescue Alice—”

“I don’t know if I’d call it—”

“Don’t worry, Blossom, everyone’s on message. You’re a big-time hashtag hero with dreams of stardom. Baby saving in your past, testimonial from Keisha as appetizer, and poor doomed Doug as . . . ”

“Main course?” That was Inola.

Zero turned abruptly, pointing her face at the view as the nurse scanned the room, and then said—a little coolly—“Breeze, we’ve got one more general assessment to upload. You’ll get a greenlight for discharge within the hour.”

Breeze sent thanks, wondering again what the nurse had done to spook Zero.

“Let’s talk about the concert opp,” Zero said, as soon as the latch clicked behind her. “We watch the first half, then head toward stairwell two and the board box. Kev Magee and company will be waiting. He’ll invite you over, all spontaneous like, and shake your hand. You introduce Keisha, he gives little Alice a peck on the cheek. Says the usual about how adorable she is. Our newsy friend captures the whole encounter and then you’re free and clear, for ten minutes, ish, to kiss up to the sim directors while Keisha shops Alice to potential parents. Got it?”

“Sure,” Breeze said.

Zero pointed at a tatter of flesh below her eye. “Gaze here. One, two . . . good! See the text of the questions, Blossom? Anything you want to know before you start answering?”

Just keep her happy, Keisha had said. Breeze shook their head.

“Fluff your hair, then, and start talking.”

The brand new Kevinsberg Concert Hall had been covered in a cylindrical veil of nanosilk, four stories high, for as long as Breeze had been on the island.

The structure beneath had been the subject of much speculation. Everyone expected some variation on an igloo, but nopers had countered that if the hall was too spherical it would end up looking like something called a Death Star, thereby drawing branding ire from litigious rightsholders.

Breeze could never have guessed they’d see the unveiling live, much less from a front row, elbow-rubbing vantage point with richies. The three of them were behind a velvet rope—crappy, ineffective fence, but Keisha said it was symbolic. They were the youngest people in the whole velvet-corralled throng.

Pop of fireworks. The silk curtains concealing the building shredded into multicolored streamers. From a thousand throats, all at once: “Oooh!”

The architects had levered the dome and entryway of the fantasy igloo up, as if it was on a hinge, and then used etched nanoglass to fill the space between the cup of the dome and the ground. The dome itself was surfaced in local stone, pale shakes overlaid in layers, each piece cut like a snowflake.

Breeze clapped along with all the others. The crowd sound was tinny—their fashion-plate goggs were still syncing badly with the hearing aids.

Zero pulled Alice’s diaper bag off their shoulder.

“Don’t touch me.”

“Bag ruins your look, Blossom.”

Zero had haggled finery for all three of them. Keisha was clad head to toe in a silvery tulip dress, an off the shoulder garment with a skirt so tight she was mincing. The baby had a dress and bow that made her look cute, in a sort of malevolent strawberry way. Breeze was fitted with hunter green trousers and a coffee-colored jacket.

With the tipped igloo unveiled and the applause finally wrapping, the crowd moved inside. All too close and jostly, and as they passed over the threshold, someone handed Breeze a piece of paper.

They almost backpedaled. “I don’t need—”

“I’ll take it,” Zero said. “It’s okay, kids. Program for the show, that’s all.”

“Why would we need paper—” Breeze’s gogg offlined, and their sound system shut down. Everything went smeary and silent; then the whole rig rebooted.

“What happened, Moil?” they texted. All around them, people were pushing their goggs up . . . into hair that looked, they realized, like they had styled it expecting a data blackout.

“Under the Ogua-Lik intellectual property user agreement, concertgoers are forbidden to run upload tech at live concerts. However, you have an accessibility waiver, on condition that you don’t transmit anything you hear or record. Personal use only.”

“Accept terms,” Breeze said. Feeling perverse and apprehensive, they reactivated their capture app.

This will be what Zero wants, they thought—me getting another one of a kind recording.

The concert hall interior carried on the igloo metaphor with transparent bricks, all angled differently, faceting the lobby with varying shades of white, yellow, and gold. Like walking inside an intricately faceted diamond, Breeze thought. They could have stayed forever, watching the shifts and cascades of light, but the crowd was moving, an inexorable wash of bodies, into the amphitheater itself—a darker space, blue lit, like the depths of a glacial cave.

More oohs. The stage looked as though it was surfaced in black seawater. Two carved pillars of ice, swirling arrays of orcas rising to the roof, had been erected to form its proscenium. Mist feathered around their bases.

Zero started to lay a hand on Breeze’s shoulder as they all trooped to the balcony stairway. They turned, clearing the grip as they stopped abruptly. “Zero. About Doug—”

“Whatever that pathetic old zoomer may have done to himself—”

“I’m not stupid.” Breeze kicked at her ankle, just a little.

Her expression blanked, just for a breath. Then: “I didn’t know he’d fireball, Breeze. I thought you’d go out there, charm him out of vandalizing the pillar, and get a few strokes for keeping him from self-harming.”

A rush of relief. “Really?”

“What do you think I am?”

A shiver ran through them. “I’m sorry.”

“Anyway, virtue prevailed, didn’t it? You got your face on the local leaderboards. Baby’s on the market. All your dreams are about to come true, Blossom.”

Breeze fought the urge to just let it go. “Okay, but. Where’s his buddy?”

“Who?”

“The other zoomer.”

“How would I know?”

“Zero . . . ”

“He ran for it, one imagines. Partnership of convenience, easily dissolved in a crisis.”

“Speaking of partnership.” Breeze forced the words out. “I don’t like surprises. You and I can’t team up if you’re going to—”

An odd smile crossed Zero’s face, distorting the scar tissue, giving it that fake-looking sheen. She dropped a hand on Breeze’s arm. “I notice you’re telling me now, when it’s too late to cancel this opp.”

Keisha turned back, an inquiring look on her face.

“I’m not a saint, whatever you think.” Breeze shook their head. “We meet Magee, we boost Alice up the adoptee queue. But then you . . . ”

“What? Go away?”

“Yes.” The necessity of it, the need to get clear, was so strong it weakened their knees. “I’ll pay if I have to.”

To their surprise, Zero nodded. “I give you my word, Breeze. After tonight, I’ll never do a single thing on your behalf again.”

Abruptly, she turned, hoofing it up the stairs, gliding past Keisha. Breeze frowned, puzzled. Then they saw the nurse, Inola, toiling up the steps in a vintage-looking ball gown.

“I said I’d do your babyminding gig,” she said.

Feeling absurdly touched, Breeze gave her social capital a stroke.

“And if you find you want to tell me what’s bothering—”

“Everything’s fine.” Keisha had backtracked to collect them.

“She’s right,” Breeze said. “This is going to be good for us. For Alice.”

If Inola had misgivings, they didn’t show. “Come on, then. A concert like this is once in a lifetime for you. Don’t miss out.” She gestured gently—go, go!—and they all started shuffling, once more, up the stairs.

Breeze hadn’t been sure what a “box” was, but it turned out to be a curtained private room, up high, with seats overlooking the stage. It offered unobstructed naked-eye views of the musicians, who were all clad in deep glacier blue. A single violinist wore a sheath dress in flame red—she, apparently, was a soloist.

They looked old, thirty at least, and some even older than that, and in the one-page paper program for the show most of them had listed missing loved ones in US cities within the space provided for their bios.

Breeze dutifully scanned for names from Detroit. They hadn’t known any musicians, they didn’t think. But you never knew.

The event was billed a celebration and the music was matched to that brand: thrilling whirls of sound that came in tinny and discordant at first, forcing Breeze into a deep dig on their hearing aids’ settings. It took some fiddling to get the metallic edge tuned out of the soundflow. Clang clang squeak, and finally their rig reset. In flowed a vast richness of chords and changes—strange, hot, lavishing waterfall of music.

They didn’t quite know how they were supposed to react to the onslaught. There were olds in the audience, down below, who were dabbing at their eyes. Everyone seemed rapt. Keisha seemed fidgety. Inola was far away.

Across the auditorium was Kev Magee.

Breeze zoomed surreptitiously. The billionaire looked just his newscycle images: ectomorphic twist of white in a whiter suit. His brand was tattooed on the backs of his hands, blue-lined circuit board diagrams, connected to navy blue permanails.

Aside from the dark-clad muscly types encircling the back of his box, Magee was the only one of his party not leaning forward hungrily as the orchestra brought the music to a bubbling crescendo, following the violinist into bright exaltations reminiscent of birdsong. Magee was chilled, all but swallowed by his seat. Aware, Breeze supposed, that the floorboards, the lights above, and all the musicians toiling below were essentially there for him.

The journo, sitting one row behind him, was muffling sobs into a handkerchief.

Zero slid into place beside Breeze just as the song ended, as everyone else, apparently having gotten some secret etiquette briefing, burst into applause. She had acquired a veil from somewhere, a drape of black fabric that hid the scar tissue below her goggs.

“Remember what I said?” Zero signed. “Turn left, meet up, do the glad-hand. Aw shucks it weren’t nothing, Mer Magee. Anyone woulda tried to save that old pervert.”

“Don’t talk like that about him,” Breeze said, undertone.

“Up,” she said, nudging them to their feet and holding out a hand to Keisha, almost gallant. Keisha shifted her shoulders in the unfamiliar gown, getting her feet under her, adjusting the weight of the baby.

Breeze looked at Keisha. Read my mind, read my mind!

Miracle of miracles—she did. “I’ll be right behind you guys.”

“No,” Zero said. “We’ll wait for you.”

Keep the godmentor happy. Breeze’s sense of something about to go horribly amiss went from embarrassing throttle-it paranoia to ice-hard certainty. The journo with Magee was setting their goggs into place; they probably had special dispensation to capture the “spontaneous” encounter between the island CEO and the community’s new-minted hero.

Zero set Keisha’s hand into Breeze’s. “Remember, Blossoms, you’re doing it all for the baby.”

They got moving, stepping out of the box, once again getting carried along . . .

Until Inola, blessedly, stepped into their path. “How’s it going, Breeze? Keisha? Need anything?”

“Yes!” Breeze said, stopping dead. “Can you take Alice and give her a primp and—”

Zero’s hand tightened on their shoulder with almost crushing force. Breeze felt the edges of their vision whitening. They struggled to hang on. Whatever staged footage Zero was hoping to capture now, the baby didn’t have to be in the shot. And maybe Inola was more than just a psych nurse . . .

Maybe she’s a cop, maybe she’s a soldier, maybe . . .

Keisha thrust the baby out. “Yeah! Please! Head down to the adoption table with her? We’ll be right there.”

Breeze felt something lighten, somewhere in their gut.

“On it, kids.” Inola slung the diaper bag over her shoulder, plucking up Alice and heading down.

Keisha gave Breeze a wild, wide-eyed smile. On the same page, the two of them stepped up to the staircase.

Zero’s claw tightened, guiding them left. As they pivoted, zoomed-in views showed Kev Magee and his entourage.

And suddenly they realized where their mistake had been. The answer was right there, in the center of the frame. Breeze had assumed they were the point of Zero’s actions. That she wanted sex after all. Or a meal ticket, at any price. But no—Breeze was just another game piece, just like the baby and Keisha and poor dead Doug the zoomer.

The carpet on the staircase was plush and new-smelling, the corridor spacious. They were walking side by side, each with one of Zero’s hands on a shoulder, Keisha taking tiny steps in her tight silver dress. All the while getting closer as Kev Magee loitered by the entrance to the grand box, waiting for his close-up. Ten feet away now, surrounded by security.

In their peripheral, Breeze saw a uniformed server working their way up a side staircase—the place was a maze—carrying a tray piled with treats and printables, stack of food so high they could barely see over it. The server fell into line behind the three of them.

“I think this must be Breeze Frame,” Kev said, in a booming baritone. He lit up with pleasure and surprise, as if he hadn’t planned this encounter down to its tacks. With a flick of one blue-nailed hand, he signaled the muscly types surrounding him. They parted, melting to the walls like so much overheated glacier.

The clamp of Zero’s fingers released its grip on Breeze’s shoulder. Kev Magee offered a megawatt smile. The journo was in position, optimal camera distance.

“Come on over here, my young hero,” the CEO prompted. “It’s so good to meet you. Do you shake hands?”

Breeze did the only thing they could think of. They pivoted sideways and pushed Keisha back, hard, toward the nearest muscly type. Surely any act of aggression would make the security guards snap to order.

But the guard wasn’t in position. He was collapsing, doing a twitch-and-drool into the new carpets. They all were.

A flat disk rose above Zero’s head, sweeping the corridor. Taser-drone?

Molten light bubbled on the edges of Breeze’s field of vision. They fought the desire to make a mental run for it as the tray of food packets hit the floor behind them. Behind it, the server—it looked like Bob, Breeze realized, Bob the missing zoomer—broke into a run . . .

 . . . don’t white out, don’t white out . . .

Breeze grabbed for Keisha, pressing their body over her, sinking them both into thick velvet curtain.

 . . . it was Bob, literally trampling the poleaxed muscle, scrambling over their broad backs as, arms out, he caught fire, going up like a torch, embracing Kev Magee in a flaming hug in the doorway of the CEO’s box . . .

 . . . screams, an auditorium full of people screaming now . . .

Zero did one last thing with her taser and it dropped into the heap of twitching security guards. She gave Breeze a contemptuous glance, ripped off the prosthetic scar tissue covering her face, and tossed it at them as she vaulted up into the array of pipes in the ceiling.

There were weeks of questions afterward, of course, and Breeze had to answer them again and again. When had Zero shown up? Had they checked her Orphan’s Club membership? Didn’t they suspect the scar wasn’t real? Did they know what she really looked like? What had she promised them? What did they think of Magee? Did they know he had a thing for wide-eyed idealistic kids?

It was the footage that kept them out of jail—Breeze’s shaky cam shots of Zero and her military-grade taser drone, working over the muscle. The follow-up shots after Breeze tried to climb into the pipes, attempting to give chase but getting wedged—there were no gaps wide enough for their shoulders. And Keisha, ripping off her shawl and trying to put out the flames on the burning bodies.

Inola vouched and vouched and vouched again, and made the Orphan’s Club get them lawyers, who argued Breeze and Keisha could never have afforded any of the tech involved in the hit.

Firebombs and flying tasers cost real money, after all.

It was billionaires killing billionaires, just as Keisha had said. And for what? Breaking with their cohort? Pitching in with the rest of humankind?

Nearly three weeks passed, long days of secured custody, of zoning out in the Hayride and taking appointments with Inola. Of telling the security people their story, over and over again, every last detail.

Permitted visit to a gym every day. Nap every afternoon.

No pings from Moil.

No job.

No baby.

No friend.

When security let them go, issuing stern warnings to turn down all interview opps unless they wanted to risk getting arrested again, Breeze walked through Ashevak Park, past a sim shoot—historical, with fake nineteen-fifties families eating a fake barbecue. Business as usual. They watched for a while, feeling a little numb.

Then, with no other destination in mind, they headed to the corner of Magenta block.

Keisha was there, eating a printed muffin on one of the ready-made stoops, dressed in fireproof pants. A welding torch was tucked at her feet.

Breeze stopped. Dropped their head. Almost walked on.

“Hey!” Keisha signed, patting the space beside her.

Breeze perched on the bench. “They let you out a week ago, they said.”

She nodded.

“Alice?”

“Homed. There was a bidding war, actually. One of the Magee heirs took her. She’s probably—” She pointed in the direction of Head Office.

“Good.” Breeze shuddered. “That’s good?”

“Good, yeah. But. I kind of miss her. All that time keeping her alive. Habit forming?”

Breeze picked at their cuffs for a second. “Were you going to leave her, that day?”

Keisha let out a weird, low chuckle. “For a minute. You didn’t give me the choice.”

“I’m sorry for that,” they said. “I—”

Keisha shrugged. “One less thing to feel bad about.”

“I don’t think you would’ve, you know,” Breeze added. “Even if I didn’t. Insist. Assume? You’d have kept her.”

Keisha smiled a little at that. “In jail, I thought about how that was the thing I’d miss most about you. The way you thought well of me.”

“Think. I still think well of you,” Breeze said.

They glanced at each other, then away. Then back. All under eyelashes and through overgrown hair. Trying to see each other without the weight of obligations or thunderclouds of mutual resentment.

“We’re a good team, you know,” Breeze added.

“We are,” she agreed.

“If you wanted to try staying homed together, we could put in a provisional family agreement, at the Club.”

Her jaw dropped. For a second, she looked like she might cry.

Breeze put up both hands. “No assumptions, no pressure. There’s an app to walk us through making a fair deal. Short-term, renewable. And only if you—”

“If we both want,” she said.

It was hard to catch their breath, suddenly. “I get it if you don’t want to.”

Keisha nodded. Put out a hand, checked that it was okay, and then wrapped it around their fingers.

That day Alice’s mom had gone missing, the two of them had been in her mother’s room, spread out on the bed, ignoring math and rhetoric. Taking a minute out from trying to get by and do school, all while trying to figure out how to avoid getting shot. It was their first time together, for sex. More than blowing off steam, less than romance.

And it would maybe have been a one-off hookup, study buddies getting busy. A little anatomy to go with the quadratic equations.

They’d showered, had sex, showered again. They’d fed Alice and put her in her bouncy swing. As the afternoon wore on and Cynthia didn’t return, they’d even washed the bedsheets. Breeze had enjoyed that—enjoyed playing house, spouse, and baby makes three. Imagining old-school family.

All pretty fun . . . until it hadn’t ended.

Was Keisha remembering that too?

“Good morning, Breeze!” Moil chirped to life for the first time since their release, interrupting the flow of memory. “I have a gig in iceberg fabrication! Punch in time is in twenty minutes.”

“Accept gig,” Breeze said. They squeezed Keisha’s hand. “What if we meet after work, eat some chicken sticks, and talk about it then?”

“I’d like that,” she said, and with that she ran a single finger over the burned-in brand over Breeze’s eye, and the two of them got to their feet, Keisha heading off to fuse the joints and pipes and bones of Kevinsberg together with fire, while Breeze joined the countless thousands making desperation ice, dumping cold hope by the ton into the still-warming sea.

About the Author

Toronto author and editor L.X. Beckett frittered their youth working as an actor and theater technician in Southern Alberta before deciding to make a shift into writing science fiction. Their first novella, “Freezing Rain, a Chance of Falling,” appeared in the July/August issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 2018, and takes place in the same universe as their 2019 novel Gamechanger and forthcoming 2021 sequel, Dealbreaker. Lex identifies as feminist, lesbian, genderqueer, married, and Slytherin. An insatiable consumer of mystery and crime fiction, as well as true crime narratives, they can be found on Twitter at @LXBeckett.

Nameless He

Robert Reed

1

There was no stepping inside until his caution was disabled.

So that was what he did to himself.

Then, unburdened by worry, he made himself quite narrow in order to pass through what only pretended to be a conventional fuel line.

Quality minds had studied the spherical artifact, but always from respectful distances. The reigning consensus was that he would find a frigid vacuum, and locked at its center, a primordial black hole. Which would be a delightful discovery, if true. Yet that possibility had been forgotten. In addition to abandoning caution, he had also purged his mind of every expectation, making him an innocent ready to embrace whatever was to come.

A volume that felt infinite.

Infinity jammed full of withering compressions of time and data.

And inside that boundless relentless everywhere.

Mayhem.

Undiluted.

Impossible.

Magnificent.

Like any sphere, there was just one wall, but this was an unruly wall, bending everywhere at once before somehow twisting back on itself. Being exceptionally smart, he entertained some very serious contemplations about hidden dimensions, scalar fields, swarms of virtual particles, and complex numbers refusing to diverge. Although maybe he wasn’t smart enough. Drifting deeper into the unknowable, he realized that he was becoming lost. So no, maybe he was just a fool—one very grim possibility that couldn’t be discarded. Worst still, every sensation was wrong. Cold and hot didn’t exist here. Indeed, what passed for his fingers couldn’t decide what they were feeling and couldn’t offer guesses as to why they were so painfully confused. Color was another conundrum. EM frequencies were discrete, precise phenomena, and he had little patience for sloppy generalizations such as “orange” or “high ultraviolet.” Yet while the wall seemed to be radiating in every frequency, he saw nothing but a specific ginger gray—a shade so vivid and lovely that he felt blessed to have just this glimpse. Which was the last reaction he expected from himself, and with that, his conflicting, ever-shifting mind began drifting toward panic.

Madness was a wondrous shock.

He promptly composed a note to himself:

“Before the next time, if there is a next time, adjust your nature. Kill the childish wonder, magnify the skeptical and the sober.”

But would those qualities help with his work?

He went hunting for confidence, and finding none, quickly surrendered the note to his internal trash. And then, staring at the beautiful ginger gray, he finally recalled why he had come to this place.

“She wants my first impression,” he said.

His first impression would be the same as his last: he would never experience anything so amazing as this infinite room.

The human was waiting where he had left her. Aasleen was a captain serving the Great Ship, and she always began their conversations by asking, “Have you settled on a name for yourself?”

She was teasing him. Names were heavy possessions, full of expectation and boundaries, and he had explained these feelings in the past.

“The artifact is lovely,” was what he said.

“‘Lovely,’” she repeated. “Not a word I expect from you.”

Yes, indeed. He was surprised to hear it rising from his many mouths.

Uncertain how to respond, he said nothing.

Aasleen deployed her own silence.

Studying her, he noted a distracted attitude about her face and her posture. Captains wore endless responsibilities along with the mirrored uniform. This was a very high-ranking captain who had to monitor vital projects, oversee underlings, and all while working to make submasters and the Master Captain happy. And most important of all, Aasleen was responsible for the well-being of the Great Ship—an ancient, world-sized starship that was long ago found wandering empty between the galaxies.

Assumptions were lazy guesses. But they were also inevitable, and if used properly, they could make a task easier.

Aasleen cared intensely about the artifact: that was his present assumption, and he clung to it tightly.

After a few moments, he said, “Thank you.”

A bright smile filled her face. “Thank you for what?”

“This challenge.”

“You are welcome.”

“My existence.”

“I didn’t build you,” she said.

“You modified me. In profound ways, it seems.”

“My work makes you grateful?”

“Yes. Very.”

“My work” began with Aasleen gathering up an army of mature AI savants. The artifact had been discovered, a special research project was underway, and after explaining costs and blessings, she asked for help. Perhaps he was first to volunteer, or out of a thousand eager souls, he was deemed to be the most fit or the most expendable. On these matters, he had no opinion. The work began by scraping away all of his memories and every habit. His oldest recollection was of Aasleen taking hold of him. She had offered a few words, but it wasn’t until later, when he learned language again, that he realized what she had told him.

“Before pretending to be a Ship captain,” she said, “I was a rather talented engineer.”

Aasleen was a genius with machines, and that genius was what restructured everything about him. His mind and physical capacities were magnified, obscure alien technologies were grafted into his framework, and this was what he became: a singular machine not only infused with heightened talents, but also wearing the freedom and resources to tweak his nature again, however he wished.

“So,” said Aasleen. “Tell me about your lovely artifact.”

He began with numbers, glorious numbers, while what passed for hands vibrated in the air, trying to embellish what he had seen, had touched, and in the most profound ways, what he had felt.

Eventually she said, “Stop.”

He couldn’t. Not instantly, and that lack of self-control troubled him.

But not Aasleen. She waited for the numbers and gyrations to end, and then, with a patient, slightly pitiful tone, she said, “Let’s go look at the beauty together.”

She walked and he followed, passing through hatches and demon doors before entering a workshop filled with simple types of light. A bubble of vacuum was suspended from the ceiling, and dangling inside the bubble was the corpse of a streakship. Or at least that was what it seemed to be. This was a partial corpse including two hyperfiber fuel tanks, each sphere three kilometers in diameter. One tank was empty, punctured at multiple points—presumably by relativistic impacts with deep space debris. But while the other tank was identical in size and construction, its surface was intact. Unblemished, mirror bright. Even the traces of cosmic radiation that streakships always endured were missing. That pristine shine was one of several compelling reasons why this flotsam, whatever it was, had been recognized as being wonderfully odd.

The rest of the original ship was lost. Crew quarters and hyperfiber shields, cargo holds and the fusion engines themselves—they were rumors waiting beyond the severed conduits, severed wiring, and mangled lengths of structural gemstones. Also lost was the ship’s original mission and course. Drifting at half light speed, it was passing through the galactic plane when it was discovered—after what might or might not have been a billion-year voyage from regions unknown.

Perhaps this streakship once carried a rich machine soul. That was an idea worth considering, even though it made him quite sad.

The wreck’s discovery and recovery were interesting topics. But for now, all that mattered was following Aasleen into the vacuum. Glass stairs ended at the fuel line. Not many years ago, human hands had grabbed hold of that hyperfiber pipe, which was when a hidden capacitor discharged, abruptly, violently cutting both of those hands free.

In death, the hands still clung to the junction.

“Why did she leave them here?” he asked.

“She didn’t need them anymore,” said Aasleen.

The pragmatic answer. An engineer’s answer. Humans were immortal biological machines, and all but the most grievous damage was easily fixed.

But then Aasleen offered a second reason.

“And as a warning to anyone who comes too close.” Her tone implied informed conjecture. A well-aimed guess. Aasleen knew the woman in question, at least enough to anticipate some portion of her mind.

The sentient machine didn’t know anyone well enough to achieve that trick.

Including when talking about himself.

“Freedom,” he said.

“Yes?”

“That’s your most generous gift for me. I’m free of the past and unburdened by timetables.”

“You’re welcome, you’re welcome,” Aasleen said. “But if you really want to thank me, tell me what this artifact’s meant to do. Not immediately, and maybe not for a century or two. But as soon as you can, share your insights. Or even better, write the guidebook for using this peculiar apparatus.”

“I will do all of that,” he said. “Or I’ll fail in places, or fail everywhere.”

What other answer was possible?

He was dwelling on that puzzle when Aasleen said, “I’ll visit again in ten years. Unless you call out to me first, that is.”

“The Intrigue,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“You like names. That’s the name I’ve chosen.”

“For you, or for the wreckage?”

“For the artifact,” he said.

She nodded.

“But of course, we’re both wreckage,” he said. As a joke.

Then he laughed and she quickly joined in, proving they were colleagues and perhaps friends too. And then, after some words of encouragement, the immortal human left the secure bunker where the AI first became conscious, and where, if his assumptions proved true, he would live out his grand good life.

2

With every second, the Great Ship crossed another hundred thousand kilometers of vacuum and dust. Maneuvering was problematic, braking impossible. Hyperfiber armor helped protect the invaluable machine. Banks of mammoth lasers did the same. Yet most of the credit went to a multitude of eyes. Mirrors scattered across the spherical hull were able to peer across the light years, spotting the blackest cinder. Once seen, narrowly talented AIs used their own eyes, wringing free vectors, likely masses and compositions. The faintest hint of artificiality triggered another species of dedicated machines. Was this a starship, a deep space colony, or something rarer? News of functioning starships were sent to the captains’ eyes. Could these wandering strangers ever reach the Great Ship? And if so, would they make profitable additions to the ranks of immortal, exceptionally wealthy passengers?

The Intrigue was first tagged as a damaged streakship with zero chance of colliding with the Great Ship. Silent to the universe but perhaps worth salvage, its existence was offered to the usual markets. But the target was moving perpendicular to the shipping lanes, and no salvage team was willing to spend fuel and the years to make any kind of recovery.

Mere came to the story after that.

A Ship officer blessed with a singular biography, she was only a fetus when her mother and the crew of a streakship were killed in a deep space collision. She was the lone survivor inside the mangled ship, cared for with every inadequate tool at the ship’s disposal. This was why Mere grew up stunted for nutrition and education, socialization and joy. But not only did she survive those miseries, she eventually made planetfall, and after being adopted by aliens, endured another several thousand years before reaching her original target: the Great Ship.

In her present life, Mere was an exobiologist with an understandable passion for abandoned streakships. To find them, an AI associate did nothing but scan the newest star charts, pulling out the best candidates. This particular wreck deserved special mention. Its slashing path through the Milky Way meant that it could be a visitor, an intergalactic wanderer. Gazing back along its present vector, the AI determined the most likely starting point was a remote spiral galaxy known for laser beacons—life signs distorted by distance and time, yet hauntingly beautiful nonetheless.

This AI began his work with Mere’s research. Absorbing every word, every data point, he took copious notes that he always set aside before erasing the experience, rebuilding his innocence, and then beginning again. And after a thousand efforts, he wove his notes into an intricate summation.

Mere borrowed various telescopes and linked them together, creating a single giant eye to give her that first hard look. But the relic wasn’t as unusual as she had hoped. Indeed, a local species, the Countereaters, built streakships with the same configuration and materials. Maybe this was a mission to deep space, its crew killed by extragalactic tragedies, and some conspiracy of gravity wells had recently brought it back inside the Milky Way. That wouldn’t leave much of a mystery, would it?

But that hypothesis didn’t explain those mismatched fuel tanks, which was why Mere broadened her search.

Every starship docking on the Great Ship had to share its logs. Unfortunately no recent travelers had noticed the wreck, and no registered vessel had ever approached it, even by accident. But then her AI colleague discovered an automated tug that recently passed within a few billion kilometers of the dead streakship. Mere shouted out for help. Several years passed, and then the AI captain responded: Yes. On several occasions, on a semi-regular basis, she heard weak, unintelligible chatter. Listening to the recordings, Mere heard a dead language tied to the Bakers—an ancient, long-extinct species who were famous for building the most amazing, enduring machines ever conceived.

“I am here. I am ready.”

That was the best available translation.

This was enough to earn Aasleen’s full cooperation. A large streakship was retrofitted and fueled. At maximum acceleration, Mere’s tiny skeleton was shattered, recovering only when her velocity matched her target’s velocity. But hopes of finding a Baker relic gave way to a collection of scraps assembled by what could have been a recent, very ordinary species. The Intrigue still didn’t exist. Mere was approaching a thoroughly depleted ruin. But she was approaching too quickly, which was when she realized that the mass of a respectable moon was somehow shoved inside the peculiar fuel tank.

An electrically charged black hole held in place by charged hyperfiber scaffolds: that’s what neutrino scans and hammer taps promised. But knowing more meant better facilities and more appropriate geniuses. The prize needed to be secured inside one of her streakship’s much larger, thoroughly emptied fuel tanks. Mere was doing routine chores when she grabbed the conduit with both hands. The only warning of trouble was a white flash that removed her hands at the wrists. Then a creature who had endured much, much worse drifted backward, and while waiting for fresh hands to grow, she reconsidered everything she thought she had known about this piece of ruined machinery.

What if there was a black hole on board? And what if that gravitational monster escaped while Mere was approaching the Great Ship?

A resident AI was given total authority. At the first sign of a breach or malicious act, her streakship would change course, aiming for the emptiest regions of space. Dooming itself as well as its one human crew member.

Yet, thankfully, the journey home was utterly routine.

But just the idea of secret dangers . . . that fragrant notion had consequences. On a thousand occasions, taking his careful notes, he had used different words to pose the same questions:

“What is the Intrigue’s true age?

“What is its purpose?

“What if it did originate in another galaxy?

“And what if its builders, astonishing as they must have been, threw the Intrigue out of their realm? Not as a blessing for the universe, no. But in a desperate bid to protect their guilty souls?”

3

Home was a purpose-built bunker wrapped inside Faraday cages, hyperfiber sleeves, and vacuum. Its location had never been mentioned to him, but so much was obvious. The subdued local gravity meant he was buried far beneath the hull and every inhabited region. Furthermore, whenever the Ship’s vast engines fired, the acceleration struck him sideways. So he was under the equator, the same as Great Ship’s fuel tanks—six moon-sized orbs aligned with precision around a core of impenetrable iron and stone.

With every decision, the captains had to safeguard the Great Ship. That’s why they’d never place a high-density mass inside the metallic hydrogen fuel. The easy and obvious location was an adjacent mixing chamber—one of the vast hyperfiber caverns where pressurized fuel was always waiting on the other side of the valves. If the artifact broke containment, frigid hydrogen could freeze it in place. And if it grew wings and tried to fly, a ferocious stream of gas could push it thousands of kilometers, depositing it inside one of the Ship’s engines. And if it still insisted on acting like a threat, then the engine would light, plasma flinging the hazard back into the void.

Pinpointing which chamber this was would be an easy chore, likely requiring nothing but the equipment on hand. Yet he set that temptation aside. Because he was strong. Because he was loyal to Aasleen and loyal to her trust. But mostly because more interesting, far more vital work was waiting, and that’s why his rebellion didn’t move beyond the sweet hypothetical.

Inside the bunker was a machine shop rivaling the best on board the Great Ship. He also possessed every species of effervescent knowledge: histories of lost races, research into exotic materials, starship schematics, treatises about cosmology and mathematics—the accepted schools as well as every renegade idea. But even those resources weren’t adequate. That’s why a secretive procurement system was in place, and within that first year the nameless AI had ordered up many one of a kind sensors, stacks of more powerful reactors, plus raw materials by the ton and by the gram—all to feed his increasingly sophisticated investigations.

By and large, every effort led to frustration and fresh puzzles. Which was never the same as disappointment. The surest way to the truth was to narrow the distractions to the richest few avenues, and after a decade spent doing else, he had reached what felt like a critical moment.

In his fashion, he stood at attention, and waited.

The captain hadn’t visited since their walk to the artifact, and as promised, she hadn’t distracted him with questions or praise. But Aasleen would arrive in the next little while. Today, perhaps. Definitely within the month. That’s why he was so still and so happy. Enthusiasm was a very useful impulse. Again and again, he practiced what he would tell her, guessing how she would react, and then he would speak again, adding details about a project that was constantly growing more impenetrable, more lush, and undeniably perfect.

He was born to do this work.

“Thank you again, madam. For this life of wonder, bless you.”

That’s how his lecture would begin.

A few conclusions were ready to be admired. There was a massive machine waiting inside the bright fuel tank—a machine completely dissimilar from every other known device. He was quite certain about that. Something massive was roiling at its center, but with multiple structures reaching to within micrometers of the hyperfiber shell. Wielding equations and hands, he intended to describe a fractal built from myriad spheres, all nested within its globular mother. The Apollonian sphere was a very reasonable model. Except this infinite machine was more complicated than that, and despite his talents and Aasleen’s generous resources, he’d barely made progress into mapping these quixotic realms.

About the machine’s composition, there was exactly one viable candidate. The highest grades of the hyperfiber were lightweight and stubborn, their resilience stolen from the hyperfiber existing inside myriad alternate universes. But there was even more impressive material: ultimate hyperfiber. It existed as theory and as tiny samples found scattered about the galaxy. How was ultimate hyperfiber built? Antimatter hammers and black hole anvils were envisioned, accompanied by some very careful pounding. Pushing the purest, highest grades of armor into denser configurations was essential, insulted bonds shortened while their strength increased, and the result was a product as dense as a neutron star, but more durable.

And if that material could be shaped with precision . . . ?

Hypotheses and some peculiarly fascinating mathematics might lead to epiphanies.

Aasleen would interrogate the AI about all of this. And for the fun of it, he imagined her voice and her skepticism wrapped inside thousands of reasonable inquiries.

In every scenario, he was the sober expert calmly guiding her to his present work and outlooks for the future. And because he was disciplined, every lecture ended with the same possibility: he was growing comfortable with the possibility that the Intrigue wasn’t just inside one false fuel tank. The true machine was the complete wreck, unsuspected systems and capacities wearing more than enough camouflage to fool the cleverest humans as well as most AIs.

Which, of course, was exactly what would be expected from entities who built marvels from ultimate hyperfiber.

“So I have much more work to do,” he said.

In his mind.

And with various mouths.

Always speaking to Aasleen, yes.

Except she still didn’t arrive today, and another seventy days of conscientious hope didn’t produce her either. Which was why he finally risked interrupting the captain’s critical work, reaching for her on their secure, never-used channel.

“I have found wonders,” he called out.

But the only response offered from Aasleen was centuries upon centuries of rigid, unexplained silence.

4

Honestly measured, passengers were the least consequential portion of any streakship. One rather tiny bioceramic brain made the human, and if she insisted on traveling in some self-aware state, then salted water, muscle, bone, and grease were woven around a respectable assemblage of biomachinery. Living, respiring passengers preferred cabins and an atmosphere, making for a far more massive vessel burrowing its way through the universe. The hyperfiber prow and comet-killing lasers were essential protection, while weapons, life support, and every other ship system had to be fed by redundant reactors. Add a wide stern jammed with engines and nozzles—power enough to accelerate that vivid mass to relativistic speeds. Yet even then, only half of the streakship existed. Only half. Because fusion engines were thirsty monsters, and even the smallest streakship required rivers of fuel. Hydrogen, mostly. Stored under extraordinary pressures, often in the metallic state.

Look at a streakship with innocent eyes, and the easy, reasonable assumption was that the machine loved its fuel more than anything else.

He was stretched between the two fuel tanks. One or both of these spheres once could have served as hydrogen reservoirs. On that topic, he held every opinion; with the same open-minded spirit, he believed every assessment about his chances for success today. This particular moment was rich with confidence. Grasping hands were connecting hundreds of leads. Diagnostic tools were calibrating themselves, with a tokamak ready to apply variable power loads. Here was the most reliable pleasure: routine actions built on calculation and guesswork, hope and disappointment. The guesswork might seem chaotically pointless, but progress was being made. He understood more now than he understood an hour ago, and in another hour, without doubt, he would become an even greater master in this arcane, one-entity profession.

These tanks once held pure hydrogen, or they never did.

They were bought as scrap and retrofitted, or inventive hands manufactured them for entirely different purposes.

Writing their history might be interesting work. But for others, not him. What mattered was the massive puzzle filled with ultimate hyperfiber, while its mate pretended to be emptiness brought from the depths of intergalactic space. It wasn’t an accident that these spheres were perfect opposites. He accepted that one insight more than he believed anything else. And when he spliced the spheres together, in the proper manner, some fabulous new mystery was certain to emerge.

Yet success remained the most unlikely scenario. There were thousands of severed conduits, pipes and electrical lines that could be knitted together in endless configurations, and that’s without considering hardware and power. Every easy, obvious choice had already failed. Regret and despair: those were the only reliable results. Weak entities would have given up by now. Others would be waiting to grab any excuse to surrender. Yet he pressed on. Nobody was better at applying habit before intuition, relishing the rituals, making himself stubborn and joyous every moment of every day.

This next test would be pivotal.

“I am certain,” he promised himself.

As he always did.

Sensors announced full calibration and eagerness, while the tokamak procured just last year started to push current into a twisted mass of electricals. The immediate result was a small, lovely harmonic. Which had happened before, though never quite this soon. So he eased more power into the system, and more, and those linked spheres began to vibrate—a reaction observed only forty thousand and ninety-nine times before today.

Hope retreated, letting Doubt do its work.

The massive tank might be perfect as it was. But that didn’t matter if its mate was a battered shell badly needing to be healed. Maybe this failure would convince him to change tactics. Maybe in another hour, he would start patching the impact craters, patching the fractures, and then begin polishing out the radiation tracks too.

Pushing those options aside, he embraced the empty tank. With eyes and with fingers, and then a single busy finger slipped inside one of the larger craters.

Fuel tanks for streakships were always crafted from nested balls of hyperfiber. This particular tank sported two distinct layers, and between them, a narrow gap always filled with a near-perfect vacuum.

Until now.

The tanks began shaking faster than ever, and from nothingness, a force field roared into existence.

“Demon walls.”

That’s what humans called barriers like this.

Except that demons weren’t involved, of course, and these fields were usually far weaker than any load-bearing wall.

Yet these phenomena proved to be something else. Sharp and vicious, the field happened everywhere and inside the same moment. A diamond fingertip was lost, and a brilliant surprise was won. Then with the power levels surging beyond what his little reactor could provide, he began to laugh.

The energy source? Critical but not obvious, and that narrow question had to be set aside.

Charting what had never happened before . . . that’s all that mattered now. Sensors were mapping events that wouldn’t end today or for ages to come. Apparently on its own initiative, the tokamak dropped into a diagnostic mode. Which may or may not have caused the two mighty spheres to shiver even harder. For barely nine seconds, they vibrated so rapidly and violently that they would have blurred in a human’s slow eye. Then the gemstone housings crumbled, and like magnets, like lovers, they flung themselves together.

Three-kilometer balls merged at a point smaller than one human palm.

Then inside the next moment, the battered tank healed every wound, the hyperfiber rendered as bright as the day of its birth.

What had no name stared at his own distorted reflection.

“Spellbound” was a weak word for what he felt.

He was so happy that he forgot to celebrate. And all he could say was, “My. My oh my.”

5

A voice called out.

“You have a visitor,” it claimed.

Aasleen always had a different voice, and the “visitor” had arrived without sharing warnings or a name—strong reasons to presume that this wouldn’t be the missing, much-loved captain.

“Welcome,” was the polite response. Then he added, “Wait patiently, if you can.”

Disengaging from his work involved time and considerable care. Seconds. Minutes. More than an hour, in the end. Considering the interruption and the lack of manners, he prepared a variety of mild reprimands. But finally emerging from the Intrigue, he discovered the Master Captain waiting impatiently, wearing a decidedly angry face.

“I want my captains,” she said.

“I don’t understand,” he confessed.

“Aasleen and the others. They’ve gone missing.”

“About Aasleen, I agree.” He counted the decades since he’d seen his associate. “About your other officers, I am sorry. I can offer you nothing but my ignorance and empathy.”

The Master Captain wasn’t physically present. A sensory drone had slipped inside the facility, and this was a projection. Yet the experience was intimidating all the same. A towering figure swollen by the constellations of implanted nexuses, here stood the only entity capable of steering the Great Ship, and more than anyone else, she had the power to influence crew and passengers alike.

It was an honor to meet the creature, yet he kept wishing she would leave.

“No, I don’t think they’re hiding here,” she said.

“I don’t believe so either, madam.”

“Of course I might be wrong.”

“Both of us might be,” he offered amiably.

The lack of latency was interesting: the Master Captain was physically close. No more than fifty kilometers from this spot, by his measure.

Shared silence ended with the question, “Do you want my help?”

Surprise claimed the globoid face. “Your help?”

“I assume that’s why you’ve come here.” He had every intention of sounding proud. “I have skills. Not for the tasks you need, perhaps. But I can acquire new strengths, and with time—”

“No. Thank you.”

Embarrassment was interesting. The next moments were spent letting a new emotion rule his nature.

Then she said, “You’re doing interesting work here.”

“Thank you. I am.” His mood shifted. “What do you know about my work?”

“The essentials.”

Everything was essential. “What do you mean, madam?”

When stressed, the false face became more convincing, more alive. “Oh, I know quite a lot about Aasleen’s machines. That two-orbed peculiarity, and you too.” A fat human hand gestured at him. “There are dozens if not thousands of unique technologies inside that peculiarity, and my research bureau would love me if I was to drop it into their laps . . . ”

Embarrassment proved to be a soft emotion. Facing this would-be thief, anger blossomed, bright and clear.

“You don’t have my resources,” he said.

“If I took everything that’s here, I would.”

Did his appearance grow more vivid with stress? He hoped so.

Then she said, “Except I don’t have time or the need. So I won’t do that.”

Relief blossomed.

She said, “I came to meet with you directly, and to give you fair warning. Your access to the outside will be restricted. Effective immediately.”

The Master Captain proved her honesty. The supply and communication avenues were being closed down now. Suffocated, extinguished.

“And too, I wanted to see for myself if my captains had been hiding here all along.” The giant woman laughed with force but little joy. “Aasleen isn’t lurking inside one of those balls, is she?”

“I don’t know how that could be possible, madam.”

“Ultimate hyperfiber.”

“Yes, madam.”

“The perfect medium for data storage,” she said.

“That’s one of its potential uses. Yes.”

“The archival densities . . . at least in theory . . . ” The Master Captain hesitated, then said, “I’m looking at your reports right now.”

“Of course, madam.”

“It’s just a lot of emptiness in there. You claim.”

“I would be searching now, but my work has been interrupted.” He rather liked this voice of his. Brittle. Injured.

“Nothing but vacant storage, unutilized hardware,” she said.

“And no living beings,” he added.

She said the word, “Interesting.”

He allowed himself one substantial guess. The Master Captain was a creature who feared novel propositions. Which was entirely sensible, considering her career. Her station. Wearing vast responsibilities, she didn’t dare risk distractions from the remarkable and the odd.

“I call it the Intrigue,” he said.

She said, “Yes. I know.”

“I have no name for myself.”

Her mouth opened and froze.

He waited.

Perhaps she was speaking with invisible others.

He waited a long while, then interrupted her work. “The Intrigue is quite enormous, madam. There could be galaxies of data hiding inside the next chamber, waiting to be found.”

“Well,” she said, “you’re welcome to keep hunting.”

“Without external resources.”

“It’s necessary, isolating this place. I don’t want to have to come back here again, wondering if my captains slipped in here while I was blinking.”

Courage was necessary, and he summoned more than enough. “If I may ask, how many of your officers are missing?”

“Hundreds,” she said.

It was a startling admission.

“So many of your best,” he said. “That baffles me. How does the Master Captain lose track of so many?”

His visitor had a harsh stare aimed at the nearest pieces of him. Yet this was a moment shared just by the two of them. The spirit of confession took hold, and she said, “Obviously, I’m not entirely excellent at my job.”

And with that, she disappeared.

6

The work continued.

Gathering supplies from beyond the Faraday cages was impossible, so existing stockpiles had to serve multiple roles. Materials were rationed, and where possible, recycled. Finished machines, the ordinary as well as the exotic, were used sparingly. In special circumstances, they were dismantled to create parts that waited to be cobbled together, becoming fresh innovations that, in turn, deserved to be babied.

Every moment was busy, but since fresh minds did better work, he often coaxed portions of himself to rest. To sleep, after a fashion. Dreams were welcome, but always following pleasant narratives sure to linger when he woke. And when insights were especially scarce, he would abuse his highest functions, achieving states where hallucinations dominated. Those experiments led to few revelations, but those doses of insanity proved valuable later, when he had to absorb the odd revelations that kept boiling out from the Intrigue.

From the beginning, he had collected oceans of data, keeping them safeguarded inside superconductive servers. With a nanosecond’s effort, he could drink from everything that was known about ultimate hyperfiber and its less spectacular siblings. Every accepted theory, principle, and philosophical truth about the cosmos was eager to explain itself to him, whenever he wished. He could and often did throw selected ideas into contests with one another—a universal war already billions of years old and still without a winner. (It was unnerving that the Creation and its mother, the multiverse, were far too stubborn or too incoherent to be fully explained.) The Great Ship’s official star chart was a staggeringly huge file, including past alignments of every celestial body, every projected future motion, as well as accounts of the known species, intelligent and otherwise. And all of that data was dwarfed by official records about the Ship’s known layout, its crew and passengers, plus diaries and published histories and fictional works, along with images and videos culled from sources both public and deeply private.

Why keep these final prizes? Because he had the power and the will to do just that, at least in the early decades. Because doing so was very, very easy. If an authority pressed for explanations, he would reply by asking, “Do you know which passenger’s most average day contains the fulcrum clue . . . that miniscule event that explains the Intrigue?” No lucid mind could give an answer, of course. But the blunt truth was that he simply found it all so appealing, possessing a virtual Great Ship, then stowing inside a bottle belonging to Nameless He.

And of all the possessions, what was the most treasured?

The mathematics.

So critical were numbers and their relationships that he carried the entire subject inside himself. These were the guiding principles built by ancient Bakers and ancient Greeks. In addition, he was an expert with all kinds of numerological systems devised by living species, by dead species, and by AIs built for no purpose but to test the boundaries of hardened belief. There was even a pair of hyperfiber cysts that had arrived inside a long-ago shipment of machine parts. Their origin was another mystery, but when inserted into his mind, each gladly offered up conjectures that had always been useless. Which was why he kept them close, and when nothing else was succeeding, he let them whisper their nonsense all over again.

Against these relentless labors, the Intrigue remained unimpressed. There were little events that might resemble success, if he let them. And that had to be enough for a long while. Then a pair of triumphs arrived, and not even a century apart. Which was heartening, yes. And all of the slow progress was done, and he was given a spectacular decade when rich new options seemed to fall at his myriad feet.

The Intrigue had control mechanisms always waiting to be found.

Better yet, the levers and buttons seemed happy to be mastered, at least well enough to accomplish a few new wonders.

Standing inside his workshop, Nameless He built what could only be described as children’s toys. Simple. Predictable. Fun.

Each of these delights was powered by wandering photons.

Then he duplicated them by the billions, as data. And gathering them up, he slipped inside a tiny sphere of ultimate hyperfiber, and under a light that resembled no existing star, he cast all of that vivid data into what was only pretending to be bright, bright water.

7

A single investigation was underway. There was nothing else to be done until there were outcomes and joy, or outcomes and despair.

“Nothing else” meant inactivity across his body and through vast portions of his mind. It meant cold darkness everywhere, and a counting of seconds. Days. Decades. Eventually, he reached the moment when his investigation was halfway complete. Perhaps. More seconds and days followed. Most of a full decade. Then the silence ended with a shudder and the hiss of hatches opening and closing again, resealing. Demon doors were pierced without complaint. A body of unfamiliar proportions was leaving the invisible world outside, and Nameless He roused himself inside the next second, asking, “Who are you?”

“Look at me, and guess,” said the visitor.

His available rosters were dated. But he found a narrow human face tied to the name, “Miocene.”

He said the name.

She said, “Yes.”

Her mirrored uniform offered much more. “Your insignia, your epaulets. Am I right to assume that you’re the Master Captain?”

“I am.”

“You were the First Chair before this.”

Miocene was always tall and thin, but her flesh had acquired an unexpected shade. Deploying sensors, he found curiosities and questions, particularly in the odor that clung to her—fragrant markers implying a strict diet of alien flesh.

“You were one of the missing captains,” he guessed.

“I was never missing,” she said, her tone sharp, yet amused.

He liked Miocene. Instantly, without doubts.

“Where’s your predecessor?” he asked.

“Stuffed inside a suitable drawer,” she said.

Those unexpected words wrung a long laugh out of him.

Miocene had brought companions. Drones tied to remote AIs scampered out of a satchel riding on her hip, and flying where they were told to fly, they surrounded Nameless He.

“The Intrigue is more interesting,” he claimed.

The human offered silence and a doubting tilt of the head.

Scans were made. Then a security system came alive, and he was suddenly powerless. It was amazing and embarrassing, being so frail. When Aasleen built him, she must have created a backdoor, presumably to regain control of a broken or traitorous AI. Through that door, a sequence of dense emotions entered his mind, and only afterward did he realize that the hatred, fear, and every surge of love were tools. Emotions were chisels used to gain access over a soul that was nearly as invisible to him as it was to the new Master Captain.

Once he could speak again, he asked, “Am I trustworthy?”

Miocene smiled. “You might be the first ever. I’ll concede that.”

He returned to his library, studying accounts of every captain. Miocene and Aasleen, and many others too.

“I’m entitled to my concerns,” she continued. “You’re a talented entity left alone here, sharing your existence with a mysterious, presumably powerful alien contraption. Quite a lot has been accomplished. At least that’s how it looks in your reports. I see successes, and I see what you’re trying to do now. In time, I hope to open your facility to the outside again. Soon, maybe. But before that happens, I need a level of comfort. Your investigations of the Intrigue might be what’s happening here. But the Intrigue could be investigating you too. Or, perhaps, it’s doing quite a lot more than research.”

He said nothing.

“Now don’t those seem like responsible worries?”

He said, “Yes.”

And, “No.”

Then after hard contemplation, he said, “I’m worried about me too.”

“Good. Perhaps that’s all I want from you now.”

The drones returned to her, and with that, those long legs carried the Great Ship’s leader out the way she had come.

“You will visit again,” he said hopefully.

“Soon,” she promised.

But unfortunately, he would never see Miocene again.

8

The project had already claimed more of his mind than it rationally deserved, as well as resources and far more years than he had ever intended. Yet the results—self-centered and contrived—became the great delight of his intense little life.

First, he immersed himself inside the Great Ship’s data, focusing on every human face, every name and truncated biography, including who was related to whom, and in the broadest strokes, how they moved and spoke and what they did in public and whatever he could see of their private lives. From that magnificence, he selected one married couple. Why them? Because they appeared to be in love. Because they were dissimilar people, yet their relationship was ancient and stable, and happy. Because few humans enjoyed wealth and adventure as much as they enjoyed it. Because the woman was pretty, and the man was pretty too, and obviously they would make lovely children. Except they were childless, at least so far as this distant AI could see, and that absence was another reason to take Quee Lee and Perri as his subjects.

He gave them a son. The boy’s lovely face and strong immortal body were drawn with data, with a date of birth not too recent but not deep in the past either. Plus a name. Humans insisted on names, and what he devised was massive and useless and lovely. From there, he added details to a biography that he always intended to finish today. Except the work refused to be done, and that was another unsolvable mystery: when did a Creator stop describing his subject’s years and moments, urges and failures? It was a trap, this responsibility for making one man real, and Nameless He finally had no choice but to accept his limitations.

“I am done,” he declared, moving to the next stage.

The Intrigue waited, as always. Its control systems were partly native, mostly provisional, and never comfortably familiar. That was one of the odd joys about this machine. Every visit felt like the first. Even though he knew what to touch and what words to use, it was as if others had done this work before. Older siblings and parents and ancestors from a billion years ago. But not him. Such a peculiar sensation, and it made him smile, after a fashion.

“Agenda?” asked the Intrigue.

“A visit,” he said.

“Destination?”

“Where I always go.”

Yet nothing about this visit was typical. His intentions were more ambitious, including the new body wearing a voice as well as the mirrored uniform of a high-ranking Ship captain.

Five intense hours were spent making ready for the next tiny step.

The beautiful gray wall embraced him, and passing through a pinprick hole, he enjoyed a long walk on new legs. What pretended to be glass stairs led him down to what wasn’t an ocean, under a sun that made his new eyes blind with pain.

What wasn’t an atmosphere filled his lungs.

To everything, he said, “Hello.”

In multiple languages, a trillion mouths said, “Hello,” to him.

“Who are you?” they asked.

He began with that wondrously long name. Then he added, “I’m a captain of the Great Ship, and I’m here to offer you friendship and cooperation, from now until the End of All.”

9

Miocene visited and then left him, and not long after, Aasleen returned.

“Nameless He,” was what she called him.

That had been his de facto name for some while now. In his official updates, and in his thoughts about himself too.

Aasleen was accompanied by strangers. One tall woman wore the First Chair’s uniform. He wanted to be polite, and polite meant opening many hands while saying, “Madam Washen. It is an honor to welcome you into my home.”

“The honor is entirely mine,” she said.

The next captain was a human male—the first man that Nameless He had ever seen—and he was a particularly homely fellow at that.

“You are Pamir. Am I right?”

“Or you’re a lucky guesser,” said the visitor.

The host laughed. Humans appreciated laughter, particularly when their jokes fell short. Then with that courtesy finished, he said, “You vanished, sir. Long before I was built, you lost your command, lost your name. But my impression is that you must have remained on board the Great Ship. Hiding.”

“Did you spot me in the security logs?” Pamir asked.

“I didn’t, but I never bothered trying to either. Sir.”

“So where’s this insight come from?”

“I had a project, and to help my research, I studied all of the captains. You were particularly interesting, sir. Your career, your multiple skills, and your basic nature. My intuition is that yes, you would always remain on board. Because you would never abandon this vessel.”

“Not willingly, I wouldn’t,” Pamir said.

“Well, I’m glad to be right, sir.”

“Glad to be your role model.”

Nameless He laughed again. Then for honesty’s sake, he added, “No, sir. I’m sorry if you heard any praise. Because I consider your career to be a rather significant disaster.”

The humans laughed, Pamir leading the chorus.

Then the host turned to the tiny lady. “Mere. I have your hands, if you want them returned.”

The exobiologist was impressed. “Still enjoying their death grip, are they?”

“No, madam. They were in my way and had to be removed. But I fabricated a rather handsome coffin, and they’re waiting for you.”

“That’s gracious of you. I’ll take them.”

“Good,” he said. “That makes me happy.”

He was studying his guests, including the distorted reflections inside the twin spheres. To Aasleen, he said, “I am so very curious, madam. Where have you been?”

The captain stepped up. Fingers touched some of his fingers, and she began with an apology. “I’m so sorry, my friend. I was ordered to another world, marooned there for centuries, and returning to you was simply impossible.”

Deploying the enormous star chart, Nameless He asked what should have been an easy question. “Which world is it, madam? Please tell me.”

“Marrow,” she said.

He saw no object bearing that name.

And then all of his guests were talking. Which was a perfectly acceptable way to address AIs of his caliber. After all, he could follow a multitude of overlapping voices, and it should be easy to distill their explanations and passion into a respectably coherent account.

The trouble was that their words were ridiculous.

All of his hands lifted, begging for silence.

“‘An entire world hiding at the Great Ship’s core,’” he quoted.

Perhaps someone would tell him, “You have misunderstood us. You must be an idiot.”

Unfortunately, nobody insulted him, and nobody denied the insanity.

The fantastical story continued: lost captains, a civilization built on fire and iron, children born without any sun, and then a tower rising from the iron, bringing Miocene back to the Great Ship.

He interrupted, saying, “She was the Master Captain. At least while she stood here with me.”

“And for a little while longer than that,” said Washen.

The First Chair looked quite sad.

Nameless He built lists of respectable questions, but his guests insisted on talking. They described Marrow as a Martian-sized body composed of metal and air, impossible buttresses and black foliage, plus pseudo-insects unrelated to every other known lifeform. And amidst the splendor, there was a malicious voice or force that had urged the children into rebellion. This was a very painful story for Washen and Aasleen, but not so much for the failed captain or Mere. The famous tower was built. Miocene conquered the Great Ship, and then she lost it again. And she died. The original Master Captain had returned to her station, except Washen seemed to wield most of the power, and the host listened carefully to every spoken word. But only because it was such an easy chore. His interests were far away when the three captains and Mere fell into a busy silence—the natural state of humans who were possessed by ageless, overwhelmed brains.

He let them have their quiet.

Then, when he was finished being polite, he said, “You are wrong, wrong, wrong.”

Aasleen asked, “Why is that?”

“The Intrigue.” In case anyone should forget, he pointed at the treasure dangling overhead. “The Intrigue is infinitely more interesting than any world or Master Captain. It’s certainly more important than your ugly Marrow. And frankly, I’m warming up to the opinion that none of you are smart enough or special enough to understand what I know.”

There. That earned cutting stares.

Then Aasleen stepped closer to him, and when he felt a finger against one hand, the supply avenues opened up to him again.

“I’ve studied your reports,” she promised. “You might be right about the Intrigue. I won’t deny that. But I want to see everything for myself. Find the means to carry me inside this world you’ve built. Can you do that?”

“I can or cannot,” he admitted.

“The only reasonable answer,” she allowed.

Much more was said, the day filled with questions and partial answers, and then, grand promises of returning visits.

The others left, but at least Aasleen returned. Every year, she came to check on his miserable progress. Opening a doorway wide enough to allow a human inside the Intrigue . . . that would require the most extraordinary magic. “Because you’re enormous,” he explained. “Not physically, but as data. One hundred thousand years of life experience bottled inside a bioceramic brain. That’s what needs to be replicated. And that’s the conundrum.”

“The Intrigue relishes data,” she pointed out. “Pick a sphere adjacent to your world, then reformat it to handle the load.”

“Yes, I’m attempting every obvious strategy.” That was his prickly response. Then he added, “There’s an equally apparent work-around.”

“Which is?”

“Send a child in your place. Newborn and simple.”

“If there’s no other way,” she said.

Year after year, Aasleen walked into the bunker, smiling at the Intrigue before she smiled at him. Then he would talk about the possibilities that he was chasing, proving his value as well as his failures, and then she would leave him alone. Which was how he preferred to be.

One day, he belatedly thanked her for telling him about Marrow.

“You’re welcome, and why?” she said.

“Because,” he said. “Marrow shows me what’s genuinely possible in this universe.”

“What is possible?” Aasleen asked.

He offered the most obvious scenario.

She grimaced, arms crossed on her chest. “No,” she said. “I can’t believe we’re just numbers swimming through numbers.”

He had said quite a lot more than that. But there was no winning the argument. Engineers and captains shared the same failure: they fell in love with one principle, one kind of machine, and every other invention was less good, less true.

He stopped talking.

“Keep working,” she urged.

“I will.” As if he had any choice in the matter.

Then as she left once again, Aasleen gave him an offhanded warning. “We’re going to be passing through some rough space,” she said. “I won’t be able to give you my full focus, if you happen to call out to me.”

“Thank you for the warning, madam. Good day.”

Not long after that, the Great Ship was battered. Not a single strike, but thousands of massive impacts. His connections with the outside were severed once again. And some days later, the gigantic starship began to accelerate like never before—but apparently without using any of its existing engines.

Various explanations offered their madness.

Of course he called out to Aasleen. To anyone. He begged the universe for the opportunity to help.

No one responded.

Which was, after everything, exactly as it should be.

10

This new silence was different from every other silence. He sensed it. Entirely on his own, freed of every duty, pledge, and calling, he carefully disabled the fail-safe systems hiding inside him. The bunker’s security gave him more of a battle, but he won that after just a few busy years, and then for the first and final time in his life, Nameless He climbed outside his home.

Centuries ago, he had mapped his location to the millimeter. The mixing chamber was an unlit labyrinth offering conduits to every other chamber as well as each of the Great Ship’s engines. Moving such a massive facility would take extraordinary efforts. But Nameless He had the intelligence and the focus, as well as the hoarded machinery and mountains of raw materials. So he selected a new hiding place, and seventy years later he successfully put the bunker on his back, ready to embark.

But before that, he intended to leave behind a simple handwritten message. For Aasleen, perhaps. Or whoever else might come looking for the Intrigue.

His intention was to explain what the Great Ship was, what Marrow was, and how very careful everyone needed to be.

But when the mind was ready, the hand refused.

He was staring at the Intrigue, staring at himself, when a whispering voice said, “Hurry. Hide. And leave nothing behind.”

It was his voice, or another’s. Both interpretations felt valid, the advice felt wise . . . and after picking up everything with meaning, the nameless soul quickly slipped away into the smothering dark . . .

About the Author

Robert Reed is the author of nearly three hundred published stories, plus more than a dozen novels. He is best known for his Great Ship stories, including The Memory of Sky. And for the novella, “A Billion Eves,” which won the Hugo Award in 2007. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska with his wife and daughter.

Boxtops, Secret Rings, and Space Helmets:
Those Brave Spacemen of the Videowaves

Mark Cole

It’s hard to imagine its impact.

The image was grainy, fuzzy, more tones of gray than black or white. There would be static, constant hissing and popping, lines rolling across the screen or, if the weather, or sunspots, or who knows what else interfered, it would roll around or break up completely.

But it was in the home, not a theater; instead of listening to your hero’s voice, you could see him, see his secret headquarters perched high atop a mountain. Perhaps the Video Rangers gathered around the set knew it was just a painted mountain with a painted tower clinging to it. Perhaps it didn’t matter.

After all, Captain Video and His Video Rangers attracted vast numbers of children and surged as high in the ratings as Mr. Television himself, Milton Berle. Norton (Art Carney) even donned an official Captain Video helmet on the very first episode of The Honeymooners and blasted off into space with him.

Originally, Captain Video was going to host Westerns.

The DuMont network’s program director watched the Captain Marvel serial and asked his writers for a hero just like him. This was more challenging than it sounds: most early episodes took place within the Rangers’ secret headquarters—and it looks incredibly cramped, as if everything took place in a ten-by-ten space.

While forgotten today, DuMont might easily have taken ABC’s place as the third network. It started out making TVs, then built some of the first experimental TV stations. Its biggest competitors had a major advantage as they had radio networks to draw on, but DuMont made up for this with innovative programming and ties to Broadway. It introduced such major stars as Ernie Kovacs, Jackie Gleason, and even Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen.

And, on June 27, 1949, they launched the live adventures of TV’s first space opera hero.

Each episode spent seven minutes with Video’s agents back on Earth—in the Old West!—taken from the movies DuMont bought for the Captain to host. Once he became the star, they didn’t want to waste the money and stuck them in whether they fit or not.

Dave Barry claimed that the Captain’s ship “appeared to be made from materials that you might find around a TV studio.” Supposedly they had a twenty-five dollar prop budget, although they may not have used much of it: they broadcast from the same building as Wanamaker’s department store, and would raid the hardware department to find odds and ends for the Captain’s latest incredible invention. Like the “Opticon Scillometer,” crafted from a muffler, mirror, spark plug, and ashtray.

Most of the time they did this mere minutes before the show went on the air!

In keeping with the general cheapness, the Captain and his sidekick, the Video Ranger, wore war surplus uniforms with an added shoulder patch.

Then there was I, TOBOR, a huge robot played by a seven-foot, eight-inch actor. It was supposed to be called “Robot 1,” but someone got the stencil wrong and they didn’t have time to fix it before broadcast. Only a few pictures survive, and a short special effects clip with a model that doesn’t match the suit.

They did six live episodes a week, a grueling schedule for which the actors made more doing supermarket openings and live appearances. The original Captain, Richard Coogan, left the show in its first year because he wanted a share of the money from toys and premiums. Al Hodge, the voice of radio’s Green Hornet, replaced him. When Hal Conklin (the popular villain, Dr. Pauli) had a nervous breakdown from the strain, he was replaced with a brief comment about how Pauli had used plastic surgery to fool Captain Video. It was a trick Dr. Pauli would be forced to try again in 1954.

Things improved in 1951 when Post Cereal sent Olga Druce to produce. “These scripts aren’t even written in English,” she complained, and hired new writers including a few young unknowns from the science fiction pulps: Isaac Asimov, Jack Vance, Arthur C. Clarke, Damon Knight, Robert Sheckley, C. M. Kornbluth, James Blish, and Walter M. Miller Jr. The show got a makeover as well, with a new spaceship; special effects on 16 mm film; new uniforms; better sets; and even a new intro, with a model replacing the painting on a piece of cardboard.

But despite the show’s success, they never put much money into it. It remained basically shabby.

Inevitably, other networks created their own space rangers.

The first was ABC’s Buck Rogers. Unlike its six day a week rival, Buck offered a weekly half-hour episode. It lasted less than a year.

Despite the short run, three different actors played Buck, while there were two Wilmas and two Dr. Huers. Nor did their two-month summer hiatus help build an audience.

While it looks marginally better than Captain Video, it also suffered from low budgets, minimal sets, and the usual woes of live broadcasts.

It is hard to assess the show today: Buck and his companions wear complex uniforms like those from the comic strip’s 1929 debut. Unfortunately, they look quite uncomfortable. The only available episode is an Earthbound mystery, with murders, an old mansion, and a séance. The mansion looks far better than one expects from a live kid’s show (and was probably repurposed from another program); we never get a glimpse of a spaceship; Buck speaks directly to the camera; and Wilma is the main character as Buck is missing for most of the show.

She also carries what looks suspiciously like a Daisy XZ-35 “Wilma Deering” Rocket Pistol.

ABC’s second attempt to copy Captain Video was far more successful.

The show starts with an impressive montage of spaceships and rocket launches. While Space Patrol began on the West Coast in March 1950, with kinescopes (a copy filmed from a TV screen) of the quarter-hour daily episodes distributed locally, it caught ABC’s eye: a new half-hour Saturday show broadcast live nationwide began that December. While this is routine now, it was quite a feat to organize the connections and relay stations.

The show was a huge hit.

The first Commander Corry lasted twenty-five shows as they paid the cast eight dollars per episode. But ABC gave them an impressive $25,000 per show and moved them to Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera soundstage. Now they could use two-story sets and hang actors on wires for space scenes. They also inherited the spacesuits from Destination Moon and added pre-filmed model sequences and live special effects: if you fired a gun, you had to point it at the right place and hope the technician set off the explosive charge.

While still quite minimal, Space Patrol had impressive painted backdrops and complex sets, which felt larger and more expansive than they really were. A big reason for its success was Lyn Osborn’s Cadet Happy: children identified with his cheerful, mildly comic, and constantly curious character, who gave Corry an opportunity to explain the more complicated parts of the story.

Like Captain Video, the show attracted lots of adults. Knowing this, the writers, led by Norman Jolley (who was also a running villain on the show) tried to make it as intelligent as possible—even though Ralston expected them to work in the latest premium (and the actors had to make those cheap bits of paper and plastic look impressive onscreen)!

A twice-a-week radio show with the original cast and writers but different adventures and a two-issue comic book came later. The show produced vast numbers of toys and premiums, more than any of their competitors.

And in April 1953, Space Patrol appeared on the first experimental 3D TV broadcast.

Some claim Robert Heinlein’s Space Cadet inspired Tom Corbett, Space Cadet (and he did get residuals for the title), but it was Joseph Greene at Grosset and Dunlap who developed the character. He’d tried to sell “Tom Ranger” to radio, and then as a comic strip, before Tom landed at CBS with a new name in October 1950. The first episodes follow Greene’s newspaper scripts closely, as did the Tom Corbettcomic strip—and Greene appears to have written the Grosset and Dunlap novels as “Corey Rockwell.” Tom Corbettexpanded into other media as well, with a short-lived radio series with the original cast, records, children’s books, and even a Dell comic book.

Tom is a Space Academy cadet. He and his crewmates aboard the Polaris—Astro, a human colonist from Venus, and Tom’s rival, Roger Manning—go on missions throughout the solar system. But rather than fight crime, they explore and learn about space travel.

Unlike the other shows, Tom Corbett was more grounded in reality: rocket pioneer Willy Ley acted as scientific advisor. There were no aliens and they aimed for technical accuracy—even if Willy told them to assume we could travel faster than light!

It also (at least in its better days) looked quite good, with excellent set decoration and nice, if primitive, effects

It was one of six shows to run on all four networks (including DuMont’s Saturday morning version that alternated with Captain Video).

The obvious inspiration for the space rangers came from the serials.

These were twelve- to fifteen-part movies shown at matinees to bring the kids back next week to learn how Buck or Flash escaped. While you couldn’t do big fights or car chases on live TV, the heroes and stories are similar, and the daily shows often serialized their stories.

Which may explain why Captain Video was the only TV show adapted as a serial.

Columbia Pictures had a knack for getting the rights to hot properties—like Batman, Superman, and The Shadow. Unfortunately their producer, Sam Katzman, made some of the worst serials ever: cheap, shoddy, and silly, openly declaring “this is good enough for kids.”

But 1952’s Captain Video is probably his best serial. He obviously put some care into it. He even color tinted the sequences on alien worlds a different color for each planet.

While it looks rather shabby today, it’s far better than the show. It has lots of what TV couldn’t do: fights, car chases, and outdoor scenes. The spaceships are cartoons, a trick they’d used earlier to make Superman fly. It’s surprisingly effective, with a fluidity of movement few model effects could match.

Republic Pictures made the best serials, creating a feature film look on tiny budgets. They’d made a lot of science fiction, most with various iterations of their Rocketman character. To break into the TV market they created a kid’s show about the latest Rocketman: Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe. It starred Judd Holdren, Columbia’s Captain Video, and had plenty of effects and stunts thanks to footage recycled from past serials.

But union rules forced them to release it theatrically in 1953, even though it has no cliffhangers. They would syndicate it, but not until 1955.

The serial was nearly dead. A final Commando Cody serial was shot concurrently but renamed him “Larry Martin.” No further movie adventures of Captain Videofollowed. However, Columbia reused the sets, props—and most of the cast—for their final science fiction serial, The Lost Planet.

The last of these live shows didn’t debut until 1953.

CBS’s Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers was very much like Tom Corbett, which is no surprise, as CBS hired George Gould, Tom Corbett’s director, to create it. He brought with him many of his writers and the “gizmo” that allowed him to superimpose actors on new backgrounds without losing image quality. Unfortunately, it was so close to Tom Corbett that they were sued and forced to settle out of court. The show ran for only a year, produced few premiums, and, unlike its competitors, never went into syndication.

It did have one claim to fame: it starred Cliff Robertson.

Other similar shows had shorter runs, like Atom Squad, which investigated super-scientific crimes out of their secret New York HQ for six months. While they mostly dealt with spies and mad scientists, they also fought a few aliens. NBC broadcasted the show from its Philadelphia affiliate, but it isn’t clear how extensively they marketed it. No kinescopes survive.

The time-traveling Captain Z-Ro corrected historical errors for local California stations from ’51 to ’53. After a two-year hiatus, he returned with twenty-six filmed syndicated episodes. He would linger on the airwaves until 1960.

Even the CBC joined the spaceman race with Space Command (1953), the first original dramatic show they produced. While distributed on kinescope across Canada only one episode survives. It features a spaceship set larger and more complex than any in the American space operas. James Doohan played the hero’s sidekick, and William Shatner appeared on the show.

1954 brought two final filmed entries into the genre.

Of the two, Rocky Jones, Space Ranger is probably more familiar, as “featurized” episodes grace countless cheap DVDs and were mocked by Mystery Science Theater 3000. Like his competitors, Rocky was a space policeman, traveling the galaxy with a comic relief sidekick, Winky (who was replaced when the actor playing him ended up in a gun battle with the Mexican police after a hotel robbery). But his adventures weren’t on any network: instead they went directly to syndication.

Thanks to being filmed on a higher budget, it had a little action, exterior scenes, better continuity, sets, costumes, and model work. Unfortunately, it was too expensive and only lasted two seasons.

The other, Flash Gordon, was the DuMont network’s third and final space ranger show, but only on the East Coast: their network was falling apart and Flash was syndicated in the West.

Despite using Dr. Zarkov and Dale Arden’s familiar names, they became Galactic Bureau of Investigation agents who resemble their competitors, not the comic strip originals.

The budget was only $15,000 per episode. It was filmed in West Berlin, a city still scarred by the war, with an abandoned beer hall in Spandau as their main location (it would later move to Marseille). Most actors were German, some couldn’t speak English. It had limited effects, just a few glimpses of model spacecraft, but harsh, almost expressionistic cinematography with lots of shadows.

By 1955, DuMont was falling apart.

Between financial woes and struggles with the FCC, they lost affiliates and were forced to sell stations. Nor was Captain Video doing much better: he lost Olga Druce when Post left and had been reduced to quarter-hour shows. While the network would struggle on for another year, Captain Video ended in April. NBC tried to buy the show, but DuMont refused.

There had been over 1,500 episodes. Most are lost: Allen DuMont kept copies of everything, but many were scrapped for the silver emulsion, and three truckloads were thrown in the East River during the seventies. Today, the UCLA film library has twenty-four episodes, but only five are available to the public.

Al Hodge had been so thoroughly identified with the role that, when he testified at a senate hearing on TV violence, many senators called him “Captain.” He was so typecasted that he couldn’t find any new parts, left acting, and died in obscurity in 1979. The Video Ranger, Don Hastings, fared far better with a forty-year run on As the World Turns.

Their biggest competitor, Space Patrol, would make over 1,100 shows (and 129 radio broadcasts) before it went off the air thanks to ABC’s attempt to seize ownership of the show. After Sputnik, the surviving daily episodes were syndicated as Satellite Police (1957). While Ed Kemmer, who’d played Buzz, went on to a long career on daytime TV, Lyn Osborn died of a brain tumor three years later. But the name lived on: Japanese toy makers used it for unlicensed toys long after the show ended.

Tom Corbett made its final move in December 1954 to NBC, with a reduced budget and without fan favorite, Roger Manning. The season ended with the cadets ready to come back for another year at the Academy. They never made it.

Tom starred in seventy-five TV adventures, fifty-two radio shows, and eight novels. As late as 1957, there were plans to revive him. Nothing came of them.

But he outlasted Captain Video by two months.

In the end, Davy Crockett laid the space rangers low.

Some blame the minimal nature of these early shows, whose exciting bits happen off-screen and are merely described (as in many indie science fiction films today!), but the real answer is simpler:

Tastes change.

Coonskin caps replaced homemade space helmets, as countless children flocked to a new hero.

Serious science fiction did appear live (Tales of Tomorrow), but the science fiction movie boom had little effect on TV, with or without the space rangers.

By 1959, the closest thing to Captain Video was Men into Space, a sober, filmed children’s series that portrayed the future of space exploration realistically, with spacemen wearing Project Mercury suits.

It is hard to miss, though, just how much the Rangers patrolling the spaceways, had in common with Star Trek.

How many of Captain Video’s old fans, one wonders, traded in their Atomic Pistols and Space-o-phones for Phasers and Communicators?

About the Author

Mark Cole hates writing bios. Despite many efforts he has never written one he likes, perhaps because there are many other things he’d rather be writing. He writes from Warren, Pennsylvania, where he has managed to avoid writing about himself for both newspaper and magazine articles. His musings on Science Fiction have appeared in Clarkesworld and at IROSF.com, while his most recent story, “Let’s Start from the Top…” appeared in Daily Science Fiction.

From Bleak to Upbeat in Three Parts:
A Conversation with Michael Swanwick

Arley Sorg

Writing fiction ranging from light fantasy to hard SF, Michael Swanwick has been earning award nominations since his 1980 novelettes landed on Locus lists and Nebula Awards ballots: “The Feast of Saint Janis” and “Ginungagap.” “Mummer Kiss” earned him his first win, an SF Chronicle Award in the Novelette category. Since then he’s received more award recognitions than can reasonably be listed in this column, from an Asimov’s Readers’ Poll win for 2015’s “Lock Up Your Chickens and Daughters—H’ard and Andy are Come to Town!” to the 2008 Locus Award-winning short story “A Small Room in Koboldtown.” Other award-winning stories include “The Edge of the World” (1990 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award), “Radio Waves” (1996 World Fantasy Award), “Slow Life” (2003 Hugo Award), and “Legions in Time” (2004 Hugo Award). To date he has published over 150 short stories.

Swanwick is an accomplished novelist, publishing In the Drift (1985), Vacuum Flowers (1987), Nebula-winner Stations of the Tide (1991), Griffin’s Egg (1991), The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993), Jack Faust (1997), Bones of the Earth (2002), and The Dragons of Babel and The Iron Dragon’s Mother 2008 and 2019, set in the world of The Iron Dragon’s Daughter. Darger and Surplus books Dancing with Bears, Chasing the Phoenix, and collection The Postutopian Adventures of Darger and Surplus came out with Night Shade in 2011, Tor in 2015, and Subterranean Press in April of 2020, respectively.

He’s well-regarded for nonfiction, such as 2001’s Being Gardner Dozois, his book-length interview with Dozois, which won a Locus Award for nonfiction. Other works include essays “A User’s Guide to the Postmoderns” and “In the Tradition . . . ” which were collected as The Postmodern Archipelago in 1997. He penned biographical works Hope-in-the-Mist (2009) and What Can Be Saved from the Wreckage?: James Branch Cabell in the Twenty-first Century (2007).

Novel City Under the Stars, a follow-up to novella “The City of God” (originally published in Omni Online in 1995), is due from Tor.com publishing in August of 2020, cowritten with award-winning editor, author, and friend to Swanwick, Gardner Dozois, who died May 27, 2018.

Michael Swanwick was born in Schenectady, NY. He received a BA from The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, VA. He’s been a full-time writer since 1983 and lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter, and their son, Sean.

In your 2009 Locus interview you said, “I worry about the future of books.” You talked about gaming and the Internet, and their impact on the reading habits of your son and his peers. Do you still worry about the future of books? Or have your thoughts on this changed since then?

I still worry. People are spending more time staring at screens than ever before and, to be honest, the intellectual and artistic content of games and television is vastly greater than it was even eleven years ago, never mind when I was a teen.

In the nineteenth century, poetry was important in ways it is now difficult to imagine. Longfellow and Tennyson were world-famous celebrities. Today . . . well, at parties, I sometimes challenge the guests to come up with the names of ten living poets. It gives you an enormous feeling of accomplishment if your group can do it.

I can readily imagine a world in which fiction writers have exactly as much chance of making a living at their craft as poets do today, one in which most of their readers are other writers scouting out the competition—and it’s not that far away.

I’m rooting for me to be wrong on this one.

Your first published story was “The Feast of Saint Janis” in 1980, and you’ve been publishing fairly consistently since, with your more recent titles, The Iron Dragon’s Mother, The Postutopian Adventures of Darger and Surplus, and the upcoming City Under the Stars due in August. Do you feel like your writing—craft, process, or both—has changed in any specific or significant ways over the past decade or two?

I have been writing constantly for forty years and everything I finish gets published. So it’s inevitable that I would learn a few things about my craft along the way.

One thing that’s changed is that my writing has gotten more concise. When I began, it took me twelve thousand words to write a substantive story. Now I can do it in four thousand. Considering that I’m paid by the word, that may not have been very clever of me.

One thing that hasn’t changed is that I can’t finish a story until I figure out what it means—what it wants to be. So one of my stories can take years to finish. On the other hand, I wrote “‘Hello,’ Said the Stick” in less than twenty-four hours because I knew from the start what it was about—and it went on to place on the Hugo ballot that year. It lost, but the story that won was also one of mine, so that was okay.

You deal in different genres, light fantasy to hard SF. Will readers find a consistent voice and style running through your work, especially over the decades?

The story is everything. My job is to make it be the best version of itself possible.

If you look at writing in strictly commercial terms, your best bet is to find one thing and write it over and over. This can have good results—look at Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin books. But that is not how I want to spend my life. My recent stories feature a world existing on a storm cloud, a hotel in the form of a living dragon, and a trickster who’s stolen the universe and hidden it in a cigar box. I’ve written a ghost story in which every word of it, save for the names, is true; one that begins with the protagonist dying and then proceeds backward in time to the beginning of the tale; and one that was written a word at a time on fallen autumn leaves. You can’t do any of that if you’re worried about voice, or consistency, or anything else other than what the story wants to be.

What does it take to stay relevant and sell books/stories and still remain part of the genre conversation?

You have to read the stories being written by your competition—and not just those of your peers who are still getting published, but the young writers as well. If you’re not willing to learn from a twenty-something gender-fluid newcomer with a strange haircut, well, you’re in the wrong business.

It helps to keep up with current science as well.

You were writing for years before you started selling, and then your career started, helped by Gardner Dozois. Did you ever hit a career slump or a writing slump after you started selling, where you struggled to sell work or to produce work? And if so, what did you do to deal with those situations?

I sold my first three stories one after the other—and promptly hit a writer’s block that lasted nine months, during which I wrote voluminously and had to throw away every word of it. During that period, I turned thirty, lost my job, and got married. It was terrifying. But I got around it by writing every day for as many hours of free time as I could find. Eventually, my hindbrain got the message that not giving me anything usable wasn’t going to get it out of sitting in front of a typewriter and the flow of ideas started up again.

Sometimes, when things got rough, I’d ask Gardner what to do. Inevitably, what he said would boil down to “Just keep writing.” Nobody’s ever given better writing advice than that.

Which of your stories stand out in your memory, for you, as some of your finest work, and why?

It’s always the latest one—because all its virtues are freshest in the mind. At this moment, it’s “Artificial People.” I sketched it out on the program during a Lyric Fest concert at the Academy of Vocal Arts, pairing songs on beginnings and endings. The composers had taken poems and turned them to music. Now I was turning music into fiction. Dare I hope that fifty years from now someone will translate my work into an as-yet-un-invented art form?

For novels, the same thing applies. My latest, The Iron Dragon’s Mother, completes a trilogy of stand-alone novels begun twenty-five years before with The Iron Dragon’s Daughter. To maintain a consistent vision of the world—both the invented one of Industrialized Faerie, and our own, which the novels comment on—is a glorious thing. The first volume was written as a fantasy and received by many as an anti-fantasy. The second was, in response, written to turn all the conventions of conventional fantasy on their head and was received as a fantasy. The third was written as a fantasy and received as such. So the three, taken together, serve as an analysis and critique of the genre that—and I hope this is obvious in them—I love dearly.

City Under the Stars follows up on 1995 novella “The City of God.” What are the challenges to completing something begun so long ago, and how do you deal with those challenges?

From the beginning, Gardner and I meant for “The City of God” to be the opening section of a novel. This was important because the very first pages established that we were telling an extremely grim story with no possibility of a happy outcome. But Gardner had a happy, even joyous, ending for the novel and a path that would take us to it.

We planned to write two more novellas, “The City of Angels” and “The City of Men,” then combine all three into a novel. Unfortunately, we were both extremely busy, and it wasn’t until a year or two ago that we found the time to work on it. Consistency of tone wasn’t hard—Gardner had a lush, beautiful prose style, and the novel leaned heavily on that. We got to work and were making good time. We were really tearing up the boards.

Then Gardner died.

There went our plan. There was no way I could write the third novella without Gardner’s ideas, his presence, and above all his prose lines. I could do a passable imitation of him, but that’s all it would have been, an imitation. Readers deserve better than that.

But I wanted the world to see the ending Gardner had in mind. I wanted everyone to know he went out on a high note. So I changed the direction of the second novella, threw out several subplots, and rewrote it so that Hanson, the protagonist, arrived at the ending sooner. Then I combined the two and broke them into chapters so that it was a real novel, rather than two novellas, one after the other.

It’s not the novel we would have written had Gardner lived. But it’s not all that far off from it.

When I read the description—Hanson works ten solid back-breaking hours a day, shoveling endless mountains of coal, within sight of the iridescent wall that separates what’s left of humanity from their gods—I think of Sisyphus, but as allegory to modern-day labor. Are there deliberate sociopolitical commentaries involved—and if so, have those commentaries changed since the first book? Or is this really just about cool visuals and coming up with a character’s personal struggle?

Gardner Dozois came from a blue-collar background and was painfully aware of the degree to which the odds were stacked against him. When he graduated from high school, with no encouragement from his guidance counselor, he applied to exactly one college and, when he was rejected, enlisted in the army because that was his only other option. He knew exactly what kind of life society expected him to have. So, yeah, Hanson is looking at society from the vantage of the underclass.

Gardner was not a political writer. To him, the question of power, of who’s the boss and who’s the victim, was a visceral one. In his notes for the second half of the novel, he wrote, “I think that if Hanson ever was given the ultimate power, as indeed he is given it for a few minutes at the end of the story, the thing that might keep him from being too destructive with it is this horror that he might himself turn into a boss. That’s the last thing he wants to do is to turn into a boss. Because he’s seen that from the other side.” Gardner’s experiences in life did not fill him with admiration of the rich and powerful.

And I have to say I agree with him on this front. Eat the rich!

Gary K. Wolfe, in his Locus review of The Postutopian Adventures of Darger and Surplus, describes the world as “both richer and darker than would seem necessary for the essentially comic capers . . . ”; City Under the Stars presents “a post-utopian hellhole,” and you described the first book as “a very dark story, even for Gardner Dozois.” What is the appeal of dark narratives and worlds? What do stories with these features do for readers and writers?

It’s not that I like darkness, but that a writer has an obligation to tell the truth. The truth is that this can be a hard world at times. I’ve led a charmed life. I have a functional career in a business where that isn’t easy. I’m still in love with the woman I married forty years ago, and we have a son who means the world to us. Yet I’ve also known heartbreak and loss. Terrible things have happened. This is true of most people and maybe all people. Life is not for wusses. There might as well be a sign by the womb exit reading: HEROES ONLY.

We are all descended from thousands of generations of those heroes. That’s why we can respond positively to dark narratives and worlds. We evolved to endure them and even to, sometimes, triumph over them. When we do this vicariously, through fiction, we’re exercising a muscle we might very well need someday.

What is important or special about City Under the Stars? What do you really want readers to know about this book?

Most people know Gardner Dozois solely as a brilliant editor. But he was an even more brilliant writer. His peers, people like Joe Haldeman and George R. R. Martin, were in awe of him. Alas, he found the novel a difficult form and only wrote three of them (two of which were collaborations) in his lifetime. Consequently, that was the accomplishment he esteemed highest. So finishing the one we were working on when he died, giving him one last novel, was an act of fraternal piety for me.

City Under the Stars is a memorial to Gardner and a reminder to the world of what a fine writer was lost when he died.

Also, as I said, it has a happy ending. Gardner could be a very bleak writer indeed, and City Under the Stars contains some of his bleakest writing. But the last thing he was working on was upbeat. He may not have liked bosses much, but he was optimistic about ordinary people. In the long run, he thought maybe they would prevail.

What else are you working on now, and what do you have coming up that you can tell us about?

Stories, stories, stories, and a few essays. I’m currently in the research phase for my next novel and writing lots of short fiction. My short stories should be popping up all over the place for the next year or so. The essays will appear in the usual obscure magazines and journals. I’m also rehabbing an old wooden master plumber’s cabinet and plan to write stories for the back of the door and the insides of the drawers. But that’s just for my own amusement.

About the Author

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he writes SF/F/H, reviews for Cascadia Subduction Zone Magazine, and is also associate editor at both Locus and Lightspeed magazines.

Miles . . . to Go:
A Conversation with Lauren Beukes

Arley Sorg

International bestselling author Lauren Beukes grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa. She attended Roedean School in Johannesburg, earned an MA in creative writing from the University of Cape Town, and spent a decade as a freelance journalist working in South Africa and the US, covering electricity cable thieves, HIV+ beauty pageants, metro cops, and homeless sex workers.

Her work has appeared in publications such as Elle, Marie Claire, The Hollywood Reporter, and The Sunday Times. She directed Glitterboys & Ganglands, a documentary that won Best LGBT Film at the San Diego Black Film Festival, and was showrunner and head writer on South Africa’s first half-hour animated TV show, Pax Afrika, which ran for one hundred and four episodes. Her comic books include original horror series Survivors’ Club with Dale Halvorsen and Ryan Kelly; Fairest: The Hidden Kingdom, a Japanese horror remix of Rapunzel, with artist Inaki; as well as The Problem with Cats, a Wonder Woman short set in Soweto, with Mike Maihack.

Beukes began publishing short fiction in 2004. Her novels have been published in twenty-four countries and are being adapted for film and TV. Debut novel Moxyland came out in 2008. This was followed by Zoo City in 2010, which was a finalist for the World Fantasy and Crawford awards and won both a Kitschies Red Tentacle and an Arthur C. Clarke Award. The Shining Girls won the August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel, the University of Johannesburg Prize, and the Strand Critics Choice Award for Best Mystery Novel. 2014’s Broken Monsters was a Shirley Jackson nominee, and a 2016 collection Slipping was on the Locus Recommended Reading list. She also wrote nonfiction book Maverick: Extraordinary Women from South Africa’s Past. She was a finalist for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2011. Her latest novel is Afterland.

Besides writing stunning novels, Beukes has given talks on storytelling at tech conferences and literary festivals around the world, including Design Indaba, TEDxJohannesburg, Webstock, and D-Construct. Lauren has also spearheaded charity art show fundraisers for all her books, raising R100 000 for Rape Crisis and R350 000 for kids lit org, Book Dash.

Lauren Beukes lives in Cape Town, South Africa with her daughter “and two trouble cats.”

What were the books you grew up reading? What stands out as important in your memory and why?

I loved the Usborne Greek mythology books and fairy tales and Joan Aiken and Roald Dahl. I had a fondness for magic and justice where the terrible people got their comeuppance. As a young teen, my dad got me into Anne McCaffrey and Philip K. Dick, my mom got me into ElfQuest and Dragonlance, and 2000 AD Monthly was a formative comics influence. The punk aesthetic, the stories about police states or mutants treated as lesser citizens, resonated as I became more politically engaged and aware of our own racist regime under apartheid.

You started publishing in 2004 and had your debut novel in 2008—Moxyland. Before that, you were a journalist. Did you struggle to break into fiction, or did it happen for you right away?

Oh man, I’m laughing over here. I’d published a couple of short stories locally in South Africa and a pop history about maverick South African women, which was a commission, but Moxyland took me four years to write while working full time as a journalist and lecturing at the University of Cape Town, and it took me a year of rejections to sell it. One of those was from Philip K. Dick’s agent who compared it to having sex on a skateboard, which is apparently a bad thing? I mean, surely, as long as you’re not falling off . . . ?

Finally, I sent it to a local publisher, Jacana, who has an eye for new talent. The publishing director Maggie Davey read it on the plane en route to the Frankfurt Book Fair and by the time she landed in Germany, I had a book deal! Thank god for eleven-hour flights! It was published in South Africa to good reviews and then disappeared without a trace, as so many novels do, but by that time I’d managed to sell it to Angry Robot in the UK as part of a two book deal for 8000 GBP. The second book I had in mind was a noir set in a magical Johannesburg where a young woman with a sloth on her back takes a break from writing email scams and finding lost objects to take on the case of a missing teenage pop star. It became Zoo City, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and that changed my whole career. It put me in the spotlight and I happened to have a great idea for a new novel, about a time traveling serial killer and the survivor who turns the hunt around, that also explores misogyny, the loops of history, and feminism in the twentieth Century.

You’ve done several comic books at major houses, including Wonder Woman for DC. How did you break into that industry, and what do you enjoy most about working on comic books?

I was championed first by Bill Willingham, who I met at Worldcon in Toronto, and then legendary Vertigo editor Shelly Bond. Shelly gave me a shot on an eight pager, which was my audition script for a larger project, writing a six parter set in the Fables universe, which became Fairest: The Hidden Kingdom, a J horror take on Rapunzel, with Inaki and Eva de la Cruz. I contributed some other shorts, including a Wonder Woman story set in Soweto, The Trouble with Cats with Mike Maihack. In 2014, I landed an original horror series, Survivors’ Club, based on a concept by my dear friend and cowriter, Dale Halvorsen, with art by Ryan Kelly and Inaki.

I love the collaboration of comics, how the art and the colors and the lettering too can change the shape of the thing, give you a different perspective on the characters or shift the dialogue. It’s such a communal art form.

Are there important differences between writing for comic books and writing short stories or novels?

In fiction, the whole world is on your shoulders, you have to hold it together. Comics is liberating because it’s collaborative, the art does more than half the work. Novels are all-consuming hellbeasts that will eat my life for a year, short stories are only hellkittens, although they always take me longer than I intended. Both allow me to indulge my love of dialogue, which I have to put hard limits on when writing comics.

Have you learned things from writing comics that you’ve applied to stories or novels?

I learned a lot from being the showrunner on South Africa’s first half-hour animated TV series, URBO: The Adventures of Pax Afrika in 2005—2009. You’re writing for kids, you’ve got twenty-four minutes to tell a whole story, so every scene has to do the work, either building on character or unfolding the plot, and ideally both. Get in and out as fast as possible, don’t waste time. It taught me to think very visually, because someone was going to have to animate what I wrote, keep dialogue taut and moving along, and to write action, which doesn’t come naturally to me.

You write in short fiction and novel length and slip across genres—do you feel like there are certain specific characteristics or themes that usually show up in your stories?

I’m interested in intersectionality, in psychogeographies, and how we’re haunted by history. I’m interested in how we can strive to be better people in the darkest of times, how it’s okay to make mistakes, if you take accountability, learn from them. The intersectional feminism is strong in my work, I hope.

Afterland is described as a thriller and you are well-known for writing thrillers. What are the most important keys to writing effective, taut thrillers?

Gosh, I don’t have a formula. I write what I’d like to read. I’m interested in putting my characters in terrible situations and seeing how they come out the other side, not wasting time, keeping it taut and moving. I always write in present tense, which gives me a sense of urgency, and mystery.

Cole and her son, Miles, and their relationship, are at the heart of Afterland. What are your favorite things about these characters, and what was the most challenging thing about writing them?

They’re both very witty, sometimes caustically with each other when they’re exasperated or under pressure, but that banter is part of their love language. I admire Cole’s ferocity, and how she’s trying to do the right thing and course corrects when she makes a mistake (and she makes some very bad mistakes). There’s a line that sums her up for me, “parenting is the worst game of improv ever.” At twelve years old, Miles is coming into himself, figuring out who he is, and part of that is in reaction to his mom, which puts him in a dangerous position that could wreck everything for both of them.

Challenging? Keeping them on track but also allowing them to be themselves, do the wrong thing, feel resentful or frustrated, and dig into this relationship, which is by no means perfect, and in terrible circumstances.

In your PEN Ten interview, you were asked “What is the responsibility of the writer?” you said it was “to ask hard questions, which you don’t necessarily have the answers to . . . ” What are some of the most pressing questions you attempt to ask in Afterland?

I wanted to gender flip the idea of the teenage girl in peril, how we sexualize girls, treat them as commodities and reproductive resources. Suddenly it’s Miles facing dehumanizing objectification, more important for what’s between his legs than who he is as a person. I wanted to interrogate the idea of a world-without-men being a gentler, kinder place, and this notion that women are inherently good and nurturing, because of course we aren’t. Because, surprise, we’re fully human, just as self-interested, corruptible, power hungry, and capable of terrible acts as men. Would there be less violence, yes, but the problems are the problems and they’re deeply embedded in our society.

Are there specific challenges to writing this narrative, or is it as simple as writing the characters and roles that you wanted to, and it happened to be a wonderfully feminist story?

That was all intentional, but I just wrote the story I wanted to. I did waste a lot of time trying to make the villain a man and it wasn’t working. It was only when I introduced the narcissist sister that the narrative fell into place.

Afterland is a near-future apocalyptic vision, with a speculative premise around a disease nearly wiping out men. The publisher, Mulholland, labels it as “Mystery & Thriller/Fiction/Thrillers/ Suspense,” only acknowledging the science fiction as an element blended into the rest. Is it important to call this work speculative fiction, or science fiction, or thriller? Do these labels carry a relevance that speak to the true nature of the narrative? Or are they just sales tactics?

I’m not a huge fan of labels. I understand marketing needs them and that publishing is a business and that it can be very useful for readers to find more of what they love, speaking as someone who used to have to get my science fiction and fantasy through a specialty mail order company when I was in my teens, because the bookstores in South Africa in the nineties only stocked the big names and had a single lonely shelf devoted to genre. I write the books I want to write. I’m not overly vested in how people want to categorize them. Please call it whatever makes you happy.

What are you working on now, what do you have coming up that fans can look forward to?

I’m pitching some TV projects with friends and I’ve started in on a new novel, although the writing is slow in lockdown life, with the generalized anxiety of the pandemic, and the specificities, and the hours lost to supervising my eleven year old Zoom-schooling from home.

About the Author

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he writes SF/F/H, reviews for Cascadia Subduction Zone Magazine, and is also associate editor at both Locus and Lightspeed magazines.

Editor’s Desk:
Yes, Virginia, Short Fiction is Important

Neil Clarke

Short fiction is important. I feel like I shouldn’t have to say that, but in my years as both a fan and as a professional, I’ve seen it treated like a younger sibling or supporting character when compared to novels.

It’s easy to come up with examples of this. I’ve spoken about the perceived financial value of short fiction in previous editorials. That’s just one variable that speaks volumes about a portion of the reading community and contributes to the lower pay rates for short stories. And then there’s the friends, fans, and family of authors that find themselves asking “when will you publish a novel” as if what they’ve published isn’t as important or even real work? Or why not take a look at genre literary awards such as the Hugo, World Fantasy, and Nebula Awards? The award for best novel is always presented in the most prestigious position, last.

And some of you are probably thinking it’s only natural that a short fiction editor is going to believe that short stories are important. So perhaps “important” doesn’t make it clear enough. I’ll be more specific: short fiction is the heart of the genre. Yes, that important.

Your heart, just in case you’ve forgotten, pumps blood throughout your body, providing it with the oxygen and nutrients it requires to survive. It’s essential.

Short fiction, just in case you haven’t noticed, is the most common entry point for new authors and a place all authors feel more freedom to experiment with new ideas and storytelling techniques that the rest of the genre requires to keep evolving. Likewise essential.

I’ve often referred to the short fiction ecosystem as “the great churn.” Within, the best and brightest often catch the attention of those publishing novels. Once that process starts, their short fiction output begins to decrease or drops to zero. In response, opportunities are created for new authors. In some ways, it can be compared to working in a school, but instead of students graduating and moving up (which would further the second-class image for short fiction), authors are actually moving onto better paying work. And also like school, they sometimes come back to visit/send us a story. That is, if they haven’t entered that sphere of publishing that solicits away those authors with the lure of a sure sale. *shakes fist*

As much as we miss those that move away, we know that the next wave will take us somewhere new and exciting. That continual churn of the field is an essential part of short fiction and valued highly by its fans. We get a front row seat to the possible futures for the genre and the authors who will keep genre vital and moving forward. Sometimes they challenge us. Sometimes we don’t get it. Sometimes they open our eyes. Sometimes they join that pantheon of favorites we all have. Sometimes they draw the attention of new readers. Sometimes they make us scream with frustration or joy. That’s how we know the system is working. That’s how we know it’s essential.

So as I contemplated this editorial, I thought it might be fun to ask the following on Twitter:

Fill in the blank:

Short fiction is important because _______________________.

(“important” here can be important to you, to writers, to readers, to the genre, etc.)

Aside from the handful of “all fiction is important” people I expected to ignore, I was pleasantly surprised by the volume and variety of responses I received. I thought it might be fun to give you a snapshot into the general themes and categories in which the responses fell.

Short fiction is important because:

many of us have busy lives or short attention spans and can only digest a story in those rare free moments.

I can discover dozens of new authors and variety is the spice of life.

every word is important and impactful. It has a focus you can’t find in a novel.

sometimes you need a quick escape (also comes with the satisfaction of being able to finish it).

it’s more open to new authors than any other medium, particularly international works and translations.

you can explore a world or character without a big commitment.

it’s where all the best ideas are explored first. It’s the laboratory.

the people publishing novels are risk averse (demographics, themes, styles, etc.). Short fiction dares the author and reader and proves there’s an audience for these things.

it offers a potency no novel could sustain.

you can learn more and hone your writing skills through having to be brief. You learn to make every word count.

so many talented writers don’t have the luxury of time to write novels.

it gives readers both quality and quantity.

it makes me think, challenges my beliefs and preconceptions, and opens my mind to ways other than my own.

it often unspools in my brain, making me more creative in the process.

And perhaps most importantly . . .

because it makes people happy.

If you participated in this little thought experiment, thank you. If not, why not take a moment and think about how you’d answer it. Maybe even share it or a story with someone you know.

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine and Forever Magazine; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a eight-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His anthologies include Upgraded, Galactic Empires, More Human Than Human, Touchable Unreality, The Final Frontier, Not One of Us, The Eagle has Landed, and the Best Science Fiction of the Years series. His next anthology, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 5, will be published later this year by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.

Cover Art:
Monk’s Mirror

Joseph Diaz

About the Artist

Joseph Diaz is a concept artist and illustrator with more than a decade of professional experience. He has done artwork for more than fifty movies and shows, such as Warcraft, Game of Thrones, A Monster Calls, and Lost in Space. He was nominated for the Art Director’s Guild Award in 2012 for his work in the movie The Impossible. He also works as an illustrator for games like Star Trek Adventures and Deep Madness.