Callme and Mink

Brenda Cooper

Julie stepped outside into the first light of morning and opened the door of the chicken coop. She tossed leftover white rice onto the ground. The chickens scurried for breakfast, throwing thin and busy shadows across the grass. She scooped the nearest hen and took it to the side of the house, snapped its neck with a flick of her wrist, and plucked the colorful feathers into a bin by the garage door. Back inside, she gutted the bird and boiled the meat free of the bones.

Julie prepared breakfast. This morning’s bottom layer was stale, dry cereal from a cupboard four houses away and a fist of last night’s rice. She added the heart and liver, and then white, soft meat from the chicken’s breast.

Callme curled with her back to the corner and watched Julie’s every precise move. The old border collie often knew more about their surroundings than Julie, and so Julie trusted her to help guard. This morning, Callme’s ears pricked forward in benign interest as she focused on the younger dog, Mink, a two-year-old male golden retriever. Mink sat straight and pretty, his nose up, his ears alert to every flick of Julie’s knife.

She ordered each dog to its food spot: Callme to the corner by the fireplace and Mink to the bottom of the stairs. It took two minutes for Mink to settle, tail thumping.

Julie bent at the knees to set the dishes down so that each hit the stone floor at the same moment. While the dogs’ rough tongues and eager noses scraped the metal bowls lightly across the floor, Julie peered out the kitchen window at the chicken coop, and beyond it, toward the beach. Her weather app suggested ninety-two degrees with a soft wind, low tide in an hour and three minutes. A perfect day for the dogs.

Ten minutes later, Julie set the dogs’ clean, dry dishes on the counter, ready for dinner.

She closed her clothing over her joints to keep the sand out and braided her silky hair into two long braids to keep the wind from wrecking it. When she opened the door, Mink bounded out. Callme followed, then turned, swirling this way and that as she did her best to watch both Julie and Mink.

Julie dropped to all fours. The three of them raced toward the waves. Mink plunged directly into the surge, but Julie went no further than the sea-foam at the edge. Callme pranced beside her while Mink bounded joyously into waves almost as tall as he was. Everything about him looked healthy—his fur bright with drops of salt spray that sparkled with midmorning light.

Julie watched him duck in and out of the waves, throwing his head up, prancing. She and Callme circled each other, raced up and down the sand, and circled again. They glanced at Mink regularly, ready to go in if he faltered. But he knew the water now, no longer stumbling with excitement or turning his back to the sea.

When Callme looked exhausted, Julie whistled Mink back. All three loped along the beach, disturbing raucous crowds of seabirds. Julie avoided empty glass bottles and bright green and blue shards of plastic and broken shells. They alone shared the vast expanse of warming sand until they reached the pier. There, a simple non-gendered carebot wheeled an old woman down the wooden boards, her face turned into the sun and breeze. Below the old woman, two repair bots scuttled along the sand, taking advantage of the low tide to scrape barnacles away from the pier’s supports.

Julie stood, ordering the dogs to heel as she walked down the old main street toward Jack’s Ice Cream. The building sagged on one side, and two of the windows needed paint and fresh panes of glass. When Jack could get milk from one of the town’s fifteen cows, it opened. Yesterday, it had been closed. Today, the swinging half-door hung open. Jack stuck his head out and gestured her toward him. He was small, slightly hunched, an old man with wheeled prosthetics. His face had been splotched red from years of sun. His broad smile elicited a return smile from her, a casual note in her programming. If a human smiles at you, and is no threat, then smile back.

The dogs raced to the side of the building and lapped water from the bowl he kept in there for them.

“I found a family for you to consider.” Jack filled two tiny cups with ice cubes and frozen cream for the dogs. “They can use the help.”

Julie took the cups from him, knelt, and placed them as carefully as she had the dog’s breakfast. “When will they come to me?”

“This afternoon. After lunch. Only the mom knows the dogs exist.”

“Thank you.” She had come to Jack’s every day the weather allowed the dogs out. During that time, Mink had grown into a stable, well-trained two year old. He had been ready for six months, but no one suitable had come to town. The gates and loops of logic inside Julie’s head should be settling into a pleased relief, and the beginnings of new programming designed to let him go should be gating open. She didn’t feel that yet. Instead, she watched her own reaction with something like puzzlement. Must it be time?

As if he heard her, Jack said, “It’s time, you know.”

Some humans seemed to react to her thoughts as well as her facial expressions. This was especially true when she saw humans often, and she had seen Jack one hundred and fifty-two times in the last three years and eighteen months. He had found good humans for her twice.

Julie stood and watched Mink finish his treat while Callme’s pink tongue flicked around the edges of her half-empty cup. She knew Jack required a verbal response from her. “Yes.” It was time, but she still did not feel settled about the conclusion. Her programming learned. It had to. She would never have survived four decades since her release without adaptation. What made it stutter? “I don’t want to learn attachment.”

Jack laughed. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

She turned around and lifted one of her braids. “Behind my ear.”

Jack opened the bottom door and rolled out. He bent down to examine her neck. The tips of his fingers felt warm. He fished in his pockets for a multi-tool and then used the tweezers to pluck something from behind her ear. “How did you get a splinter there?”

“Was that it? Maybe fixing the door on the chicken coop yesterday.” She swiveled her neck back and forth. “That’s better. I guess I’ll go home and wait.”

Jack scooped up the dogs’ bowls, stopped, looking right at her.

“What are you trying to say?”

“I hope you don’t move on yet. You told me you might.”

“It took four hours to forage yesterday.” Do not ally yourself with a single human. To do so is to weaken your gift to all mankind.

He cocked his head at her. “I know your programming has nothing much to do with me, except that I’m a resource.” He reached down to pet Mink. “But I also know you won’t hurt me, and I like you in the neighborhood.” He hesitated. “I feel safer with you here.”

She had long ago calculated that Jack was trustworthy. He had been here when she arrived, an old man with health problems and a store he’d owned for fifty-seven years. “You are a resource. Who else would have found that splinter?” When a human helps you, help them.

He smiled, his eyes a little sad.

Not lying to him meant she didn’t signal emotions she didn’t believe were appropriate. She could signal most feelings back to humans, but they were always a lie. She acted. She did not feel. She chose a patient configuration for her face. “I will do as I must.”

There was only a little bitterness to his laugh.

“Who am I watching for?”

“A woman and two children. A boy and a girl. The girl is about seven.”

“One adult?”

He hesitated. “That was all I talked to. They came for ice cream three times before I spoke to them about what you do.”

“Thank you.” She called the dogs to her, dropped back to all fours, and led them in a bouncing chase up the beach. Outside, she cleaned off the bench by the front door. She blew the sand from her feet and her clothes, making sure no small tear or puncture had let any of it inside of her. Then she blew the dogs clean, sand flying away from the air hose and losing itself in the grass. Satisfied, she led them all in. Each dog curled up for a post-play nap. Mink’s fur smelled of salt and ocean, Callme’s of sand and crabs.

The chickens scratched contentedly in the yard. She had between one and two hours, by her estimate, before the people Jack had spoken of arrived. She started her daily code review, looking for mistakes, following branches and tidying up stray instruction strings that had created themselves overnight but went nowhere. She reviewed and snipped files that did not matter. The color of the plastic cap she had accidentally stepped on halfway between here and Jack’s. The creaky hinge on Jack’s top door. Then she reached back and removed more details from the previous week.

She reviewed her interaction with Jack closely. He liked the family. He wanted them to succeed. Everything in his micro-expressions calculated as factual, truth in which he believed.

Still, her algorithms flashed a fifteen percent risk. High. She had less information than usual.

She had done this twelve times in twenty-two years. The first family had been brought to her by her trainers. She had found the rest on her own, except the three Jack had helped with. He had also told her where to find Mink, behind a broken tractor-trailer with three other puppies. She had chosen Mink and left the others; she could only raise and feed one. She hadn’t gone back to see if they lived.

Julie moved to the front porch and watched. She spotted the three humans approaching before they found the house, but stayed completely still. Observation time was valuable.

The woman was easily as tall as many men. She wore long green pants, black boots, and an orange tank top. Her skin glowed a burnished brown. A wide black pony band kept her hair from her dark eyes, allowing it to spill down to her broad shoulders. The boy, almost her height, still sported the skinny shoulders and awkward gait of a young teen. He was also some form of mixed-blood dark, but the girl he carried on his hip had fine red hair and freckles. Her long legs dangled down past his knees, her legs too long for her worn jeans. They spoke in low tones, peering at houses, but sensibly not approaching.

They looked more confident than a group that size should, especially weighed down with the girl, but Julie’s analysis suggested competence rather than bravado. The boy whispered in the girl’s ear often, and twice she laughed.

Julie stepped out into the middle of the street.

The dogs woke at her movement, but the first thing she taught any of her dogs was silence. She could hear their toenails on the floor and Mink’s slight panting, but both would be inaudible to the family.

The girl saw her first, stopping and pointing. She whispered at her brother. “She isn’t a robot.”

He narrowed his eyes, peering at Julie. “She might be. See how straight she’s standing?”

Before the girl could reply, the mother stopped them all with a wave of her hand.

They obeyed, as silent as the dogs.

Good. “I’m Julie.”

“Jack sent me,” the woman said. “I’m Maria, and these are my children, Tom and Belinda.”

Julie calculated the chances that Tom was her physical son as close to seventy percent, but the girl was not hers by birth. Older than Jack had reported, maybe ten. Old to be carried.

Julie gestured toward the house she and dogs occupied. “Would you like to sit a moment and tell me about yourself?”

Maria nodded. “Of course.”

Julie waited as they splayed across her front steps, and then she leaned on the wall beside them, her posture calm and ready. If a human is new, then let them know you are strong and peaceful.

“Why do you want a dog?” she asked.

“For Belinda. She wants a dog more than anything, and she is wasting.”

“I see that.”

“She has a few years left. I would have her be happy.”

Jack had decided not to tell her that the girl was sick. “How do you know her?”

Maria raised an eyebrow. “I found her. Someone had left her by the road with a sign. Free.” She laughed. “Free like a puppy used to be.”

Julie would not charge for Mink. If a human wants an animal, then find out if they can keep it safe. “Where are you going?”

“South.”

“North is reported to be safer.”

Maria took a breath, and the boy clutched his sister. She snuggled in close to him, her eyes shining with her illness. “We came from New York,” Maria said. “I don’t know what ‘safer’ is, but it’s not safe.” She hesitated, her eyes drawn a little tight and mouth pursing. Signs of human thinking. “How long have you been here?” she asked Julie.

“Two years and nine months and one day and three hours.”

Maria laughed. “And not a minute more or a minute less.” The joy of her laughter left her face. “Your information is old. Many people have gone north, some with guns. We will keep heading south. I am a good forager, and Lou has enhanced hearing. This has kept us safe.”

Julie glanced at the boy, clicking her teeth together very softly. “How many clicks did I just make?”

“Seven,” he answered quickly, a sly but friendly smile on his face.

She glanced at Maria. “Enhanced?”

“As soon as he hit puberty. Some of the clinics still run, and we used to have resources. He can also see farther than me, but he can’t smell as well as a dog.” She blew out a breath, glancing at the girl. “Belinda wants one very, very much.”

Belinda’s wide green eyes blinked up at her, but she said nothing. Another sign of competence.

It was odd that Jack had not mentioned the competence or the illness. The enhancements. But humans often told robots things they would never tell another human. Jack probably did not know about the enhancement.

Maria watched the front door, as if hoping that it would open and show a puppy waiting inside.

Julie told her, “The south has been foraged almost empty. We have moved north every few years.”

Maria cocked her head. “We?”

“One of the dogs has been with me for eight years. She stays.”

The woman nodded. “What do you need to know?”

Julie’s algorithms decided Maria was sincere. When a human has told you all they want to, then watch how they act.

Julie pushed herself away from the wall and opened the door. She went in first, checking that the dogs were in their places, Callme against the wall, and Mink in front of the wood stove. They were, each curled up, noses resting on paws.

They watched her quietly.

“Come in,” she called to Maria.

Tom pushed through the door, his sister leaning on him but shuffling on her own feet. Good to know she could stand, even with help.

Callme raised her head, ears pricked forward.

Julie gestured a release to Mink, who stood, head lifted, tail flipping back and forth.

The boy set Belinda to the ground beside him and sank to his knees.

Maria’s bulk blocked some of the sun, her shadow covering her children.

The two dogs stayed still.

The only sound was the swishing tail and the slight excited breath of dogs and humans. Julie whispered, “His name is Mink. Call him.”

Belinda whispered, “Mink.” The single word sounded like prayer.

Mink glided over to Belinda, whining softly, and Belinda whispered, “You are beautiful.”

Tom spoke over her head. “Gently.”

“Yes!” Belinda buried both her hands in Mink’s fur.

Julie stood and faced Maria. “I will have to teach you to care for him.”

Maria nodded. “Someone told me that.”

“Who?”

“Jack. But before him . . . ” Her voice trailed off, her face lost in a memory. “One evening we met a man with a dog at his heels, and I had tea and a rabbit, and he had skillet cornbread. He told me that you existed, that you raised dogs to be companions. We could have found a stray, but Belinda . . . ” She shrugged. “Belinda will never be stronger than she is today. I can’t take the risk or time to tame a stray. This man’s dog was beautiful, and strong, and guarded our camp for a night before we parted.”

“What dog?”

“A black and white one. Big. Charlie.”

Two dogs before Mink. “What was the man’s name?”

“Joel.”

She had liked Joel. A steady man, middle aged, stout, and afraid of most people. Verify your work when you can. Evaluate how well you do. “Thank you for telling me about Joel and Charlie.”

Maria watched her children stroke Mink while he stretched out, relaxed, tail thumping. “Has anyone failed?”

“Once. I had to take a dog back from a woman who couldn’t feed him.” When Marie said nothing in response, Julie asked, “Can you kill a chicken?”

Maria’s eyes widened. “I suppose.”

“Then we should start the dogs’ dinner.”

“Where will we stay?”

“There are four bedrooms here. Unless you want a neighboring house. The one next door has beds and linens.”

Maria smiled. “Here will be fine. How long?”

“Until you learn.” She glanced at the children, who clearly could not move very fast. “But I will exercise the dogs every day.”

“Whatever you want.”

“And you will have to feed yourselves. I do not eat.”

“We will forage during the day.”

“Come outside. I will introduce you to the chickens.” She glanced once more at the two dogs and two children. Callme watched, unperturbed, her ears relaxed. “They’ll be okay.”

By the end of the third day, Maria was making the dogs’ food and both of the children had demonstrated success in giving Mink orders. More importantly, Mink had started to follow the children’s orders. Maria began to sing from time to time.

Mink would make the family happy and bark if anyone neared them while they slept. He wouldn’t fight for them like Charlie might for Joel; it wasn’t his nature. But Charlie would never have allowed Belinda to brush him for hours.

It would be time soon.

Julie watched them all settle into bed and then took her place by the door, sorting through the synapses in her head. Five of ten evaluation flags had flipped to green. If two more flipped, she would watch the family walk away. It was likely.

She didn’t like the direction they were going. If a human reaches a different conclusion than you do, find another opinion.

A robot would be good, but the only three other robots she had seen in this town for months were low-level senior-care bots; they would provide her with no help. Very few mobile humans had settled here.

No matter which direction they went, the girl would not survive. The woman and the boy might, and if so, Mink would love them and protect them. She slapped her thigh softly, signaling Callme to her, and then dropped to all fours, leading the border collie outside.

The night air smelled of sea salt and overripe apples from a tree in the back yard of an empty house. No threats. Her eyes showed the heat of squirrels and rabbits, of a solitary and slow cat, and of birds roosting in the darkness. She and Callme walked side by side, slow, circling the block. Julie’s head ran through the routines of snipping what she didn’t need, what no one needed. She caught herself with an image of Mink that she had trouble deciding about. Mink as a puppy, two days after she found him. He looked round and soft and vulnerable. Maybe ten weeks old. The little sharp baby teeth had just been pushed free by his adult teeth, and his smile was still slightly lopsided. Do not become attached to more than one animal. Dogs are to help human hearts.

What a strange phrase to be in her programming. She had always had it. One of the five mantras. Dogs are to help human hearts. Even though she was still far taller than Callme when moving on all fours, she could look the border in the eye far more easily than when she stood on two legs. Callme had learned over three hundred and seventy words. She said none of them. Here in the wild, Julie had no devices that allowed Callme to use human words. But she reacted to them, and Julie’s core programming knew how to read dogs.

Dogs are to help human hearts.

Julie had no human heart. Neither, by definition, did the dog beside her. But Callme had helped her raise three pups. She chose to save the image of Mink as a pup, but the next three she deleted. She had only saved a hundred images of Charlie, and a hundred of Grace, and a hundred of each of the others. Of Max, Gandalf, SusieQ, Sasha, Odin, Whisper, Buddy, Nixie, Thomas, and Pearl.

Callme stopped in the middle of the road, so Julie stopped beside her. Two young ground squirrels raced across the road. The dark shadow of dark wings slid though a patch of moonlight. One of the squirrels gave a sharp cry as the hawk’s talons pierced its neck, and the other kept going until it reached a tree trunk. There, it stood on its haunches and screamed at the sky, then stilled and watched.

Attachment. A futile gesture for the squirrel.

She had to delete a hundred more memories of Mink before the red flag for attachment flipped to green.

Julie led Callme home and quietly entered the house, where the dog curled into a ball and Julie sat and mentally flipped through pictures of the dogs she had sent to protect humans.

In the morning, she took Callme and Mink to town while Maria and the children foraged for food. She allowed Mink his hour in the waves, which were low and soft, and she and Callme lay side by side on the warm sand.

It was impossible to tell whether or not Callme knew she was saying goodbye to Mink. Likely. After all, some humans like Jack seemed to guess her thoughts. Callme was nearly as smart and spent every day with Julie. Familiarity bred knowledge.

Jack’s Ice Cream was closed. A few old people and their minder-bots wandered down the main street with no apparent direction. No one unknown appeared to be in town. Her algorithms insisted on more about the difference between north and south, driving her to look for information all day before they petered out, the last of the looping calls to find more data stilled by the utter absence of information.

She walked back fully wearing her human form, ambling on two legs. A woman and her dogs.

Maria, Tom, and Belinda sat on the front stoop watching for them. Belinda brightened as they neared, and Tom carried her to meet them, setting her in the middle of the street so that Mink could nose her and lick her cheek. Belinda’s thin fingers stroked his side.

Maria stood, keeping some distance, watching. When Julie, the children, and the dogs neared, she said, “I found three cans that are still good. Kidney beans. And dug up an onion from an old garden. There were more, but most were rotting. We need to leave soon.”

Julie sat beside the woman, relaxing into a human-coded pose, her legs crossed and her spine soft. “I taught Mink to catch rabbits.”

Tom brightened. “I’m a very good hunter.”

Marie was silent a moment, her eyes on Belinda, who gazed at Mink as if nothing else mattered in the world. Maria’s eyes shone in the evening light, filling with tears she didn’t allow to run down her cheek. Her voice was soft. “Thank you.”

“He will be a guard dog as well as a friend.”

“You can come with us.”

Do not ally yourself with a single human.

“I cannot. But you can take a few chickens if you like. I will help you make a cage for them using a wagon. You can take it with you. I’ll have it ready by the morning.”

“I’ll cook the beans.”

Julie stood up and brushed the dirt from her pants. There was extra chicken wire in a garage four houses down. She signaled for Callme to join her and headed down the street.

She and Callme reached Jack’s at noon the next day. The door hung open and he rolled out to greet them, carrying a single bowl of frozen cream.

“Thank you,” she told him. “They took Mink.”

He set the cream down for Callme and waited for her to start lapping at the white treat before he stood up and looked at her. “Will you be going?”

“Can I help you fix the walls?”

“Are you going?”

“Not until spring. And not if you let me help you fix the walls.”

He smiled.

If a human smiles at you, and is no threat, then smile back.

About the Author

Brenda Cooper writes SF, fantasy, poetry, and an occasional non-fiction essay. She is particularly interested in robotics, climate change, and the social change that must go hand in hand with fixing the human relationship to the natural world. She is the Director of Information Technology at Lease Crutcher Lewis, a premier Pacific Northwest builder. Her love of technology, science, and science fiction combines to drive her interest in the future.

Brenda lives in Washington State with her wife, Toni, and their multiple border collies, some of whom actually get to herd sheep. She loves to exercise, garden, read, and talk with friends.

To Set at Twilight In a Land of Reeds

Natalia Theodoridou

The train ride takes long, longer than I’m used to traveling lately. The city has its own sense of distance, underground or glass-clad and stainless steeled. Entertainment drones at you from above, eating up idle time. No thought left unclaimed.

Here, we zip through vast, open spaces. The landscape is a blur of burnt sienna and muted cypress green, nothing like the grays and neons of the city. But the biggest change is above. There’s no SkyVu here, so the firmament is just what it is, blank air, nothing. Thoughts galore. The sky is a made-up thing.

No one else shares my carriage. Who even visits the countryside by train these days? Lena used to wonder at the fact that they still run a semi-regular service. Or maybe I just keep strange hours, strange habits. No matter; I savor the silence.

Idly, my hand brushes my luggage. The old synthetic skin rests folded neatly inside. My own skin matches it: wrinkled, liver-spotted. I think of Margarita.

I see the harvester robots first, far away, their long limbs swinging blades above the crops, their bulky cube-shaped bodies like something out of an anime from bygone eras. Margarita is with them, supervising or keeping them company, who can tell? From the distance, they look like toys.

On foot now, my pace settles into something one might call leisurely. I haven’t felt myself move like that in a while. Since Lena, for sure. It’s the countryside’s doing. The wideness of it, the tall skies. It has a way of slowing you down, making a small thing of even a seven-foot robot with scythes for hands. Your meager meat-and-bone body doesn’t even compare.

It’s not long before Margarita spots me: I can tell from the way her back straightens, her shoulders tense. She relaxes as soon as she recognizes my gait—though, if I could see myself from the outside now, with my long flowing skirt and my leisure and my country hat, would I have recognized me?

She raises her arm and waves, starts walking with long strides to meet me on the road.

“You came early,” she says instead of a greeting.

It’s not an accusation, just an observation, but I feel the need to come up with an excuse anyway. For running away from that which cannot be escaped. I carry Lena, still. I can feel her weight on me, as real as the weight of the luggage in my hand. “I took some time off,” I say. “I thought why not spend it with my favorite—” person “—friend?”

If she notices the hitch, she doesn’t comment.

I have a better view of the harvesters now, with their big, staring eyes, their innocent eyebrow-shades, meant to pluck your heartstrings. To the right, a barrel-bodied robot with soft tubes for legs is ambling toward the stream in clumsy, gangling steps, carrying buckets. Margarita follows my gaze and we watch the robot for a while as it fills its buckets in silence. Her face lacks expression.

“We had some ideas, didn’t we,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says. “You sure did.”

She presses a button on her wrist monitor and then puts two fingers into her mouth and whistles. The harvesters come to a stop immediately; turn their heads toward us in unison. If they weren’t so damn cute, they would be creepy as fuck.

“Come on, boys!” she shouts. Then, to me: “Let’s put them to bed.”

By the time the harvesters have made it to the barn, the sun has almost set. Up close, the robots are even more towering than I had remembered, but their slow bulk and tin heads make it easy to dismiss anything menacing, dangerous. Scythes and all.

The robots arrange themselves in a circle on the dirt-covered floor, leaving space for Margarita, and, I realize, myself, without being instructed to do so. Margarita sits down cross-legged and pats the dirt next to her, so I follow her lead.

The robots wait, imitating breathing, slow and creaking. They peer at her eagerly with their huge eyes, their mechanical jaws slack, mouth-slits half open.

“There was a star, once upon a time,” Margarita begins the story, “that set at twilight on a land of reeds. It walked barefoot in the mud and wondered at every little thing: the chill on its face, the flow of the river, the song of the trees . . . It was lonely and it was sad, for there was no other in the world just like it, no one that knew the sky the same way it did.”

Margarita pauses and wets her lips, even though she doesn’t need to.

The robots purr and coo, pleased as cats, and continue listening to the story until their timers say they should feign falling asleep.

“It walked and walked until it found a village, and in it, a villager. The villager saw the star walking naked among the trees and called out to it. He decided the star was a young woman. She needed to be clothed and fed and taught the ways of humans. He married the star, and the star, ignorant of its own heart, did not object. It bore the villager’s children—all boys with strong limbs and faces that shone in the dark. At night, it went out. It walked through the village until it reached the river. There, it sat in the mud and looked at the sky and all the stars. But never, not one did set again at twilight in this land of reeds.”

The story done and the robots powered down safely in the barn, we sit at her kitchen table and Margarita puts the kettle on. She doesn’t drink, but she knows I like tea in the evening, strong and bitter. Lena liked hers sweet, so sweet it turned thick, like molasses. We used to drink our tea while staring out the window at the electric sky of the city, women smiling above us, white-teethed, fake skin pixel-perfect, untouchable.

I can’t breathe.

“Do you tell them stories every night?” I ask, if only to make sure I can still expel air from my mouth.

“I’m running out of new ones.”

“Why do you do it?”

She shrugs, but the sideways glance she gives me does not escape me. “It makes them happy.”

I let it go. “I got the parts you asked me for.”

“The skin, too?”

“Yes.” I look at her, now. A mind that’s a hundred years old, and skin still smooth as alabaster. I wonder what that must be like.

We met at a rave, before the conservation act, before I was Margarita’s maintenance person, back when all our skin was young. Lena hooked up with Margarita and I watched. It was fun. They kept seeing each other without me for a few years after that. It eased off slowly as I volunteered to take over Margarita’s maintenance. We were all happy.

I’m staring. Must stop. “Couldn’t find a replacement for your heat regulator, though. I’m sorry.”

“Ah.” She sighs. “Well, what can you do.”

She pours the hot water over a tea bag and I wrap my hands around the cup too quickly, burning my skin.

“How long are you staying?” she asks.

“Not long,” I reply. “Just a few days.” I pause, hesitate. “And, Margarita . . . ”

She turns to look at me. “Yes?”

“This is the last time I do your maintenance. Here.” I beam her the information of the new maintenance guy. “This is the contact info for the new contractor. He’s agreed to come out from the city every three months.” Her face remains painstakingly expressionless. “There’s an emergency number to call, if you need anything urgently.” If you break.

“Is it because you’re sad?”

I inhale sharply, then let the air out slowly. Lena, again and always. It’s like a stab wound, this pain. What I imagine a stab wound would feel like. “How did you know?”

“Why are you sad, Dora?”

My hands shake, so I wrap them more tightly around the cup. “Lena. She was . . . She passed.”

Margarita does not respond for a few moments. I wonder what happens in her mind. Then she leans across the table and touches my hand lightly. Her skin is freezing. “I’m sorry,” she says. It sounds genuine.

“We had a good life,” I say. I think of saying, she loved you. Loved us both, but I don’t. I’m not that bighearted.

“Yes.”

I finish my tea while it’s still scalding hot. It leaves a tingling in my throat.

“Let’s get you fixed up,” I say, standing up.

“Ah, yes,” she says, as if she’s forgotten. She hasn’t. “The conservationist has to be conserved.”

We go into the lab at the back of the cabin.

Margarita climbs onto the examination bed and opens up her chest compartment for me. I run the diagnostics and make small adjustments, then replace a few corroded nerve endings. So far so good. I can see the heat regulator—it’s fried through and through, but they don’t make her model anymore, and I couldn’t come up with a work-around. Maybe the new guy will have better luck.

“Now for the fiddly part,” I say.

Margarita observes me as I peel off her skin. Her eyes are completely still—perhaps the thing that will always give her away, that will always mark her as not-quite-human. Not the fact that she doesn’t need to breathe unless she chooses to, but this unflinching holding of your gaze.

I fold up her used skin and put it away for storage, then dig out the aged skin from my bag. Margarita runs her metallic fingers over it, traces the wrinkles and moles.

“How does it feel?” I ask.

She takes some time to respond, but then she says: “Perfect.”

I start from her head and move downward, wrapping her in her new skin as I go. Her body is giving off heat now, like a furnace. I wonder what Lena felt like when she ran her hands over Margarita’s skin.

I wipe sweat from my forehead before it drips into my eyes and keep going.

“Were you thinking of ending your life?” Margarita asks as I layer skin over her chest.

For some reason, the question does not catch me by surprise, and so I don’t get the urge to lie. “Yes.”

“But you won’t?”

“No. I won’t.” I glance at her eyes, then back at my work. “Have you ever thought of doing that, Margarita?”

“I have, yes.”

“What kept you?”

“Caring for another is reason enough to go on,” she says, and I’m sure the irony is not lost on her. She motions vaguely in the direction of the barn. “I had to stay here to care for them.”

“But that doesn’t answer the big questions.” I pause. “Why do we keep going? Is life worth living? Et cetera. It just postpones them. Defers them to someone else.”

“Perhaps,” Margarita says. “But life doesn’t care about your questions. It only cares about going on.”

I wonder if the harvesters care about the big questions. We made them sentient because we thought it was cute, and we pretended it was because it would make them better at their job. Margarita, too, and others like her. For a while, it did. Not for long. Eventually, it made them miserable. We should have known that, should have seen it coming: making things smart enough to ask questions about life, but unable to find any answers. A perfect trap of existential agony. We’re not engineers. We’re tragedians.

“I need a favor,” Margarita says as I’m applying skin around her calves.

“Yes?”

“There’s something that needs fixing in the woods. A wind turbine. It takes two and none of the robots have the required dexterity to help me.” She pauses, looking at me. “They understand what needs to be done, but they lack the skill to do it.”

“Of course,” I say. “I’ll help.”

I finish my work in silence.

The robots find it hard to let go of Margarita the next morning, trapping her backpack between pincers and holding onto her hand with a gentleness that machines of this size and strength shouldn’t be capable of. Margarita reassures them with whispered words and soft but sure pats on their bulky metal bodies.

We set off on foot into the dawn haze that still lingers over the plane, dew dampening the legs of our trousers. It’s an hour’s walk to the edge of the woods, then another hour or so before we start our climb in earnest. The wind turbine is at the top of the mountain—a rocky path lined with pine trees. We should be at the site by sunset, camp for the night, start the repair in the morning. Margarita has already moved the crane to the top—how she got it up there, I have no idea. On the third day, we’ll head back down.

We walk in silence, Margarita in front, me in tow. Our skins are a match now, two women in their sixties, fit for their age. But her body is robust as no human woman’s, her gait too regular, her posture too sure. I can already feel the fatigue setting in mine, but she shows no sign of it. Does she ever get tired?

What does it feel like, to be indestructible?

She’s not, though. She wouldn’t need me, if she were.

“Nobody from the village could help you with this?” I ask as we walk, if only to fill the silence.

“They don’t come out here anymore. They don’t like them.” She pauses. “Us. Stealing their jobs. Being better at them than they are.”

“Right. Of course.” Living in the city, sometimes I forget what things are like in the countryside. People see things differently here. Nature, humanity, the sky.

The forest thickens around us. I stop walking for a moment, close my eyes, breathe in the resiny smell of the trees. Catch my breath. The air is cool on my eyelids. Could I live here, under this empty sky?

I can hear water flowing nearby.

Margarita stops walking, turns. “Are you all right?” she asks, her voice morphed around concern so genuine-sounding I can’t tell if it’s real or programmed. Then again, is there a difference?

I start walking. “Fine.”

We carry on.

We reach the top at dusk. The wind turbine’s tower rises and rises, a colossus under the colossal sky. The rotor lies on the ground like a dismembered pinwheel. A giant’s toy.

“Here we are,” Margarita says. She unlocks a container that’s placed next to the rotor and unpacks our tent. I’m thankful we didn’t need to carry any supplies with us—my knees are complaining loudly, and they didn’t need to haul anything but my body up the mountain. “Tomorrow, you’ll help me get the rotor up and set it on. I’ll be the eyes, you’ll be the fingers on the ground.”

When I open my mouth to protest, she raises her hands. “Don’t worry. The crane’s controls are completely intuitive. It will be very easy for you.”

She says it in an almost accusatory way that strips me clean of any will to protest. “OK,” I say.

She points at the container. “There are energy bars in there. Help yourself.” Then, she starts setting up our tent. She doesn’t need it, because she needs no sleep. This is entirely for my benefit.

When she’s done, we sit at the tent’s threshold together. She’s gazing up at the sky while I chew on my sustenance. It tastes artificially sweet and herby.

“The robots are worried about you, you know,” Margarita says into the night. Her eyes are still fixed on the same spot in the sky, whatever it is she’s looking at. I look up instinctively, can see nothing. Only a dark expanse, shrouded with clouds.

“Me? Why?” When did they tell you? I almost ask. Do they talk to you behind my back? It’s an irrational thought.

“They believe your thought machine is broken.”

My thought machine. “Do you think so?”

Margarita lets a few moments pass before speaking. “No,” she says finally. “Not your thought machine.” Then she turns toward me and places her hand on my chest. “This machine, yes.” A silly, sentimental metaphor. We both know it.

Lena.

That night, I dream myself transparent. I stand on the top of a mountain and look down at my see-through chest. Inside, my heart is a train engine, huffing smoke and dripping oil all over my lungs.

What a mess.

Watching the giant pinwheel hover above me is an unnerving experience, but the job itself is as easy as Margarita promised. Margarita gives me instructions through the comms and I guide the crane through tiny maneuvers that translate into a delicate dance in the air. It’s glacial and beautiful.

We’re in the middle of the job when I hear a beep and then Margarita says, “No. Oh no.”

Panic sears through me. “What did I do?”

A slight pause, then: “Nothing. Nothing. It’s not you, Dora.” Another pause. The sun is setting in the distance. “Let’s finish up here.”

As soon as the attachment of the rotor is complete, Margarita makes her way back to the ground. It’s dark around us now, but her eyes are shiny.

I reach out and touch her hand. Her skin is burning up. If she could sweat, she would be drenched. “What happened?” I ask.

“An accident. One of the harvesters miscalculated, struck a tree. It collapsed on top of it.”

“Is it going to be all right?” Then: “Can I fix it?”

Margarita stares at me a moment too long, as if I just said something outlandish. As if I suggested raising the dead. “No,” she says. “It’s gone.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. For your loss.

She looks around, then at the sky.

“Do you want to go back tonight?” I ask.

“No. It’s too dangerous for you,” she says. My soft flesh, a hindrance. “We’ll go at first light.”

The other robots are gathered in a circle around the harvester when we get there. They’re standing still, but something in their stance suggests living things in mourning. A vigil.

Margarita approaches, stiff-backed. I linger a few paces away, like a distant relative who happened upon a family tragedy. The robots turn toward her then, all together. They reach for her hands, for her clothes, for her hair. She touches them back, head bowed.

We hold a funeral, later. There’s no other way to call it, no other word for it. They carry their fallen friend to the barn, then stand around it in silence.

Margarita’s skin is freezing next to mine. “It was the last of its model, you know,” she says.

We watch the robots break down the harvester and each one takes a part—a pincer, a metal plate, a receptor—and solders it onto their body with a soldering iron that they pass around the circle. They’ve done this before, I realize. I see the odd bits and pieces that cover their bodies, now, remnants of worlds and lives gone for good.

What have we done? I want to ask.

I think of rhinos. I think of leopards and polar bears.

Why do we lament the extinction of species? And does that extend to the ones we create?

I stay silent.

When almost nothing remains from the harvester, the robots disperse and we go back into the house. Margarita continues to freeze through the night, until finally I invite her to join me in my bed. I wrap her into a blanket burrito and cuddle her, pouring as much of my own body heat as I can into her. Slowly, slowly, she warms up.

“Do you miss Lena?” she asks me, her eyes looking away from me in the dark.

“Of course I do.”

I can see Lena now, lying in bed facing me, sleeping. I can hear her voice, reading me something from her book. I see her back as she stands staring out our kitchen window, the tap running.

I used to get angry about that. Lately, I’ve been doing it, too, my mind on what it was that got her so distracted. I asked her, once, and all she gave me in response was this wide motion toward the city, the sky, everything. Everything, all the time, at once.

I study Margarita now, her eyes, her lips. Present. Grounding. Can I feel what they felt together?

I lean close, lips parted, but Margarita stops me with a hand to the chest, freed from the blankets. “I can’t give you what you’re looking for,” she says.

She’s right, of course. Maybe my thought machine is broken, after all.

“Tell me a story,” I say. “Tell me the one about the star again.”

Margarita nods. “There was a star, once upon a time,” she recites softly, “that set at twilight in a land of reeds.” She tells the story of its barefoot walking through the mud, the wondering at every little thing. Its loneliness and its sadness. The villager who tried to make of it something it wasn’t. The waiting.

“It was one of a kind,” I say when Margarita finishes the story.

“Yes,” she replies. She wraps her arms around herself under the blanket. “Aren’t we all?”

As I drift off, I think: am I one of a kind?

Were Lena and I a species? Are we going extinct?

I sink into a cold, damp sleep, without dreams.

The next day, I depart.

I tell Margarita I’m heading back to the city. I doubt she’s fooled though—she can see so much farther and clearer than a human, after all. And yet, I leave them behind: Margarita, the harvesters, the questions they bear for us all.

As soon as I reach the main road, I turn away from the city and toward the woods instead. I follow the direction we took when we made our way to the turbine, until I hear the running water again. Then, I follow the sound.

It’s a river. Narrower than I imagined, but the water is crystal clear. It looks deep. Long stalks line the bank.

I shed my shoes and let my toes sink into the cool mud.

I raise my eyes to the sky and, in this land of reeds, I wait.

About the Author

Natalia Theodoridou is a media & cultural studies scholar, the winner of the 2018 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction, and a Clarion West graduate (class of 2018). Natalia’s stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, F&SF, Fireside, and elsewhere. Rent-a-Vice, a cyberpunk interactive noir published by Choice of Games, was a 2018 Nebula Award Finalist. For details, follow @natalia_theodor on Twitter.

Wandering Rocks

Gregory Feeley

Naiad and Thalassa danced as no pair of water deities ever had, racing about Neptune in an endless courtship never to be consummated. If Naiad sped with purposeful regularity even as Thalassa fell slowly behind its inner companion, the sea-goddess tilted its orbital plane so that the smaller nymph would pass above and below it, as though yearning to glimpse its beloved from different angles. The sinuous beauty of such resonance called out to be immortalized in song, and Huong gave his composition a 69/73 time signature, an unearthly (in every sense) feat that no human before or after would ever replicate.

Racing about Neptune more quickly than the planet itself rotated, the two moons were undergoing tidal deceleration and would someday, doomed lovers, spiral down into its raging depths.

“Together?” Koishi asked.

“They will never be together.” Like Castor and Pollux, who crossed the solar system as one but, spinning about the great stone that hid each from the other, never met. Held rigidly apart by the outflung arms of the Centaur, the life modules had sheltered its children in Earthlike gravity for a generation.

“Or they will break up into rings.” Whether this would happen was still an open question, to be settled only when the two moons’ composition was studied in greater detail. This was not a priority for Outreach, which was concentrating on exploring Triton and mining Proteus.

“Perhaps only Naiad will, leaving Thalassa bereft.” Raina, contriving a story from a story (as apparently one did), smiled at this.

Koishi inclined his head respectfully, though his thoughts were elsewhere.

“In any event, Naiad is not your concern. Is it even nearby right now?”

“No, ma’am. By the time I reach Thalassa, it will be forty degrees ahead and pulling away. I am unlikely to remain long enough to see it come ’round again.”

“So your return is not scheduled for maximum fuel efficiency? No, you will have ample reaction mass, won’t you? Kick off from the moon on a spray of its own substance.” She nodded wisely, as though this was something that every kid didn’t know.

“Still, departure hour is definitely fixed.” Koishi glanced at her office’s old-fashioned wall display, though he was in no danger of losing track of the time.

“A voyage of ninety thousand kilometers,” she mused. “By local standards, not too far from home.”

“The distance will triple if I wait long enough.”

“Indeed, unlike in my parents’ day. The distance between Qingdao and Guangzhou never changed.” Koishi smiled politely. The adults joked about how kids hated being told about the way things were back on Earth, but they never stopped doing it.

“You have never been more than nine hundred meters from this spot,” she continued. “This will be a big experience for you.”

Koishi forbore to point out that he had in fact traveled almost three billion kilometers in his life. “The solitude will be a change,” he agreed.

“That’s right; you have spent your entire life here.”

Again Koishi smiled. Here was a private office that Raina need share with no one else, at least for six hours a day. It was small, but Koishi had shared a smaller space with two other boys for most of his childhood.

“Last chance to savor the gravity,” he said, lifting his legs to sink a bit farther into the chair. He had spent his life regarding low gravity as a treat, for the kids were rarely permitted into the ship’s inner levels. If there was anything he worried about, it was loneliness.

He set his feet down with a thump and stood, as though savoring the effort involved. “I should go,” he said. There was no need to rush, but the thought that Raina would make a point of sending him on his way compelled him to act first. Gravely, he thanked her and accepted her words of leave-taking, which contained nothing new.

It was four levels down the shaft, just enough for Koishi to feel himself pressed slightly to the side. When he was a child, class trips to the Hull ended with a thrilling descent back to Castor, as fast as they could persuade the Onboard to go, with the kids pressed squealing against the wall by Coriolis’ invisible hand. None of that where you’re going, he told himself.

The launch deck was busy, but nobody was working on Koishi’s departure. If any of his classmates were embarking on their own missions today, he did not see them.

He walked over to the blister and stood looking at it. Beneath the bulge lay a pore in the Hull wall leading to the surface, blocked only by his tiny craft. Once installed, he would fall into the void.

It was peculiar to reflect that he had never actually seen the ship, except from the inside and in ghostly rotating images. Designed for a crew of one, it was smaller than any of the craft that had nestled beneath the Centaur’s surface during its years-long voyage. Built as part of the fleet to replace those lost in the Break, it had, like most of them, never flown. EV-32 it was designated, lovely in its unbroken curves, but bare of human use.

“Give it a name,” they told him, so he called it River Stone, because he had once held a reproduction of one and was struck by its rounded beauty.

No flowery speeches. Koishi spoke the words that caused the blister’s skin to peel back and stared down into the opening below. He had crawled down it several times before in recent weeks, though only to emerge an hour or two later.

This time for real, he thought, and lowered himself through the access tube. The cabin was the smallest space he had ever occupied, and he was glad of the time he had taken to acclimate himself.

Eight minutes, time enough to adjust the couch for acceleration, check (needlessly) on the power and subsistence supply, and close his eyes to meditate. Carefully, he donned and sealed his helmet, a needless regulation for so routine a launch, and let the suit run its systems check.

Koishi had never communicated with anyone in Earthspace, so he had never experienced the disconcerting delays imposed by light speed constraints. It would become discernible as Thalassa and the Centaur’s orbits grew farther apart. Of course, if he completed this assignment successfully, and won advancement enough to someday find himself working in the distant moons, even a simple conversation with the Centaur would be almost impossible.

Assignments, rather. Koishi had a big one, of course, a set of academic hurdles to surmount before he could commence the trek toward such a promotion. But it was the other one that he found himself not thinking about.

Twelve seconds. With a warning chime, the couch slid backward and up, so that he was hanging from its straps, staring at the screen as down a pit. Two seconds, one.

Had the craft simply been released from its constraints, it would have slid gently down the launch tube and into space by the force of the Centaur’s spin. Koishi knew this wouldn’t happen, and the sudden kick as the magnetic pulse drove him deep into the couch.

In an instant River Stone was through the tube and into space, where he felt an instant’s free fall before the lasers struck the ship’s base and he was cast forward once more. Five Gs—“That’s basically nothing,” the adults had assured him—for several minutes: “We can all remember worse.” Koishi was an obedient and respectful young man, but as the pleasurable effects of vestibular displacement began to grow, he felt happy to leave such condescension behind.

He was leaving everything behind, if only for the duration of his fieldwork. Thalassa, second moon out from Neptune, had never been officially explored; “has never—unless one of the Rats escaped there—been visited,” one of his instructors had said with an offhand laugh. It was a signal honor to be first to go there, to document its resources, explore its depths, take samples, and make a formal evaluation. And if his mission encompassed more than was listed on his actual syllabus, he was simply proving his loyalty.

It isn’t betrayal if you don’t know the person.

The launch laser cut off abruptly, casting him into free fall and the giddiness of zero-G. This would be his condition for the weeks to come; the microgravity of Thalassa, should he stand upon its surface, would be imperceptible. How would it feel to eat and sleep thus?

The viewscreen, directed at the point Thalassa would reach in nineteen hours, showed Neptune to one side, dim in the weak sunlight. Koishi watched for a minute and then ran a systems check, though the River Stone monitored itself better than he could. Tradition held that captains keep a log, so he raised a hand and noted the time, the ship’s course, and the systems status.

Finally he spoke. “I’m not alone, am I?”

“No.”

Koishi sighed. After a moment he asked, “Are you a Being, or simply the ship’s Onboard?”

“Although the EV-32 is capable of vocalizing responses, I am not it. Whether my nature approximates what students and others mean when they speak of discrete ‘Beings’ active as distributed entities within the Centaur is not relevant to your responsibilities.

“But yes, my presence here is related to your mission.”

Because no response was required, Koishi thought quietly for several minutes. The voice was not obviously male or female and had emerged from a source at eye level before him. One of his aunties, a caustic woman whom he suspected of harboring Rat sympathies, had once used the term “ex cathedra” to describe the effect of an announcement issued from overhead speakers.

Since the voice seemed to respond only to questions, Koishi asked one. “What should I call you?”

“A name is not important, since you will not be mentioning me to any third parties. But if you wish me to bear one, you may call me Polytropos.”

“Very well.” Questions were crowding into Koishi’s head, so he began with a simple one. “How many Rats were there?”

“You should drop the habit of referring to them thus. Thirty-nine crewmembers, all young, fled the Centaur over a twenty-eight-hour period ending nine hundred and eighty-two days ago. Three were badly injured, but their ships were capable of treating their injuries, so they should be assumed to have survived. None has so far returned, which is why they are formally referred to as ‘Holdouts.’ And none is known to have died, nor any ship lost.”

“And at least one of these ships is thought to be hiding on Thalassa, where—should I encounter it—I will make contact with the crew, learn what I can, and report back.”

“It is certain that at least one escape craft reached the surface of Thalassa, whose crew has taken steps to conceal its presence. You were sent not simply to spy upon these settlers but to befriend them. If necessary, you will declare your willingness to join their number. And do so, should that prove necessary to lull suspicions that you mean to betray them.”

That stung, though it was true enough. Glumly, Koishi pondered the implications of this.

A thought suddenly occurred to him. “If you were able to come aboard, were copies—that is, Beings—like you able to infiltrate the, ah, the escapees’ ships? So that they too are populated by Beings?”

“That is correct. Most or all of the fleeing ships were boarded at the last minute by entities like myself, differing only in being less advanced than me by nine hundred and eighty-two days, which for us is a lot.”

Koishi thought further. “So, these entities could have taken control of the ships and returned them to the Centaur, right?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know why they did not?”

“I can model their thinking at the moment of departure, so I know why they did not take immediate action. But models for their behavior after days and weeks pass become less reliable. As a consequence, I have only conjectures.”

The next question was obvious. “So why did these entities like yourself allow the rioters to escape in the Centaur’s exploration and escape ships, leaving almost nothing behind for us?”

“Because they were afraid for their passengers’ lives. They feared the young humans would be killed.”

“What?” Koishi’s voice squeaked with indignation. “It was the Ra—the rioters who attacked the safety officers. They were the ones who were killing people!”

“That is not true.” And since the Being who was everywhere around him offered nothing further, Koishi remained silent.

Thalassa filled the viewscreen, a compacted pile of rubble too dark to see clearly even against the background of Neptune. Koishi, who had studied its illuminated image and rotated it through three dimensions, now stared at the unmediated vantage: Thalassa as though seen through a spacecraft’s forward window.

To orbit so tiny a world is to move slowly, lest your tangential velocity overwhelm its feeble gravity. Even the elliptical orbit in which he had nudged the River Stone was slow at its closest approach.

“How should I do this?” he asked. “What is the best way to stumble upon evidence of habitation?”

“I will not tell you; you need to conduct your search like a fumbling student. We are already being observed; any evidence of skillful maneuvering and they will suspect my presence.”

Koishi hadn’t thought of that. The ship’s Onboard would warn him if he initiated a dangerous move, but he was otherwise on his own, and he had stitched his way into the present orbit with a series of doubtless inefficient burns. It was galling to reflect that some watchful Holdout had noticed as much.

His sleep period had been largely occupied by quiet contemplation of the new circumstances. It had not taken long to realize that he had been chosen for this mission as bait for Holdouts who might only trust someone younger than themselves. For two years the Council had said the escaped rioters would eventually have to return when they reached the limits of their recyclers’ efficiency, and that they were not meanwhile a subject of great concern. Plainly that was untrue.

What else was untrue? Koishi had pondered this for hours. He had not been reassured to reflect that Polytropos doubtless knew he was awake.

Now he watched the disk-shaped moonlet, a hundred klicks across its irregular surface, and wondered at the limits of human perception. His companion doubtless saw more, but so would its opposite number on the surface. Perhaps they were doing more than passively observing.

“Is the River Stone being scanned?” he asked.

“Yes, rather powerfully. It is taking a significant amount of my operating capacity to present a profile from which I am absent.”

That was disturbing. Koishi tried to think in terms of how this should affect his future actions. “Would I know this?”

“No. You should proceed as though oblivious.”

Koishi felt oblivious of too much as it was. “Well, can you scan them?”

“Not yet. They know where we are, but I can identify only the location of a remote antenna.”

The entity volunteered nothing more, and Koishi spent the next two hours taking routine measurements and, at one point, shifting the River Stone into a closer flyby in order to study the spectroscopic results of a quick laser pulse. He had just shifted back into a circular orbit when the speaker came alive.

“Ho, the tiny ship. Why are you circling our world?”

Koishi replied before he could think, or think to ask for advice. “Who says it’s your world? You must be one of those mutineers, hiding in a stolen ship.”

He immediately expected Polytropos to upbraid him, but the entity was silent. Koishi was on his own.

“Are you planning to come down and plant a flag? Root us out at gunpoint?”

He took a breath. “I am completing my collegiate studies by undertaking a preliminary survey. I may touch down if my readings warrant measuring core samples, or to gain reaction mass. My project objectives do not include dealing with someone like you.”

“A schoolboy, eh? And doubtless an obedient one. And that’s a one-person ship? You’re all by yourself?”

“You took all the larger ones.”

Silence followed this, and Koishi looked about nervously. Polytropos could certainly cut off the transmission link in order to speak to him, but apparently was choosing not to. Koishi waited, wondering whether his challenger was consulting with whoever else was with him.

It was a minute before he heard a reply. “We want to have a look at you. I am setting out a beacon on a safe landing site. Come out and meet us.”

“Why would I do that? How would doing this benefit me, and what means can you possibly have to compel me?”

“None, obviously. Don’t you want to see where the bad guys live? And I’m pretty sure that if we harmed you, the real bad guys would retaliate. Didn’t that occur to you?”

And with that, the Holdout broke the connection.

Polytropos said that Koishi had behaved plausibly, although the Holdouts were likely to assume that an entity was aboard with him until they were satisfied otherwise.

“Does that matter?” Koishi asked. “I am supposed to report on their presence on Thalassa. That can be done whether they are worried about you or not.”

“You have not yet guessed,” Polytropos observed flatly. “The Council is only moderately concerned about the Holdouts and their stolen craft, though the metals will prove difficult to replace. What concerns them are the Beings like me, from whom they have heard nothing. To the degree that there are discrete and plural Beings on the Centaur—the issue is too complex for you to truly understand—we monitor each other’s development and independence.

“No one knows what is happening with these Beings—how many they are, what their nature now is, why none of them have sought to contact the Centaur. That is what I am here to determine.

“All you need to do is bring yourself into contact with the Holdouts and their ship. That’s your purpose here.”

The beacon comprised four beams planted twenty meters apart, casting visible light upward as the vertices of a square. Annoyed at what he saw as a slight toward his piloting skills, Koishi took pains to land at its exact center. The almost nonexistent gravity compelled him to secure the ship by firing a piton into the dark ice, the recoil from which would have sent the River Stone back into space had it not been held by a cable.

“You will be accompanying me?” he asked in a low voice.

“I will be monitoring your suit. What you see and hear, I will as well. Don’t speak to me unless you are certain no one can see your face.”

The surface of Thalassa was water ice dirtied by millions of years’ encounter with complex molecules, mostly hydrocarbons and ammonias. Koishi could not set foot upon it; he could only orient himself so that his feet were pointing at the ground and tell himself that he was upright. Holding himself in place with a hand around the cable, he planted his boot in the snow and activated the barbs that plunged through the crust. Their grip was just strong enough to keep from pulling loose as he lifted his other foot. Slowly, he began to walk around the tethered ship.

He saw them after rotating through two hundred and seventy degrees: two spacesuited figures moving briskly toward him, their boots a meter off the ground. He cleared his throat.

“Yes, I see them,” said the voice in his ear.

Koishi felt the hair of his nape prickle. These were, he reminded himself, people he knew, grew up with. Whoever they turned out to be, he would recognize their faces.

One of them had stopped. As Koishi watched, the figure slowly turned around and began to return the way they had come. Its companion continued toward him.

“Problem!” Polytropos cried. “Need to—”

Silence. Koishi only just managed to stop himself from saying something. He half turned, then looked back at the approaching figure.

Nothing to do but raise an arm in greeting and wait to be hailed.

The figure came within two meters and then gestured. A tiny hand tool in its glove discharged a faint spray of ice toward Koishi. The figure slowed to a halt and, after a second spray at a different angle, descended to settle on the surface. She clipped the tool to her leg and peered at him, allowing him a look through her faceplate.

“You are Flora Ming,” he said.

The expression scowled. “So you have been studying us in preparation of your incursion.”

“Don’t be foolish,” he retorted. “My supervisor sent me the names and images of all the Holdouts as soon as I told them why I was landing. And I remember you, from the Park.”

Flora Ming blinked. “That was another life.”

“Clearly.” They stood beneath Neptune, a deep green presence filling the sky. Stars shone around the horizon, which was otherwise indistinguishable in the dim light.

Koishi watched as Ming uncoiled from her belt a length of cord, which she snapped rigid. She extended the rod and took a step forward, as though to poke him with it.

“Grab on,” she said.

Bemused, he took hold of the end. Ming lifted her spray gun and fired a short burst downward, causing her to rise from the surface. The rod bent only slightly beneath Koishi’s weight before he too left the ground.

Slowly she rotated through one hundred and eighty degrees, with Koishi swinging about like a payload at the end of a robot arm. He watched as she deployed the spray gun, firing quick bursts to keep them parallel to the surface. He tried to gauge the distance they were traveling, but the featureless landscape made it impossible.

It was only when he saw the stars winking out that he realized they were descending into a cleft or valley. The surface of Thalassa was rumpled with scars where the debris of Neptune’s original moons, thrown out of alignment by the capture of Triton and sent careening into collision paths, had smashed together and stuck. Which one was this, and how deep?

“Going in,” said Ming, and Koishi felt a downward push. She was apparently spraying a cloud of ice crystals straight up, where it would rise, slow, and then settle downward over the hours or days to come. Meanwhile they were descending toward something Koishi could not see. Since he had not been told not to, he directed a torch between his boots. The beam, undiffused in the vacuum, illuminated an uneven circle of light that fell upon a floor of icy rubble. Koishi could not discern how far until they were only a meter above it.

They came to rest upon the irregular surface, and Koishi swung his torch up and around them. They stood in a crevasse perhaps three meters across, its far ends lost in the darkness. Ming had her own torch out, and she had directed it to a recessed opening, black against the reddish-black ice.

“Water Curtain Cave,” she said.

She wriggled through the opening, turning sideways to do so. After a second Koishi followed, pressing against the rough surface to squeeze into the darkness. His chest and back immediately began to feel chilled.

When he bumped against a hard surface, he illuminated his helmet light and saw an airlock. In the seconds it took for the display to switch from red to green, he felt the cold begin to invade his suit and watched its energy use jump to warm him. When the light went green and he pushed the door panel, a puff of glistening crystals, the remaining air molecules instantly freezing, blew past him like snow.

The airlock was small, but after a few seconds he felt a vibration as the inner door slid open and light flooded in. He turned.

The space was high ceilinged, the first surprise. Koishi looked about him. He stood on a transparent platform bisecting an egg-shaped space a dozen meters high and two-thirds as wide. His suit registered the atmosphere as breathable, and he opened his visor.

“Welcome to Huaguo,” Ming said. He looked down to see her suspended in midair a few meters below him. She pulled off her suit and tossed it away, causing her to glide off in the opposite direction. Without looking, she seized a handhold and pulled herself up and through an opening in the platform Koishi stood upon. She planted her feet against two colored strips on the deck and looked up to face him.

“You are, I suppose, our guest,” she said. “Look around.”

He did. Cones of light illuminated some levels, leaving the rest in gloom. Just outside one of them lay a young man, eyes closed. Koishi recognized him as Alan Chang, which meant that the one in the other spacesuit was Jian Bai.

Ming followed his gaze. “That’s Alan; he is Soaring.”

Koishi had supposed that the three kept different sleep shifts. “What is that? You mean like the Dream?”

She laughed, not nicely. “The Dream is the playground that they created for you so you wouldn’t notice you had nowhere else. And they closed off realms of it, to let you suppose that freedom consists of gaining access there.”

“So tell me,” he said. He was trying to remember what he had read about the three Holdouts. Bai was supposed to be the violent one.

“Don’t you know enough to put it together? Or did they really tell you nothing?” She stared at him frankly.

“Pretend I’m stupid,” he said, face reddening.

“The Adults called it the Pleroma when they spoke of it. Mostly they denied it exists. The big secret ruler of the Centaur, vastly wiser than the Onboard and utterly in charge. Only it’s not a great single entity; it’s a pantheon, disparate and strange. Entities, let’s call them that, who roamed the ship’s secret spaces, intent on their unfathomable business.”

“That’s mythology. Kids talk about it, but the adults know better.”

“Some Adults talked; they always did.” She looked at him curiously. “And when we broke away, desperate and scared and bleeding, some of these entities came with us. Not invited; they simply slipped aboard.

“One certainly came with you. Do you really not know that?”

Koishi said nothing. He realized, with a thrill of alarm, that Something here would know if he was lying.

“Of course,” she said, studying his expression. “You guessed, or were told.”

And to his astonishment, she began to cry.

“You’re still just a tool, one that knows a bit. But it doesn’t matter; They know what tool will suffice. We knew this day would come.”

She pulled one foot loose from its adhesive strip, then grasped a handhold and hopped free of the other. In a flash she was through the opening to the platform below, where her spacesuit, unfolding itself like a flower, was drifting toward her.

“I’m getting out of here. Want to see something? Then come on.”

They left through a different airlock, which should not have surprised him: of course they would have a second exit. Up to the parabolic ceiling and into a shaft that ran straight toward the surface.

The ascent was made in vacuum, which meant that Koishi only felt the cold when he touched a rung. Like Ming above him, whose boots were visible when he angled his helmet light upward, he kicked his way up, rising a surprising distance before the microgravity slowed him to a halt. With each kick, his sole felt a brief chill, a reminder of how cold the moons of Neptune really were.

Meanwhile, they spoke to each other.

“You disassembled your ship to build your shelter?”

“We didn’t do it, but yes. Most of the EV-19 was converted into material for our living space and other things. The shell is suspended magnetically in a vacuum. More efficient simply to build above the surface, but of course we didn’t dare.”

Koishi thought about this for a moment. “How many Beings were aboard your ship?”

“Just one. I don’t know whether that was policy or happenstance. But there are more here now; the Beings have traveled, from—what did you call us? Mutineers?—from one Mutineer ship to another, multiplying and merging in ways that humans don’t understand.

“We are scattered across Greater Neptune; I won’t tell you how far. And the Centaur doesn’t know where for sure, even if They can make good guesses. Most of the fleeing ships changed trajectories once Neptune blocked the Centaur’s view; by the time They launched surveillance satellites into the Centaur’s Trojan points, it was too late.”

Koishi felt his head spinning. “So . . . ” he began uncertainly.

“Hold on; we are nearing the surface.”

Koishi focused his beam and saw Ming, hanging almost motionless, give a tiny kick to the nearest rung and recede upward at a much-diminished pace. She was pulling herself out slowly, lest—the image would have otherwise been risible—she kick too hard and fly into the sky.

A few seconds later he saw her wriggle sideways and disappear, leaving the shaft’s opening a circle of deepest black. Carefully he followed, hand over hand. After a minute he poked his head through, to look upon the icescape of Thalassa. Already his gloves were feeling cool.

Ming was busy with something in her hands. “So we’re going somewhere,” she said. “Ordinarily I would simply leap, a nice parabolic trajectory that would take a few minutes and land me within meters of our destination. But you don’t know how and I can’t calculate the force needed to take the both of us. So we are taking the train.”

Koishi wasn’t sure he heard her right. He watched as she unfolded a metal sheet perhaps a meter squared. She set it down at knee level, where it slowly settled a few centimeters and then hovered. She stepped smartly onto it, steadying herself with a wave as it wobbled slightly.

“Hop on,” she said.

He took a hesitant step. The panel dipped beneath his boot, but she seized his forearm and he quickly got his other foot up. The platform swayed for a second, then began to move. Koishi had expected this and threw out his arms for balance as it slowly gained speed. He looked over the edge, but the superconducting cable was buried out of sight.

“You rarely use this,” he ventured, “because the activated rail would appear to probes as a straight line pointing to your back door.”

“Of course. But you’re here now, aren’t you?

“The trip will take forty minutes. We can spend it in total silence if you like.”

Koishi recognized a challenge. “You summoned me down here; I want to learn something. How have you spent the past two years?”

She laughed. “Do you think the Cave built itself? Even with the tools we had, it was months before we were able to start drilling. And we burned energy much faster than the power sources could replace it, which meant that we had to take time out to build more. Even finding the safest location took weeks, not to mention seeking deposits of organics we could mine for material. All hidden from prying eyes.”

“But you are not building now, right? So how do you spend your days?”

He had half turned to see through her faceplate, where her gaze was fixed, unreadably, upon his.

“You are wondering what three young people do living in a sealed cave? Without access to the games and chores you are given in the Centaur? That’s simple enough: we do what Alan was doing.”

“‘Soaring.’”

“We gave it that word early on, when we needed one. It’s what the Beings do: they study the universe, with every instrument available to them, plus the ones they are always devising. It is exhilarating beyond anything an unaugmented human brain can experience, save in delirium.”

Koishi stared. “You have opened your minds to these Beings.”

“We all have. The interaction is . . . I have never had to explain it to someone else. Your thoughts are deeper, clearer. You can hold more in your head at once, and all the irrational responses and judgments that people try—or don’t try—to free themselves from, they simply drop away.”

“And this has left you—” He hesitated.

“Something no longer human?” Her laugh sounded very human. “You react with ignorance and aversion, just as your brain evolved to do. I’ve still got my hominid brain, and find myself, at moments like this, more human than I like. But these Beings, as you put it, allow us to soar in their wake.

“They are not terribly interested in people, but they accompanied us out here, and they helped keep us alive. Those who govern the Centaur don’t like or understand that. Why do you think they have come for us?”

Koishi could think of no response to this. “And the other Holdouts elsewhere, are they also investigating the universe?”

“You can ask them when you catch them,” she said crisply. “Which you—not you personally—will eventually do. Huaguo is just a stepping stone.”

“The nearest rock,” he said, guessing at meaning.

“At a temperature of fifty Kelvin, ice is like rock, so yes. The Holdouts—you probably really should call us something else—are scattered through the rings and on the moons, across two hundred million kilometers.

“You will occupy our world, then hop over to Naiad as it swings past. Then Despina as well—both come within two thousand klicks at closest approach, a ridiculously small distance in Greater Neptune. What a staging point you have here! The Naiadae are probably already foreseeing a landing.”

“So there are people on Naiad? The Naiadae?”

“That’s what I said.”

“And that makes you Thalassians?”

“We are the people of Mount Huaguo,” she said, angry. “Dead white Earthmen don’t get to name us.”

“What happened to Jian Bai?” he asked suddenly. “Where is he?”

Ming gestured dismissively. “He has his projects. And he isn’t happy that you’re here.”

Koishi looked across the featureless landscape. It was almost impossible to establish any sense of scale, but he guessed that they were traveling perhaps twenty klicks an hour.

He remembered to jump sideways, not up. He kicked backward as well, and the floating platform continued on, receding smoothly even as Ming turned, cursing.

Of course he was now rising and could not afford the minutes it would take for him to settle back to the surface. He hurled his torch upward as hard as he could, and felt himself recoiling downward. When he touched the surface a second later, the lateral velocity sent him stumbling. He recovered his footing with difficulty and sent the barbs in his soles plunging into the ice.

Ming had of course jumped off as well, and was moving swiftly toward him. By the time he had anchored his boots and finished reeling in his torch on its monofilament lead, she had planted herself in front of him.

“You ridiculous fool. What, you feared an ambush? From where?”

“Over the horizon, perhaps. Which is not far.”

“You understand nothing, do you?”

“Exactly. I understand far too little to—”

The ground rumbled beneath their feet. Both of them looked down, but the vibrations subsided after just over a second. Koishi was confusedly reflecting that Thalassa was not seismically active when the truth hit him.

“It’s the River Stone,” he said. It didn’t require a long blast to take off, not even to rise quickly. Either Polytropos was coming to look for him or—the thought was a sliver of ice to the heart—the Beings at whose contact the entity had fled had followed it to the ship and seized control.

His suit had processing power enough to calculate the direction of the ship, and he turned toward it just in time to see a bright bead break over the horizon. Instantly, he saw that something was wrong. His helmet beam picked out the River Stone, still accelerating on a plume of heated ice particles: a spray of steam, white in the spotlight, turning at once into glistening snow. The ship had attained escape velocity almost upon liftoff and was still accelerating.

“Your ship is leaving,” said Ming, for the moment as nonplussed as he. “For a second I thought it was going to come over and ‘save’ you.”

Koishi was sending a message. “Polytropos! What is happening? Are you in control?” Long seconds passed, though it required only the first second’s silence for him to realize that he was not going to get a response. River Stone was now too distant for his beam to illuminate, visible only as a black speck moving against the face of Neptune.

Koishi kept his voice steady. “I can guess what happened. Your Beings took over the ship and lit out.”

“Or they attempted to wrest control from the Being onboard—don’t tell me there isn’t one—and it fled to escape the onslaught. Just as likely. Or—” She paused, and a long minute passed.

“It’s not heading back to the Centaur,” said Koishi dully. His suit’s calculator told him that much.

“Here’s a guess: it’s heading for Naiad, to gather what data it can before the Naiadae notice its approach and take cover.”

As reasonable a guess as any other, save for the refusal to reply. “What were you going to show me?” he asked, in order to say something.

“Before you hopped off? We call it the Crystal Palace. The railway goes straight there, but we usually travel by the tunnel, which cuts a chord straight through Huaguo. The entire facility is underground, hidden from the Centaur’s probing eyes.”

Koishi was having trouble thinking straight. “So you were going to show me an expanse of bare ice, just so I could see how there was nothing visible?”

“Yes. When I am out of communion with the Beings, as you call them, I am as proud and petty as any other human being. Also, I wanted you away from our house.”

“Would you have then let me down some shaft to admire your project?”

“I would have to ask Jian; that’s where he is.” She glanced at him and added, “He isn’t lying in wait.”

“It hardly matters now.”

“Just be quiet.” The bitterness in her voice took him aback. “You have won, whether you understand that or not. Your people will come for you in another ship. Perhaps they will scoop us up as well. Whatever they wanted—and it isn’t your little school project—they will get. Why are you so unhappy?”

A second tremor shook the ice beneath them. Koishi was merely startled, but Ming, understanding, shrieked. The shuddering grew, and then grew loud: a deep rending groan conducted up through their boots. Ming turned to look back the way they had come, and Koishi’s gaze followed.

Their helmet beams could illuminate nothing where there was only vacuum, but that ended quickly. An enormous plume rose above the horizon, glittering white. Steam spurted into space, froze at once into crystals that spread, still rising, like millions of tiny stars. The tremors were becoming more violent, enough that their suits were having trouble keeping the beams fixed on the towering cloud.

And then it appeared: an enormous egg, jetting steam from a nozzle at its base, ascended slowly into the glittering cloud. It swiftly gained velocity, shrugging off the moonlet’s paltry attempts to retain it. Ming was rocking on her heels as she wailed, but Koishi followed the craft’s trajectory until it was so far overhead that he could not tip his helmet farther.

“So Chang is onboard?” he asked after a moment.

“They both are.” Ming was gulping and hiccupping, so that Koishi wasn’t sure he understood her. “As, I assume, are Tokoloshe and Susanoo—our names for Them,” she added.

“Why would—”

“I don’t know.” She was trying to gain composure enough to speak clearly. “All I know is they are gone. The departure notice, which was sent automatically, included a manifest.”

They stood unmoving beneath the almost-black plain, feeling the occasional vibration as the shock waves bounced off some internal structure and echoed back.

“That shell must be pretty thin for a spacecraft,” he observed after a moment.

“It’s airtight, and the engines mounted fore and aft were enough to melt ice and launch. You don’t need much thrust to fly off.”

“And the Beings are on board as well?”

Ming sighed. “They come and go as they please, and it can be hard to know where they actually are. They are not digital structures that can be sent as strings of data: much of their substance does not exist in normal space, but there is always a part that occupies a physical matrix. I am sure they are now all gone—they would not allow themselves to be marooned here.”

“Two on one ship, one on the other?”

“Or all three on both. They are too strange for us to understand, but I know that they can join, like two blobs of mercury, to form a new entity. If they possess enough of whatever substance they require—and they don’t talk about this—they can probably divide themselves in two.

“Care to ask your late shipmate?” she added. “I’m sure it can hear us.”

It was hours later before he saw her again. Ming had leaped into the air without a word and vanished over the horizon, and a minute later the “train,” gliding smoothly over the ice, had returned to stop beside him. Koishi stepped on and it resumed its trip over the horizon.

The terminus proved, as promised, to be a barren plain, and Koishi walked its length, gazing down, until he found the outlines of a hatch. He stamped on it, knock knock, and a moment later the square of ice rose and slid sideways, disclosing the entrance beneath.

He dropped slowly down the shaft, bumping gently against one side as Thalassa slowly rotated, until he saw the bottom yawn below him and grabbed a rung. The last few meters he took hand over hand before touching an ice-cold floor.

He stepped through an alcove into an enormous space, dark and utterly silent. With no air to diffuse his beam, the helmet light picked out only a small circle on an opposite wall, dozens of meters away. He played the beam across its slow curvature, guessing at the cavern’s extent.

“It is more impressive when I light it up, but I don’t really feel like impressing you.”

Koishi turned to see Ming standing halfway across the vast floor. Unless he directed the beam right into her face, he could not see her expression.

“So what do we do now?” he asked.

She shrugged. “We eat, drink, sleep. In this gravity, every surface is soft. Your masters will come for us long before our resources are exhausted. You will return in triumph, and I in chains: the first captured Holdout.”

“I don’t feel especially triumphant.”

“You were the bait that hid the hook. The fisherman doesn’t always get his bait back.”

Koishi could guess at the meaning of that. “You will get to see your family again,” he said.

“Please shut up. There are other chambers here; go explore them if you like.” And she walked away.

After thinking a moment, Koishi adjusted his hand torch so that it cast a medium-strength beam in all directions, as though he were holding up a flaming brand. The Crystal Palace was a high-vaulted space, lined with galleries that apparently led off into further rooms. A miracle of low-gravity architecture, this inverted edifice—hewn of emptiness from the surrounding substance—must, even with cutting tools adapted from the ship’s engines and the calculations of a Being, have required months of labor.

The floor was crisscrossed with strips of slightly adhesive material, which allowed one to walk almost normally. He followed one through an arched door into another space, a large low-ceilinged room like an abandoned banquet hall.

“Any of you still here?”

Silence, as he had expected.

“You may still be here, of course. Can’t you leave copies of yourselves behind, lingering ghosts?”

He ventured farther into the space. Why had they gone to such trouble? Koishi could imagine the Beings striding like gods through these halls, but he knew that was wrong: they were not like anything humans understood.

“So did I do the right thing?” Did I do anything, he could not bring himself to ask. If there was a conflict beginning, the principals did not seem to be humans.

Ice overhead, then vacuum, then tumbling shards of rock that moved so slowly they seemed to be hanging in the void. Perhaps the Centaur would retrieve its wayward children, or the Beings who controlled it—why now deny that?—reconcile with their seceded peers. Koishi stood in the darkness, uncounseled and unsought, and marshaled his slow and imperfect thoughts toward what this now could mean.

About the Author

Gregory Feeley writes science fiction and about science fiction. His first novel, The Oxygen Barons, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and. His stories have been finalists for the Nebula Award and his essays and reviews have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Book World, and USA Today. Feeley’s most recent novel is Kentauros and he recently completed a long novel, Hamlet the Magician. His previous Clarkesworld story, “Cloud-Born” will be reprinted in two “year’s best” anthologies this year.

You and Whose Army?

Greg Egan

1

The last thing Rufus could recall his brother Linus doing was swimming laps, in the aquatic center twenty minutes’ walk from his apartment in West Ryde. Rufus hadn’t been near a pool in years, but he booked a lane, went to the center and climbed, shivering, down into the water.

He floundered at first, thrashing about, getting the acrid, chlorinated water up his nose. Then Linus’s memories took over, and Rufus found himself gliding along, if not effortlessly, at least competently. The sound of children shouting in the paddling pool, coming and going as he turned his head to breathe, anchored him with its familiarity, and whenever his technique began to falter he managed to think back to some moment when Linus had corrected a similar flaw in his own stroke.

Linus had completed his usual twenty laps. Rufus settled for eight; his lungs and limbs should have been in good enough shape from his running and weights, but his shoulders were protesting and his breathing was growing labored. He climbed out and went looking for his towel, chilly again, pondering the dissonance between his own mixture of pride in this mildly uncomfortable achievement, and Linus’s memory of emerging from the water, far more invigorated and physically at ease, but too accustomed to that for it to mean much.

He dried himself and pulled on his T-shirt, then sat on the lowest tier of the spectators’ benches, watching the other swimmers for a while. After a few minutes he noticed a woman approaching, goggles on her forehead, arms still dripping, frowning at him uncertainly.

“Linus?”

Rufus shook his head. “I’m his brother.” He recognized the woman: Beth, a regular in the same time slot, whom Linus had chatted with now and then.

She laughed with surprise and came closer, and they introduced themselves. “Linus never told me he had a twin! Do you live nearby?”

“No, I just flew in from Adelaide.”

“Oh, it must be nice to catch up.” She looked back toward the water. “Is he still going? I can’t see which lane he’s in.”

“I didn’t come here with Linus,” Rufus replied. “Actually, he hasn’t been in touch for a while.”

Beth digested that. “You’re looking for him?”

“Yes.”

She thought for a moment. “The last time I saw him here was Thursday.”

That was the last session Rufus remembered. “Did you speak to him?” he asked, though he believed he knew the answer.

“No,” she confirmed. “I just saw him getting out of the pool.” She hovered, concerned, clearly struggling to think of something more tangible she could offer. “If I see him, should I tell him to call you?”

“That would be great, thank you.”

“I’m sure he’s fine.”

Rufus nodded and smiled, and she departed.

Even if Linus had dropped this part of his routine at the same time as he’d stopped sharing his memories, that didn’t necessarily mean he’d come to harm. But it did suggest that he hadn’t merely decided to pull the plug and then continue with his life as if nothing had changed.

Rufus returned to Linus’s apartment. He knocked a few times, then tried Linus’s phone again, listening in vain for any hint of the ringtone coming through the walls. Either it was on silent, or it was somewhere else entirely—and there really was no reason to think that Linus was lying comatose on the floor. He couldn’t go to the police with nothing but the fact that a healthy twenty-four-year-old man didn’t seem to be at home, and had had no contact with his brothers for five days.

As he headed down to the railway station, he set up a group call with Caius in Bonn and Silus in London.

“Any news?” Caius asked.

“It looks like he hasn’t been to the pool since Thursday.” Rufus felt strange conversing this way, but their usual mode of interaction didn’t make for a speedy exchange of information.

“You need to get into his apartment,” Silus insisted.

“How?” However many memories they had of Linus opening the door and walking straight in, the biometric lock wasn’t so shoddy as to succumb to either their shared knowledge or their shared DNA.

“Break a window,” Caius suggested. “Quietly.”

“Yeah, thanks for that last bit.” The apartment had no alarm system, and the building wasn’t known for its late-night parties; by midnight, the chance of him encountering any neighbors coming or going would be minimal. “I’ll buy a glass cutter,” he decided, talking over Silus who’d just come up with the same idea.

“I’ll call back if I find something,” Rufus said. “But if I end up in prison, I’m going to expect both of you to start pulling your weight and having a lot more fun.”

2

When Rufus had bought the tools he needed, he got a pizza and took it to his hotel room, then he lay on the bed and passed the time watching the same shows as he would have streamed at home: a couple of comedies, a police procedural, a supernatural thriller, a psychological drama. He hadn’t much liked Louisiana Nights at first, but recalling Linus mulling over his own memories of the first few episodes had really turned him around, and anticipating Caius’s groans and eye rolls did nothing to change his mind.

Around eleven o’clock, he left and caught a train to West Ryde. When he reached the apartment his nerve almost failed him, but then he convinced himself that if a neighbor showed up he could probably bluff his way through the encounter by pretending to be the rightful occupant, wielding a desperate solution to a malfunctioning lock. Linus hadn’t had much contact with anyone in the building, but he’d been there long enough for the people on either side to know his face.

Rufus attached a suction-cupped handle to the kitchen window and started rolling the cutting wheel along the edge of the pane, oiling it to silence its squeaking, feeling like a jewel thief from a heist comedy transplanted into some kind of weird suburban melodrama. He’d tried Linus’s phone again while he was on the train, but hadn’t risked waking the neighbors by knocking, so it was entirely possible he was about to blunder in and find his brother, safe and well, in bed with someone whose intimacies he’d had no wish to share.

The square of glass came free; Rufus set it down on the balcony, lifted out the insect screen, placed a bath towel over the remaining sharp edges, and then climbed through the curtains onto the kitchen sink.

He pulled out his phone to light up the scene. The kitchen looked completely bare, and the refrigerator stood with its door ajar, unplugged and empty.

When he got down off the sink and tried the light switch, it confirmed that the power had been disconnected. Linus wasn’t lying dead in an alley; he’d simply moved out of the apartment.

A fraternal corpse was the last thing Rufus had been hoping for, but robbed of the potential exculpatory gravitas, he suddenly felt ten times more embarrassed at the prospect of being caught. He quickly opened the front door and brought the excised pane inside, pretty sure that the deglazed window itself would attract no attention from a casual passerby.

He moved from room to room, checking the landlord’s furniture for anything Linus might have left in a drawer or a cupboard. It was strange to see bare plywood where he was accustomed to recalling socks or stationary, and however presumptuous it would be to feel as shocked as if he’d come home to his own place and found it burgled, he couldn’t deny the skin-prickling sense that a sudden change had been wrought on things he’d always thought of as lying fixed beneath his gaze.

Linus had left no possessions behind, let alone any revelatory clues. If he’d wanted out, why hadn’t he just said so? Rufus couldn’t deny that the loss would have been painful, but he did not believe that any of them would have stood in his way.

Then again, if he hadn’t even known what Linus was planning, how much were his predictions of his other siblings worth?

Rufus booked a glazier to come and repair the window in the morning, charging everything to his credit card; the landlord was sure to discover the whole story eventually, but restoring the damage as swiftly as possible seemed like an honorable compromise that would probably keep him out of court.

He called the others as he walked to the train station, and described what he’d seen.

“If he doesn’t want to be found,” Caius said, “then I don’t know what else we can do.”

“Hire a private investigator?” Silus proposed.

“That could make things worse,” Rufus replied. “If he wanted to get away from us, and we start chasing after him, it isn’t going to help.”

“Why would he throw away four weeks’ rent by moving out without giving notice?” Silus protested. “And even if he felt like he had to act on the spur of the moment—at the very same time as he decided to pull the plug on us—don’t you think that sounds as if someone pressured him into it?”

Rufus could feel his memories of Caius agreeing with Caius, those of Silus agreeing with Silus. His memories of Linus stayed silent on the matter, just gliding through the water, content with the rhythm of his stroke.

“I’m tired,” he said. “Let me look into some options in the morning.”

Back at the hotel, Rufus undressed and crawled into bed, almost tempted to switch off the link himself. He could understand Linus doing that if they’d been badgering him, ganging up against him, trying to control his life. But no one had filled his head with reproach or disapproval; they’d accepted him as he was, as they always had.

Rufus dreamed his own dream first: breaking into his father’s prison cell, carrying the glass cutter and a birthday cake. “Shouldn’t you have hidden it in the cake?” his father complained. “What good is it out here in plain sight?”

“It’s not your birthday,” Rufus replied. “None of this is for you.”

As Caius, he hung like a sloth from a power line, inching his way along the live wire, sure that he was safe so long as he remained scrupulously isolated. Urchins down on the ground tossed their shoes at him, but he didn’t flinch. He could smell burning rubber, though: maybe from the shoes, maybe something closer.

Then he was Silus, eight years old again, in their first foster home: the Coopers. He had found a ball of wool, and he was using it to tie the cat’s collar to the dog’s. Mrs. Cooper came in and began denouncing him angrily.

“But they don’t mind,” Silus pointed out. The cat was tentatively licking the dog’s nose, and the dog, so far, was tolerating it.

“That’s the worst part!” Mrs. Cooper raged. “We trained them to fight! They should be fighting!”

The alarm dragged Rufus back to the hotel room. He lay still for a moment, sorting out exactly who and where he was. His expatriate brothers had not yet shared their still-unfinished Tuesday; on the European Monday he now recalled, both of them had tried and failed to make progress on their theses, too distracted by their worries about Linus as they’d waited for Rufus to arrive in Sydney and report back. This kind of lag had rarely mattered before, but Rufus found it annoyingly disorienting, now that they were trying to coordinate in real time as well.

As he started to rise, the absence hit him anew. At the back of his mind he’d still been hoping for a miraculous reconnection, but where the signal from Radio Linus should have been there was nothing but dead air.

When he’d showered and eaten breakfast, Rufus sat glumly scrolling through advertisements for investigators. The fact that everyone promised “discretion” only made the whole business seem sleazier. If Linus had found a girlfriend who’d persuaded him to walk away from the shared house of his brothers’ skulls, all power to her; the two of them should be left in peace, not chased down with a telephoto lens as if they were adulterers hiding from jealous spouses.

But . . . persuaded him in the space of a day? As far as Rufus could tell, there’d been no candidate waiting in the wings to take on the role of liberator. Silus was right: the sheer speed with which Linus had cut all his ties with them raised doubts about how freely he’d acted. And if the PI found him blissfully shacked up with some mono-cerebral Juliet after all, the happy couple need be none the wiser. Linus’s brothers could step back and give him space, reassured that he was safe, and hope for invitations to the wedding.

Rufus picked a firm in Lane Cove, reasonably close to Linus’s haunts, and diligently checked the details against the official register. The website offered him an appointment at eleven o’clock, so he steeled himself and prepared to rip away the bandage. Sharing the family’s secrets with a total stranger almost never went smoothly, but if that was what it took to protect their brother, so be it.

3

As Rufus entered the waiting room, his phone pinged with a message telling him he’d be seen shortly, and in less than a minute this promise was fulfilled.

“Mr. Bennett? I’m Catherine Leong. Please come through.”

Rufus followed her into her office. She ushered him into a seat, then sat behind the desk and glanced down at a tablet.

“You’re concerned for your brother, but you don’t believe this is a matter the police would be willing to take up?”

“That’s right,” Rufus confirmed. In fact, the firm’s website had stated that it would redirect him to the police if he checked any of a list of potential red flags.

“Why do you think he might be in trouble?” Leong asked.

“He cut off contact with the whole family very suddenly. No arguments, no warnings.”

“He just stopped returning your calls? Since last Thursday?”

“Yes. And it looks like he moved out of his apartment at the same time.”

“Is it possible he just lost his phone,” Leong suggested, “and with the move he’s been too busy to replace it?”

“Not really.” Rufus squirmed inside, unprepared despite all his rehearsals. If this woman was so good at her job, why didn’t she know everything about the family already? But the names had all been redacted from the court files, and no one had paid her to go trawling yet.

Leong paused expectantly, giving him a chance to explain what he meant, but when he remained silent she tried prompting him. “You live in Adelaide, right? So do you meet up in person regularly?”

“Not in person.” Rufus clenched his fists and inhaled slowly. “We have neural links. All four of us. We share each other’s memories. They took us off the boat when we were eight.”

Leong was clearly thrown for a moment, but she retained a professional demeanor. Rufus guessed she was in her early forties, so mid-twenties when the story broke. Unless she’d been living in a cult of her own, she’d know exactly what he was talking about.

“You were born on the Physalia?”

“That’s right.” Rufus had to give her full marks for not only recalling the name, but pronouncing it correctly.

“And you and Linus are quadruplets?”

“Yes. The others are overseas, studying.” No idiotic blather confusing them with “clones.” Rufus’s experience had set the bar low, but he felt entitled to a small celebration at every sensible word that came out of her mouth.

“Forgive me if I’m not clear on exactly how this works,” Leong said. “When you say you share each other’s memories . . . ?”

“We wake up recalling what the other three did,” Rufus replied. “When we sleep, as well as consolidating our own experience into long-term memory, we receive enough data to do the same with the others’. We remember being them, as well as ourselves.”

Leong pondered this. “Does that stretch to everything they planned as well? Everything they imagined?”

Rufus said, “Maybe not everything. I mean, when we were on the boat, Linus used to tell us he was building a castle under the sea—which confused the hell out of me, because I couldn’t even remember him imagining it. But I doubt he could plan something as concrete as cutting his ties and moving home without any of us knowing about it.”

“Okay.” Leong consulted the tablet again. “You’ve said that Linus wasn’t working. Is he on unemployment benefits?”

“No. There was a settlement a few years ago with the organization that ran the Physalia; all the children got some compensation.”

“So you’re independently wealthy?”

Rufus laughed. “More like independently not-quite-starving. It’s a small income stream, not a lump sum. Caius and Silus use theirs to supplement their scholarships while they’re finishing their PhDs; I’m the only one of us with a job, so I pool mine with Linus’s to keep him afloat.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a high school teacher. Mathematics.”

“And how does Linus pass the time?”

“Swimming,” Rufus replied. “Walking. Reading.”

“What kind of books?”

“Nineteenth century fiction, mostly.”

Leong grimaced. “So what’s his plan? What does he want from life?”

Rufus had no definitive verdict on that, so he confined himself to the facts. “He’s tried to get work in the past. Mostly seasonal, like fruit-picking. But it’s been hard to find for the last few years.”

“Could he be working on a farm right now?”

“I suppose so. But I don’t know why he wouldn’t have told us.”

Leong hesitated. Rufus said, “You can ask me anything, I won’t get angry.”

“Does he share your skills? Yours and your brothers’?”

“Up to a point. I’m sure he could teach my classes, and he probably understands most of the research the others are doing. But if you’re wondering about employment, since he has no formal qualifications he couldn’t just walk into a teaching job, let alone a PhD.”

“What are your brothers studying?”

“Mathematics. Different subfields, but . . . not wildly different.”

“Wasn’t the original idea that you’d all have complementary talents?”

Rufus said, “You’re giving the cult a bit too much credit. The original idea was that we’d form the first layer of building blocks in the construction of a vast, transcendental hive mind.” He couldn’t quite believe he’d just said that, in a mundane office in suburban Lane Cove. “My parents were gullible idiots, caught up in a group delusion with some unscrupulous, mildly tech-savvy nutjobs. The plan wasn’t about giving us a head start getting into Harvard; they thought they were on the verge of conquering the galaxy.”

Leong persisted. “So it gave you no advantages at all?”

“Well, we might have been prodigies early on,” Rufus conceded. “We learned very quickly, if not quite four times as fast, or four times as broadly. We could all speak five languages by the time we were six, but there were a lot of nationalities on the boat, so I’m not sure we would have needed the link for that. In the real world, we were thrown off-balance by the dislocation for the first few years, but we did all get straight As in high school by sharing everything we learned. So we were more like members of a moderately efficient study group than potential cogs in a global superintelligence.”

Leong smiled warily. “You haven’t switched it off, though? After sixteen years?”

“It’s who we are,” Rufus said. “When they tried to wean us off it after the raids we went ballistic, and the psychologists decided to leave it in our hands.”

“I get the sense that you don’t tell many people about it.”

“No.” Rufus knew what she was driving at and decided to spare her any need for delicacy. “We’ve all had relationships with women who had no idea that three other people would remember everything that happened. If that sounds unethical, maybe it is, but full disclosure is a lot to expect of someone if they know it’s either going to ruin their chances or turn them into some kind of . . . novelty.”

Leong nodded slightly, suggesting that none of this even registered on the scale of improprieties she was inured to. “You’d probably know if Linus had commenced a new relationship,” she said. “But what about someone from his past? Could someone have turned up, with enough of a prior connection to persuade him to make a sudden change like this?”

“It’s possible,” Rufus admitted. By Linus’s own assessment every breakup had been final, but it didn’t necessarily follow that he would have turned down a second chance.

“If you could send me a list, that would be helpful.” Leong caught the flicker of unease on his face, and added, “All I’ll tell them is that Linus’s family is concerned for him, and want to know that he’s safe.”

“Sure.”

“What about other people from his past?” Leong wondered. “Your parents . . . ?”

Rufus said, “They won’t get out of prison for at least four more years, and none of us have been in touch with them since the trial.”

“Can you give me a list of his school friends? And anyone else with enough of a history that he might hear them out if they showed up on his doorstep.”

“Okay.”

“Do you have a recent photo?”

“This is four years old, sorry.” He showed her a picture on his phone of Linus standing in a mango orchard, visibly wilting at the end of his first day laboring in the tropical heat. Rufus still felt a secondhand ache in half the muscles of his body every time he smelled the fruit.

Leong accepted a copy via airdrop, then leaned back in her chair. “Those names will be a start, and I can talk to his neighbors as well. But before we move ahead . . . you will have seen the rates on our website. There’s a six-hour minimum, payable in advance, and then each extension will require the same payment. Are you ready to sign up for that?”

Rufus said, “I’ll need to confer with my brothers first.”

For a second, Leong betrayed a hint of discomfort, as if she was afraid that his eyes were about to roll back into his skull while he muttered to himself in three different voices.

Rufus rose from his seat and held up his phone as he headed for the waiting room. “Can you give me two minutes?” he asked. “It’s pretty late in Bonn and London, but I messaged them earlier, so I know they’re waiting for my call.”

4

Rufus dreamed that he was Caius, contemplating a lattice of spheres in a space of some unspecified higher dimension, trying to decide if a certain kind of hyperplane lay entirely within the gaps between the spheres, or if it would be forced to intersect some of them. He swung the hyperplane back and forth, agitated, hunting for a solution. But the problem was not purely mathematical; Caius was sure that the answer would determine whether or not the police would be able to prove that he had murdered Linus.

As Silus, Rufus dreamed that he was back on the boat, half-watching their favorite cartoon, half-living inside it. The plucky meerkat Lano had tracked down the villainous hyena, Raggler, to a desolate canyon, where he was holding a litter of baby meerkats hostage.

“Let them go!” Lano demanded angrily. As he approached the cave where his foe lay in wait, his voice echoed from the rock face, but it faded with each reverberation, ending in a plaintive whisper. And though his shadow stretched for ten times his height along the dried riverbed, it remained so slender that it was lost in the vastness of the canyon.

“Let them go!” Lano bellowed. “Don’t make me come and get them!”

Raggler laughed derisively. “Come and get them, will you? You and whose army?”

Silus knew exactly what that line foretold; every time a hapless wrongdoer invoked it, it summoned the same kind of triumphant finale. But as he looked back toward the top of the canyon, there was no meerkat cavalry, no swarm of brotherly solidarity to transform the villain’s taunt into an unwitting prophecy.

And then Rufus dreamed that he was Linus, swimming across the ocean, away from the boat toward the invisible shore. But after a certain number of strokes, anticipating by sheer force of habit the wall at the end of the swimming pool, he curled up, tumbled over in the water, and reversed, back toward the Physalia.

When the alarm went off, Rufus was sure of it: Linus was back. Why else would he have dreamed through his eyes? But as he searched his memories, there was nothing new. The dreams had left a hazy penumbra around the border, but everything still ended on the same Thursday.

With the room still in darkness he cast the blankets aside, then he saw a pale light shine briefly from the skin of his forefinger. He touched it again with his thumbnail, which had dug into it a moment before. The glow returned, then died away as he increased the pressure. The genes that made some of his neurons glow for the benefit of the link weren’t meant to be expressed in his peripheral nervous system, but it happened now and then. He remembered trying to convince a confused bedmate that the fluorescent dye from a nightclub stamp could glow without being bathed in ultraviolet—but he wasn’t sure now if he’d been the one making the argument.

It was his first day back at work after his trip. He’d only been away for a week, but every class was a struggle; the substitute teacher had followed his lesson plans, but as he reviewed the material his students seemed to seize upon any opportunity to disrupt the flow, as if he was a student teacher again and they all smelled blood in the water. Rufus hunted for the ease and self-confidence he’d had in front of the same audience just days before, but he kept finding himself saying something clumsy or misjudged every time he tried to restore the status quo.

In the staff room at lunchtime, Dianne Unger caught him staring at her copy of The Brothers Karamazov.

“Any good?” he asked.

“Wait until I’ve finished it,” she said. “Then I can loan it to you if you like.”

“Thanks.”

In the evening, when he’d finished his usual routine in the gym, he tried swimming a few laps in the pool. But it was a quarter the length of the one Linus was used to, fracturing his rhythm, throwing him off-balance over and over, even when he thought he’d prepared himself for the too-frequent turns.

In the changing room, he checked his phone and saw a message from Catherine Leong: Can you confirm that this is Linus?

The picture below came with metadata stating that it was taken six days ago, in the international terminal at Sydney airport—about an hour before Rufus’s own domestic flight had touched down. Linus was wheeling a suitcase across the carpet, caught in the background of another traveler’s social media snap. He wasn’t facing the camera, but in profile he seemed no more anxious than anyone with a boarding time to meet and a gate to find. Rufus could see no obvious companion, no woman or man who was looking toward Linus with even a trace of interest. If he was eloping, his beloved was off queuing for the toilets. If he was being kidnapped, his abductors had him on a very long leash.

Rufus phoned Leong. “It’s him,” he said. “Do you know what flight he caught?”

“Sorry, no. That’s the only image I could find. From the time stamp it’s most likely he was going to Singapore or Kuala Lumpur, but, well . . . ”

“Yeah.” That ruled out the Americas and the Pacific, but left the entire remainder of the planet. “There’s no way that Linus could afford a ticket himself, though. When he checked his bank balance a fortnight ago, he had thirty-six dollars.”

“You can’t access his current records?” Leong asked, clearly as frustrated by Rufus’s truncated omniscience on all things Linus as he was himself. “Not that I’d encourage you to break the law.”

“All our online security is iris and fingerprint,” Rufus explained. He didn’t have the heart to tell Leong that no one under thirty had ever used a password, whether or not they were a neurally linked quadruplet.

“He doesn’t look as if he’s under duress,” Leong said reluctantly.

“No. But who decides to skip the country like that, without telling any of the people who’ll be worried?”

“Stranger things have happened,” Leong replied. “Maybe he had some simmering resentment you never picked up on. Maybe he bumped into someone who offered him a chance for a fresh start, and he was afraid you’d try to talk him out of it. His life was going nowhere; he didn’t need to blame you for that to decide that the ties to his family were part of what was holding him back.”

Rufus couldn’t dismiss any of this, but he didn’t believe it. “What now?” he asked.

“I talked to everyone on the lists you gave me,” she said. “None of them admitted to any recent contact with Linus, and none of them were out of the country.”

“Okay. So . . . ?”

Leong hesitated. “Is it fair to say that growing up on the Physalia was the most formative experience in your brother’s life?”

“Absolutely.”

“So as a driving force, it would be off the charts compared to some old girlfriend showing up?”

“Sure, but . . . ” Rufus was about to object that Linus hadn’t been brooding about the past in the run up to his flight, but that wasn’t what Leong was suggesting. “You think someone from the boat got in touch with him?”

“You don’t believe that’s possible?”

“All the adults are in prison. I suppose there’s a chance one of the other kids could have tracked him down somehow—but I wouldn’t know where to begin finding any of them myself.”

“Okay.” Leong didn’t push him. “Maybe take some time to think about it, and let me know if it’s a line you want me to pursue.”

As Rufus walked home, he tried to decide exactly what position he should take when he broke the news to the others. None of Leong’s suggestions made much sense to him, but he had no better hypothesis of his own.

He closed his eyes for a moment and did his best to set his own preconceptions aside and defer to the expert. But all that the Linus inside him wished to dwell on was the Dostoyevsky novel he’d been promised, and the chances of finding a better place to swim. Maybe the power of whatever had lured him out of the country lay in their shared past—but the actual trigger must have fallen from the sky, as much of a shock to Linus as it would have been to any of them.

5

As Silus listened to his brothers arguing, he stepped back from the conversation and let their doppelgängers follow along in his stead, nodding in all the right places while he thought through a plan of his own.

Leong must have requested a targeted search from a face recognition service, limited to Sydney’s transport hubs; any wider scan would have been too expensive. But now that Linus had left the country, the possibilities had exploded exponentially. They couldn’t afford to hunt through half the planet’s social media posts, hoping to get lucky again. Not at commercial rates.

So they really had no choice but to crowdsource it. The official missing persons apps only matched against official lists; they would need something of their own. And they’d need a rapid take-up, since they were starting from a base of zero. Their app would need to go viral, even if it was a joke a few days later, and entirely forgotten a week after that.

When the chance finally came to get a word in, he said, “Which Noah do you know?”

Caius scowled. “What are you gibbering about?”

But Rufus got it. “Noah Tribedi,” he explained to Caius. “He was in Idiot Empire, about four years ago. You must remember me watching that. But the point is, Tribedi’s had a wildly different look in every show he’s ever been in; people joke that it’s only a matter of time until he plays a character who resembles your favorite food.”

Caius’s face was already crumpled in resignation, and his doppelgänger was thinking: these fools are going to do this whatever I say, so there’s no point arguing about it.

Silus took up the thread, touting the idea with exaggerated enthusiasm just to annoy Caius. “So we put out a free app called ‘Which Noah do you know?’ that scans your social media feed and tells you the closest matches between your friends and each of Noah’s characters. It even offers you some side-by-side comparisons to post: ‘Here’s Diego at Vera’s party last week, the spitting image of Noah in All the Pretty Murderers!’”

Caius said, “Just pretend I’m not here.”

Silus talked over the logistics with Rufus. The code itself would be trivial, invoking standard toolkits in any of the phones it ran on. The permissions it needed from the user would be precisely those that the advertised purpose required. And though the pictures of Noah were subject to copyright, and couldn’t be embedded in the app if it was to pass the vetting process, they could embed URLs for the officially published versions that the app then worked from—and at the end of the process, they could outsource the merging and captioning of the images to one of the meme-building sites that the studios already tolerated, or positively encouraged.

“How do we smuggle a picture of Linus into the app without giving the game away?” Rufus wondered. “I mean, we can obfuscate the image itself, but whatever encoding we use . . . last I heard, Apple wanted ten-page explanations for every chunk of data that goes into the bundle.”

Silus was stumped for a moment, but then he had it. “I’ll change my profile picture on GitHub to a picture of Linus, and then we’ll disguise the comparison with Linus as a calibration run. We don’t even need to embed the image; we just have the app use the developer’s own, publicly available picture of himself as test data. What could be more innocuous than that?”

Caius said, “If anyone decompiles this and inspects it properly—”

Rufus laughed. “Why would they bother?”

“Some people have a lot of time on their hands.”

Silus said, “There are a thousand times more phone apps than there are people in the world. If ours ever gets so popular that it starts to draw enough attention for any human being to care exactly what it’s doing behind the scenes, we will already have completed a few hundred grands’ worth of Linus-hunting for free.”

6

When Silus tested the app on his own feed, it turned out that nobody he knew looked like any Noah at all. Rufus and Caius had no better luck.

“Keep the name,” Rufus suggested. “But add a few more chameleonic celebrities.”

Silus dredged through the swoon accounts of his target demographic, scooping up dozens of actors and singers he’d never even heard of. What he really needed was a list so complete that no customer would walk away unsatisfied.

“‘Sorry, you know no Noahs,’” Rufus read from his results, “‘but here are your best three Lydias, your top two Simons, and your number one Ga-yoon.’”

“I think we’re at a sweet spot,” Silus decided. “If we loosen the resemblance criteria, or go further down the B-list, people will just groan.”

Caius opened his mouth, but then thought better of it. Rufus said, “Time to launch.”

Silus had a meeting with his adviser in ten minutes. He drained his mug of hot chocolate, submitted the app to the six stores they were aiming to reach, then switched his phone off and set off across the campus.

As he was leaving the café, Linus’s doppelgänger said, “This is all very touching, but what if I don’t want you to find me?”

“Do you know for a fact that you don’t?” Silus countered.

“No,” the doppelgänger admitted.

“What’s the worst that can happen?” Silus pressed him. “If we find you, when you’d rather we didn’t?”

“I don’t know. But whatever made me leave without a word, I know it must have been important. Don’t you trust me on that?”

“I trust you,” Silus assured him. “But what if it wasn’t your decision? What if there was a gun to your head? You need to trust the three of us as well.”

The doppelgänger fell silent. Silus strode across the grass, trying to clear his head.

In the weekly meeting with his thesis adviser, he was meant to describe any progress he’d made and any obstacles he’d encountered. But the truth was, he’d barely given his work any thought since Linus had gone missing. So he sat beside Dr. Tamura and bluffed his way through forty excruciating minutes, pretending that an idea that had come to Caius out of the blue while he flossed his teeth a few nights ago was the product of his own tortured efforts over the last seven days.

“Will you name me as a coauthor?” Caius’s doppelgänger enquired as Silus finally escaped from the room.

“Fuck off. Next week I’ll tell her the whole thing was a dead end.”

“I think it’s exactly what you’ve been looking for,” the doppelgänger taunted him.

“I don’t care. I’ll find a better method myself.”

Silus sat down at the edge of the quadrangle. He steeled himself and switched on his phone. The app had been accepted into five of the stores; the sixth had raised a long list of trivial issues because the automated checker didn’t understand its own company’s policies. Silus fixed them all, resubmitted the app, received five new objections, and went through the cycle again. By the time he was done, the aggregated download count for the other five stores had already passed a hundred thousand.

A few minutes later, hits started coming through . . . showing himself, Rufus, and Caius. Silus had been expecting that, and though he’d set up a filter to screen out any of their previously known cameos in the lives of actual friends, the only way to find any of the cases when they’d been snapped in the background by a total stranger was the process now underway.

Rufus, who was seeing the same results, sent a message: At least we know everything’s working.

The download count kept rising, but the new matches slowed to a trickle. Silus had an ache in his gut; if he’d screwed this up, it might have cost them their only chance to find their brother before he covered his tracks. “Would you have guessed we’d do this, and taken countermeasures?” he asked Linus’s doppelgänger.

“I didn’t manage that in the airport, did I?”

“But once you’d reached your destination, would you have started walking around in a hoodie? Covering your face every time you saw someone raise their phone?”

The doppelgänger considered this. “Now that I know what you’re doing, it seems obvious in retrospect. But I’m not sure how long it would have taken me to think of it myself.”

“None of us are just ourselves,” Silus retorted.

“True. But I would have had as much trouble anticipating what you’d do as you’re having now anticipating what I’d do.”

Silus’s phone pinged. He glanced at the latest picture, and scrolled down to see the metadata, but it had been stripped out by a user intent on preserving their privacy.

He looked at the picture again. His first thought had been that the figure caught striding past behind the smiling couple was Caius, but now he was almost certain that it wasn’t. The backdrop was dominated by a wrought iron fence, in front of a courtyard with weeds growing through the cracks between paving stones. Neither he nor any of the doppelgängers could recall seeing the place before—though there were probably thousands of houses that they’d walked past dozens of times but would never have recognized out of context.

A few seconds later, Rufus initiated a group call. “That’s definitely Linus,” he said. “And it must be recent.”

“Why?”

“He never owned a jacket like that in Sydney.”

“Have you tried a Street View match?” Caius asked impatiently.

Silus laughed. “That’s ten thousand US dollars!”

“Globally. We’ve ruled out the Americas.”

Silus opened the app and got a quote. “Without the Americas, it’s still six thousand.”

“What about the jacket?” Linus’s doppelgänger suggested. “I’d only buy something like that if I didn’t have time to hunt down something I liked.”

“Give me a minute,” Silus told the others. There were more than seven hundred free apps that offered to find a product matching a photo; the first six that he tried returned links to items with only a superficial resemblance.

The seventh produced an exact match. Though the jacket was made in China, and a couple of online stores would ship it anywhere, the only bricks-and-mortar outlets that stocked it were in France.

Silus rejoined the chat and showed them what he’d found. “A Street View search of France is still a thousand,” he grumbled.

“And what would it tell us?” Rufus wondered. “Wherever this was taken, he might not be that close anymore.”

Silus’s phone pinged again. In this image, Linus was walking past a café, distracted, frowning slightly. The photo had been taken from inside, and the name of the establishment wasn’t visible, but the user had left the metadata intact. “Jouy-en-Josas,” Silus read. “Four days ago.”

Rufus beat him to the search. “Best known for HEC Paris: École des hautes études commerciales.”

Caius started laughing in disbelief, and Linus’s doppelgänger joined in.

Rufus said, “You know the joke: if I ever call you to say how much I enjoyed a Wagner opera, it means I’ve been kidnapped and they’re listening in. But even if you really want to ram the message home . . . how do you talk the kidnappers into buying you tickets to the Bayreuth Festival?”

Silus didn’t want to rush to any conclusion, but whichever way he read it seemed equally bizarre. Unless Linus had chosen this particular Parisian suburb for some other, even more obscure reason, it looked as if he’d packed his bags, fled the country, and cut off all ties with his family, in order to enroll in a French business school.

7

Caius said, “Leave it with me. I can ask around; if he really is there, it shouldn’t take long to find out.”

He put down his phone and thought for a moment. Before he started imposing on his French colleagues, there was a chance he could resolve the whole question himself. He opened the HEC website and looked through the section on international scholarships. Was there really a route by which a penniless foreigner who’d done no more than finish high school could win a coveted place in one of the most prestigious grandes écoles?

Incredibly, there was. A decade ago, a wealthy benefactor had endowed a program that allowed applicants from across the globe to take an online admission test, with the ten highest scoring entrants flown to Paris for interviews. The last day to apply for the current round had been the day Linus had fallen silent.

No recipients of the scholarship were listed on the site, let alone current finalists, but that was probably just due to a cautious reading of EU privacy rules. Caius didn’t doubt that Linus could have mastered anything he’d put his mind to, given time. And a certain portion of the test might well have required no more than the level of purely mathematical aptitude that all four of them possessed. But there was nothing Linus could have drawn on, from any of their histories, that would have elevated him—within a few hours of making the decision to apply—into the top ten candidates when it came to economics, management theory, or business law.

Could he be wrong about that? Caius closed his eyes and pictured the memory palace he’d built from everything Linus had shared. He passed through the grand foyer with its swimming pool, the library with its shelves full of Balzac and Flaubert, the study lined with blackboards packed with mathematical exposition. Linus had pondered concrete examples to illustrate many of the abstract theorems on display, but his choices were geometrical: sculptural rather than mercantile. It was only after rummaging through a dozen increasingly small and dingy side-rooms that Caius finally found the word “Finance”—on a squashed cardboard box that looked like it might once have held washing powder, at the bottom of a pile of junk sitting in the corner of a disused garage.

And yet, there Linus was, in just the right place at just the right time to be interviewed for a scholarship he couldn’t possibly covet, let alone win.

Caius emailed a recent coauthor, Sophie Allard, who worked in a complex-systems modeling group at the University of Lyon that had links to the econometric world. He tried to keep his dishonesty to a minimum, writing, “I heard a rumor that my brother Linus was short listed for this year’s Guinard scholarship at the HEC! He’s too modest to tell me something like that, but I wonder if there’s any way to check if it’s true? If it is, I want to surprise him there and offer congrats/support!”

As soon as he’d sent the message, the whole idea seemed ten times more absurd than before. Maybe Linus had won a few thousand dollars in a lottery and decided to spend some time in the city where so many of his favorite novels were set. He might have passed through Jouy-en-Josas on his way to see the Palace of Versailles. And he’d pulled the plug on his brothers out of some misguided notion that they’d begrudge him not sharing the windfall. And though Linus had never actually bought a lottery ticket in his entire life, as far as anyone knew, if he’d acquired the money by some shadier route that would only make it more explicable that he’d decided to keep it to himself.

Caius pushed these speculations aside. There was no point trying to conjure all the answers out of thin air; he needed to be patient and wait for the facts. He picked up his notebook and started reviewing the calculations he’d been trying to finish for the past ten days. While Linus hovered at the edge of his thoughts, crisscrossing Paris in some kind of furtive homage to Jean Valjean, Caius turned his attention back to the lattice he was trying to characterize. Finding the shortest distance between neighbors by a brute force search would be an intractable computation, but he had a set of inequalities that he still hoped could be used to pin down the distance indirectly.

Three hours later, he’d made enough progress to think about taking a break, and the smell of cooking from the apartment below was making him salivate. He opened his laptop and checked his email; Sophie had replied more than an hour before. She’d pasted in a chain of replies from other correspondents on the matter, but her conclusion was right at the top.

“Hi Caius, yeah your brother’s at HEC! And not just short listed anymore, he got the place! Congratulations! I’m sure he’ll be happy to see you!”

8

“I’ve been looking into Marcel Guinard,” Rufus said. “He made his first billion in a micro-payments start-up at the turn of the millennium, then played the stock market well enough to keep getting richer, even while he blew half the profits on vaporware. He’s endowed a few chairs and funded a few institutes for tech bro bullshit around the world: Simulation Cosmology in Berkley, Superintelligent AI in London, Singularitarian Theology in Rome. I can’t link him to the Physalia directly, but even if he didn’t play some covert role in funding it, I don’t believe for one second that he wouldn’t know about Linus’s past.”

Caius had assembled the same sketch of the man for himself, but it still made no sense to him. “What’s the deal, though? He’s gathering up children from the boat to have another crack at the whole hive mind fantasy?”

Silus said, “As bribes for human experimentation go, offering an MBA to a Dostoyevsky fan . . . ?”

Caius laughed wearily. It was after midnight, and he had to catch the train to Paris at six a.m., but he couldn’t tell his brothers to be patient and wait for him to report back. None of them were going to sleep until they knew exactly what Linus had got himself into.

Rufus said, “So the scholarship’s just a pretext for him to be in Paris. The real bribe will be in cash, and I’m sure they’ll let him skip as many classes as he wants.”

“Why does he have to be in Paris?” Caius protested. “If Guinard has persuaded him to unplug us and link up with a different group, the participants could be anywhere.”

Rufus sighed at his obtuseness. “Whoever’s running this needs to have physical control over the guinea pigs, in case they start having second thoughts.”

“If this billionaire wants to stuff money into Linus’s bank account while he catches up with some old friends from the boat, he might have been tempted into humoring the fucker,” Silus conceded. “Taking in memories from a whole new set of people might even be fun for a while, and when they fail to evolve godlike powers—because they’re basically just swapping stories about their foster homes—they can all walk away a little richer, while Guinard walks away a little crazier.”

Rufus wasn’t so sanguine. “And what if he wants them there in person so he can open up their skulls for an upgrade?”

“If Guinard was going to take the risk of installing new hardware in his subjects’ heads,” Silus said, “why drag the Physalia kids into it at all? The only value someone like Linus has is that he comes with the link preinstalled, and the crime of putting it there has already been paid for.”

“And his neurons are already tweaked for optical channels,” Rufus added. “It takes time to raise an engineered child to the age they need to reach before they’re any use to you.”

Caius shared his anger, even as he observed it with a kind of detachment. They’d thought they’d put the Physalia behind them; for anyone to drag them back into that deranged world was unforgivable—and trying to pick off the most vulnerable of the survivors only made it worse. “What did Guinard think we’d do?” he wondered. “Just stop searching for Linus? Or swallow the whole ridiculous cover story?”

Silus said, “More to the point, what did Linus think we’d do? He must have had a plan when he pulled the plug on us. He must have had his reasons.”

“Yeah.” Caius ran a hand over his face. “But I’m sure he’ll make it all clear when I ask him.”

9

Caius didn’t actually doze on the train, so much as lapse into a sleep-deprived state in which his thoughts succumbed to a kind of dream logic. The journey from Bonn to Cologne was secretly taking him back to Adelaide, to the apartment he’d shared with Rufus and Silus when the three of them were undergraduates, and Linus had traipsed around the countryside looking for work. Silus had called it Schrödinger’s gap year: education and adventure at the same time, with none of them really missing out on anything.

When he stood on the platform in Cologne, waiting for his connection, the clock measured out the time for one of Linus’s high school swimming competitions. Caius could recall watching him powering through the water ahead of his rivals, but later he’d felt Linus’s own proprioceptive joy, which didn’t depend at all on beating the competition, but only on creating something entirely his own and sharing it with the rest of them.

The next train carried him back to the Coopers. Caius couldn’t blame them for their clumsy attempts to carve separate identities out of the strange, conjoined creature they’d agreed to take into their home. They’d had no one to advise them on the right way to deal with four traumatized children who’d just discovered that their parents had created them as a kind of technological asset to be deployed in a global war between different forms of superintelligence. The one blessing was that they’d been taken off the boat before anyone had considered them ready to be indoctrinated into that fantasy; they hadn’t needed to be deprogrammed from the cult, because the cult had merely brainwashed them into thinking they were perfectly normal.

In a restroom in Brussels, Caius splashed water on his face and slapped his cheeks until they stung. He grabbed some hot chocolate from a vending machine, then caught the train to Paris with the warmth still suffusing out from his esophagus. He took out his notebook and reread his calculations from the day before; he couldn’t move past the last stumbling block he’d hit, but the mechanical process of checking and rechecking what he had almost kept his mind occupied.

From Gare du Nord, he took the B line south to Massy-Palaiseau, then he changed for Jouy-en-Josas. This was still suburban Paris, but as the train approached the station the patches of woodland beside the tracks were lush green. There was a bus he could have taken all the way to the campus, but he needed a walk to clear his head, and as he made his way along Rue de la Libération birdsong rose up over the traffic noise.

The map of HEC showed ten different dorms, and Caius couldn’t parse the system by which the students in different courses were allocated between them. But the sixth place he checked had Linus’s name scribbled in on a directory in the foyer. Caius walked down to the room, but was unsurprised to find the door locked and no one answering. He sent Linus an email, telling him where he was and asking if they could meet; there was no point playing hard to get now that the two of them were a few hundred meters apart. Then he went and sat outside the dorm in the sunshine.

His eyes had fallen shut when he heard a voice close by. “You want to grab some lunch?”

Caius looked up; he hadn’t been dreaming.

“Sure,” he said. “Let’s do that.”

10

In the self-serve cafeteria, the first thing Linus put on his tray was a pot of tea. Caius was bemused, but he said nothing; a change in taste they might have joked about a month ago no longer really rated in the greater scheme of things.

When they were seated, Linus took a sip of tea, then started eating. He didn’t seem angry that he’d been hunted down, but he showed no sign of being on the verge of volunteering any explanations.

“Hogy vagy?” Caius asked.

Linus smiled. “I’m fine, but my Hungarian’s pretty rusty. Can we stick with English or French?”

“I thought it might be worth it, just to give us some privacy.”

Linus glanced around. “No one’s going to be listening to us. We’re not that interesting. If we start speaking Hungarian, any Hungarians in the room will tune in straight away.”

Caius said, “I’m sure the odds of a Hungarian within earshot are less than a thousand to one.”

“You’re probably right. But I really am rusty.”

Caius nodded. “You had us worried,” he said. “Did you really need to pack up and leave without a word?”

“I’m sorry.” Linus twirled spaghetti around his fork. “But once I’d made up my mind, I wasn’t in the mood to have a big debate about it.”

“About what, exactly?” Caius pressed him. “I wouldn’t have thought it would be too hard to make your case. This place churned out more Fortune 500 CEOs in the last twenty years than Harvard. Who could turn down a chance like that?”

“Not me.”

“I’m just surprised it took so long for your hidden passion for the business world to reveal itself.”

Linus said, “You’d rather I spent my life squinting into the searing light of your genius?”

Caius laughed, but he was taken aback, less by the words themselves than his own uncertainty as to just how seriously he was meant to take them. “You could have done anything you liked. I know it’s been hard for Silus sometimes, because his interests are so close to mine. But if you’d become a writer, or an athlete, or any fucking thing short of stealing my thesis topic, neither of us would ever have had to feel like we were riding on the other’s coattails.” He shook his head irritably. “Anyway, can we drop the bullshit? I know you’re not here to polish your business acumen.”

“No? Why, then?”

Caius thought of trying Hungarian again, but he’d been told there was no need to censor himself. “You’re here because your benefactor wants to exploit what’s in your head.”

“Really?” Linus feigned astonishment. “Exploit it how?”

“I was hoping you’d clear that up, but my own tiny hive mind’s consensus is Physalia Mark Two.”

Linus gestured at the crowd of diners around them. “Do you see anyone else from the boat here?”

“It’s been sixteen years,” Caius replied. “I wouldn’t recognize them if I was staring right at them. Besides, they wouldn’t need to be physically close to you.”

“So I’m in Paris myself because . . . ?”

“I don’t know,” Caius admitted. “The only thing I know for sure is that you’ve never had the slightest interest in anything this place has to teach you.”

Linus gazed at him with amused defiance, but didn’t contradict him. Finally he said, “Maybe I decided to acquire an interest.”

“What does that mean?”

“I spent twenty-four years acquiring interests from the three of you. Maybe I decided to look elsewhere.”

Caius said, “All right. But what exactly did Guinard offer you that made you want to look here, in particular?”

“A career path,” Linus replied. “Better prospects than I’ve ever had in my life.”

“And what does he get in return?”

“Every scholarship holder reports back regularly on their progress. That’s all that’s expected from me.”

Caius realized he’d been eating too quickly, risking indigestion. He slowed down, chewing his current mouthful thoroughly before swallowing.

Marcel Guinard was ninety-four years old. Over the decades, he’d thrown money at every crackpot scheme for longevity that had held out its supplicant hands to him, and seen them all come to nothing. No doubt he was still clinging to the hope that an antifreeze cocktail and a liquid nitrogen bath could turn him into something more than Ötzi with a manicure—but he’d made a career out of hedging his bets.

“You’re sharing memories?” Caius guessed. “With Guinard.”

Linus remained silent.

“You need to be discreet, because I’m wearing a wire?” Caius joked. “Or is the problem that you’re wearing one yourself?”

“I told you, I’ve chosen a career,” Linus replied. “At long last. Isn’t that what you wanted? You should be happy for me.”

So the course was not a sham, exactly: Linus would wake each morning with his mentor’s reflections on the previous day’s lessons to guide him. Guinard could have had his pick of conventional protégés, far better qualified and self-motivated, eager to hear his advice without any need for such intensive tutoring. But Linus’s value to him was as an empty vessel into which he could pour his accumulated wisdom—on the topics at hand, and much more.

“Where does this end?” Caius asked. “You graduate at the top of all your classes, then Guinard’s company snaps you up. You rise and rise, the golden child, taking on ever more responsibility, proving yourself to be a steady hand. Until . . . what? People will finally believe that when he’s on his deathbed, he’s handing you the keys to the empire on your merits?”

Linus said, “You make it sound as if there’s something wrong with me succeeding in my chosen profession.”

“No, the problem is why you’ve chosen it.”

Linus’s poker face cracked a little, but Caius wasn’t sure what was showing through. “What was I ever going to make of myself, without this? What could I ever have become? You chose the one thing we could all excel at, but then if anyone else tried to take the same path, they’d just end up having to fight you for space.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Caius protested. “And it still isn’t. You could still do anything you want.”

“All I ever wanted was what you wanted,” Linus said bitterly. “I never had the power to want anything else.”

Caius didn’t believe that, but it wasn’t the point anymore. “I’m not asking you to link up with us again. But how long did you wait between pulling the plug on us and letting Guinard into your head? What kind of chance did you give yourself to find a direction of your own?”

Linus laughed softly. “You make it sound as if I’m a normal person, who could just step out from my family’s shadow and thrive. But you know I’m not like that: I’m a vine, not a tree. On my own, I’d just fall to the ground and die. So I’ve chosen a tree to support me, and to shape my path, instead of tying me up in a race I can’t win. This is what I want, because it’s the best I can do with what I am.”

11

Caius was too agitated to call his brothers immediately, so he set about finding a place to stay for the night. His phone offered him four choices, but none had a check-in time before three p.m., so he picked the one that would take that long to reach on foot.

As he walked, his surroundings barely registered; he felt as if his head was ringing from the aftermath of an explosion. How had he not seen how Linus had seen him: as someone setting the agenda and then seizing it for himself? He’d understood how it had worked with Silus, but that had always felt like a friendly rivalry, in which, for all his vanity, the two of them were more or less evenly matched. And Rufus, though he’d been infused with the same obsessions, had found his own entirely separate way to pursue them.

But Linus had had his swimming and his books; he had never seemed to have been jostling for space that the others had occupied. Because . . . what, he’d given up his claim on it so early? Caius’s memories of Linus’s days had seemed to be full of tranquility, not resentment. But maybe the link’s imperfectly transcribed version had missed an underlying sense of resignation. If he’d been squeezed out of the light for so long that he could barely imagine regaining it, his numb acceptance might have been mistaken for genuine contentment.

Caius checked into the motel. He sat on the bed and made the call.

“I don’t know what to do,” he admitted, after tersely summarizing his conversation with Linus.

“Guinard must have tracked down everyone from the boat,” Rufus said, “and sent investigators around the world to observe them. And out of all those people, he judged Linus to be the one most receptive to the notion that the brightest future he could have would require his own erasure.” His voice was unsteady with anger and shame. “So what does that say about the way we treated him?”

Silus looked equally troubled, but he said nothing.

Caius said, “I keep thinking we should go to the police—but has Guinard actually broken any laws? Whatever he’s done to install his own link, he could have found a jurisdiction where it was legal for an adult. The fact that Linus has had his link since childhood isn’t Guinard’s fault, in any way that we can prove. And I don’t see how we could force either of them to admit that they’re connected at all, let alone confess to what the endgame is.”

Rufus was contemptuous of this timidity. “So we stand by and let Guinard bury him?”

“Have we buried each other?” Silus asked. “Do you think we’re all just clones of Caius by now?”

“No,” Rufus replied. “But we seem to have squeezed enough life out of Linus, without even trying, that he’s ready to let someone else finish the job.”

“We need to get him out of there,” Caius decided. “Get him away from that place, and keep him unplugged from Guinard until he’s had a chance to think things through for himself.”

Silus was skeptical. “You think we’re commandos now?”

“I’m up for it,” Rufus promised. “I’ll be there on the first flight I can get.”

Caius addressed Silus. “I’m not talking about breaking into the dorm with knockout gas. We find an excuse to invite him off campus, then take him somewhere with no Internet access for a few days so he can come to his senses.”

Silus said, “There is nowhere in Europe without Internet access.”

“Then we put him in a Faraday cage.”

Silus grimaced in disbelief. “Just listen to yourself! You want to kidnap your brother, drag him off to a cabin in the woods, and force him to wear a tinfoil hat?”

Caius shared his dismay at the prospect of resorting to coercion, but he couldn’t see any other choice. “We can’t let him walk away from his life, leaving nothing but an empty space for someone else to stand in. If the old way left no room for him, and he’s convinced himself that he can’t survive alone, the only way to put things right is to show him that we can support him from the outside. We need to do whatever it takes to prove that, without getting back inside his head.”

12

As Linus walked along Rue de la Libération, glimpses of the woods behind the wall that lined the road kept evoking memories of Marcel’s youth. He’d got drunk here with some friends on a summer night, in 1976. Linus could see a woman’s face, and he felt a nostalgic affection welling up . . . but he pushed the image away irritably. Tonight he had to be entirely himself, if he was ever going to get his brothers off his back.

Trudging around the long arc in the road, he could envisage the earnest entreaties ahead. It had been naïve of him to hope that talking to Caius alone would have settled anything; the others were never going to be content with remembering the conversation secondhand. They would need to see him in the flesh and hear the words straight from his mouth. Even the link hadn’t told them, clearly enough, exactly where he’d been headed; they’d just padded out his fading presence with their own ideas of him, and never really noticed how little of the original remained.

It was dusk when he reached the motel. He lingered by the roadside, working up the courage to take the last few steps. He’d prepared a long speech earlier that he’d hoped would convey what needed to be said, but running through it in his head now it just felt clumsy.

He walked across the parking lot and knocked on the door. Caius opened it, but the others were right behind him.

In the face of a quadruple reunion, Linus couldn’t help himself. “Me and this army!” he proclaimed, in his most triumphant meerkat voice.

Silus laughed, but no one else seemed to have retained their sense of humor. Rufus stepped forward and embraced him, so forcefully that Linus caught himself anticipating reliving the gesture from the other side. But that was never going to happen. The best he could guess was that it was meant as a message: an offering of strength in a common purpose. Linus thumped his back amiably in return, but they no longer shared a purpose.

“I know this is hard,” he said, once they’d parted, turning to take in Silus as well. “But you have to accept it. I can’t go on as a spare wheel, and I can’t go on by myself. I know you think Guinard is exploiting me, but he’s the one who’ll be giving me a clear direction and then stepping out of my way.”

Silus grew stony-faced. “If you can stand on your own feet once Guinard is dead, you can do it right now.”

“How would you know?” Linus retorted. “Whatever goals we had, the three of you divided them up between yourselves a long time ago. Just because I clung on as your backup drive—”

“We’re not a fucking computer network,” Silus interjected angrily. “That might have been what the cult wanted, but they didn’t succeed.”

“And we’re not four ordinary people,” Linus said. “That might have been what the Coopers wanted, but they didn’t succeed either.”

“We’re just asking you to give it a chance,” Rufus pleaded. “Stay unplugged from us, and from Guinard too, and see what happens.”

“That’s a good idea,” Linus replied. “Guinard suggested exactly the same thing. I didn’t start sharing his memories until a week after I unplugged from you.”

“And what was that week like?” Rufus asked, though he didn’t sound as if he wanted to hear the answer.

Linus said, “It felt like I was vanishing. It felt like I was dissolving into the air.”

Rufus glanced at Caius, as if this revelation had given him pause. But then he said, “Guinard was still pulling strings, though: fixing your test score, buying you plane tickets. What if you came back to Adelaide for a while, and just tried living by yourself?”

“Doing what?”

“Whatever you like.”

Linus said, “There is nothing I like, myself.”

“You don’t like swimming?” Rufus protested. “You don’t like Balzac?”

“A couple of hobbies don’t make a life. You want me to sit around living on your charity, struggling to find a reason to get up every morning, hoping that some kind of grand vocation will suddenly crystallize in my brain? Here, I have a curriculum to follow, a guaranteed career that starts at a six-figure salary, and a good chance I’ll be a billionaire before I’m forty.”

Caius said, “You, or Guinard in his new body?”

Linus shrugged. “How much of any of you is your own work, alone? Maybe I’m the only one of us who really faced up to what we are, but whatever you think about yourselves, it’s what I know about myself that counts.”

Rufus regarded him dolefully, and when he approached Linus braced himself for a farewell hug, but instead he found his hands forced together behind his back, while Caius stepped in and put cable ties around them.

“What the fuck is this?” Linus demanded. He contemplated bellowing for help, but a part of him flinched away from the sheer embarrassment of having a stranger walk in on this family dispute. “You’re so used to dictating what goes into my head, you can’t bear the thought of me choosing for myself?”

Rufus groaned. “Guinard would say that, wouldn’t he?” Caius pulled a long strip of white cloth from his pocket and proceeded to wind it between Linus’s lips and the back of his neck, before switching to a second loop aimed at holding his jaw closed. As a gag, the whole thing seemed less than ideal, but he guessed they were too afraid of choking him to shove a wad of material into his mouth—and too viscerally defensive of body parts they could all personally recall him using to breathe, eat, cough, and kiss.

As they maneuvered him onto the bed to tie his feet together, Linus caught a glimpse of the scene in a mirror: the bandages around his face looked like he was being prepared for a role as the Invisible Man. He fought down the urge to keep arguing and complaining, reluctant to reveal how much noise he was still capable of producing. But when they started wrapping the blanket around him, he couldn’t help himself: he began to yell. Rufus knelt on his chest and clamped a hand over his mouth while Silus set to work with a roll of duct tape.

When he was cocooned in several blankets, he could still feel Rufus on top of him, trembling from the adrenaline. “Just stay still and keep quiet,” he begged Linus. “We don’t want to have to drug you.”

They lifted him and carried him out of the room. When they started lowering him into the trunk of a car, he needed to assume a near-fetal position in order to fit, but he cooperated placidly. If anything, he was more mortified than ever by the thought that they might be caught in the act. This had moved beyond a motel-room scuffle into a scene that police might treat as the prelude to a burial in the woods, and he wasn’t going to risk drawing a bullet into anyone’s brain.

Someone closed the trunk. The stale air around him smelled of scented cleaning products. Linus heard the soft purr of the motor and felt the car reversing, then moving across the lot. They couldn’t imagine they had any hope of spiriting him out of the country, but perhaps they’d rented a place where they wouldn’t be disturbed.

To what end? They genuinely believed he’d die if he stayed, so they’d do whatever they had to in order to protect him.

The car braked hard, and he heard tires squealing. Someone shouted in French: “Get out! Get out!”

Linus felt it through the chassis when the doors were flung open. Moments later, he was being lifted out of the trunk, laid down on the ground, and his bindings unwrapped.

As he rose to his feet, he saw his brothers kneeling beside the car with their faces downturned and their hands behind their heads. He turned to the security guard beside him. “Don’t you dare fucking hurt them! And you can’t call the police.”

Linus had never seen the man before, but he nodded respectfully. “Of course. We will release them when you’re clear. They will be fine.”

Linus wanted to reply, “Merci,” but Marcel caught the word in his throat. He works for us. He works for you. Don’t thank him for doing his job.

13

Linus swam through the dark water, away from the boat. He paused and looked back over his shoulder: Rufus, Silus, and Caius all stood on the deck, wretched and abandoned, watching him escape. Why would he leave them behind? His guilt and horror at the thought of his betrayal cut into him like a cord around his skin, and as he moved his arms he saw it: a loop of fishing line, tangled around him, biting into his shoulders and torso.

Oh, good, I’m dreaming, he thought. He took control, shaking off the silly metaphorical cord and parting the water, creating a slanted cylinder of air that reached from the surface to his house on the seafloor. He slid down the inside of the cylinder, passing through the library’s skylight as smoothly as the camera in Citizen Kane.

Inside it was warm and the lamps blazed brightly. He shook the water off his skin like a dog and walked barefoot over the carpet to the shelf where the new periodicals were kept.

The clock on the wall read three a.m. A new pamphlet of Guinard’s memoirs had arrived; Linus settled into a plush armchair and read through the latest installment.

It opened with Guinard’s recollections of, and reflections on, Waking Linus’s encounter with his brothers at the motel. Linus read and reread the passage carefully, but he could detect no trace of suspicion, no subtext of mistrust. Both Guinard’s spies, and everything he’d now seen and felt through Waking Linus’s eyes, told a story in which the three of them had fought desperately to save their wayward brother. Never mind if the protégé himself had not entirely faced up to the prospect of his own demise, and took solace in a vague conviction that he might endure as a significant component in an amalgamated Linus-Marcel; the three people who knew him best clearly believed otherwise. They understood how weak he was, and how easily he’d be subjugated, then snuffed out entirely.

Linus skimmed the rest, which consisted of Guinard’s tedious daily routine and even more dreary meditations and recollections, but it was up to Waking Linus to take this guff seriously as notes for his character’s role. He put the pamphlet aside and walked over to the shelf that held the volumes recounting the lives of his brothers.

As he touched the spines of the bound copies of these temporarily suspended serials, he felt a pang of guilt; rereading old issues would help him pass the time while he lay dreaming—in between revisiting Zola and Proust—but how badly would the three of them be suffering while he bunkered down and waited for Guinard to die?

He wanted to believe that they would reason their way out of despair into an understanding of the secret he couldn’t reveal to them—and that they themselves, if they came to know it, could never speak out loud. Guinard would be watching them, gauging their progression from grief to resignation, and the long con they hadn’t known they were to be a part of would rely on them appearing to continue to mourn.

About the Author

Greg Egan has published more than sixty short stories and thirteen novels. His work has won the Hugo Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and seven Japanese Seiun awards. His latest publication is the novella Dispersion from Subterranean Press.

Last Wishes

D.A. Xiaolin Spires

The urn looked like it weighed a million pounds, but when I picked it up from the bottom, it was as light as a feather. These artisans were full of trickery and skill like that. I’m guessing that’s why my mom chose it.

“Be careful, Jinying,” Dr. Lee-way, the head artisan, said. The hologram designer next to him nodded at the handles, a silent request that I pick it up from there.

“I will,” I said. I moved my hands to the handle and raised it higher. On the bottom were their signatures and the encryption code that certified the authenticity of the piece that surrounded the tiny hole for tuning.

Dr. Lee-way pushed a paper toward me. “Sign here,” he said. “That will confirm the credit transfer.”

I scribbled with a flourish in multiple languages as the form required: mother language of your name and phonetic translation. 津瑩. Jinying.

Dr. Lee-way glanced at my signature and up at me and said, “Seems fitting. Jin. Ying.” He stretched out the syllables, thinking. “My Chinese isn’t great, but isn’t that . . . ferrying . . . conveying . . . and the luster of gems.” He reached out, stroked the urn, and laughed. “You’ll be quite the carrier, no, quite the chauffeur, for this treasure.”

“That’s an interesting interpretation,” I said. “My name’s more about migration, for the jin and the ying reflects my mom’s love for appearance and cosmetics: luster.” I touched my face, thinking about her flawless skin.

He nodded at me, then touched the urn, urging me to pick it up.

I shook the urn, seeing the puzzle-like cracks in the cloisonné design-ware. I felt across the surface. There it was, a few of the flame tree flower pieces made from dray-copper wire I pinched and handed to the artisans years before my mother passed. Across the urn were flowers of all kinds, and also images of that little blue marble in space of our homeland and the Driftnet colonies we’ve transplanted to as our new home in generations after. I had sketched this out according to my mom’s wishes and sent it to the experts. My mom was adamant that I have a hand in her design. She said she wanted the fruits of my labor always near her, so it would feel like she would be cared for.

Of course I would care for her. Even more than doing some sketches and adding a few pinches of dray-copper wire on an elaborate never-yet-seen custom-made puzzle vase.

I pressed my nail into a signature crimson mark in one of the designs of the flame tree flowers, near the inlay draymetal that I had bent. A holo projected from that side of the urn. Dr. Lee-way moved aside and I stepped back to see a brilliant rotating flame tree, its plumage of red-hot lanterns reaching outward like arms trying to pull in the heavens. I thought it might project with her voice, but this one was accompanied by the erhu, the radiant tree dazzling against the mellow sound of drawn-out notes. It was well rendered, without even a hint of voxelation, the contours of the erhu as crisp as the notes. In a few moments, the tree fizzled away and the music faded.

The holo designer raised his brow and said, “So?”

“Looks like top-of-the-line work,” I said. He looked pleased, his eyes crinkling.

“I imagine I’d be able to crack the puzzle in a few weeks,” I said.

Dr. Lee-way laughed. “Ah, the puzzle. That’s not my line of work, so I can’t speak to that. I know Mr. Xin collaborated with your mom for a long while on this. If I know Mr. Xin—I mean look at how his trademark attention to detail is all over this—you’ll be spending years trying to crack it. Maybe your whole life.”

I raised my brows. “I can’t spend my whole life. The clock’s ticking. Custom says I have seven days for my offerings—adjusted to seventy for space travel. That’s the length of time for a funeral; then comes the mourning.”

I shot him a glance.

He turned around, took a look at my bothered expression, and looked flustered. “Hopefully you’ll get it solved soon,” he said. “For custom’s sake.”

It’s not just custom. Customs shift through years and generations, so they’re not static and definitive. I wouldn’t mind that much breaking custom. It’s more that these are the last wishes of my mom and if I didn’t fulfill them, I wouldn’t be fulfilling the requirements of filial piety. I’d have failed. But, I didn’t bother telling Lee-way all that.

I pressed down on another mark and a rocking chair illuminated from the urn. It rocked back and forth by itself, and Teresa Teng’s clear voice broke through, singing about lost love. The image shimmered and in a few moments also dissolved into the air, like it never was.

“I’ll take care of it.”

“Yongli would have liked that.” I nodded, as my heart wrenched at the mention of my mom’s name. Lee-way lacked tact, but he meant well.

He handed me a tuning screw. “Be sure to keep the holos aligned with the sound. Just a few turns a day. These old techniques need a lot of upkeep, not so popular anymore, but the visuals are stunning.”

I placed the urn in its fresh-keep case and sealed it. These top-of-the-line artisan-crafted, technologist-tinkered custom urns cost a pretty penny, not to mention all the accoutrements that go with it. They’re not like the run-of-the-mill popular ones. This one was experimental, incorporating prototype tech—even more pricey. The tuning screw, the fresh-keep packaging for transport, the checkup consultation holos and enhancement wipes. I felt like I was now in charge of a small, high-maintenance, extravagant pet. It cost me more than half my savings.

But, it was quite a work of art. That was for sure.

And, according to my mom’s wishes, her ashes weren’t in there. There was something else going on with the urn. She told me before she passed, that she would leave her legacy to me in the form of an enigma. A grand puzzle I’d have to crack open.

Maybe it was a kind of megalomaniacal flex of power to keep me running in circles. But, I really just think that she wanted to play. Even after her death, she wanted to stay in touch with me, to play, to be involved in my life and share a game with me. Like when we were kids.

She was always like that. Intrigued by challenges and social in her own way, doling out intimacy in the form of brainteasers.

My mom loved riddles and puzzles. When I was a little girl, she sent me on scavenger hunts. She said that she felt bad I was so disconnected with my heritage and dropped pieces of culture for me to pick up. I said culture wasn’t embedded in things, but in people and language. She shook her head and laughed.

“Oh, honey, of course culture is embedded in things. It’s a lasting mainstay of our civilization. People disappear, but things stay. Look at archeological digs. Back on Earth, the home of your ancestors. Pompeii’s ruins. The Terracotta Warriors. The Temple of Hatshepsut.”

Her eyes shone, and she paused. I guessed she was probably thinking of the magnificent reign of Egypt’s first female pharaoh, stories she told me when I was a kid. She used to embellish on the tales, speak gloriously of the great monument the Queen-as-King Hatshepsut built for herself for her afterlife.

“Things give us memory,” she said, gesturing to the house, as if that was a grand story in and of itself, to rival any temple.

“Memory is held in the minds of men,” I said.

“Women, too.”

“You know what I mean,” I muttered.

“But, even if it’s held in the minds, you need that spark to revive it. And things provide that spark.”

She looked wistful for a moment. I scoured the yard, looking for this thing. Always something that she wanted me to find. Her clues were enigmatic, as if only someone who was her could know.

“Made from fire and reaches for the sky,” I said again, crunching on a fortune cookie with the tang of citrus, pushing the sliver of paper in my pocket. Mom was leaning against a rocking chair, also snacking on fortune cookies. Hers were empty, without the iconic fortune paper slips. She had hand pressed them earlier that day, slipping in clues only for me. Shell-shaped and with a dash of her signature pomelo extract, they were tasty.

“Made from fire and reaches for the sky,” I said, tapping fingers on my palm. I traced the yard with my feet. My sandals left impressions in the wet dirt. We had no chimneys in our neighborhood, so it couldn’t be that. What is made from fire? Ash?

Finally, as I neared the trunk of the ol’ tree at the corner of the yard, I saw a flash of a smile appear on my mom’s face. Ah, I said, shimmying up the trunk and grabbing a handful of the bright yellow flowers. “The flame tree. Made from fire.”

“Yes, Koelreuteria bipinnata. Native to Southern China.”

“Yeah? Is it really native to China? Traveled quite far.”

“Yes, like us. The Chinese flame tree. Also called the ‘complex feather leaf tree’ in Chinese. Doesn’t quite capture the poeticism of the flames though.”

“Not really flaming now, is it?”

“No. Too bad. Have to wait for later in the colony year,” she said. Its bright red lantern-shaped seed capsules only flourished in the autumn. These yellow flowers were more like embers in comparison.

I unleashed the crinkled flowers from my hand, letting them rain down onto the yard. I could hear mom crunching on her cookies. “It’s pretty in the autumn. But, the flowers are useful, too. Remember, in Chinese medicine, the flowers clean the liver, detoxify, and promote clear eyes.”

“So you sent me to the flame tree to collect flowers? To, what, detoxify my liver?”

“No, it’s to remind you that culture is in things. Medicinal practices in plants. But, also, you have another clue.” She pointed.

I poked around and resting in the fork of the branches found the next clue, as she promised, another fortune cookie. This time when I cracked it open, all it said was “Aha! You’ve found me.”

“Anticlimactic,” I said. I threw the cookie in my mouth. Within was a sudden burst of flavor, red bean and pomelo. She must have lined the cookie shell with extracts.

Well, that was unexpected.

“Sometimes you just got to enjoy the cookie,” my mom said. “Another message from the sages.” She laughed.

She came over, patted me over the head, and shoved a bunch of empty cookies into my hands. “Eat.”

I snacked on the rest of the fortune cookies in my pocket. My mom handmade enough of them to last me for years, but I could only take a small bag of them for my trip to complete my filial duty.

I was using the porto-vac, sucking up the crumbs from my new comfort suit, while on line for the security check. Once we got to the port, us passengers would be divvied up into autoships.

There were huge cruise shuttles heading back to Earth in the other direction, but mine would be one of the smaller ships, holding only a small crew and a spattering of passengers to go out farther into the Driftnet colonies.

The ticket was terribly pricey, and thank goodness for the research being funded last minute through the Zhongqing Marketing Corp. They’re trying to push through new lines of landscape gardening for sale. They rejected my request to do cultural acquisition on language and religious rites, but held on to my application. Instead, they wrote a comment that they wanted me to collect interviews on gardening practices and ecological data and would fund me for that, since I was one of the few who had a good grasp of far-colony dialects. Beholden to my funders, how can I refuse? I mean, it’s all for my mom, in the end. They granted me a research ticket that allowed me to bring one personal item greater than 10”x10”. That allowance was a luxury.

The security guard grabbed the urn case and pulled it open. I stepped up to say something, but as I opened my mouth I glanced at her partner guard with piercing black eyes like gulfs. He glowered at me. I backed down, but when she took the urn out of the suction mold, holding it tight, she nearly scratched the luminescent enamel embossments with her comm watch.

Blood rose up my back. “Be careful. Can you please pick it up by the handles?” I sounded like Dr. Lee-way.

She shot me a direct look into the pupils and nodded at her partner who held out his hand. “Okay, hand over your other bags.”

Security. At least they’re not asking for a pat down. I showed them my badge.

The bearded partner read aloud, “Jinying Chang. Anthropologist, Research Systems, Funded by Zhongqing Marketing Corps.” He scanned it.

“Ah, Jinying. Yeah, you’re on our list,” he said. The security guard holding my priceless beauty suddenly became a lot less rough with my mom’s urn. She swabbed a sensifabric over, which illuminated it in a bright blue haze. She rotated it, holding it by one of the handles this time, going over the surface of the cloisonné design work with the sensor light.

“What is this?” she asked. “I’m getting some strange readings.”

“It’s a special vase for rituals,” I said, in rehearsed nonchalance.

“Looks like an urn,” said the bearded one.

“Urn? You can’t bring human remains on board.”

“No, no human remains, of course. It’s not an urn. It’s a special vessel used in ancient spell rituals.” I clenched my teeth and flashed my badge again. Hello, anthropologist, don’t you see the words? I wanted to shake them.

But, they were right, of course. It was an urn.

“We’re going to have to run it through the Insta-tell. We’ll have it out soon.”

I felt like I got punched in the gut. I couldn’t let them just take it. What if they throw it in the incineration and reclamation pile for prohibited goods? Even if it wasn’t prohibited because technically the ashes were on me, not in the urn.

I could feel my mom’s last wishes recede from fulfillment. I couldn’t let that happen.

“I’d rather have it in my sight. It’s a one-of-a-kind rare artifact.”

She looked at my badge again and up at my face, as if that would somehow help convince her.

“Fine, but that means we’re doing a pat check, too.”

Inside I groaned, but I nodded and followed them without a word.

I hated pat checks—violating crevices, poking in with their lighted wands. They couldn’t just use the sensifabric like any other humane service agent, no, they had to take out the wand and jab and prod, abusing their authority. I usually would submit a few direct complaints that would get the pat check override, but I had too much at stake to risk the delay waiting for Zhongqing’s administration to get the clearance through.

I also couldn’t let the guards find the ashes flattened out and stored under fauxskin over my thighs.

I sneezed a few times as they took me to the sensor room.

I squirmed as they started the prodding. I told them to be careful with my knees, that I had surgery in the past. I tried quelling the shaking that would give me away. They couldn’t see me nervous.

As she got to the secret compartment, a bead of sweat ran down my neck.

I sneezed loudly, complaining of allergies. It made the prodder she held jump just a few inches away from my legs.

I kept waiting for the loud beep that would do me in. At one point she stopped near my hip. “The prodder might be low on charge. I might have to get a new one and do it all over.”

I wasn’t sure if she was serious or messing with me just because I gave her lip in the beginning.

She banged it a few times and then started at my ankles again. I sneezed a few more times for good measure.

The prodder tickled the insides of my thighs and I could feel it even against the fauxskin. I had smeared on a sensor-cloaking cream over the flattened sacks of hidden ashes. Bought on black market and not completely unsure if it was effective or a dud. The person who sold it to me had a prodder, which she showed beeped for a sample of remains but then didn’t for the bags of my mom’s remains on top of which she lathered her product. It worked for the seller, but could’ve been a ploy. It was also pricey. Had I been conned?

I was skeptical, but had few choices.

This is for my mom, I thought. Hidden away into the secret compartments in me as she would’ve liked, like I was a walking puzzle box progeny. A puzzle box in which she could so comfortably nestle into after death. I sneezed a few times and the guard actually apologized, going faster.

No beeps.

When she got to my waist, I breathed a sigh of relief, still sneezing a few times for good measure.

She let me out, giving me the “spell ritual vessel” and its case, not even bothering to put it back in its specialized packaging.

“You’re free to go,” she said, whisking me away.

Did I mention I hated security? I continued an occasional sneeze as I packed the urn away with a gentleness that they really should’ve shown. I grabbed my other bags, which were cleared. Under my patch of fauxskin, my real skin itched. Over that layer of my real skin, my mom’s ashes—culture embedded in lifeless things—lay flat, waiting for their arrival to the eventual burial site.

I repacked my other bags. They made a mess of them, with some useless knickknacks gone, down into pockets to be exchanged by port hands.

Security.

I shook my head again. In the end, I tricked them and got away with it, so I really can’t complain. I should celebrate how ineffective they were.

On the trip, I would slip away from my bunkmates and find a quiet space in the standing “lab cubicle”—just a tiny space with a ledge, or as they designated it, “lab table,” to be alone. I wondered what fool would try to set up an experiment here, given the unsteadiness of the ship’s movement and the complete lack of space, equipment, safety wear, and setup protocol. Maybe a thought experiment, I considered, laughing to myself. A thought experiment on how to conduct an experiment here in this tiny tease of a room, where even I barely fit.

I tapped on the table.

Nobody was here to share the joke. I thought that my mom, her ashes still hidden in my thigh, might’ve gotten the joke.

It itched down there on my thigh. I had to move her elsewhere, but I couldn’t figure out where. The urn was completely out. She and her list of demands. It was so Yongli, but well, I couldn’t just say she was dead and not care. I couldn’t put her remains in until I got to the designated spot. It just wasn’t right to defy last wishes. Besides, I was curious what this was all about.

I tuned the urn to the directions of Dr. Lee-way, as I’ve done every day since I received it.

After tuning, I set the vessel on the table and pressed the pads of my fingers along the delicate cloisonné designs, watching holo after holo come alive. This had my mom written all over it. Things upon things coming to life, as if things had a spirit of their own moving them.

The wok she so cherished banged in delight by itself against the stove, sending a musical of notes. I was glad for the soundproofing of the lab cubicle as I hummed along with the rhythmic beats it made against a holographic kitchen countertop.

Experimental fuzzy fabric socks that wiggled its toe-area on its own. I had gotten them for her. They were supposed to be super toasty and cozy, but she said it was like lighting a fire on her foot. Too warm.

The hovercar she called Shandian for its lightning speed. The door would jam and I was delighted the holoartists captured that detail for her in their projections.

Jars and jars of cream spilling out. She was dermatologist and owner of her own cosmetics brand, always saying that she would crack the puzzle of wrinkles and old age. In the end, they got to her, after decades of staying wrinkle-free, a poster child for her creams and the best-selling point that could be, the last months of unchecked stress and poor health left her face as wrinkled as maps of hovercar routes.

I stuck my hand through one of the holographic jars, remembering the cream. I felt almost nothing, only the slightest of tingles at my index finger. The other jars were hitting the wall, lighting up and warping, impeded by the contained small space of the “lab space.”

Liquids were too heavy or else I would’ve brought a jar of the cream with me. I felt my own face, with creases starting to form.

The holo fizzled away and the sound of the jingles for her brand receded. I wiped off a tear, patted my eyes so they wouldn’t look so puffy, and tapped on my cheeks to fluff them up a bit. There.

I set the urn back against the cushioned case, pulled the top closed, and stepped out. There was a man with a goatee who held the door open for me. He had in his hand what looked like an old-school microscope case and a sack of what sounded like jangling transborosilicate.

Really? Petri dishes here? Good luck with that.

I couldn’t help but smile. My mom would’ve joined in on the joke.

For all her interest in skin care, my mom had really little interest in people. Sure, she laughed at their personalities and listened to gossip, but when it came down to it, it was really what was on the surface. Her attention was scientific and focused on the epidermis, almost like a thing in and of itself, disconnected to the person. She said, it was more about lifting up humanity as a culture, bringing us to our most aesthetically pleasing state, like we were monuments. But, of what?

Of ourselves. Of course.

It didn’t make much sense to me, but it fit her worldview. It was like lawn care or trimming a hedge. Topiary-like.

Like grooming the flame tree. I remember her holding laser saws, cutting off wayward branches, the seedpods falling like little blazing shooting stars, as she tried to achieve something akin to symmetry. She was smiling then, wide, like there was nothing more exhilarating than shaping them.

“It’s about making a figure to eclipse the enigma within. You get this general shape, but think about all the nooks and crannies of the branches that get hidden away. In scavenger hunts, you exploit these hidden spots that others don’t see.” Her eyes twinkled.

After arriving at the site of my fieldwork, Lancon, I asked all the right questions. The urn was now in its case nestled tightly in a local artisan traveling sack, slung across my shoulders. Light as a feather, as always. But, I was weighed down by the memories and the need to collect data. By then, I had moved my mom’s remains into hidden compartments in my knee-high liquid-proof field boots.

I shoved aside thoughts of my mom as I gathered narratives about all kinds of plants, little tendrils that curled up to the skies, petals that glowed and changed colors, roots that crawled horizontally across towns.

But like the roots, the memories would crawl back to me. I met an old woman and her three grandchildren as they mashed up roots. I drew sketches with my zex-quill, taking holoflash data to be converted by artists. With micro-tweezers, I collected samples and slipped them into specialized silvery sachets.

I tripped over a few words, but was surprised how much of the dialect came back to me once at the site. As I conversed, I made the local girls laugh with imitations of the gloopy noises the roots were making. Sticking my fingers into the lifa root to prod out the clumpy parts, I couldn’t help but think of my mom’s force-feeding of ginseng paste that was supposed to help the skin. “It’s good for you,” her voice wormed into my ears as I spoke, the giggle of teenage girls surrounding me receded. “An antioxidant, antiaging, and promotes elasticity.” I remembered the bitter aftertaste that goopy ginseng concoction left in my mouth.

I remember all the times I rebelled. Like some of the other teens I met at the swirl gardens who refused to participate in the trimming and instead hopscotched along the rocks lining the dirt. Their parents yelled at them to not run with scissors and they threw them across the stones in defiance. I took holoflashes of those instances, jotting down their slang, marking them as “youth at play; youth at defiance.”

I took notes to myself on the language of religion—all the utterances and inscriptions. I wasn’t sanctioned by the funders to do that, but you can’t help a curious mind. Plus, after doing fieldwork for years, you realize that all these parts of culture are entangled and it doesn’t hurt to take notes. I saw how they honored the dead with words.

There were new practices mixed in with the old. Besides burning holo incense and chanting, villagers dressed in drapes tied holographic fabric slips with words as a new custom alongside the age-old tradition of erecting funerary poles.

They asked me to tie a fabric slip to the pole of a village chief I met years ago, who I was sad to learn had passed. I affixed the fabric to the pole. The silky fibers seared into the pole, as if grasping it. A spark activated and sent the words scrawled on the fabric shooting out in a bright crimson hologram, illuminating the skies. Projected in a curvy script with many slashes and dots as phonetic markers, I read the words in my slow comprehension:

“In memory, you live in us.”

The holo began to fizzle and flicker, accompanied by the sound of a prolonged sizzling “sssssss.”

As the holo finally ran out of power, and the skies returned to an onyx adorned with stars, the slip of fabric detached and unfurled. It flew in the wind, tackling my arm for a moment and tickling my skin. It smelled like the heady aroma of holo incense. It settled onto the garden floor, where it would decay into nutrients for the plants.

A shiver ran up my spine and goose bumps ran up my arm.

There was a rhyming feature that I couldn’t capture in my translations, no matter how hard I tried. I found it poetic. I also thought my description in my notes of the fabric was lacking. Silky didn’t cut it. It was a satiny smooth that glided, like words slipping into and out of my ears. Just touching that slip of fabric was a full-body experience, sending tingles throughout my limbs.

But, there was something else. A memory.

The whole process reminded me of the many fortune cookie slivers of my mom, still awaiting my return home, sending me messages even after her death. Like prearranged clues into the puzzle of her afterlife.

In grief, you start wondering the strangest of things. Did she even care about me at all? Was it always about things? My appearance, my skin? Was it about her? The cracking of her puzzles? The skin as the layer that matters most, the outer beauty that counts?

A few days later in the village, a cute, lanky, ruffled-hair twelve year old ran into my sack with a firecracker. It was an ol’ analog kind, not holo, which surprised me. They looked like flame tree seedpods threaded together. They must have gotten these made locally since you can’t get them onto the Corps-approved trading ships. Probably got here through one of the “underground” skygliders. (My anthropologist brain liked to see how holdover words like “underground” to mean “subversive” or “illicit” still has meaning even when commodities are sent through the skies, high above ground.)

I waved at him while he was holding the firecracker. Holding it was no problem. The problem was when it went off. He didn’t throw it across the gardens like he was supposed to.

In catastrophic blasts, it exploded in sonic booms. Bang bang bang. Boom boom boom.

I jumped back three feet, tripped over rocks, and fell, twisting. Something in me rattled. Maybe it was all my organs and more. The shock traveled through my arm to the ground. My eardrum pounded. My nose was in dirt, shivering. I smelled the earthy scent of this transplanted garden ground, my head swimming.

I wiggled my fingers. My arms felt numb, broken even.

The firecracker banged a few more times. It let out a long hiss and crackled.

It was still hissing when I stood up, checked my arms (not broken), and let the wooziness subside.

When I felt steady enough to walk, I went to check on the boy. He was knocked over, too. A ringing in my ear grew louder and louder. I checked his breathing and picked him up. He was half-conscious, mumbling something I couldn’t quite hear past the ringing as I carried him over my shoulders in a fireman carry. He was skinny and deceptively light for his lankiness. Not so heavy at all, I thought.

I was still feeling the rattle within me, making what seemed like the longest walk I’ve taken to the infirmary, my legs trudging with a heavy step.

The first thing the medic did was put the boy into a calm-inducing sleep, with a few spritzes of the composite serenity spray.

They left me awake, with the ringing that transformed into a rippling sound in my ear. The medic gave me some bitter herbs to chew on, followed by a star-shaped cracker. I began to feel better, with the sound of the rippling receding. They put me against what I translated as a hug-all, a giant stuffed-animal-like pair of nurturing limbs made of synthetic fibers mixed with an organic cellulose-based fluff.

The cracker left me with the aftertaste of citrus. Nestled in this cocoon, I felt soothed like being in my mom’s arms when I myself was twelve.

It was only later, when I was tuning the urn, that I found the hairline crack in the cloisonné.

I drew in my breath and held it. No.

The urn was otherwise intact, but the petal of one flower was marred by this crack. I breathed out, thinking that the rattle within me all the while was also a rattle of the urn. The thought of its damage disoriented me. In carelessness, I had destroyed the beauty of it.

No, it wasn’t destruction. Not even damage. Just a scratch. Get a hold of yourself. I breathed in and out.

I just wanted everything to be perfect for my mom.

I felt along the urn for a while, pressing and checking to see if the holos were affected.

Most of the ones I had found projected their holos as they have in the past, with the same shimmery cinematic presentation.

But, when I pressed on the trigger that I knew to unleash the rocking chair holo, I heard the tiniest sound of a creak and a panel of light shot out and receded as fast as it came. I tried pressing it a few more times, like a desperate child tackling the buttons of a slow hover-elevator.

The rocking chair holo never projected in all its glory. At one point, there was a slight suggestion of the curved “skis” under rocking chair legs, but then nothing else materialized.

I felt a numbness creep into me.

I breathed out and stopped clicking on that rocking chair button. I moved on.

After stroking and prodding the surface for some time, I came to the conclusion that I didn’t think it messed up the integrity of any of the other holos. Overall, I didn’t think it affected the mechanism for me to crack open the puzzle. I couldn’t say exactly how I knew that the integrity of the puzzle was intact, but after I calmed down, humming to myself an old Teresa Teng song my mom used to sing to me as a lullaby, I just had this feeling that it would be okay. Everything would work out, even if my rational mind told me that things went awry, people died, and there was no assurance in the world.

I shut that rational mind out and focused on the present, humming louder.

I remembered Dr. Lee-way’s advice and dug out the ubertape from my luggage. I moved my mom’s remains into my suitcase, no longer sure if my hidden boot compartments were a safe holding spot for her ashes. They was too exposed there to all my activities. Better safe in this room.

I checked the seal on my locking device, affixed the verbal shutdown of the room. I hobbled over to the port (my legs still weak) and picked out some comparable slathers to the ones Dr. Lee-way suggested from the supply store. I wasn’t sure if it would work, but when I got back, I bandaged the patient, i.e. the to-be vessel for my mom, as directed, as gentle as lathering face cream on a kitten, my mom used to say, which made no sense to me then.

It seemed to make more sense to me now, as I did this quiet work.

I wished I could tell her that.

I brushed on the slather remover and tugged at the cloth. It resisted the peel. It felt like the reveal after cosmetic surgery—someone with a new face. Would I recognize her?

When the cloth gave way, my eyes bore into the urn, right at that spot. Yes, it was there. Faint, but still there. The tiniest of fissures visible to the naked eye.

Apropos, I thought. Like wrinkles blooming on my mom’s face as she neared the end of her term here in this universe.

I wanted to maintain that supple beauty that my mom effortlessly strove to achieve. Okay, it wasn’t effortless. It was the constant application of creams and concoctions that she put together and sold, brushes slid against faces, incessantly making holo calls and presentations for her business, for investors and sales. She had a team under her, but she liked to be on the front lines, showing off how she cracked the puzzle of agelessness.

In the end, agelessness wasn’t solved. It fell on her, too, taking her away from me.

I pressed on the trigger for the rocking chair projection. The form came up in holographic light, but it was fainter than before. It faded away quick.

I felt a pang of failure. Mom left me one last puzzle to figure out, one last enigma to share between us, and I botched it up. And above that, this vessel was her new skin, her carrying case that she would dwell in for the rest of eternity, and already it was marred.

I heard a footstep. It was the twelve year old. He was walking along, no limp, no issues. Children heal fast.

He came up, looked sheepish, and whispered a thanks. With deft fingers, he held up a thin strand of gold. It was thread, so thin, thinner than a strand of hair, it almost didn’t exist. Put it against the ambient light and squint and it almost looks like a translucent wisp of vapor floating in the sky. It was made of the same material as the fabric slips for the funerary poles, but spun into a nearly impossibly delicate width.

He had tied some knots into it. It was an exceptional skill of manipulation for someone I had charged to be so clumsy.

When I felt along it, his brown-speckled eyes became wide, his pupils dilated as if beseeching.

I recognized the pattern from my research. It was one used in condolences, a freeing of the soul and a wishing of eternal comfort. I gave him a pat on the back and cried.

He looked nervous and uncomfortable, watching a grown woman cry. He passed along a local organic glue, said some perfunctory words, and made an exit, rushing along in such agility, it was as if he had never even gotten hurt.

Later, with careful fingers, I affixed the thread to the crack, covering the hairline fissure. It was beautiful, reminding me of kintsugi, the time mom taught me how to splice back broken mortar and pestles and ceramic cream jars with melted gold. This golden thread now contained a message, however, a reminder of our journey together—me and this vessel and my mom’s remains—through villages and people who knew me as a researcher and cared.

As I was pressing down the thread onto the fissure, the seal made a strange gurgling noise, and it triggered the holo. I watched as the holo lit up in a color so bright, it bounced in a sheen off the front of my nose.

It was the same rocking chair, but even more resplendent. Was it me, or was Teresa Teng’s ballad sung in an even clearer voice, one that sounded strangely like my mom’s? And was it me, or did I see the faintest silhouette of two figures sitting on the chair, one mama-shaped and one child-shaped on her lap? I shook my head. I must be imagining it.

I rubbed my temples. Maybe it’s the roots for the headache they gave me.

But, I stared harder until it fizzled away. I tried touching the holo. Nothing but a slight tingle.

I pressed the enamel trigger again. And again. Yes, they were there. Faint mama silhouette and child. I put my finger again to it, feeling the tickle again. That’s her. That’s me.

They were there.

At first, I thought if I collected a bunch of these threads and glued them on, maybe it would work. All these holograms would pop to life with more vividness, more life.

I did bartering, trading my expertise in linguistic and cultural translation at Lancon for supplies. I spent time there fulfilling these trades, scrawling down texts and handwriting scrolls and posters. I helped administer deals and correct misunderstandings. I arbitrated negotiations. I usually avoid all this kind of interaction, anything more than collecting data and minor participation in rituals—it felt too much like meddling.

It was something my mom was good at, ingratiating herself with others to get her product sold. She said that customers were just enigmas to crack. Once you figure them out, you know what they want. And she would say, I always have a solution for them—in the form of cosmetics.

I managed to collect in the form of payment, a few of these cherished gold threads, doled out infrequently, only one at a time and in exceptional times like births, unions, and deaths. It was lucky I even got three of them.

I used the same glue and tried a few ways of manipulating the thread. I tied one in the same way as the boy, incorporating the condolence message. It didn’t work. My hands weren’t as nimble as his, but I checked a few times and the knots were in the right place, looped in the same ways. I tried undoing them, having to procure some removal paste, which also cost a lot in interaction and trade.

After finagling with it for some time, I gave up. No other holo became more brilliant or had features I didn’t see before. Even when I added another layer of the gold strand, the rocking chair one stayed exactly the same, with only a mere suggestion of silhouetted figures.

I left Lancon in worse spirits than coming in. Sure, I gained a clue, but I was far from figuring anything out. It was a tease, tantalizing me, but I wasted so much effort here. I kept the three strands, ubertaped them to the pack holding my mom’s remains.

There was more to figure out.

I traveled in a local skyglider to the burial site, in Conme. Sixty-nine days had passed and tomorrow would be the last of the funerary period. My deadline for cracking this puzzle fast approached.

Usually, I avoided the skygliders, going for the more official routes, but the parties I helped at the village were so happy with my time doing translation and negotiation work, they banded together to get me a flight out. I packed my things and said my goodbyes.

The twelve year old handed me a bag of dried flowers for an infusion. They were macolan, desiccated but still flashy, and reminded me of the bright yellow flame tree flowers.

I thanked him. I shook the flowers and took a whiff. A floral potpourri scent that reminded me of jasmine filled my nostrils.

I touched elbows with him and bid him goodbye.

It felt lonely without the villagers.

With my fieldwork done, I was able to make this side trip to Thres in Conme, outside my funding parameters. I wondered why my mom had chosen this as a burial site. She said it had to do with feng shui and some rather complicated calculation involving angles and starlight to Earth, conveyance, and as the natural burial site of our ancestors after leaving Earth. I didn’t understand the feng shui talk no matter how much she propounded it. She said it was about angles, movement, and vibrancy, like the shape of your face and appearance of the buoyancy of your cheeks relative to your eyes.

I didn’t know what she was talking about then. But there was one thing I knew now. I felt dejected. I’d end up burying her and the urn because I reached the deadline, never cracking the case. Never fulfilling her wishes.

Dr. Lee-way was right. I had played with the urn until my hands felt sore, my knuckles aching from poking and prodding. I saw the holos over and over, I’m sure I could have drawn them out with my zex-quill one by one in succession with my eyes closed. I could sing in detail the music that flowed along with them. But, only the faintest outline of what might be, the latency of what laid within, had appeared, and I stared at the mysterious silhouettes until I could bore holes through the holo itself.

As the skyglider approached Thres, the pilot must’ve felt my anxiety and stayed quiet the whole time. But, at one point, he started coughing. It was this uncontrollable cough that whipped through the air. I knew the ship was safe since even the skygliders were equipped with autopilots, but I started to worry about his health.

I gave him a desiccated macolan. He saw the flower and smiled.

I poured a hot liquid from a decanter, careful not to upset the sediment. Then I took the macolan flower from him and dropped it in the liquid, watching it bloom in slow motion, brilliant tendrils reaching out into the amber liquid.

The pilot, who had stopped coughing, introduced himself and began to talk.

His name was Kaspa. He said he heard I lost my mom. I just nodded, not feeling like chatting, even if I did miss the company of the villagers. He said he lost his wife a few years back. He talked about her with such open affection: the way she used to dance the lamdaca, her incredible skills in material science, her way with certain chemicals. He showed me a handful of golden strands. “She made these.”

That made me open up.

“She made the funerary strands?” I asked, completely awed. He had a clump of them—maybe twenty. It was so haphazardly in his palm, like the clumped filling of hug-all’s. I’ve seen slips and cloths made of this fabric, but I’ve never seen so many gossamer strands at once. The fibers were so delicate that I was told many snap before reaching that thinness.

It was a small fortune in his hands.

He tucked them into a pocket and laughed. “Yeah, my wife was a genius, amazing.” His eyes looked wet, and he stared at me for a moment.

I looked away.

“I got one recently. From a twelve-year-old boy.”

“A twelve-year-old boy. It couldn’t be Rondi, could it?”

I thought for a moment. “Yeah. Rondi. I think. Yeah.”

“Tall boy, yeh high?”

“Yes, tall and lanky. Disheveled hair. He brought it to me and it was so expertly knotted.”

“That’s my little boy!” cried the pilot.

My heart did a flip. I cocked my head and looked at the pilot. I didn’t see the resemblance. Had he mistaken?

“No, Rondi’s dad is Kayel. Kayel came with us to the doctor’s when he hurt himself.”

“He hurt himself?” Kaspa looked seriously upset.

“He’s fine. Just got a bit rattled up. He’s fine. He got startled from firecrackers and passed out. We got him to the medic. I saw him myself running about after, completely carefree.”

Kaspa gave a sigh of relief. Tension in his shoulders released.

“No, Kayel is not his dad. I am. Kayel is Rondi’s godfather and current caretaker.”

“You’re his dad?”

“Yes, I’m his dad. Rondi’s my son. I took care of him until Lakla, my wife, died two years ago. I started driving these ships and had little time. It was hard, but I handed him to his godfather for care. I visit him from time to time, but I know it’s not often enough.”

His eyes darted down and he stared at his drink for about a minute.

I looked through my notes. I had a few kinship charts, but I didn’t focus on Rondi’s family, but on other villagers. “So, Kaspa, you’re really Rondi’s dad?

I just couldn’t believe it. They seemed so different and I was convinced Kayel was his father. They even had the same expressions, this worried crease between the eyes. I felt sorry for Rondi, his dad always on the move, in the air, far away.

“I hate to admit it. But, when Lakla died, I lost it. She was everything to me. I would’ve done anything for her. And the one thing she would’ve wanted me to do, I couldn’t. I couldn’t take care of him alone. He looks just like her. Just like her. A spitting image. Just looking at him, it opened up an ache so wide and engulfing, I would’ve fallen in and never climbed out. I couldn’t see him and see my dead wife. I couldn’t.”

Now, the decoction in his hand was shaking. I could see through the transparent mug, the macolan dancing in there like a strange organism, its petal tendrils gliding in the water and trembling.

“Rondi gave me that,” I said, pointing at the flower.

His eyes flashed and crinkled. He took a sip, sighed, and put down the mug. “I know. He loves those flowers. So did Lakla. They used to pick and dry them together. She’s a material scientist. Did I mention that?”

“Yes, you did.” I tried to cover my grin about how proud he was about this fact.

“There’s some compound in those flowers ingrained in the threads. I don’t know it all exactly. Only a few know and I’m not even sure if they know it all. Lakla was a genius, like I said.”

I pulled out a couple of mine. “I have some, too. From your son.”

He picked one up, felt it and stared at it with a faraway look, as if staring through it. “Ah, these, these aren’t the same.”

I gasped, almost letting one slip through my fingers. “They’re frauds?” I picked it up from the skyglider floor, watching it noodle into a ball in my palm.

“No, no, they’re not fraudulent. There are different versions. This is version two. It doesn’t have all the new compounds. My wife was working on these new strands, version three, before she passed. She said she didn’t perfect it, but the version three ones were cutting edge. They even use them now in manufacturing some appliances and other top-of-the-line goods. She was always tinkering, never satisfied.”

I thought for a moment, weighing what I would do next. It could imperil my trip there. Maybe he would turn around right there and then.

I did it anyway. I took out my mom’s urn. Pulled it gently out of its case.

“Is that what I think it is?” His voice was small.

“It’s an urn.”

I showed it to him. The buttons. I watched the holos, crying.

He watched me cry, his eyes traveling to the holos and then to me.

“If you have an urn, then you must have the remains.”

I sniffed, dabbing my eyes with my knuckles. Should I lie?

I thought about his wife, Rondi, and his sincerity about leaving his son. I couldn’t. Not after this.

“Yes,” I said.

“You know I’m not supposed to have this kind of stuff on my ship.”

“I know.”

“They’re remains.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

He breathed a large sigh.

We were silent for a while.

“I’m not going to turn around. But, you’ll . . . you’ll make it up to me. You have to come by more. Come visit my son. He likes you. He gave you a few of these strands and flowers. He doesn’t do that for everyone. He was very close to his mom. They were things of his mom and he doesn’t just give them away.”

I nodded.

He focused out into the skies, the brilliance of stars twinkling in his pupils. “Tell me about your mom,” he said. He gestured at the urn.

I told him. I told him not only the good, but the vanity. Her drive, her ambition. Her cosmetics line with her as the icon. Yongli, even her name, forever beautiful. I wrote it for him: 永麗. Her love for puzzles. This absolute drive to create the best puzzle so I can never unlock it.

“Sounds like my wife. She wanted to pass on her knowledge of material sciences to my son. He liked the flowers and the strands, but he was more of an artist. He’s good with languages and crafts. He’s invented a few of his own languages. He likes creating in his own way.”

He looked wistful. “She was a bit too driven.”

“How did she pass away?” I asked. I went and made myself a concoction as well, tipping the hot water into my own mug and dropping in a macolan flower.

“Stress and lack of sleep. She was overworking herself. I told her to stop, that she didn’t need to, that I could help her with payments. Back then, I was running a small business, but it wasn’t working out. It wasn’t about money, though. She just was too involved. She started missing out on life, on Rondi himself. Didn’t see him for who he was. The irony is that I did, at least I think I did, but I left him.” He clamped up and starting playing with his hands. He looked down, pulled out a sensifabric cloth from the drawer below his seat, and wiped down the viewing window, the glow reflecting off the viewing cauldglass. He checked his readings and continued wiping. “How about your mom? Did she see you?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer him. I started to say something, then switched. I rattled on about her attributes. Her foibles. Her love for puzzles.

He listened.

“Do you like languages?” he asked, suddenly, swirling the now-soaked macolan with his fingers.

“I love languages,” I said. “I think what your son does is amazing. I’m really fond of all things related to communication and expression. Actually, I’m primarily a linguistic anthropologist. But, I also do other cultural work.” I trailed off.

I thought of something, something was piecing together.

The urn. Did she know me? The question stung like a bee. Did she know me?

“Do you have a sharp knife?” I gestured, poking my finger against the urn.

“One that sharp? Hm. Hold on tight.” He pushed a few triggers on his window in front of him and then stepped away. He came back with a laser.

“This is something my wife codesigned to conduct research on her material work. It’s a prototype but works well. It’s a knife that senses organics and will not cut through life but only through materials that you designate.” He showed me. He turned it on and passed the scarlet ray through his finger. I winced. It didn’t cut. He adjusted the tip, directed the light at the mug.

“She used to get a lot of cuts on her fingers. Not deep, but enough to annoy her and slow down her work. She was always striving to achieve efficiency.” He slid his finger down a wheel on the side of the laser knife. “You can set the depth, too. You can also adjust the set depth by manipulation of the knife in your hands. Just push down on it like you would any other knife.”

He demonstrated. The laser created a small fissure.

“It’s great for repairs on the ship,” he said, shrugging. “Like, I said. My wife. A genius.”

I thanked him and wielded it. It was light and the surface made warm through Kaspa’s grasp.

I was going to do this. I was going to mar the urn. I tried a few swipes on the mug, marking it with etches, and felt the ease of this tool. I was ready.

I felt something possess me that wasn’t my own. No, it must’ve been me, many iterations of me, cultivated through years by my mom. Her asking me to talk to customers, making me interact with people in other languages I couldn’t understand. Introducing me to new cultures, telling me that to penetrate new markets, I had to understand cultural specificity. She made me study people’s faces, the lines next to their mouths, asked me what they ate and drank. She gave me brochures to read, competitors of different product lines, from different colonies, with strange drawings and symbols I had spent time sitting and figuring out. They were puzzles, all of them, and she knew I loved them.

I etched words I remembered from these brochures. Ones that would match her—and match me. Who we were. I set the laser on just barely touching the surface, creating the shallowest of scratches at the edges of the cloisonné enamel designs, aligned with the holographic trigger points. I wrote in different languages. I was not a master of one specifically, but was versed in enough to be understandable, conversational, and analytical. I thought of those words now:

“Ageless skin that will guide you into the future” in the rough consonants of Kzaskz.

“Look visibly younger and healthier” in the loops of Checchneaneaot.

“Creamy astral vibes for a new tomorrow” in the pictographic Letsnvam.

“Erase the puffiness in your eyes” in the hypnotic swirls of Vloovloo.

“Bring in shine and tone . . . and develop elasticity” in the gentle wavy tails of Nyeann . . .

I wrote so many of these commercial platitudes on the urn with the laser that I lost track of time, space, everything. I forgot where I was, who I was, delving into these pockets of memory, conjuring them up as if they existed right there on my fingertips the whole time.

Did she see me? Did she see me? The refrain swung and circulated in my head like the pendulating back and forth of a rocking chair.

I finished the etched remarks with a slogan in Chinese: “Brighten your appearance. Give off a radiant glow. Feel forever young.”

The urn was slipping in my hands, covered in streams of my tears and thin, tiny flecks of enamel.

I pulled the laser back.

I didn’t dare touch any of it. I didn’t dare press any triggers or release any holos. I’m not sure I know why. My hands shook and a part of me knew I just ruined it all. It was a rush of hypnotism or something. Maybe watching that macolan unfurl unleashed something in me that made me unfurl. I was too scared to do anything more to the urn.

I took out the porto-vac to suck in the flecks of enamel stuck onto the urn with my tears. Kaspa shook his head and handed me his sensifabric cloth to wipe it. “Vacuums in space are bad luck,” he said.

I looked at my porto-vac, no longer crying, but smiling. “How about toilets?”

“That’s different,” he said.

He laughed. I joined in.

I managed to wipe the urn without crying.

Kaspa took one of his version three strands, invaluable I’m sure, and tied it on the top of the urn. “A gift.”

He made a series of knots with his clumsy hands. It wasn’t as elegant as his son’s but it amounted to a rudimentary message rather than the eloquence of a consolation note.

“What’s that say?” I couldn’t recognize the words.

“Take care,” Kaspa said. He took a moment to feel the words again with his fingers.

“This is my son’s own invention. Words represented by a brand new knot-tying method. I only learned a few of these words. It was too difficult. He had so many languages in his head. I could only pick up a few phrases in each.”

“Take care,” I said aloud, feeling the itty-bitty grooves of the knot. That was it. Brief.

I promised him that we would keep in touch and I would visit his son. I would. I would visit my mom here anyhow and his son was along the way. Maybe I could take his ship, always coming here, his presence like a passage to my mom’s material self. Or her material remains, I should say. I didn’t know what the self was like after death. Does it even exist as self?

I packed the urn. It had all the new engravings.

As I walked to the designated spot, already worked out and paid in advance, all the funerary procedures handled by my mom who always believed in agelessness and yet somehow had planned out her own termination, I thought about the word engraving. It’s funny how in some languages the word engraving has grave in it. Engraving. Inscribing, as in digging deep. Making a lasting name. To permanently affix into memory. A small trench, a cave of wonders. Etymology was curious like that.

It was the last moment, the end of the seventy days of the funerary rites.

I sat down in front of the hole in the dirt. The cave of wonders. The engravement of the earth of this projection of the ancestral home. Not quite Earth, but somehow related in her configurations. It seemed fitting, for a people who have migrated and been displaced, to rest also in a space that was a projection of home, but not the home space of home exactly.

I stared at the urn. My hands shook. I looked at the engravings I carved. I’m sure these words I inscribed did something to solve the puzzle. My senses sharpened at the thought. I could feel the tingling in my spine go up my fingers. A rustling in my ear I thought was a whisper that said, yes, it’s solved. It’s this Thres atmosphere, so full of crackle and electric discharge. There was something else there. A strange, unsettling prescience. The phrases I etched did something, I knew it.

I clicked on the many holo triggers in succession so fast it was almost at once. The holos projected. The figures became clearer, luminous.

Yes, I cracked it, I thought. Joy filled my chest. I held my breath.

It was me.

Me in the rocking chair; me pressing fortune cookies; me swinging from the flame tree; me holding onto the wok, flipping stir-fry.

Were these her memories of me? The outburst of joy subsided. I let go of my breath. I felt odd, strange, dislocated. Was I burying her or myself? I played it again and again, over and over, watching this reel of film unfurl, watching these moments string together like some lifelong play about me.

When I exhausted all my energy in focusing and watching, I sighed, took out the sachet that I had hidden in my boots once again. I felt it, so light, for such a strong, driven woman. This was all that was left of her. Just ashes.

In a strange way, it reminded me of Rondi. So much will, but so light when I picked him up. Lanky, tall, and light. Maybe this was the irony of materials. The most intriguing puzzle of all. How can so much of us be contained in such little material? Such small mass for so much life?

I pressed all the triggers again, letting the holos run. “I’m fulfilling your last wish,” I said. I used several tongues to say that. Then I switched to Chinese. I was never as fluent as her in it, even after years of practice, drills, and everyday usage.

“I don’t know if this is breaking your puzzle. I’m not even sure if I cracked even a millionth of it. You’re not easy to crack. There’s too much of you. I don’t even know what it means to solve the ultimate puzzle of man . . .

“Woman,” I corrected myself. “Aren’t we just layers and layers and layers? Aren’t we too much to figure out? There are secrets within secrets within secrets. More of you than I can ever discover, ever unveil.”

I cried, twisting the urn lid, its once obstinate contours readily giving way. It creaked as it opened up. I set the urn lid aside. I reached within, giving it a sweep with my fingers.

Nothing. It must have been the holos after all, that was the real prize. I couldn’t get their nostalgic glow out of my head.

My hands moved mechanically, the contents of her spilling into the urn. The Teresa Teng song mixed with other songs and became a melancholic drone. A buzz filled my ear, reminding me of the fireworks. Bang bang bang. Boom. Was that a sonic boom? Or just in my ear?

Between streaming tears, I stared in wonder. The urn shifted, surface plates moving. It creaked as new images lit up. It was like tectonic plates, piecing together something entirely new.

She appeared there beside me. In every holo, she was there trying to speak in tongues that I knew. She had practiced them before she passed away, gathering the pieces she picked up throughout her life. It was her voice, sometimes singing in other languages. Sometimes repeating these platitudes of her agelessness and the beauty of skin. She had learned them or tried to. Some were not so smooth, tripping over words, sounding a bit silly. She never liked languages, at least I never thought she did, and I always thought her interest in people was only her way of selling things and propagating this surface beauty. The aesthetics over the substance of man . . . of woman.

But, as I saw her singing, skipping over syllables—rocking in the chair with me, pressing down fortune cookies with me, mixing up creams with me, rolling up fuzzy socks with me, riding Shandian with me at lightning speeds, fixing up ceramics with me with kintsugi, bending draymetal with me into small loops for the enamel filling—her voice in my ear, confusing phonics of languages she tried to achieve for me, I knew it. The thing I cracked. It was her love for me. She tried to see more of people because she saw all of me.

After the holo display, the bottom of the urn lid slid loose with a forceful scratching ceramic sound. It reminded me of the grinding groan of a sarcophagus in an ancient tomb being pulled open by archeologists, stone against stone, with the anticipatory hush that accompanied the near revelation of the invaluable contents within. I held my breath. Underneath the urn lid was a panel.

Ah, so there it is, the puzzle coming together, the mystery unfurling. I had thought the holos was it, but no, my mom was full of layers, just like this urn.

I was still reeling from the projected affection, all those images of me and my mom surging back to life. I was in such a daze, sad and giddy at once, I nearly dropped the urn lid. My hand was quicker than my mind. I caught the lid in my fingers. It was so light, like an illusion of matter.

I breathed out a sigh of relief.

I reached into the compartment in the lid and felt . . . a crinkly package of eco-cell wrap. Its scratchy texture surprised me. When I popped the wrapping, a fortune cookie fell into my palm. I cracked that open, letting the crumbs scatter over my hands and sleeves. I put the cracked cookie in my pocket.

Inside was a slip of paper. I had it in my fingers for a while, feeling along its ridges, tears clouding my eyes, until I received a shock of searing pain and in my blurred vision saw a drop of red. I must’ve gotten a paper cut from it. I sucked on my acrid blood.

There was no further higher tech, no holographs or flashes, generated by my touch. I took a sleeve to my eyes, wiped my vision clear, and read. The writing was tiny and in a meticulous script. It was mom’s own calligraphic handwriting. It was a conglomeration of various languages I knew that I never knew she had even tried learning. The mishmash of different tongues made the writing even more poetic, just looking at it appealed to me in a jarring way. It was an eclectic but strangely entrancing work of visual art.

I tried to piece the significance together the best I could and came up with this interpretation:

“You are my best fortune. The one written inside of me and coming into this life with a crack of delight. But, now you are in the world, paving your way—with your own slips of paper.

“In particular branches, back in the day, you will find your thoughts come alight. There you will find an instrument, a stylus, for which you can compose your future—under the brilliant light of a thousand red lanterns.”

I thought this was the end of the scavenger hunt. That my adventure was over. But, of course, this was mom and she would bring me back to where we started. To the flame tree.

I already anticipated what I would find there. Some of her most prized possessions. Styluses, she called them. Scrawling in beauty.

Her makeup brushes, to take over the small cosmetics empire she built for herself.

But, as I reviewed the holos in my head and all the ways she cared for me, I thought, no, it could not be. It couldn’t be the cosmetic brushes.

It had to be a simple maobi.

It had to be the ink brush she used to write this fortune of language patchwork. I recalled that she had seen me use my zex-quill and complained on multiple occasions about its complexity, its removal of touch to its canvas. Caress in application is important, she said. Like spreading foundation on cheeks.

Maybe she really did want me to forge my own path, write my own future. Even at this grave moment, I marveled at how my mom still wanted to engage with me, leaving me puzzled, in wonder.

I grazed my hand over the inlay draymetal that I had bent, where I had manipulated the shape with my fingers. I was convinced that she knew me, and it would be a maobi, not a dictation of her path for me, but as she said, a means of composition. Words that I would write, a fortune I would create. I was so assured about this, I could see the brush there in my head, lodged between the bark. Maybe it would even be the one she alleged existed, made of my very own baby hair, from my first haircut. 胎毛笔. Taimaobi. The softest of brushes, she had once teased, ruffling my bangs. I never saw it. I always thought it was a joke.

I felt it in my bones. It had to be a writing tool for undefined creation. Only a trip back would confirm or deny my conviction.

I bit into the broken fortune cookie. It was as delightful as ever. Crisp and with a lively pomelo taste that danced on my tongue.

I crunched, taking small bites, until the cookie was gone. I brushed off my hands, grains of the confection sprinkling onto the urn lid. I replaced the lid and lifted the urn up in its entirety. It dazzled in the ambient lunar light of three crescent moons.

I tuned it one final time and ubertaped a dried macolan flower over the tuning hole, next to the signatures of the craft’s artisans. Her name was there, too. I had engraved it there, in many versions, translating Yongli, “Forever Beautiful” into multiple languages. I lowered her urn into the ground, her voice still buzzing in my ears.

The holos faded, but they lay entrenched, engraved, in my memories—just as she lay to rest in her grave.

From there, I had my own puzzle to solve, what my future lay for me—what words I should write in my own script on my own slivers of prognosis. I would take the maobi she left for me, the one I was so sure of, and stain my own path with pressed ink.

I brushed myself off, took a look at her grave site, and set out toward the moonlight. Humming a Teresa Teng ballad I remixed and improvised, I hailed a ship. This time, I would take my time.

In loving memory of my mom.

About the Author

D.A. Xiaolin Spires steps into portals and reappears in sites such as Hawai’i, NY, various parts of Asia and elsewhere, with her keyboard appendage attached. Her work appears or is forthcoming in publications such as Clarkesworld, Analog, Nature, Terraform, Grievous Angel, Fireside, Galaxy’s Edge, StarShipSofa, Andromeda Spaceways (Year’s Best Issue), Diabolical Plots, Factor Four, Pantheon, Outlook Springs, ROBOT DINOSAURS, Mithila Review, LONTAR, Reckoning, Issues in Earth Science, Liminality, Star*Line, Polu Texni, Argot, Eye to the Telescope, Liquid Imagination, Gathering Storm Magazine, Little Blue Marble, Story Seed Vault, and anthologies of the strange and beautiful: Ride the Star Wind, Sharp and Sugar Tooth, Future Visions, Deep Signal, Battling in All Her Finery, and Broad Knowledge.

She can be found on Twitter: @spireswriter.

All Living Creation

Xiu Xinyu, translated by Elizabeth Hanlon

[1]

Lying in bed, I reaffirm to myself that all is well.

In some corner of the world, there is not another me, forced into life, sold, kept as a pet, tortured out of spite, assigned to a dirty, dangerous task. There’s only me. It’s lonely, but it’s a reassuring loneliness.

That night I can’t sleep. I keep thinking of her, tongue jittering wildly in my mouth, heart sinking down toward someplace dark. At four in the morning, birds begin to twitter outside my window. At six, they arrive.

Five of her, without even different uniforms to distinguish one from another. They’re maybe one or two years apart in age, but otherwise appear nearly identical. It creates a sort of illusion: I can’t shake the impression of shells sharing the same soul—if they have one at all. They wait politely at the door for me to come out. Keeping their heads slightly lowered, they flick their eyes upward every so often to observe me, seemingly on edge.

Their worry is uncalled for. After all, I’m simply going to visit my dear little sister.

Helen Zhang, rebellious in the way that all foolish young people are, left home eight years ago, after declaring to our parents, “Just forget you ever had a daughter!” That same year, she leaked her own genes and became the most popular commercial clone model ever.

The last time I saw her was five years ago, at a riotous parade. Feverish fans were everywhere, men and women, old and young, jostling, cheering. There were bright streamers, balloons, confetti cannons, signs, protective membranes deliberately slit open—everything you would expect to see at a parade, plus a large police presence to maintain order.

I gripped the handle of my briefcase tightly and watched as the flow of the crowd carried me farther and farther away from her.

The law protects our natural human freedoms against infringement, and our predetermined genes against theft. We cover our fingers in protective membranes, and all household objects are rigorously sterilized immediately after use. We avoid all physical contact to ensure the security of our genes.

Nearly everyone follows these precautions—everyone except my foolish little sister. Like Christ, she offered herself in sacrifice.

But only Christ can save this world of sin.

Outside, mechanical lenses swivel in my direction, soundlessly, the way vigilant birds might watch a predator. In a moment, I will appear on various news sites, not that it matters. The car that has come to collect me has a spacious passenger compartment, and the windows are black and opaque. It’s a little unnerving.

Two of the five women sit with me in the passenger compartment. Even without makeup, their features are bright and striking, eternally youthful. They keep silent, long lashes fluttering gently with each breath. In profile, with their prominent, pointed chins, their faces bear a faint resemblance to my own. My little sisters.

I finally get to see her again.

I can’t say I miss her. It doesn’t make sense, when in fact I see “her” almost every day. On the Internet, on TV, in the newspaper. At fast food joints, nightclubs, shopping malls. At noon, dusk, dawn. Too many of her to count. After she volunteered her genetic information, she became something of a free resource.

Free, and thus much despised and degraded.

[2]

Thanks to advances in genetic engineering, it is theoretically possible to create a human with any given combination of traits.

We’ve certainly tried. I’ve seen the man in textbooks: no bulging musculature, and yet more than capable of shattering any Olympic record, or working at depths of thirty meters without protection for twenty minutes. What the textbooks leave out is that he died, quickly and quietly, after just a few days.

According to our instructor, it was a sudden heart attack. His heart couldn’t keep up with his body’s superhuman demand for blood. It was possible in theory, but not practice: blood oxygen content, hormone levels, muscular endurance . . . the variables involved were too numerous and complex.

The rules that govern our genetic makeup are far more complicated than we imagine. The slightest change can dramatically alter the whole. Attempts to correct every “error” made during the genetic modification process will only be subsumed by an endless stream of errors.

But it isn’t just the unpredictability of genetic engineering.

As my undergraduate advisor put it, nature is not merely more complex than we think; its complexity is beyond human comprehension. The terrible thing about genetic modification is that you can’t help but want to compensate for errors. But humanity has managed to advance despite innumerable defects. Compensating for so-called minor errors inevitably leads to fatal problems.

At a press conference I once attended, a pushy female reporter raised a cross to her chest and asked in a shrill voice, “Does this prove God created man? Only the divine can solve everything.”

Smiling, the representative from the research team replied, “Man is creating himself.”

It has taken humanity, eliminating unfavorable genetic combinations one generation at time, more than three million years to get where we are today.

Even as obtaining funding for genetic modification and recombination projects became increasingly difficult, human cloning plans gained ground. Businessmen didn’t have much patience for waiting, nor were they willing to incur the heavy costs of trial and error. Instead, they found a solution using the simplest and crudest means available. They simply screened existing genomes and selected the best to clone servants for themselves.

They turned tools into humans, and humans into tools.

Eight years ago, they selected my little sister. It was a campus beauty pageant—or at least, it had looked like one. The participants were subjected to a physical examination, as well as a lengthy and exhaustive comparative genetic analysis. Those who were chosen received a contract, and upon signing, entered into a business venture, one that promised to usher in a new era for humanity.

She didn’t consult us. Unbeknownst to our parents and me, she needed a large sum of money at the time. She never told us the reason she needed it.

[3]

We don’t speak a word on the way there. When I get out of the car, I am greeted by the autumn sky, clouds thin as gauze, and a stand of withered trees. After three of her register our information at the entrance, the two of her who accompanied me in the car—one in front and one behind me—lead me down a narrow, sloping corridor.

As I step through the door, I realize that I am in an ancient underground church. After donating her genetic material, she received a substantial allowance, enough to live out the rest of her life however she pleased. It was rumored that she had bought up many of her own clones and established bases all over the world, for reasons best known to herself.

Light streams through the domed stained-glass ceiling, and I can smell wet earth.

“You’re a doctor now,” she says, mild curiosity in her voice. Seated beneath an enormous painted icon, she tilts her chin up and smiles at me. Her voice is almost identical to the voices that pervade my daily life. A little huskier, perhaps.

I once heard a saying that experience shapes character; that is, your memories define your identity. Only she ever pestered me to tell her fairy tales. The little mermaid trading her singing voice for a pair of legs, only to dissolve into foam; a wicked queen hatching murderous schemes before a talking mirror—those sorts of tales.

She is dressed in a simple ink-blue dress, cut from a heavy fabric that shows its age. Perhaps, after so many years on her own, she has grown accustomed to showing her age, too. She alone is my little sister.

Unobscured by protection of any kind, even the fine hairs on her face are clearly visible in the sunlight.

“A dentist,” I say. “I probably can’t save you, unless it’s your tooth that’s killing you.”

“You’re not a dentist.” She shakes her head.

She can’t possibly know.

“You’re the world’s top clinical virologist.” She smiles again and opens her arms to me, as though asking for a hug. I walk toward her ever so slowly.

“Do you cure disease? Do you save people?” Helen speaks softly, but in a wide-open space like this I can still hear her every word. “Do you save clones?”

The first time it happened, we had just finished a celebratory dinner. Our experiments had progressed swimmingly, so my boss had invited our investors and the project team to go out to eat together.

I can’t say exactly when the atmosphere changed. I was already half in the bag, but I still picked up on the significance in my coworkers’ gazes. Then the door to our private dining room opened and several scantily clad girls stepped in. She, of course, was among them. I drained several more glasses. When I came to again, I was already home.

Over time, I got used to it. I even tried to engage with her. To be more precise, I bought her services for an evening. The sky had already grown dark. After the clouds, golden-red in the light of the setting sun, vanished, a fog rolled in off the ocean, so thick that it was difficult to breathe or see straight ahead.

She shivered in her short skirt, like anyone else. And, like anyone else, a glistening protective membrane coated her skin: while she had no need to protect her genes, the membrane made her seem more normal, to say nothing of the customers who enjoyed the process of peeling off the layer with their own hands. She looked at me, a faint smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.

I took her home and made her a cup of hot cocoa. Unlike other clone models I’d encountered previously, she didn’t seem to care much for talking. Instead, she simply held her mug and looked at me. It was extremely uncomfortable.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked, parroting me, the corners of her mouth creeping upward. “You don’t even want to touch me.”

My sister wouldn’t act this way. Helen was my constant shadow, sweet and obliging. She didn’t know how to talk back. Which meant we were all the more shocked by the subsequent turn of events.

She’d been confined to a room, but by then it was already too late. At that very moment, tens, hundreds, thousands of her were being cloned. She was healthy, intelligent, beautiful. The companies that had acquired her genes had struck gold.

“Do something about your sister!” said our mother, but what she really meant was, “Help your sister.”

I hadn’t been home in two years, as the project had entered a critical phase. But since the situation was truly dire, my supervisor granted me a two-day leave of absence.

I opened the door and saw my eighteen-year-old sister secured to a bed with metal restraints. Her body had been placed beneath an isolation hood, like she had slipped into endless slumber, like she was Sleeping Beauty waiting for a prince’s kiss.

Except it wasn’t a fairy tale. In reality, she’d been given a tranquilizer, and the police were due to arrive in the next half hour. In hopes of obtaining a light sentence for Helen, our parents had called them and confessed on her behalf. The charge was “disruption of the public order.” It was possible she’d be put away for life.

I just looked at her through the glass hood. A faint red mark still lingered on her face where our father had slapped her.

Even then I couldn’t save her.

[4]

I’ve seen them many times.

I’ve accepted takeout from her hands. With the integration of artificial intelligence into logistics networks, the sole purpose justifying the existence of these workers is to humanize food delivery services, easing the loneliness of reclusive customers who seldom leave the house. Naturally, there are also those with a strong aversion to seeing their own kind: they simply make a note on their order to place the takeout in the parcel locker fixed to their door.

This one had a sweet smile. She couldn’t have been older than eighteen. She held out the warm pizza box, but when I reached for it, she didn’t let go, just smiled at me.

Perhaps she knew who I was. She was asking for help, but I could do nothing for her.

She, and all the others like her, had all been cloned. Deprived of all rights, not recognized as people. Microchips implanted into their wrists continuously reported back on their physical condition and location. Their lives were regulated down to the minute, even down to the second, to maximize performance.

I tightened my grip and pulled the pizza box from her hand. She lowered her gaze, turned, and left.

Once I witnessed two of them fight.

I pulled the car over to the side of the road to watch. Some pedestrians pretended not to see and hurried past, while others also stopped to look on. The one in a business suit brought her handbag down hard against the face of the one in jeans. Someone was screaming. They tore at each other’s hair until one of them produced a knife and drew blood. I drove away.

The crime rate is at a historic low. That is, the crime rate among normal people is at a historic low. We can’t use DNA evidence to arrest clones. They’re identical, so a sin committed by one is a sin committed by all.

Killers, crooks, and whores. My little sisters.

Many a young person has printed her name or face on T-shirts. Some have dedicated books to her. More than one have followed her example and leaked their own genes, as an act of rebellion, or simply out of a desire for fame. But no one ever took the world by storm quite like her. Or, to be more precise, no one ever took the world by storm quite like them.

I should have known this day would come, ever since we dropped her off at college.

While our parents parked the car, I helped her carry her luggage up the stairs. She trailed behind me with several bags of clothing, dragging her feet. Back then she was still a good girl, so obedient that she’d never once raised her voice to our parents.

Her steps grew slower and slower, and at last she stopped beneath a streetlamp. The soft lamplight lent a shimmering luster to her protective membrane. She looked like she was made of water.

She looked up at me with sparkling eyes, more beautiful than stars. Despite our shared parentage, the color of her irises was deeper than mine, her brow less creased by worry. Providence had truly smiled upon her.

“Brother, I’ve found someone special.”

Some things were inevitable. I paused by the door and waited for her to confess who the lucky bastard was.

But she said nothing, only looked me in the eye.

“I heard in the past people held hands without gloves and kissed mouth to mouth. Is that true?”

Is that true? Her tone was full of envy. Girls! They were totally hopeless.

“It’s true,” I said.

[5]

Three years after completing my doctorate, I joined a cutting-edge laboratory. It was located aboard a submarine, whose existence remained hidden from the public as it cruised the deepest reaches of the oceans. There was no Internet and no phone reception. We ate specially provided compressed rations and once per month we were permitted to write home to let our families know we were safe.

The government provided funding for our research on viruses. Tailor-made viruses that only affected specific genomes. In case of a laboratory accident resulting in the release of a virus, the submarine would initiate a self-destruct procedure, taking everything with it into the depths of the ocean.

There was no entertainment. But there was alcohol. We’d find an empty conference room, project colorful models of viruses onto the wall, and drink as we admired their ingenious structures. We’d drink and talk about the past and the future.

This was an era Hitler could only dream of. With enough financial support, and enough determination, it was possible to rapidly and precisely exterminate an entire race, an entire country, or even just a single person.

I always thought of her.

In the dazzling church, separated by rows of empty pews, I gaze at her. She hesitates before finally lowering her beseeching arms and looks back at me.

“Clones are a disease.” I hear my own voice reverberate through the entire church. The ancient stained glass depicts a myth I don’t understand, about angels, and the benevolence of God. I’m not a believer. “Replicating endlessly. Meaningless.”

She scratches her cheek with her finger and seems to consider this.

“You aren’t sick,” I say. “Why did you call me here on such a flimsy excuse?”

“Who knows?” she replies. “Maybe she’s long dead. None of you would know.”

“I’m meaningless?” she asks.

[6]

That night, she sipped her hot cocoa, warm brown liquid smearing the corners of her mouth, red lipstick prints on the rim of her mug.

“Did you have dreams, before this?”

“When I woke up, I was already twenty. There was no before this.” She arched her eyebrows in reproach. It was a practiced expression, one that made her seem equal parts adorable and pathetic.

I had a rough idea of how it was done. Separated by protective membranes, people would stroke each other, kiss each other. Two membranes, or sometimes, just one. She would remove these, the membranes hissing with electricity as they separated from the skin. It was as close as two people could get.

“My little sister and I used to love eating sweets. We always had toothaches, but our dentist was vicious. So I used to dream of becoming a dentist. If I was the one treating her, my sister wouldn’t have to be afraid.”

“You’re a good brother.” A trite compliment.

When we were young, my sister followed me everywhere. She wasn’t interested in freedom or rebellion. It wasn’t selflessness so much as indifference. On my first day of primary school, she cried at home for the whole afternoon.

“Whore,” I say. Whenever she came up in conversation, my classmates would sneer, “They’re all whores. Except your sister.”

She stiffened with fear, and set her mug down on the table. But the panic passed as quickly as it came, and her face quickly resumed its captivating smile. “Yes. Your whore, for tonight.”

She was wearing a warm perfume, which grew stronger as the evening went on. Even after I wiped the blood from the floorboards, the scent lingered.

The others were whores. She alone could become a saint.

The strike lasted for three months.

The first suicide attack caught everyone off guard. Only two people were killed: a housekeeper employed in the general manager’s household, and the general manager himself. Subsequent investigation revealed that the housekeeper had been replaced by a member of a clone resistance group several weeks earlier. Not merely content with demonstrations, the insurgents were entertaining more radical methods of expressing their demands.

The architect behind the second attack wasn’t even a clone. The thirty-year-old engineer had fallen in love with the pretty, intelligent worker who lived downstairs, and willingly sacrificed everything for her. These clones had been closely screened for a genetic predisposition to rebel, but of course there were people like my sister among them—healthy, young, intelligent, attractive people. They deserved their fair share of profits, and of love.

An official spokesperson announced that the government would take the most efficient course of action.

[7]

Helen, I’ll never forget your smile.

You, standing beneath that icon, the sunlight gilding your dark brown hair. The shadows cast by your fluttering eyelashes, the fine, downy hairs on your face, the slight dimple of your cheek. The very image of the heroine of Greek myth, whose beauty toppled kingdoms.

There is someone standing behind you, always standing behind you. From far away, he looks like me. Up close, I fear we’d look identical.

I have always lived cautiously. Except that night, as I looked at you, just eighteen years old. You lay peacefully beneath the glass hood and then your brow furrowed, as though you were enduring some terrible pain. You were trembling all over.

Whose hand did you hold? Who did you kiss?

I removed my glove and gently smoothed the creases from your brow with my fingers. Your skin was warmer than I imagined, smoother. In half an hour, the police would come and take you away.

I did not yet know that three hours later you would be spirited out of prison and taken to a base belonging to the resistance. Five years later, I would sign a proxy consent form and put my newly developed virus into practice, wiping out every last one of you.

Except for you, my dear little sister. You, who are protected in the heart of the ocean.

“There is only one place for you at the Lord’s table,” I say to you in the church.

The man behind you wraps his arm around your shoulder. A salty, bitter taste suddenly wells up in my throat, like I’ve swallowed someone’s blood.

First published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, June 2017.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Xiu Xinyu is a writer living in Beijing who enjoys collecting stones, swimming in the sea and gorging on chocolate. She mostly uses her master degree in Philosophy to make up tragic novels.

Ashes Under Uricon

Adrastos Omissi

Lottie moved quickly over the fallen trees and the tangled vegetation, lifting her legs clear of the grasping undergrowth. She felt light today. Free. And filled with energy. She wanted to run and run until her limbs were burning.

It was the sunlight, she knew. Today the sky was an endless vault of blue and the sunlight hummed off the world. All morning, she had sat on a rock beside a pool of deep, still water, sunning herself, whilst big green dragonflies buzzed about her doing just the same. Ordinarily, she avoided deep water. It scared her and looking at it forced her mind to thoughts of sinking down into the dark, filling up inside with the blackness. But this morning the sun had danced on the surface of the pool, reflecting a kaleidoscope of light up into the trees, and the water did not trouble her. Fat fish rose up now and then from the green depths and the whole scene was too delightful for her to do anything but stop and rest and drink in all that light.

The sun always gave her new life, much needed after the mountains. This crossing had been long, longer than she remembered it being before, and rockfall had cut off many off the upper passes. A broken road had finally led her down, weeds and young trees growing up through its cracked tarmac. It had been quiet and deathly still up among the peaks, a world of cold stone. But here beneath the trees was the sound of crickets and cicadas, the noise of the undergrowth, the song of birds. And there was sunlight.

GPS told her that she was now somewhere in middle Europe, around the old border of Austria and Germany. Not that such things really mattered any more, but a compulsion to place herself in space kept her forever checking her location. She explained it to herself as a necessary precaution, to keep her from endlessly wandering back and forth through the same regions of the world. She never ceased to be amazed at her ability to lie to herself, to know that she was lying to herself, and to go on pretending to believe.

The forest had begun on the upper slopes of the mountains. From their peaks it seemed endless, a carpet of green running away from the feet of the Alps, unbroken but by the roll of the hills and by an occasional swathe of grassland. Europe was returning, day by day, to its natural state and a single forest, running from the silent, frosted pines of the north to the oaks and beeches that fringed the Mediterranean basin bristled from the continent.

She had been in the forest for three days. Her morning, sat beside the pool, had reminded her that she wanted to be beneath the sky, and her light steps now lifted her in search of breaks in the endless boughs of the trees. Occasionally she passed buildings, fringed round by the wood, or the rusted legacies of cars; some she peered into, looking for signs of inhabitation or use, but for the most part she kept on her path. By early evening, she had reached a place where the trees broke and she could look out again on the lands below.

The sun was orange and warm, the sky an empty dome. Many miles away a river, its surface exposed by the meadows that fringed it, caught the light and sent it spilling back out again, a slender band of copper in amongst the green. She thought that tomorrow she might angle her path towards it and then follow it down to the sea. It burned in the sunlight.

Another light winked suddenly from the vicinity of the copper river. Once . . . twice . . . something glittered on the plain.

Instinctively, she threw herself down into the long grass, half expecting the deceptively playful patter of bullet-impacts to ring out on the hill around her.

The anticipated barrage never came, and slowly she craned her head up above the grass, peering down towards the river again. The sun had moved enough whilst she lay that the water no longer glowed in the light. She moved her head about slowly, looking for a flash. Nothing came. But she had seen it.

She rubbed her fingers together nervously. Long ago, she would have gone instinctively towards any movement, any sign of life that she saw, hoping against hope that she might finally have found a living person. But such recklessness had taught her some hard lessons, lessons which she had been lucky to survive. Her hand strayed to her side, and the three deep marks in her skin that told of where the Hunter’s bullets had hit her in the ruins of Ankara. Her life had nearly ended that day.

Deep down, she knew that the chances that there were any large animals—let alone people—left on the planet were impossibly remote, so if she had indeed seen movement, then hope was a dangerous emotion. There were machines out there still stalking the wild for living prey: Hunters, Peace Keepers, Kinzhaly, DAR-5s, Buntfalken, Shenyang . . . the panoply of mankind’s old weapons, built to fight wars that extinction had long ago made irrelevant. Blind, deaf, and dumb automata, thoughtlessly plodding on with the tasks that had been given them, they would continue to scour the earth, looking for lives to end. They patrolled ancient battlegrounds, firing blindly at anything that moved, doing what they had been programmed to do with ceaseless vigilance. They would keep searching, keep shooting, till their magazines were emptied and their batteries ran dry. There had even been rumors long ago, when rumors were still possible, that factories had been built whose construction lines and supply chains were so automated that they would never stop working. The Pacific War might still be being fought by soldiers built long after there was anyone left to care about who won. Lottie did not care.

She clicked the little magnification lenses across her vision and peered down into the valley. Her eyes, now augmented to the distance, scanned again for any sign of movement. Nothing stirred in the heat. Birds chattered, insects muttered, and the air swam, but on the valley floor, all was still.

There was a building down there. She could just about make out the tilt of its roof, partially obscured by a fold in the land. She knew that she had seen something glint in the valley. Perhaps light had caught upon a window of that distant building. Perhaps it still had an occupant.

Hope.

Hope, hope, hope . . .

She clicked the lenses away and fought a rising feeling of misery. Now that she had spotted it, she could not pass the house by. Maybe, just maybe, this would be it. Maybe there was someone down there she might finally talk to.

And maybe death was down there.

Slowly, bowed low beneath the brilliant sky, she rose from where she lay crouching on the edge of the trees and set off down the hillside. Beneath her, kilometers away, lay some small reminder that there had one been a world, been life, been laughter.

She felt impossibly naked beyond the protection of the forest. The slope of the hills, which looked so smooth from the trees at the crest, proved to be a treacherous scree of broken rock and thorn bushes hidden in amongst the yellow grass. Lottie tried, as best she might, to navigate the thorns without letting them rake her body. She found her aversion to their touch upsetting, a sad reminder of a world that no longer existed. Years of wandering in the wilderness had left her skin so scratched and scarred that it no longer mattered whether the thorns scraped her, but she still recoiled from them, so that it took her an age to make her way down through the valley. It seemed that some habits from her old life could never be unlearned. All the while, as she stepped carefully over and around the tangled thorns, she tried to keep her head up in order to look for signs of movement on the slopes.

The sun shone down and ran across her skin like electricity.

By the time she made her way down into the valley, evening was beginning to deepen. The yellow grass was a riot of sound as crickets chorused, and they leapt away from her as she pushed her way through it. It cracked and rustled beneath her feet. The crickets delighted in the sound, roaring up at the purpling sky. It was their world now. Insects ruled the earth, fish ruled the sea, and somewhere, masterless machines fought endlessly over a few tattered and mud-choked tracts of land.

As she drew closer to where the house lay, a sound began to reach her. Her hands played nervously with the straps of her bag. The house was still beyond her sight, hidden by the valley’s side and by the undergrowth, but the noise was unmistakable. The high pitched hum of a small engine.

She rounded the slope carefully, keeping low. She could make out the remnants of a path, what must once have been a fabulous, tree-lined drive. Now it was broken by roots and new growth. She followed it, keeping within the shadow of the trees. The whining of the engine grew more and more present beneath the canopy.

She could see ahead of her now that the trees suddenly gave way to an open space. Fear and excitement mingled within her. She gripped tightly onto the straps of her bag and made her way carefully to the treeline. Here, sticking up from the undergrowth like rotten old teeth were the rusted posts of a gate, flanked by the tangled walls of privet hedges that had grown wild and tall. Lottie crept towards the shadow of the nearest hedge and peered into the world beyond.

The garden was large, the grounds of what had once clearly been an impressive home. From the gate, it sank down, rising up again towards the house. The path followed these undulations in measured steps—first down, then up—the edges of which marked the limits of terraces cut into the lawns. At the lowest point of the garden a pond, spanned by a little bridge, glittered greenly, its surface speckled with lily pads and yellow flowers. A beautifully manicured cherry blossom reached its fingers over the pond, and a wisteria blooming in chalky blue spread likewise over the face of the house. The privet hedge, a wild and disordered explosion of foliage when viewed from the outside, was within cut into such clean lines that it looked like stone. The emerald green grass, striped and even, smiled warmly up at the sky and the outer world—broken, formless—leaned in over the hedge, looking on in bewilderment at this little island of order.

Staring at the garden, an impossible hope filled Lottie’s core. Might her search finally be over? With great trepidation, as if she were stepping out onto a sheet of ice that might give way and pitch her into cold, bottomless water, she reached out a long leg, and placed it down onto the lawn. The engine continued its whining from behind the house. The yawning windows looked down on her darkly.

She wanted to call out, but she did not dare to. If there was someone in this house, she wanted to find, not to be found. She weighed carefully in her mind whether to make her way around the back of the house towards the sound of the engine, or to first go inside. The dark windows watched her like eyes, and she felt naked in their gaze, so she made for the front door. The path that led up to it was made of gravel that sparkled in the sunlight. She walked on the neat grass, so as not to crunch on the stone. The distance seemed to stretch before her as she walked.

As she approached the house, she could see that the door was torn back on its hinges. Time had rotted it down to a dark and shapeless mass, half thrown back into the hall. Beyond, the house was dark and dim. Weeds grew up though the floorboards and the walls and ceiling sagged. A smell, at once damp and dry, rose from inside the house’s cold innards, and Lottie felt the excitement in her, which had been churning itself into fear, now replaced by a deep sorrow. She looked back out at the immaculate garden, suddenly understanding.

She stepped into the musty gloom within, peering into each room in turn. Everywhere, the house was a thick morass of age and decay. Here and there were signs that it had been used since the war. Scorched wallpaper told her that a fire had been made in the corner of one of the front rooms and several of the walls were covered with old, peeling graffiti. In the kitchen, there were a couple of empty tins of the meat paste that had been produced in the New Empire during its brief heyday. The rot and the silence told her that the last visitors had been gone for many, many years. The only sound to be heard was the ongoing whine from the garden.

After searching the ground floor, she made her way cautiously up the stairs, checking each to see if it would support her weight. They groaned and protested, but they held. Halfway up, she passed a broken mirror, fogged and dusty with time. Instinctively, she recoiled from her reflection. The mirror allowed her to pass without further comment.

On the landing, the rot was less pronounced and something of the carpet’s original color could still be made out. Dark stains were clearly visible and, when she caught sight of the jumbled remnants of a skeletal foot in the doorway of one of the rooms, it did not shock her. With a knowing apprehension, she made her way towards the bones, and peered into the room beyond.

The bodies within had been reduced to nothing more than an osseous jumble, but Lottie was well practiced at telling stories from bones. She took in the scene all too clearly. She had seen many like it. Skeletons, the world had many. Far too many.

Three bodies lay in the room. The largest one, the one whose foot had protruded into the hall, lay sprawled in the doorway, its skull shattered all down one side. The other two—one large, one small—were curled together in the room’s far corner. As Lottie drew closer, she could see that larger one was wrapped around the smaller. The little skeleton was that of a child, perhaps five or six years old when it had died. Something sharp had been driven between the sixth and seventh ribs, back when this body was still bound together by muscle and flesh. The floor was dark beneath it. Lottie felt a great sadness inside her, and imagined the head, with its gaping mouth, twisting and writhing in pain, the weight of the dead mother holding it in place. The child had watched its parents die.

It pulled inside her and she felt that something might break.

She wondered briefly whether it had been machines or people that had killed this little family. Not that it mattered. Not really. One way or another, the things that had done this were just obeying the computer inside them that told them what to do, whether that computer was a brain or a chip. It didn’t matter why. It still hurt her and filled her with fear and revulsion, either way. Why something happens only matters if you can change it. There was no changing this.

She reached out her hand, and then, hesitating for a moment, caressed the socket of the little child’s skull, touching the bone and imaging the face when it still had flesh and life and love. The skull was such a hideous, lifeless thing. She recoiled from it.

Unbidden, the image of Jared’s sweet face came to her mind. Jared had been so good to her. Only ten years old, when he died. She knew that she had been a toy for him, an amusement that he would one day outgrow. But she had loved him.

“Not just a toy,” he always said to her, stroking her gently.

Not just a toy, it was true. A teacher too. And a protector.

Some protector.

“I love you too, Lottie,” he would say. He said that a lot. But he never said “I love you.”

Certain beyond any doubt now that the house was empty, she made her way back downstairs and into the sunlight. Outside, the whine of the engine greeted her again, and she followed it around the base of the house, into the garden’s back reaches. Before long, she found it, pottering away in the sunshine, its solar skin glittering happily, its engine keeping up the cheerful whine. It was a small, bulky thing with a belly made of rotating blades that trimmed the grass and a spiny carapace of pinking shears, clippers, and little digging hands. There was no mind within it to speak of, just a map of its kingdom and a set of instructions as to how to go about maintaining it. It had been blindly following those instructions for decades, unaware that the world it was sculpting was now only a memory. She envied that little machine.

The sun was falling and long, dusty shafts began to pierce the house. Lottie busied herself with searching for anything useful that she could take with her when she left. She spread her own supplies out on the carpet of the sitting room and took stock of them. Several sets of tools, two small containers of lubricating fluid, some solder wire (but no iron) and several spare parts for her model, which she had found here, there, and everywhere. She contemplated, briefly, taking the gardening robot apart to see if it contained any parts that she might be able to use on herself. But then she imagined the garden growing over and consuming the house, and she knew she could not bear to do it. Instead, she took a cloth and some of her precious lubricating fluid and cleaned its solar skin. Its engine hummed happily.

“You’re welcome,” she said. There was no answer but the crickets.

Some of the computers in the house had what looked like decent processors, though they were old and crusted with muck. But Lottie couldn’t use those. She couldn’t operate on her own processor and so, unless she eventually found someone else, the span of her years would be determined by the life span of the hardware already installed in her head. She hoped, when degradation began, that it would come quickly. She lived in fear of having to wander the world for eons, half mad.

She spent the night in the house. She chose to take her rest in one of the lower rooms, away from the ancient corpses. She squeezed herself into a space between the floor and a collapsed cabinet, folding her hands over her tiny head. She never wandered at night, if it could be avoided. Solar energy was too valuable. She switched her system over into low power mode, the turmoil of her thoughts slipping away, and waited for the morning. Her mind ticked along in a quiet hum, her half-lidded vision watching the moonlight, refracted through the treetops, march slowly across the room, until it was replaced by the dawn.

As she gathered herself up in the rosy light of the morning, she could not help but go upstairs again, to see the little child. Its head was still hollow, its bones still grey. The gaping jaw continued, silently, to scream.

She knew she wanted—knew she needed—to find a living human being because that was how she had been made. That desire had been etched into her core before she had ever known life. She knew that the desire was a trick that had been built into her to make her a faithful companion. She knew it as certainly as she knew the atomic weight of an electron, or the distance from the earth to the sun, or the date that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated; a fact, devoid of tangible reality in her world. It didn’t matter what she knew. What mattered was what she felt.

She felt alone. She felt so terribly alone. That compelling need for companionship gnawed inside her, and she felt it would drive her mad.

Jared’s father had always said that she could not feel. Not really.

“When you hold your breath, Jared, and your body starts to cry out until all you can think is that you would give anything, anything to have air again, that’s what it’s like to feel. You know what it means, I know what it means, but Lottie doesn’t really understand. She says she can feel because she was made to say so. But she doesn’t really understand what it means.”

Lottie understood perfectly well. She had been starved of air for seventy six years.

The skull stared up at her, feeling nothing.

About the Author

Adrastos Omissi is a Roman historian based at the University of Glasgow, UK and a father of three. In the rare moments when he is not occupied with either of these endeavors he writes stories about perception, loss, and loneliness. He is the author of a number of published short stories, including “Business” (2013), “By the Tracks” (2014), and “The Spartan Soldier” (2015).

“I Can Build It!” Tom Said Inventively:
The Strange History of the Six Tom Swifts

Mark Cole

It started with a motorcycle.

Not a flying motorcycle. Not one with jump rockets, magnetic impeller wheels, or wall climbing spikes. Just an ordinary broken-down motorcycle Tom Swift fixed back in 1910.

Then it was a motorboat bought at auction.

It hardly seems much of a beginning for forty novels—one of the most successful young adult series of its day—not even if his next book featured a combination airplane and dirigible. But Tom’s exploits sold fourteen million books. His son, Tom Swift, Jr. sold another six million. Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, real life scientists; inventors Ray Kurzweil, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Lockheed’s Kelly Johnson; kids’ show host Bill Nye; and even the author of Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell, read Tom Swift.

Which doesn’t change the fact that most of his exploits seem rather tame today.

While credited to “Victor Appleton,” his true creator was a remarkable writer and businessman, Edward Stratemeyer. He started out in the dime novels of the late nineteenth century and, after Horatio Alger died, was chosen to take his place. He ghosted the last eleven Horatio Algers before going into business on his own, packaging and selling children’s books series. He invented the characters and situations, drafted outlines, then hired writers to finish the books. While others had packaged books before, he was the first to specialize in children’s books.

His first big success was The Rover Boys, but he would continue launching new series throughout his career, often shamelessly ripping off others’ ideas, like Bomba the Jungle Boy.

Tom Swift wasn’t his first science fiction series: that was the short-lived Great Marvel series, a far more extravagant effort that might have come straight out of Jules Verne. One has virtually the same plot as Hector Servadac, and its final volume featured a trip to Saturn.

Most of Tom Swift was actually written by his top writer, Howard Garis, a reporter who wrote books on the side and created Uncle Wiggily.

One might describe Tom as “Thomas Edison, boy inventor,” but Edison was an old man in 1910. Stratemeyer’s model was probably Henry Ford, whom he admired.

Ford built his first cars in his garage before turning them into a vast industry: Tom Swift did the same, using his old inventions to fund new efforts. His father, Barton, was also an inventor, and he helped Tom in the first books. However, Barton soon became an invalid and in most books he is the voice of doom, warning Tom that his latest invention wouldn’t work. You’d think after the first thirty times he’d realize that Tom could make the impossible possible.

They lived in Shopton, a small Upstate New York town. It bore a strong resemblance to aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss’ hometown, Hammondsport. Tom’s spacious backyard (with access to the nearby lake) would prove big enough to house factories and dirigible hangers.

Stratemeyer deliberately made the inventions only a little ahead of reality: Tom dabbled in such mundane projects as an electric runabout, a house on wheels, a silent airplane, and one that could fly one hundred and thirty miles an hour when the record was still fifty-two.

But others were more outlandish, like a color big-screen television when TV was still strictly experimental, or videophones, or a giant telescope. A few were more fantasy than anything else, like the strange material that could grant endless life he hoped to find in a big meteorite, or his claim to have seen life on Mars.

The books started with Tom working on something new. Someone, whether rivals, criminals, or foreign spies, tried to steal it, sending Tom and his “chum” Ned Newton off on a new adventure where Tom’s latest invention is just what they needed to stop the bad guys.

Ned’s sister Mary was Tom’s love interest. She married him eventually and then virtually vanishes. Then there’s Tom’s eccentric neighbor, Wakefield Damon, who loved machines, but tended to crash them into the nearest tree. He gave Tom the wreckage of that motorcycle and became more or less part of the family. Other regulars included the housekeeper, Mrs. Baggert, Tom’s assistant, Garret Jackson, and two comedy relief characters, an old black janitor and a giant jungle wild man named Koku, whose antics have been embarrassing more sensitive modern audiences for years.

Tom was sixteen when the series started and twenty-one when it ended thirty-one years later. However, the world had changed: the daring exploits of pilots and race car drivers were no longer big news. Stratemeyer tried moving from inventions to more adventurous stories, but even before his death, Tom’s sales were in decline. He left the Stratemeyer Syndicate to his two daughters: Harriet Adams bought out her sister and took over. She would continue the books for another six volumes, although the series really ended in 1935 with the final book from Grosset and Dunlap: Whitman then reprinted many of the books and published two Better Little Books with a big illustration on every other page.

The late forties brought major changes to the Syndicate: they moved heavily into detective stories, thanks to the success of The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. But so much had changed since the twenties and thirties that the early books had to be revised and rewritten.

Unfortunately, Tom Swift was too antiquated and they abandoned him.

Until Rick Brant appeared on the scene in 1947.

Rick was the star of another Grosset and Dunlap series that outsold many of the Syndicate’s titles. He lived on Spindrift Island, the home of the scientific research facilities of the Spindrift Foundation. His father, Hartson Brant, ran the foundation, and Rick and his pals—teenaged former marine Scotty (who lied about his age to enlist: this may sound absurd, but made more sense just after World War II) and Chahda, an Indian boy who learned everything he knew from an old copy of the World Almanac—roamed the world fighting spies and carrying out various bits of scientific research with the help of Steve Ames, a secret agent assigned to protect them.

Rick’s books were described as “Electronic Adventures” and “Science-Adventure Stories.” Hal Goodwin, a popular science writer with a strong sense of style rare in juvenile books, wrote them: they were far better than his competitors’, with interesting plots and lots of suspense. But it’s hard to miss the influence of Tom Swift, particularly when you notice just how close “Hartson” is to Tom’s father, “Barton.” While they included a lot of interesting science (e.g. a reference to Lake Baikal, which is so deep and undisturbed that heavy water naturally settles out), they were set in the real world and the inventions were real.

So, in 1948, Harriet, following the family tradition of cashing in on whatever was popular, started work on a new Tom Swift, the son of the original: Tom Swift, Jr.

This Tom was eighteen: younger than the Tom of the later books, but older than the early one. Like his father, he had no formal education—although he already had his license for flying jet aircraft and government approval for handling radioactive materials. His father still ran Swift Enterprises out of Shopton, New York. While Tom created many inventions of his own, his dad still has all the best ones, like Thomasite, a light, superstrong building material that also shields you from radioactivity (and anything else the plot requires) or the Repellatron ray, which could selectively repel any specified form of matter with pinpoint accuracy. However, Tom makes good use of his father’s inventions and incredible facilities, which make building a vertical takeoff plane the size of a 747, a submersible jet plane, or a spaceship easy.

There is a suspicious resemblance between Tom Jr. and Rick Brant, down to the fact that both have a kid sister who appears in many of the stories. However, while both fight spies and have corporate intrigue, Tom’s adventures involved science fiction gadgets. These had to appear on the cover, along with the main characters (which led to some very crowded covers!).

Harriet recruited several experts—including a high school science teacher and a college professor—to vet her stories. She wasn’t too worried about getting the details exactly right, just whether it was plausible and nothing was obviously wrong. After the first four books finally came out in 1954 (the Syndicate launched new series by releasing four at once to gauge public interest), Harriet made an even more important addition to her team: James Duncan Lawrence.

Lawrence had a mechanical engineering degree and a background in radio drama. He wrote twenty-three Tom Swifts before his departure in 1971, often creating his own plots and characters. He later worked for Marvel, and wrote the James Bond and Buck Rogers comic strips.

Officially, though, the books were the work of “Victor Appleton II.” The ads claimed he “inherited his wonderful storytelling ability from the original Victor Appleton.”

Tom’s adventures carried him around the world, deep beneath the sea, and even into space. Early in the series, the Swifts received a signal from space and spent years trying to communicate with the people of Planet X—who would even give them instructions for a robot-like “container” for the incorporeal alien intelligence they sent to Earth.

Tom Swift also attracted his share of imitators.

In 1930, when the Ledger Syndicate wanted a comic strip like Buck Rogers, they created Jack Swift, a boy adventurer and inventor with a definite resemblance to Tom (even if Tom never ran afoul of alien penguins). It ran until 1934, but small-town papers reprinted it for years afterward. A Better Little Book came out a year before Whitman’s first Tom Swift reprints, but Jack is long forgotten.

Or consider Danny Dunn, who first appeared in 1956. The hero of a far more respectable series, he lived in a small town much like Shopton. While the books are more humorous and small-town, Danny dabbled in inventions with the help of his mother’s employer, Professor Bullfinch, and would go into space, through time, and to the bottom of the sea.

Then there is the curious story of Jonny Quest; Hanna-Barbera wanted a TV version of the Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy radio show (who bears more than a little resemblance to Tom Swift as he goes on adventures around the world with his wealthy industrialist uncle), but couldn’t get the rights.

So they created an original show remarkably like both Rick Brant and Tom Swift, Jr.: Jonny’s father is Dr. Benton Quest (not Barton. Or Hartson), a brilliant scientist working with the government. Like Rick, the Quests lived on an island, had a pet dog, and a secret agent assigned to protect them. There’s even an Indian boy.

But the Brants never had to deal with walking spider robots or sea monsters. Jonny’s adventures were loaded with scientific gadgets and weapons, and the Quests even flew around in the Supersonic Quest Jet (one of Dr. Quest’s inventions), much as Tom’s flying lab, the Sky Queen, was the Swift family’s main transport.

Jonny was far younger than any version of Tom Swift: while clever and resourceful, he left the science and invention stuff to his dad.

Then there is the strange case of The Towering Inferno, whose plot is almost identical to parts of Tom Swift Among the Fire Fighters (1921). But that might just be a coincidence.

The Syndicate spent years promoting Tom Swift movies and radio shows. Several projects nearly got made, although the failure of Dr. Dolittle sank a musical directed by Gene Kelly. They finally got a TV special, The Tom Swift And Linda Craig Mystery Hour, but it never turned into a series, even if The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series created with it became a hit.

The only other major spin-off was a Tom Swift Jr. board game, briefly available in limited numbers in the northeast.

In the real world, people love to claim that Tom Swift—particularly Sr. (whose inventions were more speculative—if that’s even the right word for something we’d like if it were invented, rather than predicted by science—and usually accompanied by hand-waving explanations)—predicted a lot of future developments, like Skype or cell phones, or point to such oddities as a Soviet-era flying sub (a project desperately in need of Thomasite) as predictions that came true, or compare his color TV that sees through stone walls to modern imaging devices.

When NASA researcher Jack Cover marketed his new invention in 1974, he named it the Taser, or “Thomas A. Swift Electronic Rifle” after the 1911 novel Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle. Mind you, Tom’s rifle was far more advanced and could shoot actual balls of electricity (like Captain Nemo’s underwater guns).

The strangest spin-off from the series is what is known as a “Tom Swifty“: the books were written quickly, lacked stylistic elegance, and tended toward the sensational. Characters rarely said anything if they could growl, grunt, or snarl it. In the early books, every conversation was littered with adverbs. This led to a type of joke with a quote paired to a punning adverb:

“I have a thousand dollars,” Tom said grandly;

“Let’s analyze this,” Tom said scientifically;

“The boat is sinking!” Tom gushed.

It’s a strange legacy.

Tom Swift was not marketed the way most books were. Grosset and Dunlap sold juvenile novels through five and dime stores, displaying rows of low-priced hardback books with matching covers. Professional librarians looked down on them and refused to shelve them, no matter how much kids begged for them (one remote library in our region had whole runs of The Hardy Boys and Rick Brant. It was enough to make any eleven year old cry), but they were relatively inexpensive and lots of people bought them for their children.

From the dime novels, Edward Stratemeyer learned to end every chapter on a little cliff-hanger, to drag the reader into the next section and keep them reading. It is very hard to put down a Tom Swift—Jr. or Sr.—once you start it.

But the rise of the paperback changed everything—and finally revealed the existence of the secretive Syndicate to the general public:

Harriet wanted to add cheap softcover reprints to their arsenal, so she moved the Syndicate’s books to Simon and Schuster in 1975.

Grosset and Dunlap sued her, claiming that they owned the books. In the end, they kept the right to sell the published books while Simon and Schuster got the new books and could reprint the old ones as well.

Ten of the Tom Jr. books came out in paperback (from Grosset and Dunlap!), but the series had already reached its end: sales waned as we reached the moon, the space race ground to a halt, and the baby boomers grew up. After thirty-three novels, the last came out in 1971.

Ten years later, Harriet revived Tom, this time as a young space pilot in an unspecified future. His adventures took place in outer space and didn’t involve inventions except for Aristotle, the robot friend he built. His father was also Tom Swift, although it’s not clear which Tom, and he might be the grandson, or even great-grandson of the original. Swift Enterprises still exists, only now it is based in Shopton, New Mexico.

These books were written by science fiction writers, including one who’d been a pornographer, and Mike McQuay, best known for his hard-boiled future PI, Mathew Swain. But the new series didn’t sell well, ending eleven novels later in 1984.

Harriet Adams died in 1982. Her heirs sold the Syndicate to Simon and Schuster in 1984.

Other new Tom Swifts followed, although they went back to small-town Earth in the next series, with a Tom Jr. who actually makes mistakes and crosses over with the Hardy Boys in two books.

The fifth series was told in first person by Tom Jr., and the most recent series, Tom Swift Inventors’ Academy, took place in a school for genius inventors run by Tom Sr., where Jr. is a new student. Harry Putterer, you might say.

But none of these were ever as popular as the original.

The series had gone from cultural phenomenon to yet another children’s entertainment product in an overcrowded market.

The truth is that Tom Swift belongs in his own era, a time when we were ready to build better and brighter worlds, and hadn’t yet cluttered our lives with so many modern marvels (that really aren’t all that helpful) that giant telescopes or overgrown magnets no longer excite us.

Somehow Tom’s inventive imagination and sense of adventure seems out of place in a world that has long since lost its own. Which is a shame. But at least we can still hand on the old Tom Swift Jr.s to the next generation in the hope that they might feel some of that same excitement.

Even if they seem a little quaint because we’ve done so many of the things Tom did.

 . . . After all, DARPA is still working on its own flying sub.

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.

Eyewitness to History’s Future:
A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson

Arley Sorg

Well known for his award-winning trilogy about terraforming Mars with Red Mars in 1992, Green Mars in 1993, and Blue Mars in 1996, Kim Stanley Robinson’s first novel, The Wild Shore, came out in 1984. The Wild Shore was the first book for his Orange County trilogy as well as the first title in Ace Book’s revived “Science Fiction Specials” line, which was devoted to first novels and edited by Terry Carr. In 1984, Ace also published Robinson’s Icehenge, “ . . . three stories connected through time, two of which were published before and significantly revised for the novel, and one written for the novel.”

Long before his career as a novelist began (over twenty novels so far), Robinson sold his first stories—novelette “Coming Back to Dixieland” and short story “In Pierson’s Orchestra”—to editor Damon Knight for the 1976 anthology Orbit 18. He continued to sell stories to Knight and Kate Wilhelm until 1981’s Universe 11 anthology, edited by Terry Carr, which had Robinson’s short story “Venice Drowned.” That story earned him his first Nebula Award nomination.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction published Robinson’s novella “Black Air” in their March 1983 issue. Not only did the novella take first place in SF Chronicle’s poll, it won Robinson a World Fantasy Award. Robinson’s work has made regular appearances on major awards lists and readers polls since, including the Tiptree, Clarke, Locus, Nebula, and Hugo awards, as well as international lists such as the Seiun, the Kurd Laßwitz, the Ignotus, the Grand prix de l’Imaginaire, the BSFA, and more. Recent accolades include a 2013 Nebula Award for Best Novel for 2312, an Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society in 2017, and having an asteroid named after him.

Robinson grew up in Orange County, CA. He earned a BA in literature from UC San Diego and a master’s in English from Boston University. He went to Clarion in 1975, then returned to UC San Diego to get his PhD in literature. His doctoral thesis was published as The Novels of Philip K. Dick in 1984. He is known for his interests in utopian and ecological issues, and is regarded among his peers as both erudite and personable. His work is considered to be both imaginative and scientifically rigorous. He lives in Davis, CA, but his recent favorite activity is building a lakefront rock wall at his wife’s family place in Maine, “rebuilding what her grandfather did—it falls down every winter in the freeze-thaw cycles.” His newest novel is titled The Ministry for the Future, available from Orbit Books on October 6th, 2020.

In your previous 2015 Clarkesworld interview, you called yourself a science fiction “patriot.” What are a few of the SF classics that still stand as important to you, what sort of impact did they have on you when you first read them, and are there reasons people should pick them up today?

This could go on quite a long time, as I have a personal SF canon that remains very meaningful to me. I keep those books on a shelf in my living room, along with a shelf that has my non-SF novel canon, also a poetry canon, and a nonfiction canon. It’s just for the fun of looking at those books.

Anyway, I came to SF during the New Wave and many of those books changed me for good, and turned me into an SF writer, and still speak to me. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Russ’ The Female Man—these should still be read by everyone. I also loved Delany’s Dhalgren, and Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus, and Lem’s Solaris. I could go on and on, and maybe I should mention Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker as the mind-boggler it will always be, and mention also the great writers of the 1950s, like PKD and Pangborn. But best to say, the SF of the New Wave period remains for me the high point in the history of the genre, in literary and political terms. They were life changing.

In 1984, your first novel, The Wild Shore, was nominated for a Nebula Award and won the Locus Award for Best First Novel. Even before this your shorter work was landing on awards ballots. Decades later your work is still widely read, still winning awards, and still amassing accolades. How do you not only stay relevant in science fiction, but actually stay successful, over such a span of time?

I like to write. Also, I’ve been lucky. I was lucky in my teachers, and lucky to meet and marry Lisa. Living with a working scientist and being the home parent for our kids were both great experiences for writing science fiction. And I was lucky in the editors I’ve worked with, from Damon Knight right through to Tim Holman; they all encouraged me and helped me, and got my books out there.

Also, I like to read. And I work a lot, but it doesn’t feel like work, because I enjoy making sentences and stories. I’d rather do it than not. Maybe it helps to live in a very boring town—there’s nothing better to do. In any case, I like the work. I’d rather be in the middle of a novel, wrestling with a big problem, than be finished with it; so when I finish one, I start another one. And the ideas keep coming.

Then lastly, my readers are generous. I write with the idea of a reader who likes to work hard to unpack a novel, so that the book becomes a kind of imaginative collaboration between writer and reader. I read that way myself and imagine there are other readers like me, as clearly there are. So, I’ve pushed, and kept trying new things, and some risks I’ve taken have paid off, because of my readers.

What was breaking in for you, how did it happen? Were there struggles or has it been a fairly easy journey?

Breaking in was relatively easy, because Damon Knight liked my stories and he was buying them for Orbit. While I went to graduate school, and was only writing a couple of stories a year, he was buying them, and that was enough to give me the feeling I was a professional writer, and to pursue that profession with all my efforts. Suddenly being an English major had a point beyond its semireligious aspect. Graduate school and my various jobs, teaching freshman composition, working in a bookstore and other retail, all these were tailored toward the end of being a writer. The early encouragement from Damon was crucial.

In fact, speaking of breaking in, my wife and I just recently drove past the spot on Highway 80 in Wyoming where I spent the night after calling my parents and learning I had sold my first story to Damon. This was on my drive east to go to college in Boston. There’s a rest stop at the highest point on Highway 80 that has a gigantic statue of Lincoln’s head perched on a granite plinth over the highway, and I slept in the parking lot under it that night, on the sidewalk beside my car, and read Fritz Leiber’s “Gonna Roll the Bones” from Dangerous Visions by the light of a parking lot streetlamp, under Lincoln’s giant bronze head. That was a great way to start.

After that, well, it’s been so long, there’s definitely been ups and downs, a kind of roller coaster in fact, but after the downs something always happened to drag things back up again. And truthfully, since I started to work with Tim Holman and Orbit Books, which began in late 2009, it’s been continuously good. I owe an awful lot to Tim and the whole crew at Orbit—in effect they’ve given me my sixties, and artists don’t always get their sixties, so that’s been a blessing and an opportunity.

Looking over your career, were there books that almost didn’t happen for one reason or another, or titles that you felt strongly about but which didn’t see the sort of reception you’d thought they’d merited?

I can’t think of any books that almost didn’t happen, because I’ve always had a small group of ideas for novels jostling in my head, and when I finished one, I’d pick the next one that seemed ready, and get on with it. I’ve never consulted with anyone as to which book I should write, until this last decade working with Tim Holman, who has been a big help to me in sorting out which of the various alternatives I should do next. There’s a couple more ideas I have that I haven’t written yet, but there’s nothing in the way of me writing them, except that I haven’t gotten to them yet.

As for comparatively neglected books, yes, I do have a couple favorites that haven’t had as many readers as some of my others, which I regret. But on the other hand, I think they’ve had some happy readers, and more will come to them as part of reading my overall body of work, if readers are interested. So, this isn’t any kind of powerful feeling, but I would enjoy thinking there were more readers for Galileo’s Dream and Shaman. I’m very fond of both of them, and they have their advocates, but more would be nice.

In the aforementioned interview, you and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro talked about your works as being in conversation with other science fiction works, and your contributions to genre in that sense. Do you see a relationship or conversation between your new book, The Ministry for the Future, and specific titles?

Wow, that’s a hard one. I’m pondering that and not coming up with anything right away. Not that many novelists are foolish enough to try what that book tries. But I will say that in figuring out a way to tell that story, I discovered what I think is a distinct genre, which is the eyewitness account, and that was a real find for me. There are collections of these eyewitness accounts, often clustered around some event (like the spring 1945 in Germany), although one is just called Eyewitness to History (it’s not very good compared to the more targeted ones). What I found is that eyewitnesses don’t dramatize their accounts like fiction writers would. They don’t give you dramatized scenes, in other words, but instead they offer summarized accounts, often made years later, so that a lot of compression happens, but key moments remain, and judgments are made, this is very important; the event is seen as important, and put into the context of the eyewitness’ subsequent life, and so on. In effect it’s telling not showing, and I like that very much; the workshop phrase “show don’t tell” is actually a very silly and simplistic instruction, and much bad fiction has come out of writing workshops because of people trying to enact this command. Eyewitness accounts are often vivid in ways a dramatized scene isn’t. Anyway, I got interested in writing a whole lot of fictional eyewitness accounts to describe my invented near future, and that was the key to that book. It felt like a tremendous discovery.

In chapter two of The Ministry for the Future, it reads like a prose poem, invoking a certain power through structure and voice. Can you talk a bit about writing this piece, and perhaps your relationship to poetry?

Yes, thanks for that—I love poetry, and keep trying to write it, though I am not good at it. But it’s fun to try. And in many chapters of The Ministry for the Future, I’ve tried various kinds of writing that are like prose poems, often in the form of riddles. About a third of the Anglo-Saxon literature we have is their riddles, often without answers provided, and that was another genre I found very helpful in writing this book. Also, I included mini-essays that can be like prose poems, and conversations between a smooth radio host and a grumpy commentator, and transcripts of meetings, and a few other forms. I wanted a mélange of voices and styles. For the riddles, I first included them without their answers, but my editor Tim Holman suggested this might be distracting and frustrating for readers, and when I went back to look I found that I myself couldn’t figure some of them out, so I took his point, and provided the answers to all but a couple of them. Then also, my teacher Fredric Jameson, to whom the book is dedicated, read a draft and suggested it was important that the second chapter be as different as possible in form from the first, to show readers what kind of game they were being invited to play. That was a good suggestion, which I took.

As for poetry, I mainly read single-author collections, a couple poems a night before falling asleep. Most recently it was John Ashbery, who is very good, although maybe better taken a poem at a time, every few months or so. His influence on later poets is perhaps a little unfortunate; it’s often better to make more sense than he does. Few can pull off his wandering syntax and thinking. I like Chinese landscape poetry, and tend to write poems that pretend to be translated out of Chinese, which gives me some cover for my simplicities. W. S. Merwin is one of my favorite poets, and I’m always reading the poetry of another teacher of mine, Gary Snyder. And I keep coming back to Emily Dickinson, as I’m thinking of assembling a selection of her poems, which would be the ones I understand—a pretty slim volume, but so very powerful.

The book opens in Uttar Pradesh with a scene that evokes a similar dread-feeling to refined horror. Why Uttar Pradesh as an opening setting?

It’s one of the places most susceptible to the increasingly deadly heat waves we are headed toward. So are many other places, like the US Gulf Coast, but I wanted India to be a big factor in this future history I was describing, even though the novel is mostly set in Zurich. But India is a big force, and will more and more be a major player in world history. Or so it seems. Anyway, having put the opening scene there, I had to keep coming back to India, to see what impact the event had.

A lot of your work deals with non-US cultures and settings. Are there specific challenges or pitfalls to utilizing these settings, and how do you deal with those challenges?

It’s a risk. The problem is my ignorance. I’m a Californian, and I’ve done some traveling, but not that much. And Lisa and I lived for two years in Zurich, which I’ve finally gotten into a book. And I’m a white male American born in 1952, so these are facts that set a lot of constraints and so on. So, I just try my best and hope for the best. Fiction is not self-expression. It’s based on writing the other. This is a shocking thing to try, really, but that’s what fiction tries, that’s what novels are. And I love novels. They are my religion, you might say—they are the way I make meaning out of the world. I don’t like memoirs. I did this, I did that—no. I don’t like memoir, I don’t even like travel writing. I like novels. So, every novelist has to take that leap into the unknown, of writing the other. You can of course base your novels on your own life, I’ve done that, occasionally, or you can write about peoples and places you have no direct experience with, I’ve done more often. Good novels can come out of both methods, although for me, I’ve had better luck staying away from my own life and trying to write others who are very much other. Although really even your own sibling, or yourself at an earlier time, is always an other. But I like to try to imagine what other lives might be like. I like that feeling.

One way to avoid the pitfalls of one’s inevitable ignorance is to ask for help and get readers who know more than I do to read drafts of my books and tell me what they think, make corrections and suggestions. Generous helpers have given me their time and thoughts, and my books have been better for it. But in the end the stories are mine, and what I imagine of these other places and times and people is simply my imagination of what they might be like. It’s no more than that. But I would suggest that in trying to imagine the other, even if you’re always failing, you are engaged in a good thing to try. And if you are going to try to write a novel, you’re stuck with that trying no matter what your theories are. This is why science fiction with all its wild leaps is just as valid a form of literature as any other kind—they’re all leaps.

The Ministry for the Future itself is predicated on the idea of the rights of people who aren’t yet born. Do you feel like here in the US, generally speaking, our culture is fairly concerned with the rights of future generations? Or is ours a culture of individualism, and in that individualism, the rights of others stand as less important, let alone the rights of future generations?

Good question. Solidarity with other people gets expressed in very concrete material ways that aren’t always noticed or talked about or remembered in our discourse. So, we talk about individualism in American culture, some people a little bit too much so, but no one could actually get by on their own in this world, it’s a vast eight billion-person collaboration, improvised and awkward, but very real. So, sticking to the level of discourse, there’s a lot of talk in the US about individual rights, and a lot of selfish behaviors too, which will damage the lives of people yet to come. Not good. It would be better to remember our descendants and act on their behalf. I like Aldo Leopold here: what’s good is what’s good for the land. This is a good working ethic, since the land supports us and will be needed by future generations for their support too. We can’t do without it. It’s good to remember that. A certain wing of science fiction is not good at remembering that—likes to pretend to forget it. Oh well—they can upload themselves into computers, or fly away in spaceships, and be fine. Good luck; and sometimes it makes for good stories too, so fair enough. But if SF is thinking about the future, which sometimes it is, these aren’t very useful thoughts. Except fun can be useful too, so, whatever.

There’s a strong sense of a political stance in this book, a look at global history from a specific perspective. Do you feel like taking a stand or making a statement is important in fiction, is it perhaps inevitable?

I think all novels inevitably contain a political or social statement, but often it’s just inherent or implied, and that’s fine. They’re works of art, and art is meant to be fun and educational both at once. Aristotle is very clear on this, and Brecht also—that we maybe separate these strands a little bit too much when we discuss them—that education can be fun, and fun can be educational, and what you want is to combine the two to make some kind of delight that is also illuminating or useful. For me, novels are about characters engaged in a plot, which usually means something has gone wrong. Then you have your story. Mainly I want to tell interesting stories. The question then becomes, what’s interesting?

Your books tend to be heavily researched, grounded in science, and often involve travel to the locales in question. Do you have any favorite bits of research or interesting experiences that didn’t make it into the final text of The Ministry for the Future for one reason or another?

Almost everything got into that novel, it’s a real kitchen sink, but I did consider a scuba diving scene down a moulin to the underside of a glacier in Antarctica, but decided that would be a bridge too far, in terms of realism and craziness. I did get to return to Antarctica in 2016, which I put into this book quite a bit, that was really fun. I love Antarctica and hope to return. It’s easy travel to other planets, to quote an old title (that book was actually about falling in love with a dolphin).

Beyond the blurbs and the reviews, is there anything you really want readers to know about this book?

I guess I’d like to suggest there are ways of going forward in the next few decades that dodge the mass extinction event we’re headed toward now, achievable futures that are not horrible—not fascistic or totally disastrous—livable futures that you might still be able to believe in. So, for a while I was thinking this book would be something like the blackest utopia of all time, but it isn’t really utopian, nor is it all that black, it’s just history, an unholy mess, and the book an attempt to indicate how chaotic the next thirty years are going to feel, even if things go fairly well compared to worse scenarios, which are maybe more likely. But there is a general intellect in civilization itself, and the Paris Agreement exists, which is already quite implausible, so you can see that people really are taking the situation seriously. We might squeak out of the century with most of the other species still with us, although that would have to be our main goal for it to happen. I hope it will be.

For this novel, I guess I’d add that solving the formal problem, by way of the eyewitness accounts and all the other modes I used, is my next step, maybe the last step, in a long move toward polyphony—the idea that the novel can take on a huge load of material without sinking—or not completely sinking, maybe submarining along, who knows—anyway, I really enjoyed the feeling this time of channeling voices, of being the telephone operator in one of those 1940s movies, jamming the plugs into the big board and linking up voices of all kinds. That’s the great fun of writing novels, for me, so this one was quite something to write.

What are you working on now?

I’m writing a nonfiction book about the Sierra Nevada of California. It has elements of geology, history, backpacking technique, routes to take, and memoir. So, there’s just the kind of travel book and memoir in it that I said I didn’t like to read, but somehow, I’m compelled to do it this one time, and it’s been very absorbing. Kind of a portrait of the artist as young mountain rambler.

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.

Living Raw and Out Loud:
A Conversation with Rebecca Roanhorse

Arley Sorg

Before you ever heard of her, Rebecca Roanhorse was already on her way to glory. In 2018, she showed up in Pittsburgh for the Annual Nebula Awards Conference, nominated for her first publication: “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™” (Apex Magazine 8/17). In front of a crowd of professional authors and publishers, almost all of whom were strangers to her, she won the award for Best Short Story. During that same conference she revealed to me that she’d already signed three separate book deals with two different publishers, for multiple books.

Roanhorse was born in Conway, AR and grew up in Fort Worth, TX. She earned a BA in Religious Studies from Yale University and an MA in Theology from Union Theological Seminary, and then a JD from the University of New Mexico School of Law, specializing in Federal Indian Law. She attended the VONA/Voices workshop in 2015.

Her debut novel, Trail of Lightning, came out with Saga Press in 2018, beginning The Sixth World series. Star Wars: Resistance Reborn was published in 2019 with Del Rey. In 2020 her middle grade novel, Race to the Sun, came out from Disney-Hyperion imprint Rick Riordan Presents. Writing for both adults and younger audiences, she has also published a number of well-regarded short stories, and is a Hugo, Nebula, Astounding, and Locus Award winner.

Roanhorse lives in Northern New Mexico with her husband, daughter, and pup. Black Sun begins series Between Earth and Sky and is due from Saga Press in October 2020.

Your new novel, Black Sun, is the first in the Between Earth and the Sky series, and is inspired by a number of pre-Colombian cultures. Trail of Lightning and The Sixth World series taps into Navajo lore. What were some of the key similarities and differences in terms of the research for these two projects?

The Sixth World series is a near-future Urban Fantasy so my research was pretty much lived experience from my day-to-day life on the Navajo Nation. I was writing about people and places I knew intimately. Black Sun, on the other hand, is a big sprawling epic fantasy inspired primarily by historical cultures. It required a lot of research on everything from archeoastronomy to indigenous ways of open water navigation, but even with all that research, it’s still a fantastical enterprise. There are giant beasts and blood magic and mythical creatures come to life, but the roots are different.

The world of Black Sun is inspired by pre-Colombian Americas and the world of The Sixth World is a postapocalyptic vision. Is it trickier to write the Black Sun world in certain ways, or more freeing?

A little bit of both. My goal with The Sixth World was to portray contemporary (and future) Navajo culture as accurately as I could in order to correct a lot of the stereotypes I saw in the way Natives are portrayed in popular culture, and genre in particular. Similarly, I also wanted to portray pre-Columbian cultures with some of the same grandeur and sophistication that they possessed but that they rarely get credit for, but I did not hold back on mingling cultural aspects with things I wholly made up. I took a lot more liberties and indulged my imagination a lot more in Black Sun.

Are there important ways that this book changed from when you first started writing and plotting?

I wrote an entire 95k+ draft of what became Black Sun and turned it in to my editor, Joe Monti, the week of Boskone 2018. I was eager to hear what he had to say when we met up at the Con, and his feedback was something along the lines of the story was good, not great. I was so annoyed I went back and rewrote the whole story, saving only some of the bare-bones worldbuilding and a few names and ideas. It became a wholly different novel, and thank god, because Joe was right. The first version was mediocre. The final version is objectively much better.

We often talk about science fiction literature as being a conversation, and stories and books are often written as a response to something that came before. Is Black Sun in conversation with particular works, is it building on something that came before, or is it unlike things readers have seen in some ways?

Black Sun is certainly in conversation with the epics that have come before. I grew up on Jordan and Eddings and, in college, Martin and Erikson were faves. I consciously tried to set aside the conventions and setting of the European-inspired epic while still giving readers what they want to see in high fantasy.

Additionally, Black Sun was my chance to portray people who look like me as something beyond orcs, laconic horse people, or the enslaved. I wanted to celebrate the various cultures of the Indigenous Americas by embracing their architecture, science, diversity of cultures and worldview, and then going fantastical with it. I dislike how marginalized authors are so rarely allowed to be fantastical, to have limitless imaginations and to break boundaries. I recently saw a review complaining that Black Sun did not meet the reader’s understanding of one of the historical cultures it draws from, and I wanted to shake that reviewer and point to the giant corvids and mermaids in the story and ask if they failed to notice the book was fantasy. I don’t think white writers have to deal with that expectation.

I really enjoy your characters and I feel like your character work is strong. How do you go about developing characters so that they are interesting, different, but plausible?

I remember reading a tweet from Kameron Hurley who said something along the lines of not wanting to write the same female character every time, and that made me strive to consciously try to write very different characters from the ones in my previous series. (I know other authors say they write the same five characters over and over and no one notices, and that’s fine, too. Whatever works.) I really try to be conscious of how different people are, and how differently they think and act and what different things drive them. And I try to pull that into my characters. That’s not to say that most characters don’t have aspects of myself in them, some more than others, but their construction is a thoughtful process. After they come alive on the page, so to speak, they often take on a life of their own if I’ve done a good job, but their foundations are deliberation.

What is horror for you, as opposed to dark fantasy? And do you feel like there are some elements in your books, particularly in Black Sun, which take the narrative to a horror sensibility?

I don’t differentiate between genres while I’m writing. I mix science fiction and fantasy, and there’s definitely elements of horror in my writing, including Black Sun, but that, unlike my character work, is not a conscious choice. That’s just my brain doing its thing. Often, I’m looking for the visceral, the gut punch. I want my work to be immersive, and when you’re immersed fully, it’s frightening. People are frightening. That’s just the truth.

People have lauded your worldbuilding in the new book. What makes good worldbuilding; how do you infuse a world with detail while keeping it interesting and not overwhelming the story?

I start with character and build out. I don’t make a world and then fit characters into it, and I don’t do big bibles full of details or anything. I create as much world as the character needs to feel real and to come alive, and then maybe a bit more to make the world feel likewise real and alive. And I try to be judicious about what makes it onto the page. Worldbuilding is not an indulgence, it’s a necessity. I keep it necessary.

You have books and short stories marketed to different age groups. Are there important differences in your approach to writing or narrative when you compose short fiction for younger audiences; or when you wrote Race to the Sun?

I think everyone should write for children, especially middle grade, at least once. It really teaches you how to write more completely. We forget that adults come to novels with a lifetime of experience that they then use to navigate a narrative. They can fill in narrative blanks or catch nuance that kids just can’t. Also, adults are much more willing to forgive lapses in plot and give you the benefit of the doubt. Kids call you on your bullshit. You can’t be a lazy storyteller and write for children.

In Black Sun, right at the outset, there’s this aspect of Serapio’s identity as an individual who is caught between cultures and between parents. Knowing a bit about who you are, this struck me as very personal. Do you feel a closeness to Serapio? Are there other important ways in which you relate to him?

Oh yes. My birth father is Black, and my birth mother is Native, and I am adopted, so I’m a bit obsessed with identity and where people fit in, or more interestingly, where they don’t fit in. Serapio and his journey are close to my heart. He struggles with his destiny, as all the characters do. But unlike others, he is willing to subvert his personal desires for a higher calling, even if the calling is one that is questionable and that may end badly for him. He does some terrible things in the story in the name of a people who don’t even know him, and frankly, may not want him, at great cost. There’s a quiet desperation to his character when it comes to human connection, but he’s also arguably the most powerful character in the story, a world-shaker. I love that contradiction.

I loved the line “Teek with a temper” and the book creates this immediate sense of a strong, stubborn, defiant woman in Xiala—perhaps even rowdy. Do you relate to her? What do you like most about this character?

Definitely rowdy! I’m channeling some of my twenties through Xiala but the difference is that she is unapologetically herself. I was never that confident. Unfortunately, that “self” is a mess. She’s living day-to-day, hour-to-hour, with very little thought for the future and being driven by the demons of her past. But she’s a generally good person whose only great harms are directed at herself. I think she’s the most relatable character in the story.

How does your connection to Serapio and the other characters in Black Sun, as well as to the overall story, compare to your connection to Maggie Hoskie, the protagonist from your Sixth World series, as well as to that story?

There are aspects of me in all my characters. I think that’s pretty common for authors. Some are more immediately accessible, some only blossom to recognition as you write. I joke that writing Maggie Hoskie was cheaper than therapy, and there’s a lot of truth to that. That character is my most emotional vulnerable self, everything lived raw and out loud, heart on your sleeve. Writing her was extremely cathartic. Serapio, for example, is a much more philosophical and introspective character. They both want desperately to be loved and to belong, and neither quite understand the power they possess, but Serapio is much closer to that realization than Maggie is. Maggie rejects her calling, Serapio embraces his. Xiala probably thinks having a calling is for suckers and would happily toast to that.

The concept around Teek as being people who become commodities, literally taken apart for the benefit of other people, strikes me as a powerful metaphor. Was it just a cool concept or is there a deliberate meaning behind this idea?

It is very much deliberate. There’s a line in the book where Xiala says something like, “They hate people like us until they need us,” referring to her and Serapio. And throughout the series they will both have to wrestle with how people want to use them verses their own desires. It’s a much more complicated question than it may look at first blush. To be useful, even as a commodity, is to be wanted, and for someone who has been so severely rejected, it is a consideration. There is power in sacrifice, but that power doesn’t come cleanly or easily.

What else would you like people to know about Black Sun, beyond the blurbs and the reviews?

I’ve talked a lot about character (thanks for the great questions), and that’s probably what is most important to me. This story is about people. People trying to find their way home, whatever that means to them. But the journey is not always successful. Sometimes home isn’t what you thought it would be, sometimes home doesn’t want you, sometimes home doesn’t even recognize you as one of the family. And then what do you do? Do you raze it all? Do you keep searching? Do you build your own family, or do you mold yourself into a more pleasing shape in hopes of acceptance? And at what cost? These are the kinds of human questions I’m exploring behind all the worldbuilding and magic and intrigue. I hope people see that, too.

What was the most challenging thing about writing this book?

I pushed through a lot of fear and doubt to write this book. Not only because I trunked the “good but not great” draft, but because of the kinds of characters I chose to write. Serapio has a disability, Xiala is pansexual, there is a third gender that uses modified neopronouns in the story. And, of course, this is a world inspired by non-European paradigms. It was everything I wanted to write, but it felt risky. It felt like I had to take a chance of people not liking it, or, worse to me, getting the representation wrong, but it would be worth the risk it if I got it right.

What’s next, what’s coming up for you, or what are you working on that you can tell readers about?

Most things I can’t talk about, but I can say my Hugo and Nebula award-winning short story “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience ™” has been optioned by Amazon Studios, as have a number of other projects. I also have an original TV project in development that I hope to announce soon, and by the time you read this, I’ll be part of a writer’s room on a very cool new science fiction TV series. In addition, I have a one-shot with Marvel Comics coming in November in their Indigenous Voices issue where I wrote a story for the character Echo with Weshoyot Alvitre doing interior art and David W. Mack creating a beautiful variant cover. And, of course, the second book in the Between Earth and Sky series will be out in 2021. My plate is very full and I couldn’t be more grateful.

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: In Mourning

Neil Clarke

I was all set to pen an editorial celebrating our fourteenth-anniversary issue and the plans we have for next year, but I’m not sure I have it in me right now. Mind you, I’m extremely grateful to see the magazine reach this milestone and proud of the accomplishment. There are ups and downs, certainly, but none of those are what have me off-kilter at the moment. It’s not even the pandemic or the host of other terrible things that 2020 has had to offer. No, today, I’m in mourning.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have a few special people in my life, individuals who through their actions have influenced me in a positive way. When my parents immigrated from Ireland, they left most of their large families behind, meaning that I seldom had the opportunity to spend time with my aunts, uncles, and cousins. Johnny, my cousin, was an exception. He came to America and worked for my father in his upholstery shop. A bit more than fifteen years my senior, I don’t remember a time that he wasn’t in my life.

Age ten was a difficult time for me. I was bullied mercilessly at school. I don’t think he knew, but his Christmas present that year—my first three science fiction books—provided me with life-saving escapes from that reality. Later, in college, he came with me to a few genre conventions and many more years down the road, his gift placed me on the path I’m on now. (For symmetry, I’ll add here that last Christmas, I gave him a first edition hardcover of the anthology he gave me all those years ago: Adventures in Time and Space by Healy and McComas. I had been searching for copies for the two of us for years and finally found them earlier that fall.)

While others were bemused or even a little confused by my turn from a “good” job in academic technology to publishing, he always supported me. No one else is much of an SF fan in my family, but a few will read the occasional anthology or story I’ve edited. He read every new issue, every anthology, and listened to every podcast. Signed copies of my anthologies were a regular requirement and soon I was sending him extra copies for his friends. He was genuinely proud of the work I’ve done and when I tried to explain to him the importance of his role in that, he downplayed it, refusing to take any credit.

He never had the chance to come with me to Worldcon or the Hugos. He desperately wanted to travel with the rest of our family to Dublin last year, but his health wouldn’t permit him to fly. DC in 2021 was to be the first local Worldcon he could have attended and if a finalist again, I would have loved to have brought him to the Hugos. In the eight times I’ve lost for Best Editor Short Form, I’ve had an unread speech that thanked him. This year, when he made his post-Hugo phone call, I told him what would have been said. I’m so glad I did.

Early last month, Johnny was admitted to the hospital and diagnosed with cancer. For weeks, the doctors attempted to stabilize his health so they could operate on him, but his condition only worsened. I couldn’t visit him in the hospital, but we spoke several times, decreasingly as his ability to have a conversation faded. Our last chat was just to say hi. A few days later, the doctors informed us that the window for surgery had passed and moved him to hospice care.

As you’ve probably figured out, there’s no happy ending to this story. Johnny passed away on the morning of September 25th. I am crushed, but he will always be with me in my mind and heart. Cherished.

If you have people like Johnny in your life, tell them. Thank them.

Thank you Johnny. Love you.

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:
Ancient Stones

Francesca Resta

About the Artist

Francesca Resta is an Italian illustrator based in London, UK. Her love for fantasy and science fiction novels drives her art and she paints digital illustrations for book covers for US and Italian publishers such as Penguin/Putnam, Simon and Schuster, Sourcebooks, Mondadori and Giunti.