Left Behind

Cat Rambo

Her office doorway was one of the many things that annoyed Shi about her job. It wasn’t a proper door, one that could be closed, but an open arch. She’d complained about it more than once, but been told that doors were antithetical to the institute’s brand.

“It signifies openness,” the director had said, smiling effulgently. It was a thin neuter with glossy hair and eyebrows that curled in elaborate patterns. Floral tattoos colored its pale brown skin, colored purple and blue that pulsed with the director’s heartbeat. An expensive body-mod, one that signaled the director’s financial status, in a way that Shi’s Business professors would have approved of.

It didn’t really matter how you presented, as long as it was costly enough to signal your status, they had said. You figured out a percentage of your budget—were you maintaining or actually trying to get ahead? And of course there were other investments you could—should—make, but none of that mattered if it was a dead end job, being phased out, with no lateral shifts available, only downward, if you didn’t have the initial dollars to invest. Time advances; adapt or be left behind.

Shi had put together a solid wardrobe a few years back but things were starting to fray. She caught the director eying her sleeve and folded her arms to hide the shirt’s cuff.

“I have a new case for you,” the director said, tone as pleasant as a pastel.

Relief made Shi realize she’d been holding herself stiffly upright in the director’s presence. That means I’ve made quota with still another week to go this month. Every month her clientele dwindled further, though. How will I manage when the inevitable moment comes and I fail to meet requirements three months in a row? She took a breath, and triggered calming agents in her bloodstream. They’d give me six months severance. All I have to do is figure out how to best use it.

The director was saying something about the client’s children. “They seem conflicted. They’ve agreed to it, but only if you can help their mother be more than a dumbship. Remember our work enables an entire industry.” They dropped a pad on her desk.

The director had transferable skills. And they were management. So they’d be among the last to go.

She smiled at them and nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Shi was currently female. She had chosen to present as an eleven-year-old girl, a slim, short shape that she had found disarmed most older people. Although there was a small percentage who found it off-putting. “Creepy,” one had called it, trying to explain the aversion. “An adult mind in a kid’s body? You just know too much.”

She’d handed him off to another client. Most people were genderfluid, able to inhabit any sort of body, but changing was expensive. Not just the procedure, but maintenance, clothes, sometimes furniture and other necessities of life. More than just changing the uncomplicated pronoun to be used in day-to-day affairs or the much more complicated set to be used in intimate occasions, signaling sexual availability and preferences.

That was risky, establishing personal relationships manually. Easier to figure out what you wanted—which you knew intimately after first establishing a profile scan and diagnostic discussion, and which might actually be the opposite of what you thought you wanted. Imagine being someone who didn’t understand all of that internal stuff and just blundered along on gut feeling! The computers used DNA and personality tests and your social media presence and a barrage of other factors in order to figure things out, and while you could game the system by picking the right keywords, certainly, why would you ever want to do that and risk setting yourself up with a relationship that was doomed before it even started?

It might be different if you didn’t have choices. But that battle had been fought decades ago. You had a right to your own body, to make it take whatever shape you wanted (and could afford). At the highest and lowest levels, they went “natural” although at the high end of that it was a nature that was augmented with as much beneficial science as could possibly be crammed in a body without making it obvious.

When the trio appeared in her door, she had the file open. Cianna Jones, age 98. The two adult children, Rick and Ruth, flanked their parent, who presented as an older woman. They had chosen to present genders themselves, one male, one female, though Shi wasn’t sure whether it was by preference or to keep their parent more comfortable. Each held their mother by the arm, steering her.

Cianna herself seemed adrift, a fluff of feathery white hair and vague blue eyes. She had undergone some minor cosmetics, but for the most part she seemed unaltered, which often happened with older citizens, ones who might even remember the early part of the century and the old ways there, that primitive time that seemed so obsessed with sex.

Introductions were made by the children, while the mother smiled vaguely at Shi from the seat they had pushed and tugged her into.

Shi didn’t address the group overall, though—just her client. There were important formalities to be observed.

“You understand why you are here?” she asked.

“I can have my mind wiped or else you can build me a palace,” the woman murmured. Her voice carried a slight natural drawl, somewhere between southern and Midwestern, probably uncorrected natural rather than a mod. She smiled sleepily at Shi, and Shi wondered briefly if she were drunk or stoned.

“After a fashion, yes,” Shi said. “That’s one way people refer to them in the literature, mind palaces. It’s the virtual reality best suited to you. You can fill them with all sorts of things. All of your past, and the places you never got to but always wanted to.”

She projected a smile at the client, a barrage of white teeth intended to elicit confidence. But the smile that was returned was much harder to read. Did Ms. Jones actually understand what was happening? Shi eyed Rick and Ruth, sitting on the edges of their seats and occasionally shooting dagger-eyed glares at each other, before she continued.

“Your children don’t want you to be a simple shipmind. That’s where I come in. I teach you how to keep part of yourself separate. To that part, the conscious part, it’ll feel like a life in virtual reality.” She didn’t add that the life depended on the quality of Cianna’s mind, how well she could summon up details. Constructing a mind palace was a collaborative effort whose ineffectual results were another thing she hated about her job.

But, oh, the good ones, the well-realized ones . . . those were her only chance to experience the sort of thing you usually had to pay an arm and a leg—sometimes literally—for.

Cianna stared off into space. Shi looked again at the children.

“Your parent does understand what we are doing?”

“She’s measured .9 on the Sati meter,” Ruth said. “She has been declared incapable of autonomy and this seemed best for her.” She smirked at Rick.

Shi looked at him, his hands clasped anger-tight in front of tensed torso. “You’re not comfortable with this decision?”

“It’s the only choice,” he said stiffly. Shi sensed an echo in those words, that it was something that had been said to him over and over—probably by his sibling—until he was convinced by it. “But I don’t want her to go if she can’t . . . if she doesn’t understand what’s going on.”

“She doesn’t, part of the time,” Ruth said. “She has episodes. She harmed someone during one. Not for the first time.”

Cianna stirred but Rick replied. “Don’t exaggerate. You’re making a lot out of a couple of shoves.”

“Human beings,” Ruth said primly, “don’t resort to physical violence to get what they want. That sort of thing may have been in style when she was growing up, but it’s outmoded now. So let her go off, into a place where she can’t hurt anyone.” The look she gave her mother said that “hurt” encompassed a great many things. “The money’s great. I’d volunteer for it myself if I could.”

The automatic spiel spooled out of Shi’s mouth. “Younger brains like yours and mine—the ones that have lived all their lives with shunts—can’t adapt to the technology. You and I can inhabit the mind palaces, but our autonomic systems don’t interface with the system the way theirs do. We need them to drive the ships. To become them. That’s why the price the institute pays is so high.” She looked at Cianna again, trying to connect. “You’re a precious commodity.”

The mother sat silent, smiling vaguely, but something about the glitter of her eyes made Shi uneasy. Something off about the situation, something out of kilter in a way that she couldn’t exactly define but definitely didn’t like.

“You can try,” Rick said grudgingly. “Then we’ll talk.”

In the chamber, the waiting couch smelled damply of antiseptic, freshly swabbed and ready, the plastic a soothing pinkish-gray that always made Shi think of uterine flesh. Muraled walls, confluences of pink and gray spirals, gauzily drawn in tiny tiles against a beige background, boxed in the chamber. The light calculated to the last lumen to provide just enough illumination to soothe, watery sunlight sifted through new leaves.

Buckles clicked into place as she strapped the older woman into the plastic couch, explaining as she went. They were quieter and more docile if they understood what was happening.

“We’re taking a brain scan,” she said. “In building the palace, we’ll use many of your memories, but we’ll also correlate them with the physical record, all the existing photos and videos, and use those to make details perfect. Think of all the wonderful places that are gone and that you would like to return to. They’ll all be back, there in your head, and you’ll be able to spend as much time as you like in them.”

The older woman made no response other than an acquiescent murmur. Was it odd for her to have an apparent child explaining the situation? Shi wished she had picked some different way to present for today. Once you had presented to a client, you were supposed to stay in that form, in order to give them a sense of security and continuity.

Not to mention Shi couldn’t afford it right now.

“It will feel as though you’re going to sleep,” she said. “You will be, in a sense. Would you like me to explain the science behind it?”

Cianna ignored her, stared off into space with an intensity that gave Shi pause. What was going on in the woman’s head? She watched the face slacken as the machine took hold and Cianna’s grip on consciousness was gently pried away, finger by finger, until she floated in the void, awaiting Shi.

It was always enjoyable, stepping into someone’s inner landscape for the first time, but she could tell from the first second that this one would be extraordinary. It took a high level of sensitivity and imagination to create a mindworld like this one, surgical sharp and vivid, down to the smell of the tiny coral-colored tea roses around her feet, the feel of a sea breeze tickling her cheek as it came from a sweep of vast blue that footed a long green slope broken with a tiny red brick building, and an enormous tree (her infochip murmured madrona, identifying it) in the center.

This would be Cianna’s core landscape. They differed from person to person, and usually you didn’t know what yours was. Shi did. Hers was an enormous skyscraper, resembling the one she’d grown up in, but with plenty of undiscovered halls leading in odd directions, and staircases of a kind that hadn’t existed in the actual building, long crawls of cement stairs that led downward, never upward, towards some menace that lurked at the foot of things. She had learned by now to break those dreams, to turn around and say determinedly not real not real loud enough to shatter the world around her but she had never done what her training suggested she should do: dig farther into the meaning and extract it, learn something about herself that she should—in theory—know.

If you understood your internal workings, you were more in control of your life, able to compensate for your foibles, but Shi thought that she wanted to leave herself some level of unexplainable mystery, of moments where she wondered at the motivations of her unconscious, where it was unknown why she had lost her keys or had a particular piece of music playing in her head.

Why she wasn’t preparing herself for the death of her profession. Cianna had to be one of the last. The competition was fierce. She’d been lucky to get it, the director had implied. The fact that they had felt the need to tell her that was alarming, had implications. Social networks were more important than luck in government work. You had to have influence to get a high-end job, one that came with good accommodations, even some luxuries.

She walked down over springy, damp grass, covered with dewdrops that threw up scintillations of light, spangles of color that danced in the air around them. Shi had rarely witnessed such intensity of mind. She certainly couldn’t think of any cases that had been stronger.

Cianna was there underneath the tree, but she didn’t greet Shi as she appeared, turned her face away. She was humming, a tune that Shi didn’t recognize, something slow and almost familiar.

“Won’t you walk with me and tell me about things?” Shi said, but the other woman didn’t acknowledge her. Sometimes they weren’t capable of it, but Shi thought that she was perceived, simply that Cianna chose not to speak to her.

And that was interesting in itself, because that spoke of an internal determination—perhaps even anger—that belied the vague smiles. Was it possible that Cianna didn’t want to retire to her memory palace? It would be—surely—a better existence than this one, with the two bickering children posing as adults.

But people resist change, inevitably, particularity the personalities that have throve in older times. A fading mindset. At some point all of the minds like this would be dead and they would have to turn to some other way to do it. Maybe Shi would be suited for that, but probably not. Nowadays the computers steered you into a particular career and while it might not be the one that you would have chosen for yourself, it would always turn out to be the one that you ended up sticking with, for one reason or another.

She set out. This initial session, she’d be sampling Cianna’s memories, building up an idea of what the ultimate structure would look like, how much it would hold. This brain would live for centuries, but it would always be confined by the limits of Shi’s creation. Part of her job was to gauge how narrow its confines could be, and with brutal efficiency, build not a step more.

Sometimes that resulted in very small spaces indeed, depending on the type of mind. That one a few months ago had chosen a world the size of a couch, an endless coupling with a variety of partners and an algorithm designed to ensure that fresh choices would always be available. That seemed like a very circumscribed existence, and yet they had been happy enough with it. An eternity of good sex didn’t sound all that bad, but you could achieve something very similar right now if you were willing to jack in.

Cyberlife was almost always more interesting than real life; it was designed to be, in a way that real life just wasn’t. So much advertising science had gone into its design that it was deeply compelling and every year you heard horror stories about people plugging in and never being heard from again—there was a brand of assisted suicide that specialized in it, in fact—either go into the virtual reality and live there until your body starved or actually seek out your death inside it while a watching attendant threw the kill-switch at the right time.

Some wealthy people lived that way by choice, though. Enabled by vivid minds, the minds of artists. Cianna was that sort of mind, but she was also compatible with one of the great transport ships that carried colonists outward, able to serve as its heart, its lungs, its guts, as well as the mind that drove it forward. Shi’s job was only to prepare and reconcile her. It didn’t matter what artistry might be lost in the process.

To the left, white two-story buildings, old ones, surrounding a quadrangle of more deep green grass, five deer grazing there. She marveled at the depth as she moved closer to them, at the fuzzy ears on the half-grown fawn, the way they twitched. She studied a deer as it scratched its neck with a hind-hoof, twisting around to do so. This sort of detail meant this was a childhood landscape, something seen for the first time, observed with the grave intensity of a curious child.

She went up a set of concrete steps, their edges eroded by time and weather’s subtle grip, to the first house. She could see nothing through the windows, which were silvered by the sunlight coming from behind her. The wooden door swung inward, admitting her, when she knocked, and she stepped into a white-walled hallway, a woolen rug underneath her feet to soften the pine planking. At the end of the hall, a glimpse of kitchen, but to her right an archway into a parlor decorated with pine furniture and small candles along the red-brick fireplace.

A girl and boy playing there. One would be Cianna. The other would probably be a sibling; she made a mental note to research them, taking a quick shot of the narrow, long-nosed face and the wealth of coal black curls, the thin quick smile and dark penstrokes of eyebrows. A beautiful boy, made even more beautiful by the particularly of the rendering. Cianna had an extraordinary mind, and surely that must make the memory palace even more appealing to her? The sort of world she could construct for this client would be the best that she’d ever done, she thought. A masterwork, of the sort that got commissioned by the wealthiest of clients.

But they didn’t have minds like Cianna.

She watched the children playing for a while before she moved along.

She drifted from house to house. Each held pieces of Cianna’s life: a childhood in Shelbyville, Indiana, then a move to the east coast and Baltimore as a teen, then college at William & Mary. Ambitions for a job, thwarted or at least stifled by marriage to a high school sweetheart.

Not the boy with the black curls, but he remained in every scene, some childhood friend that Cianna had managed to retain, unlike most. A constant, even up to the present day, she realized, catching a passage that smelled of yesterday, where the two stood talking. In this memory, Cianna was animated, lively, almost a voluble chatterbox. Shi expected a conversation about the memory palace process, but they didn’t say a word about it, caught up in an argument that she didn’t entirely understand, about a movie with an unexpected ending and whether or not it was possible to see it coming.

“It’s a matter of red herrings,” Cianna insisted, but the man, whose name she never spoke, laughed at her, saying it was more subtle.

It sounded a little like a meta-conversation, the sort of dream construction that can usually be peeled away into layers of meaning and signifiers, but though she listened for a few more minutes, she didn’t know how to read it. Perhaps she’d come back to this moment.

After what felt like weeks, the hour timer on the machine dinged, and Shi pulled back, reluctantly, into the confines of her own head. She stretched and released Cianna from the machine, helping her stand up. The old woman’s hand was warm and leathery, but she only touched Shi as long as she needed to in order to keep her balance, then let go with a hastiness that Shi thought bordered on distaste.

She said to Cianna, “You could challenge the competency hearing.” Better to say it now, when there were no live recording devices and, if questioned, she could say that Cianna must have misunderstood her and heard what she wanted to hear.

But the old woman only blinked at her. Shi saw suspicion in the stare, and distrust. She said, “You have a remarkable mind. Surely it must . . . ”

“The judge,” the old woman said, speaking clearly and not at all as though she had been silent till this point, “is a friend of Ruth’s.”

The implication was clear.

“Another judge . . . ?” Shi said.

“They’ll only find another place to put me,” the old woman said. She drooped as though suddenly tired, as though she had been walking along with Shi in the physical world. “I don’t know what I did to make them hate me so,” she whispered to herself. “I only tried to help them be all that they could be, and when they failed at that, they said it was all my fault.”

Shi kept silent. She had looked at the records. She didn’t like to be a bigot, but people who tended to keep a single gender often seemed to have other issues. Maybe she was misremembering or distorting that in her head, but it seemed true enough when she matched it against every client she had dealt with.

She was paid to analyze people, to understand why they did what they did, because it helped her construct alternate lives for them. Once this technology had been designed for nursing homes. Then the real breakthrough had come, and humanity realized how useful they were, these minds that were a diminishing quantity. Only a few more decades of them, perhaps, before that supply was exhausted by the depletions of time.

But she was not a family counselor, not trained to fix broken relationships. In fact, she’d been encouraged to help make things worse if she could, in order to encourage the older person to abandon their children and their own lives, in order to take on the existence that she offered them.

She crossed to the poster in her office. A spaceship, a vast colony ship ready to take its slumbering, frozen cargo out into the universe, a ship driven by one of these minds, the consciousness wandering its memory palace, living out a thousand lifetimes, while the unconscious systems, the autonomic ones, drove the important parts of the ship, just as they had once driven blood and breathing and balance, all automatic and unthought of.

Years of life . . . centuries, really. A body that was virtual, that never tired, that could instantly fly or change or whatever without tiresome surgeries or modifications. Who could resist something like that?

No, the old woman would like it. And Shi would make sure that she had a memory palace that would keep her happy. She wouldn’t cut any corners with this one.

She sat down and began to mesh the memory notes with the other files, data pulled from all over, pictures, sound clips, video files, feelies.

She didn’t notice the lack for a little while, but the data felt incomplete somehow. Then she realized. No sign of the black-haired boy, even in later years.

Had he died recently perhaps? But there was yesterday’s conversation. Odd.

She called the son. He answered without picture. “Yes?”

“I’m trying to track down the name of one of your mother’s friends. Lifelong. A man her age, his hair once black, mostly silver now, dark hair, a little goatee?”

“She doesn’t know anyone like that,” he said with flat finality.

“But they spoke together yesterday afternoon, for some time.”

“Yesterday she was at my house because my sister dumped her there. She spent the afternoon staring out the window, sipping chamomile tea, and eating crackers.”

Shi was silent for a second, trying to understand. Finally she simply said, “I must have misunderstood. I’m sorry to have wasted your time.”

She punched the call off and stared at the phone’s numbers. The man was too vivid to be a delusion, surely. Was the old woman truly mad? But if there was some chemical or neurological imbalance, they would have discovered that already in the medical exams.

But she couldn’t move forward until she knew what was happening. A mad shipbrain was prone to too much chaos, too much risk. Maybe Cianna’s brain was unsuitable. She couldn’t imagine either of the children being happy about it.

She couldn’t move forward on this before she cleared it up.

Cianna’s children did not agree. In private conference, Ruth came so far as to skirt the edges of bribery, mentioning considerations, perks, things that might come her way if only she could see her way clear to . . . then trailed off, leaving everything else unsaid.

“Both of you must sign off, legally,” Shi said. “Let me see what I can construct, and if she’ll adapt to it.”

After Ruth left, she pored through the files. She resorted to the government search, the one she, strictly speaking, was not supposed to have access to. Where was he? Who was he?

At night, staring up at the translucent ceiling tiles that showed murky moonlit clouds, she tried to fit her head around anything other than insanity. Conspiracies. Magic. Ghosts. Lost souls. Time travel. Alternate dimensions.

Because something about Cianna was so eminently sane, at the heart of it. Her mental landscape was so clear. Being in it was like being in a hyper-real version of the world. So alive.

How could insanity produce something like that?

Requisitioning the brain exploration a second time was not unheard of but required special forms, part of her discretionary budget. Not something to be indulged in lightly and as a matter of fact, something that she’d always taken pride in not doing.

Only Ruth came this time. She said to Shi, “Is this really necessary? Why can’t you just sign the forms?” Her fingers twitched their way around each other; Shi saw with a twinge of pity that she’d already gnawed through what looked like freshly grown nails, blue and purple stripes echoing her wrist-insets.

Literally eating at herself. What will happen when Cianna is out of the mix?

She touched mental triggers, making sure her face showed no sign of her emotions and said, selecting gentle reassurance, “Perhaps you’d like to wait in the relaxation room we have upstairs. There’s a sunlight machine and several sound sculptures. Very pretty.”

The hands writhing, worrying at a loose cuticle. Then heels trit-trotting away without another word.

“She doesn’t know how to be kind to herself,” Cianna said.

The words startled Shi. Cianna had been so silent that she’d fallen into a beginner’s trap, thinking her furniture rather than participant.

“Who is the man, the dark-haired man?” she said.

Cianna’s lips slackened, went quiet with an almost malicious twist.

“Ask him.”

Again the green quadrangle, the madrona at one end, the slope bordered by cliffs overlooking the ocean. This hadn’t appeared anywhere in Cianna’s childhood. But it seemed so real, surely it must be based in some place that was just as actual? She fumbled through neurons for the name. Port Townsend.

This time she chose the little chapel down at one end. She couldn’t remember if it had been there last time. Surely it must have been.

The world pressed in on her with maddening, dazzling intensity like noon sunlight at summer’s peak. When she slipped inside the white-painted doorway, she breathed a sigh of relief.

Inside, another sycamore tree. No Cianna, only the boy, the same body-age as Shi, perhaps a little older, sprawled on the green grass in shorts and blue striped shirt, his eyes closed as though he were dozing.

Somewhere someone was mowing grass. The sharp scent bit her inner nose as she moved forward towards the boy, the blades springy under her slippers.

He didn’t move. She stepped beside him and knelt down, meaning to touch his shoulder.

But before she could do so, his eyes snapped open, dark and glaring at her.

“What are you doing?”

She stumbled back, off balance, and fell on her ass in the green, that smell almost as overpowering as the external sunshine had been. As she thought external sunshine, the sunshine here intensified to match it. Her eyes watered. The boy, a little blurry, sat up.

“What is your name?” she said.

“Call me Hypothetical,” he said, and laughed. “Maybe Hi for short.”

“You’re not real,” she said. That was the only possible explanation, but he seemed so animated. So three-dimensional.

“I’m imaginary,” he admitted. “Cianna thought it would confuse and delay things.”

“It did,” Shi admitted. “It certainly did.” She felt some tension drop away. It was not unusual for a candidate to resist the technology, and this was one of the cleverer attempts she had ever encountered. It must have taken a tremendous feat of imagination to strew this figure through the old woman’s thoughts to the point where Shi had thought him real.

She settled herself into the grass, enjoying the warmth of the sunlight, letting her eyelids droop. How often in her life would she get to experience something on this level? A realer than real version of a vanished age of sunlight and personal space and uncontrolled green things.

What would someone pay for this kind of experience? Artists at this level commanded more than she’d make in a lifetime for a single performance. But her Sati rating meant she was incapable of making choices, except for that tiny part of her psyche that had been able to construct Hi.

And Cianna’s daughter wanted her gone, wanted her off-planet.

Better just to enjoy this while it lasted. “She gave it a good try,” she said languidly. “But now we’re over.”

“Indeed,” he said. “You are, at any rate.”

His hands closed around her throat.

There were net legends about this sort of thing, even a few movies. But the truth was, if you died in someone else’s mind, you simply emerged back in real life, shuddering and gasping, to see Cianna looking at you with disappointment, eyes glittering in the dim light.

“It doesn’t matter,” Shi said. “You said it yourself. They’ll find somewhere to put you. Let me build you a wonderful palace to live in.”

“Rick won’t let you do it.”

“Not there, no. But nursing facilities are expensive. And it’s similar technology, being plugged in when no one is visiting you. The ship’s computer has thousands of times the processing power, though. You have to know what a gift you have. What it could be.”

Cianna’s face twisted, showing real emotion for the first time. “There has to be a way. A way that lets me stay real.”

Her voice was loud and shrill and hurt Shi’s ears. This was naked emotion, unfiltered, unmuted, shocking in its exposure. In the 20th century people had hidden their flesh from exposure; in the 21st it was their minds. That was why appearance didn’t matter.

No one wore their heart on their arm anymore—was that how the old-fashioned expression had gone?

Shi’s overrides were going up, otherwise her heart would have been racing. This was unpleasant, so unpleasant.

“You want to shoot me into space,” Cianna shouted. Shi could hear the rumbling of security coming, drawn by the noise. “Out into space, all alone, nothing but zombies for company!”

“There are algorithms for randomness,” Shi said. “The people will feel real to you. As real as your creation, at least.” Her neck remembered his fingers, even though it had never felt that touch.

Security bots in the room, columns and tentacles that paused at the sight of Cianna bound in the memory chair, screaming, swiveling to regard Shi.

“It’s all right,” she told them.

“It’s not!” Cianna screamed, and went on, high-pitched shrills of inarticulate rage until Shi pressed a console button and slid her into sedated silence.

“Your mother is more than capable of being plugged into the ship and staying herself,” she told Rick. “She’ll be happier.”

Shi had called him before talking to Ruth. She knew what Ruth would say already.

“The law trusts you and your sibling to make the right choice for her, or you wouldn’t have been given the decision to make.”

His head tilted from side to side, an uneasy, snakelike motion.

“She has to agree,” he finally said.

A third excursion was unheard of. But within reach, if she was willing to expend every iota of social capital, every scrap of influence asking fellow employees to like her project on the internal boards, swapping away vacation days and perks, even part of her vacation pay. Depleted her.

Cost-benefit analysis allowed her to compute the odds but she had to shut off all emotions in order for the equation to make sense. Otherwise it kept inexplicably tipping, kept summoning up Cianna’s indignant face, the drawn skin translucent as bone, but the eyes still alive, still full of purpose.

She filled herself with silent calm and re-evaluated a dispassionate formula. Yes.

Wind from the inland this time, sighing towards her full of pine. The deer were everywhere, as they always had been, nosing through blackberry vines with black tails flicking. Every house was deserted. She found Cianna alone, standing on the cement structure at the bluff’s end: a former military embankment, the guns stripped away long ago, the cement fuzzed with emerald green moss and rusty lichen.

She climbed up the narrow stairs. The wind hurled itself against her.

“You don’t have to go alone,” she said. The wind slackened. Gulls hung overhead, wingtips wavering as they rode the wind. Cianna turned.

“I’m going to branch. Make a recording of myself. It’ll go with you. Live with you in the memory palace.”

Cianna’s nose wrinkled. “A recording.”

Shi reached for the handrail to haul herself up the last steps and move to lean against the concrete blocks. “You know how it works. I’ll go with you. It’ll be me. It’s not cheap. I’ll have to bribe someone to slip the recording in the ship but I’ve got enough, I think.” She shrugged. “It’s in your hands. This is the best I can do. You know sooner or later Ruth will have her way.”

And if the benefit of a lifetime, a retirement of the kind I’ve never dared dreamed of, falls my way in the process, well, who does that hurt, really?

She continued, “I don’t mean to be cruel, but do you want to stay here, neglected by your children? They don’t want you. I do.”

“You have a choice. I don’t. They say I legally can’t make them.”

“They’ll put you in the program, no matter what, yes. But if I help you—if you let me help you—you can prepare your mind, be more than just the thing that drives the ship. You’ll remember who you are.”

The wind whipped around them and a seagull wavered in the sky, a wispy cloud flowing to obscure then reveal then hide it again. Sunlight and windchill fought for supremacy on her uncovered skin and the dazzle on the waves made tears blur in her eyes as she swallowed against the earnest lump in her throat.

“All right,” Cianna said, finally, wearily. “Where do we start?”

Shi woke slowly, swimming up through dream layers. She’d been so tired when she’d laid herself down to make the recording. She’d worked nonstop, night and day, to build the memory palace, to fill it with more than one had ever held before, a world of possibilities. A life that she and Cianna could inhabit.

She looked forward to it. Her own parents had been distant. And it wouldn’t be as though they had to continually interact if they turned out not to suit each other well. The world she had made from Cianna’s imagination was her masterwork, full of details. How often did you get to build your own Paradise, almost literally?

Now here she was, light seeping under her virtual eyelids. All around her the hyper-real, the beautiful world that would be her home for centuries . . . longer. A world of possibilities and wonder.

She opened her eyes.

But the tiles overhead were the same as always. She sagged back into the mattress.

She wasn’t the recording. Only the original.

Still left behind.

About the Author

Cat Rambo lives, writes, and teaches atop a hill in the Pacific Northwest. Her 200+ fiction publications include stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld Magazine, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She is an Endeavour, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award nominee. Her 2016 forthcoming work includes Hearts of Tabat (novel, WordFire Press) and Neither Here Nor Here (collection, Hydra House). She is the current President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

The Universal Museum of Sagacity

Robert Reed

Walter Fitzgerald was a rising force in the insurance industry, living in faraway Boston when he met a lovely Bohemian girl named Madeline Furst. The one-week courtship led to a wedding officiated by an Episcopal priest, and the couple settled into an apartment near Beacon Hill. Maddy was my mother’s aunt, but only briefly. That adventure ended after a year, and besides tax records and snapshots, very little survives from those days. After that, Walter returned home to the Midwest, married a local girl, and had two children. Those were my mother’s cousins, and odd as it might sound, they knew Maddy. In a fashion. She was the very pretty lady who flew in for the holidays. But only when they were little, and for one reason or many reasons, their parents neglected to explain the woman’s significance.

Which is a story unto itself.

Mom was a decade older than her cousins, and she also didn’t know about “the Boston wife.” What she saw at the Christmas parties was a cosmopolitan lady whose life revolved around art. Maddy was said to be a genius with paint and with words, and there was considerable travel, complete with cocktails and cigarettes. It was hard to decide which part of that biography Mom found most appealing. But later, when she was told about the family secret wearing high heels, she had to marvel at the woman’s capacity to sit beside her ex-husband’s wife, the two of them happily discussing nothing, not a touch of jealousy on display.

Christmas meant cameras, and I was eleven when I came across three of the surviving photographs.

“Who’s this?” I asked.

Nobody can answer that question. Not about themselves, much less other people.

And that was true a thousand times over for Maddy.

I was sitting on the living room floor, and Mom was across the room from me. But it was easy to guess which face among the dozens of faces caught my interest.

“Oh, that’s my Uncle Walter’s first wife.”

The time stamp on the white border claimed this was March of 1965. But that’s just the date when the film was developed. Those album pages were dedicated to Christmas in 1964. Some of the subjects were smiling for history, others ignored the camera. Then there was the lady who was posing and not posing. Who was smiling politely but a little fiercely. Her bent elbow was cradled in the free hand, a cigarette riding between two fingers. Even a boy who didn’t know much could spot the face that didn’t belong, and I mentioned that impression to my mother.

“She’s different,” I said, or something along those lines.

Mom heartily agreed, and joining me, she shared a fresher piece of the saga. Her cousins lived elsewhere, but she met them for lunch last year, both of them home for a visit. The topic of Maddy came up, and trying to deliver a compliment, my mother applauded their mother for being so gracious and good. And why was that? Because she allowed Walter’s first bride to join in their celebrations.

Guess where this story leads.

Yes, this was unexpected news. It was practically a thunderbolt, unanticipated and leaving everybody off-balance.

Yes, the cousins remembered the pretty lady. But Miss Furst was just a family friend. Nothing more. How could my mother get the story so wrong? Except she wasn’t wrong. My grandmother, Walter’s sister, had shared the history. But that admission happened years ago, and it wasn’t supposed to remain a secret. Not once the children were grown, and why didn’t anybody ever tell them?

Lunch ended with embarrassment, confusion, and a lot of anger trying to find any worthy target. The Fitzgeralds held an emergency family meeting. Mom didn’t witness any of that, but it was easy to imagine the conversations. Difficult questions led to belated confessions. “Except really, where’s the scandal?” she asked me. As if I were the jury, one eleven-year-old boy. Mom didn’t intentionally ruin anyone’s secret, and she refused to accept any blame. Every parent had the obligation to tell their children the truth, and since nobody else did their job, she did it for them. And really, the whole incident made her cackle, replaying the shock in the faces of those forever-younger cousins.

That was the first time I heard the story. But that day was just as important because of something I learned about myself: I had the capacity to become infatuated with a faded black-and-white photograph. Sure, Maddy was beautiful in the usual ways, looking at me from thirty-five years in the past. Her cigarette was ominous and sinful, and thus wonderful, and I imagined the moments after that picture was taken, smoke blowing out of that pretty smart, and very angular face. She had dark hair cut short and a small mouth, the chin pointed and eyes that held nothing but mystery. And making her even more astonishing was the ex-husband. Walter was a prematurely old man, bald and heavy, sitting passively beside Wife Number Two. Who was a pretty gal in her own right, I should add. Which was why later, as I began to understand people, I realized Walter must have had quite a lot to offer the pretty ladies of that other long-lost century.

But at that moment, I was just a kid sitting in our living room, struggling to make sense of faces and mysteries that keep their secrets even today.

Mom stopped talking at last.

What was she telling me?

No matter. I asked, “So where is she?”

“My aunt?”

“Yeah.” I was bracing for a fresh photograph of an old lady, smoked out and drunk out and spent.

But no, Mom gave me the one answer guaranteed to make this apparition even more real. “Maddy died,” she said calmly, but not sadly.

I noticed that tone.

“In Turkey, in Istanbul,” was her follow up detail.

For the first time in several minutes, I looked up from that photograph of a dead woman and a lost day.

“There was a car crash, Colin. In 1965.”

We were months away from a new century, and another forty years had to be crossed before that lie was revealed. But whatever my mother knew, and whatever she thought about secrets, it was best to keep that particular and very peculiar honesty out of my sight.

Born in 1988, my childhood was spent inside the soggy, slow days when the Internet was half-realized, when machines could only pretend to be smart and pretend to be our friends. For all of its noise and eager promise, science was accomplishing remarkably little. Fusion would always be twenty years in the future. Genetics were being manipulated, but only for disease-resistant wheat and prettier flowers. And the total invests into SETI were barely enough to run a few antennae watching the wrong parts of the universe.

I married a pretty lady of my own, though she wasn’t mysterious or Bohemian and she never pretended to be artistic. The most ordinary couple in the universe, we had children and what felt like a very durable family, and then everybody was grown, including two middle-aged people who looked at each other for the first time, realizing that our best possible future involved a polite divorce.

Single again, hungry for change, I found a new job in a different state. PinPoint was the tech beast that ate Google and Apple, and PinPoint saw talent enough to hire me. To outsiders, everything about my employer sounds spectacular. But honestly, nothing about me is exotic or special. We happen to be the world’s largest corporation, worth trillions and possessing a chokehold on genius and a hundred new markets. But the bigger any company is, the more it needs a corp of dull experts who manage the kibblebucks and bitcoins and dollars. Which is not to claim that I’m an accountant. Bookkeeping is better done by AIs, and by AIs, I mean the intellectual servants buried inside my extended, effervescent nature. Which is the PinPoint system: A marvel of technology endlessly remaking humanity as well as this golden new world.

We aren’t the first company to tap into machine consciousness, but we have always been the pioneers who embraced machines hardest, and as a result, we delivered the most profound results: Fusion reactors pounded out like cookies; endless foodstuffs grown with bottled sunlight and air; prolonged lifespans; augmented intelligence; and the possibility of starships that could punch through the quantum nature of the universe—a universe proving to be both larger and quite a bit smaller than anyone had guessed.

Everything was becoming possible in these last years, or so it seemed. And I was in charge of the brilliant machines that expertly herded the pennies.

People always want to think they’re part of something special.

And usually, we are so wrong.

My mother had a talent for repetition. I don’t know how many times I heard the Maddy story. Not often enough, she believed. But there were ways to shake the story, making it into something fresh.

For instance. As a young man, good with numbers and a little wise about human nature, I proposed two possibilities. Obvious scenarios, and well worth sharing.

“Maddy needed money,” I said.

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“Why she came to Christmas. It was Walter’s way of giving her an allowance for the next year.”

“What? Like a divorce settlement?”

“Why not?”

“Because there wasn’t any alimony,” Mom said. “They parted on excellent terms, and she made her living from art.”

How many artists paid their rent, much less bought booze and plane tickets? But there was another possibility, sharp and obvious. “So they were still having sex,” I said. “A few days every year, and Walter paid her or he didn’t pay her.”

“Oh God no,” she said.

This was a burdensome time for my mother, her grown son pushing through a phase of blunt honesty. Which isn’t the same as truth telling. If you think about it.

“Or,” I said ominously.

Bristling, she asked, “Or what?”

“The two wives liked each other too. If you know what I mean.”

“Colin,” she said, preparing to say quite a lot more.

But no other words offered to help. And my mother turned and hurried out of the room.

Embarrassing lunches and bad afternoons: Every family suffers them. But eventually I decided there were boundaries worthy of respect, and I stopped making trouble. Which was when the Maddy stories returned to their traditional pattern, decade after decade, until my mother was living inside a tidy, very modern facility that catered to the dying.

“Istanbul,” she said. “Did I tell you about Istanbul?”

“Where your Aunt Maddy died,” I said.

“So I told you that part?”

“Once or twice.”

An odd, oversized grin emerged. “But I didn’t tell you the big secret, did I?”

“I don’t know, Mom. What’s the big secret?”

“The part Uncle Walter shared with me and nobody else.”

This felt new, or maybe I wasn’t paying attention earlier. “What did Walter tell you?” I asked, not quite sure where a secret would sit.

“My aunt was exceptionally creative,” Mom boasted.

I nodded. Waited.

“Madeline was.”

“Aunt Maddy. Yeah, you told me. She was some kind of artist.”

“A brilliant soul. That’s what was most special about her. It doesn’t show in those old pictures. But how could it? She was an incredible person, and none of us realized it at the time.”

Mentioning the name was enough for me to remember Maddy’s face. A divorced man in his later years, and I still cherished my odd infatuation for a black-and-white image. And there were the alluring possibilities of inventive marital arrangements between three long-dead people.

“I can’t say what was most incredible about the woman,” Mom continued. “And your uncle couldn’t explain it to me either.”

Walter wasn’t my uncle. But I didn’t dare stop her.

“I’m sorry. I’m not sure about dates. But Maddy was noticed. In the early 1960s, I think. For one painting, for all of her poems. I don’t know the particulars. But they singled her out, and that’s why she was granted a very rare honor.”

“‘They singled her out,’” I repeated. Silly as hell, I imagined my dead great-aunt in Stockholm, wearing a robe and gold medal.

“Just once, Walter said, ‘Very, very few of us are noticed.’”

True words.

“Walter had this wonderful rough voice,” Mom said. “Very manly, very smart. ‘But my Maddy,’ he said. ‘She was one of the fortunate ones.’”

“Who noticed her?” I asked.

“Oh,” Mom said. Then with a conspirator’s laugh, she said, “I can’t tell you that, Colin. I promised not to.”

The woman was very old, very frail. And there were moments when I wondered if senility was in charge.

So I said, “Oh Mom.”

But she was lucid enough to hear the tone in my voice. Then she put her hand on my wrist, saying, “Think of something you would never believe. That’s what happened to your lovely Aunt Maddy.”

Old people are experts at shuffling through the past, and that’s one of the few blessings we are losing, living in this world increasingly free of illness and mortality.

My mother was dying. Every week brought medical wonders, but she was dying at a very particular pace. Another few days, another five years, and she would have been saved. But there had to be a funeral instead, shaking hands with surviving family and friends, and there was business involving Mom’s possessions. Except those final chores had to wait. One recent promotion had led to another, bigger promotion, and I had too many work responsibilities keeping me distracted and happy. It was half a year before I was inside an air conditioned locker, opening up boxes filled with more boxes, and waiting inside a shoebox were three photographs of Madeline Furst.

Two of the images weren’t particularly remarkable. Maddy was out of focus in one, badly lit the other. But I spent long moments with the image I remembered best, watching the woman stare back at me from that other century. And because it was so very easy, I fed those images into PinPoint’s in-house search engine, along with my narrow version of history.

Every visible photograph in the world was examined.

And all of the public records too.

Time barely passed before several thousand photographs were recovered, and with those images came a storyline that marched forwards until a spring day in 1965. In Istanbul. A British tourist took a snapshot of a street scene, and in the foreground, caught while sitting in a cafe, was an American lady doomed to die tomorrow in a car crash. Accounts of the accident were reported in newspapers as well as the police files, all translated into mid-21st Century American, and I read them while ten more minutes of superconductive labor revealed nothing else.

But the search engine asked the usual question: Should she continue pursuing images of the lady?

Magic spells are powerful, in part because they are so easy to unleash.

“Sure,” was my magic word, and having said that, I returned to sorting through my mother’s favorites and forgottens, certain in my mind that nothing more would come of this.

Lesser companies offer climbing walls where their people can embarrass one another while wrenching muscles.

Instead of walls, PinPoint maintains a private mountain. But it isn’t a respectable peak in Colorado or Central Asia. PinPoint doesn’t accept the ordinary. The mountain is a marvel of algorithms and sculpted data, all tended by our in-house art department, with the collaboration with staff geologists. Peacefully scenic on its lower slopes, the virtual edifice turns steep and beautifully angry. Any employee is free to enjoy the mountain whenever he or she wishes. Exercise is a priority at PinPoint. Camaraderie with your fellow workers is another goal. The limits of lightspeed remain, but the new sub-mantle optic lines shave microseconds off transmissions. That’s why a member of the accounting department can drop onto a pine-shadowed trail, walking uphill for twenty minutes before reaching a favorite vantage point: Two kilometers above a winding river valley, and two kilometers below the blue ice and wreathing clouds worn by a nonexistent summit.

I’d recently turned sixty-seven but was being dialed back physiologically, with the goal of making myself forty again. Though it was possible to shoot younger, if you were that kind of man. I’d made the hike a hundred times, and my habit was to stop at the overview and lay two fingers against my wrist, relishing an increasingly youthful heart. But that day strangers distracted me. Three of them were perched at the cliff’s edge, the air directly above them warped to form a lens. Instead of counting heartbeats, I joined them. Which is encouraged. We were colleagues in the same great venture, after all. By rights, we should stand beside one another, regardless of station or status or every well-deserved pride.

“Too close,” one of the watchers said.

“He won’t make it,” another said hopefully.

“But he might,” the third warned. Then she lifted a slab of light, giving instructions to the algorithms responsible for the weather three kilometers above us.

The change wasn’t as abrupt as pushing a Kill button, but it might as well have been. Through the lens, I could make out a faceless human figure scrambling up snow-clad stone, using nothing but strength and fearlessness encased in gecko skin. The gentleman wasn’t a hundred meters below that fictional ground. Which is the mountain’s more impressive feature: Sierra PinPoint was designed to be unscalable, and what I stumbled across were three of the people who lost sleep worrying that some bold or lucky other would beat their baby.

The conjured storm came from nowhere, and the climber vanished behind gale-driven clouds.

“Fell,” one person said gratefully.

Nobody died, of course. Which was another reason to maintain a fake mountain over the real sort.

But that left the trio with the urgent task of improving their mountain, and like any corporate problem, there were limits to what was possible. Two of them were artists, and the third was a PhD who looked at the world as a series of cross-bedded sediments and rift valleys. He made suggestions about how real mountains acted, and the artists struggled to weave their vision around rational rules as well as budgetary limitations. Data are not free. Even the smallest data occupy space and demand energy. In other words, numbers need to have homes, and every home costs money.

I was eavesdropping, understanding almost nothing.

And they ignored me in that non-insulting way people do when private problems consume them.

Then I surprised all of us.

“I can help,” I decided.

The geologist appeared older than me. Because he hadn’t dialed back his years, or because he wanted to wear the elder role? Whatever the reason, the gray fellow warned, “This isn’t just piling rocks on top of rocks.”

“I understand that,” I said.

But he realized quite a bit too. “You work in Billing.”

The trio might have had hopes, but a quick scan washed that away. I was a bookkeeper, yes, which put me low on every scale.

Then I offered them a number.

“Excuse me?” said the woman artist.

“What are you talking about?” asked her colleague.

“Your mountain is an indulgence, not a priority,” I said. “But I have a pretty fair sense of what you need in terms of funding. There are departments with extra resources. Some of that fat is going to get eaten in another six hours. Which happens every day. And as it happens, the man you just threw off the mountain controls a division with enough capital to make everything possible. If you approach him now. If you promise him a higher peak and thinner air and far worse weather too.”

“That’s going to make him happy?” the geologist asked skeptically.

“Ignore his happiness,” I said. “He knows the rules and never planned to summit. But he expects you to keep him chasing what can’t be caught. So yeah, I believe you should meet with him. Right now. While the memory of his death is fresh in everybody’s head.”

The sculptors fell into private channels, discussing the possibilities.

I stepped away, hoping for thanks and getting nothing but one more growl from the geologist. Then he left the mountain by the most direct route, stepping off the cliff to drop back into his office and most trusted chair.

The sculptors and I lingered in the clearing. But nothing was said between us. I watched the mountain below while their attentions shifted to an impromptu meeting with the mountaineer. Then a few minutes later, winning smiles appeared, and then some infectious, child-like giggling.

Which was when the new group arrived.

One glance told me everything. There was no reason to approach these intruders. PinPoint is a juggernaut for a lot of reasons, but particularly because we have a genius for finding genius. Half a dozen of our best were standing in the false sunshine. These people were brilliant at birth and every subsequent technology had added to their cognitive wonders, their insightful motors. They looked ordinary enough walking the mountain, but their true bodies were punctuated with every species of AI link and randomizing generators, plus devices still being tested by R-and-D.

I have never liked PinPoint’s big guns.

And that moment only made my biases worse.

They glanced at me and through me and gave up on me without bothering to learn anything about my little job.

Then they examined my companions. The woman sculptor was still giggling, hands drawing sculptures in the air while her partner kept his eyes closed—a contrast of styles that made them even more obvious.

One of the geniuses sighed and said, “Artists.”

That was all she said.

Then the others laughed. Not loudly and not cruelly, no. Just a shared little giggle of their own, probably adding to an old joke not worth repeating. And with that, these masters of Creation attacked the next slope, continuing a climb that would last as long as they wanted it to, and that would never be allowed to end.

Multiple PinPoint divisions worked on SETI projects, each armed with distinct strategies and competitive ideals. But those watching the sky, in whatever capacity, were doomed. Theorists armed with faux-black-holes were first to realize that the universe wasn’t just thickly populated by other intelligences, but that seeing our neighbors and speaking to our neighbors could be as easy as talking to the person holding your hand.

The enormous news broke on a Monday morning.

People from sixty busy years of life were instantly reaching out to me. Did I still work for PinPoint? And even if I didn’t, did I know anything? Most of the messages would never earn a personal answer, but everyone who got past the gauntlet of AIs and indifference posed the same question:

“Do you get to talk to the aliens?”

If not those words, then at least by implication.

“Sure, sure. Do you want to chat with them too?” I quipped.

Good for a gasp and maybe some misplaced respect.

But I’m not much of a liar. “No, sorry,” I’d confess. “You’re talking to the wrong department.”

“But you will eventually,” they insisted.

I didn’t have the clearance to see that future or enough gossip to guess if our geniuses were trading words with anyone. But one technical trouble was obvious, and that’s what I tried to explain.

“The inflow of data,” I said. “It’s enormous and PinPoint isn’t ready. Nobody could be ready. We’re downloading images and audio and long, long stretches of video, and it’s coming as ancient recordings as well as in real time. From trillions of worlds, close suns and distant galaxies, and despite what you hear about how smart we are and how much smarter our machines are . . . well, we aren’t. PinPoint is an elephant that can drink an entire river. But this is ten trillion oceans, and PinPoint is swimming a million kilometers from shore.”

I liked that image of water. The first time I used it, and ever since.

“Oh, but this is so exciting,” my ex-wife said.

A lady who never got excited about much, I should mention.

“Even if we can’t understand what they’re telling us,” she continued. “I mean, I love the pieces already posted. That alien with the wings. She’s such a beauty.”

A million species had wings. So far. Counts were accelerating, and even among the ranks of bookkeepers, it was obvious that the scope and reach of this technology would never allow us to enjoy another lazy breath.

Spectacles were wonderful, until the spectacles refused to end.

“I’m proud of you,” my ex-wife said.

Another thunderbolt in a day of nothing else.

“I have to get back to work,” I said.

“Of course,” she said.

Then as if I had any finger in history, she said, “Good job, Colin.”

For the next eighteen minutes, I was a marvel of cyborg brilliance, shifting funds where they begged to be, leaving people paid in exchange for their devotion to our corporation. And I would have finished my nineteenth minute. Except. Research budgets were suddenly frozen. Everywhere, everywhere. A thousand projects ripped from existence, not a shred of mercy shown. I was told to do nothing, which is an impossible trick for any creature with more than three neurons. This was a day of aliens, yet every starship program had been shelved, all of that frozen money assembled inside one account, access granted only to a freshly assembled team wearing a very peculiar name: The Sagacities.

I couldn’t guess what that name meant, but that didn’t stop me from trying. And in the midst of all that misplaced conjecture, I received word that the Sagacities were meeting at the corporate headquarters, inside our most secure room, and I was expected to join them as fast as humanly possible.

“We found her,” one man said.

To me, apparently, and that’s all he said.

But the woman beside him refused to accept credit. “No, you’re responsible, Colin. Without you, we could have missed her entirely.”

I counted faces. Twenty-three people and their perfumed beverages were sharing the conference room. The best minds straddling PinPoint, and everyone was staring at my idiot face.

“Well good,” I offered.

Then, “Glad to help.”

Just before I asked, “So who exactly did I find?”

“Your great-aunt,” the man said. A small fellow with a booming voice that delivered his news along with an uncomfortable twist of the shoulders. “In fact, we can see Madeline right now.”

“How’s that?” I sputtered.

“Live feeds from elsewhere,” was his cryptic reply. Then, “Would you like to see her?”

I didn’t have time to answer. One long wall dissolved into a street scene. Except the “street” looked more like black satin carpeting than a roadway, and nothing about the native architecture was human. Structures were more grown than built, full irregular blobs and jumbled angles that made at least one man uneasy. A dwarf red star stood fixed to a sky thick with pink dust and glittering machines, and the carpeted street was jammed with aliens. Not one species or ten species, but countless shapes marching and dancing while producing all manner of purposeful noise. And deep inside that mayhem stood one very familiar figure: A woman presumed dead but now leaning against what resembled an upright badger. I spotted her hair, dark as always but longer. Age had done nothing to the pretty face. And with all of the surprises raining down, I was a little startled to find the lady acting chummy with an animal. Maddy never struck me as the sort to keep pets.

“This is live,” I managed.

“Not this particular view, no,” the woman offered.

But the man was in charge, glancing at his colleague with a narrow smile. Then looking at me again, he said, “You were hunting for this person.”

“I wanted pictures,” I said. “The AIs offered to help, and I let them. But I haven’t heard anything from them in a very long while.”

“Well, the hunt continued,” he explained. “Several AIs made themselves into experts in that one face, and when the floodgates opened, they were well-trained to find Ms. Furst.”

“Maddy,” I said.

Everyone was watching me, nobody talking.

Utterly thrilled, I said, “So the aliens carried Maddy off to the stars.”

Maybe these people were having a good day. Several of them laughed, though it wasn’t a joyful laughter, and meanwhile the small man in front preferred to curse, under his breath but with an extraordinary amount of enthusiasm.

Nobody took the trouble to educate the honored guest.

“It’s time,” said the woman. She was rather pretty, particularly when she winked at me, saying, “Watch your Maddy now.”

My Maddy said a few words to her pet. I heard her. Somehow her voice was pulled out of the mayhem, and what I heard was as rich as I had imagined her voice had to be, and every word was incomprehensible. Then the beast lifted his hairless palm, presenting it to the human tongue that licked it twice and twice again. And then he did the same, caressing her hand with a piece of soggy blue flesh that sprang from his exuberant, tooth-rich mouth.

“They’re kissing,” I guessed.

“Who cares?” the man said. “But watch what happens next.”

Maddy dissolved. Without sound or apparent effort, she turned into a puddle of water instantly absorbed by the black carpet. And accepting her absence, the pet that wasn’t any pet walked away on two stout legs.

“Okay,” I muttered.

I had nothing smarter to offer.

“That scene was recorded this morning,” the man reported.

“Did she just die?” I asked.

“No, the body was temporary. Woven out of native ingredients. Her mind is somewhere else, presumably protected. And that’s how you travel in the universe. We know this. We’re very much sure. Life moves without going anywhere. By erecting bodies where and when you need them, and then tearing them apart when you decide to leave again.”

I nodded, asking, “Can you see her now?”

“Oh yes,” he said, waving a single finger. “This is her real-time feed.”

The sky turned to darkness punctuated with a few smudges of light, and beneath that emptiness lay a flat expanse of floor. Maddy was in the middle of the floor, wearing nothing. She was wearing clothes on the alien street, and to a fashion-impoverished man, they seemed like unremarkable clothes. But in her new location, wherever this was, she was naked. By the looks of it she was working, testing the bright colors of paint or dye or whatever that substance was that poured out of a thousand mechanical hands that seemed to be doing her bidding.

I stared at the paint-splattered body until I embarrassed myself, and then I looked at the sky. “She jumped to her world’s night side,” I guessed.

“No,” the man snarled, the rest of the room nodding in agreement.

I looked at the prettiest genius. “I don’t understand.”

With a glance at her boss, she asked permission to explain.

The man offered a silent shrug.

“Every feed comes to us wearing a label, a marker,” she said. “Imagine an address larger and quite a bit richer than the contents of every human library. Well, this particular feed is called ‘The Universal Museum of Sagacity.’ At least that’s what our translators have decided to call it.”

“She was an artist,” I said, gawking at rivers of yellow and white paint wetly shining. “Maddy was Walter Fitzgerald’s first wife. She died in Turkey, supposedly. Except there was a secret about her life, and I don’t know what that secret was. Walter told parts of the story to my mother. Something about the best of us being noticed for our talents, and as a result, being rewarded.”

I paused.

Never in my life had so many people stared at me with such intensity.

Finally I asked, “Why do you want me here?”

Most of the faces looked at the man in charge.

He decided to say nothing.

“It was an offhand comment,” I said. “I asked the engine for help, just once, and now she’s found.”

“It seems so,” said the growly man.

“What else can I add?” I began.

Then before anyone could respond, I offered a second question. “So what other human faces have you found?”

The man straightened his back, irritation mixed with confession when he said, “None.”

That seemed unlikely, ridiculous. “Why not?”

Shrugs were the best response. I was sharing the room with frustrated little shrugs.

“My mother’s uncle,” I began. “Walter implied Maddy earned an extraordinary honor, but he didn’t share anything about starships and aliens.”

Eye after eye went vacant. People were talking among themselves, on private channels. Deciding what to do next, maybe.

“So the aliens liked her art,” I ventured. “They carried her off to their world, and she didn’t age much on board the starship, what with being frozen or having time slow. But she’s awake again, doing her big art projects in this big museum.”

Nobody seemed to hear me.

I watched the naked woman throw rivers of ruddy brown across a gigantic floor/canvas.

“Where is this?” I asked.

A few looked my way.

“She’s on a nearby planet,” I guessed. “Or the badger’s stardrive pushes way, way past the speed of light.”

With a cranky sneer, the top Sagacity said, “No to all of that.”

“No?”

“The museum doesn’t sit on any world,” he explained. “It’s a Dyson structure, and we’re estimating it’s a little more than one light-year in diameter.”

I said, “Shit.”

“According to navigational markers, what you see floats in a void far removed from every galaxy.”

“Shit,” seemed like the perfect word. I offered it several more times.

“A few hundred years of science,” the man continued, “and we finally realized that distance means nothing. People don’t need spaceships in the garage or transporters in the closet. Because every other world is in easy reach, if you know how.”

“Do we know how?” I asked.

Nobody answered.

“So where is my Maddy?”

“Probably somewhere close,” he allowed.

Then the woman jumped in. She was talking to me and everyone else too, promising, “When we find her, we can reverse engineer the technology. And after that, hopefully, we’ll be able to wrench open the sky.”

The old fellow was sitting upright in his exceptionally fancy, very busy hospital bed. I started to offer my name, but he remembered that and quite a lot more. “God, Colin, you look like your mom,” he said. “But I’m sure you get told that.”

“And I see your dad,” I offered.

Baldness is mostly derived from the maternal parent. So the patient’s mother must have granted him that gift, helping his resemblance to his twice-married father. Plus, he was named Walter the Second. “I wanted to go to her funeral, but I was in pretty miserable shape,” he said.

“Not anymore,” I observed.

“Isn’t that the truth?” Tubes and more tubes fed Walter’s stout body, surgical wands teasing aged genetics, and if these radical therapies continued unabated, my mother’s last living cousin eventually would be able to leap out of bed and cartwheel free of the room. That young, sturdier than ever, he would inhabit a life no reasonable mind would have dreamed for itself.

And there I stood, thinking how my mother didn’t live long enough, and despite every goodness inside me, I was ridiculously angry with this lucky man.

The patient didn’t notice my pettiness.

Or he politely ignored it.

With a gracious wave of a meaty hand, Walter said, “Sit, if you want. I’m guessing you’re here to talk about the lady.”

The bedside chair seemed too close. Better to claim the soft lounger.

“I barely remember Miss Furst,” he said.

“The artist,” I said.

“Yeah, I didn’t know anything about that.”

“Or that she was your father’s wife,” I said.

“Because she wasn’t.” That brought a big, impressively testy laugh. “Not when I knew her, she wasn’t. They weren’t.”

Staff psychologists had suggested strategies, but I was in charge of this little side operation. And that’s all it was. The highest technologies available were scouring the world, searching for a person who vanished decades ago. The Sagacities were convinced that AIs and algorithms would answer every mystery, but until then, they gave me enough authority to speak to one old man.

I threw a recorded feed into the air. We watched Maddy on that cosmopolitan world. She was sitting in what might be a cafe, smoking a root or stick while sipping what looked like milk. This was the video released last night, in an effort to get people looking into drawers and attics. PinPoint was ready to pay fortunes for any item related to this suddenly famous lady, and that included the recollections of some very old people sitting happy on healing beds.

I didn’t mention money.

The old man was nodding at the image, or at his own thoughts.

“She eventually talks,” I said.

“I’ve heard the voice.”

“Is it her voice?”

He shrugged. “You remember how people sounded a lifetime ago?”

“If they were important to me, yes.”

Maddy crushed out the half-finished smoke while telling her companion something very casual. Unless it was the most important phrase ever uttered. Who knew? Sitting at her table was a small golden creature built more from light than flesh. What wasn’t a mouth answered with a similarly impenetrable phrase, and the two mismatched entities did nothing after that but sit quietly.

She would melt away in a few minutes. But PinPoint was keeping that piece of the story secret, at least for the time being.

The recording looped back to the arbitrary beginning.

We watched it all over again, and one or several Sagacities watched us. I felt them wishing for something more substantial than two old farts sitting in a hospital room.

I was just as impatient as they were.

The increasingly young Walter noticed my feet dancing, and like any man with ten thousand years ahead of him, he said, “Relax, kid.”

“I’d rather not.”

“All right then. So what are you doing here?”

“I came to ask for your permission,” I said.

“To do what?”

“Search your belongings. We want to hunt for anything that Madeline might have left in your family’s care.”

“Like some old painting,” Walter said.

“Do you remember anything like that?”

He shrugged, that one gesture dangling possibilities. But even as my hopes rose, he said, “You’re welcome to look. Yeah, I give you my permission. But there’s nothing to find.”

“You’re certain?”

“Everything was thrown after our parents died. Which was decades ago, and hell, I doubt there was anything to find in the first place.”

A thought struck me.

He saw something in my face. A flash of excitement, maybe.

So I stiffened my mouth, saying, “Well, that’s disappointing.”

“Yeah, it is too bad,” he said. Sarcastically. Obviously, he didn’t care one way or another.

A final topic needed to be mentioned. “You didn’t throw out your memories,” I ventured.

He shrugged, saying, “I’ll tell you who Madeline was. To me, she was this person who hung around us at Christmas. That’s all. And in those days, believe me, Santa Claus was more real to me than she ever was.”

But that didn’t prove his ignorance. I cut the Maddy feed and then offered questions. My questions and others suggested by experts, each meant to trigger a rich trickle of details. But the increasingly young Walter surrendered nothing but vague recollections of plastic toys and Christmas hams and words said in public, with little kids watching.

The interrogation ended.

Like Maddy and her golden friend, we sat together, saying nothing.

Walter finally broke the silence. “So when do we launch our starships?”

“We’re building stardrives right now,” I lied. “Fifty of them in a new factory on the back side of the moon.”

“Okay then,” he said.

I stood and thanked him for his trouble, and I left him.

The first time.

Standing in the hallway, I endured one brief chat with brilliant people who didn’t see any more potential in Mr. Fitzgerald.

“In another few weeks,” the top Sagacity suggested. “Rejuvenated minds have sharper memories, all in all.”

“But I’m done for now,” I said.

“Sure.” Then he was gone, probably chasing another useless thread.

I’m not the brightest creature. But I appreciate how the world works and what it takes to gain an advantage. I severed every electronic connection between myself and PinPoint, and then my second visit began. With a loud knock, I strode back into the room. “Actually, Walter. Sir. There’s another memory I want to talk about.”

The man was tired of me. That much showed.

“Years ago, you and your sister met a cousin for lunch. My mother, as it happens, and she said a few things that you hadn’t heard before.”

That earned a gruff, “Yeah?”

“Well, from I was told, that lunch was followed by some sort of meeting with your lying parents.”

The face suddenly looked old, and exposed.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just as I guessed.”

In the presence of scenery, people look down more than we look up. I’ve noticed this. Whether the peak behind them is going to be climbed or not, we want to see the world beneath us in all of its wonder, and it doesn’t matter if that world is total fiction. I studied the valley and the individual pines and what was meant to look like a condor working rising columns of dry crisp summer air. “We call them overlooks,” I said quietly. “Not underlooks. Which means something about us, I suspect.”

“Excuse me,” my companion said. “What are you telling me?”

Nothing, so far.

“Again, thanks for helping with our funding,” she said.

“Glad to do it,” I said.

A weak laugh. “Which makes you our patron, I suppose.”

Not a bad title, and I laughed.

One hand lifted. Consciously or not, she drew a question mark in the air between us.

She wanted to know the reason for this meeting.

“I’ve been studying your work,” I confessed. “Not with PinPoint, no. But the stuff you did before we hired you.”

She offered a guarded smile.

“I don’t think I’ll ever understand your art, and it makes me breathless, trying to appreciate it.”

“That’s the oddest compliment,” she said.

Then my next guest walked out of the pines. He was two minutes early, which bode well for the future. Odd statements from an accountant had lured him here, and while neither of them knew it, the accountant mattered more to them than anyone else in their life.

“I wanted to thank you person,” said my artist friend. “That’s why I came. But I do have quite a lot of work.”

“Stay,” I insisted.

She glanced at the little man, dislodging the impressive beginnings of his biography.

“I have to talk to him, but it won’t take long. And don’t worry. I’m going to help you again. So much so that you won’t be able to thank me, not in a thousand lives.”

Curiosity fixed her feet to the fake ground.

Approaching the top Sagacity, I said, “Thanks for taking the trouble.”

“I’m barely here,” he warned.

Sure. This was a diluted avatar, most of his genius focused on a world of unanswered problems.

“I found Maddy,” I said.

His presence didn’t grow. The technology didn’t work that way, and so no, I couldn’t feel his soul shutting down every distraction but me. What I saw was the clear gaze of steel-blue eyes, and a tight small voice say, “You have.”

Not a question. Just a pair of doubtful words.

“Have you found her yet? No?” I glanced at the artist, and when my companion followed my gaze, I said, “I discovered fire. Did you know that?”

“What?”

“I was four, and I decided to cook dinner for my family. With a microwave and Ramen noodles and celery stalks. I put the food on the carousel and programmed the machine to run for twenty minutes, on high, and the fire was impressive.”

“What you’re telling me? That you’re crazy?”

“No, I’m admitting that I didn’t discover fire. How could I? And I certainly wasn’t the first entity to tame it. And I didn’t figure out gravity or spacetime or the evolution of life, and neither did you. Other people did those things before us, and before people were scampering about, a multitude of other creatures and worlds made the same discoveries, endlessly and often feeling like they were the holy first.”

The man looked down the mountainside.

“It bothers you, I think. A little bit, a lot. You and the others in the Sagacities. You possess these enormous gifts and the key of the universe is resting in your hands. All you have to do is learn how to turn the key inside the lock. But be honest now. In your life, what discovery have you made that no other organism in the universe has made? What principle have you identified first? And what relationship should be named after you? Nothing and nothing and nothing. Those are the only honest answers.”

I could hear him breathing, steady and deep.

“Of course you can be the wizard who opens up the universe for humanity,” I said. “Which will be a great accomplishment. No doubts there. But doesn’t it bother you that when you look at these trillion trillion feeds, you see just the one human face? Someone already out there, and she isn’t like you at all. Is she?”

“But we have three faces now,” he told me.

“Working at the Museum of Sagacity. Am I right?”

The nod was followed by a quiet, “They seem to be, yes.”

“I have an idea where to find Maddy,” I said. “How you utilize my insight . . . well, I don’t know that. But if I help you, then I’m owed quite a lot of consideration for whatever comes next.”

“Consideration,” he said.

Before I could respond, he said, “You want to go visit your aunt.”

I shrugged. “I do want to walk on another world. Any world. But that’s not what I’m talking about here.” Pointing to the lady standing beside the fictional cliff, I said, “She should go. Artists as accomplished as her, and more so. They should be the first people to step out into the universe. And if they want me riding along with them, fine. And they can invite you too. But they matter a lot more than either of us.”

“Either of us,” he repeated angrily.

“You and me,” I said. “We’re just the competent people who put the numbers where they belonged from the beginning.”

In the end, Maddy wasn’t especially interesting. Lovely, yes. And talking to her gave me a vivid connection to the dead in my own family. But even when we sat together, discussing important matters, much of my left-behind head was busily absorbing the sights sounds and stinks of a wondrous place, a world full of life that had nothing better to do than shamble and dance its way past my place at the table.

“So you’re the one who found me,” she said.

Not true. But it was safe to claim, “I was just the first to realize what kind of lie you were.”

She acted more amused than impressed.

“Tell me,” she insisted.

“The best AIs on the Earth chased you,” I said. “Old photographs and a divorce decree were found, and rental contracts, old airline records. But nobody uncovered so much as a single doodle or piece of haiku with your name attached. Which is just about the damnedest thing. Great or not, every artist leaves behind a tangle of work.”

That earned an interested grin and a long draw on some smoldering piece of lumber.

“Of course maybe the Museum of Sagacity claimed your work along with you. But we recovered photographs from your childhood, from classmates and people you never knew. And in all of that, there isn’t so much as one snapshot of Maddy Furst’s work in the junior high art show. And why? Because you and your art were claimed long before that point. In fact, we think the Museum claimed you sometime just after your sixth birthday.”

Whenever I spoke, she looked away. When I paused, she turned to stare hard at me.

I didn’t like those eyes. Not nearly as much as I imagined I would.

“You graduated from high school, moved to Boston, and then you married my great-uncle. But at the same time, you were living this transformative, go-anywhere life. Acting like any other person of the time, except your mind had been recast as an ageless, enduring glass. And that glass was encased inside the machine we found churning away some two hundred meters under your childhood bedroom. A machine that my bosses found and eventually deciphered, and now we’re punching them out on an assembly line. I’m the tenth person to get this honor, by the way. Telecommuting in the Infinity. Anywhere I want to go, I go. A cage of wet meat is built from local ingredients. That cage lasts as long as I want it to last. Then I’ll give a command and this carcass falls to water, absorbed in the black carpet that civilized places use to keep the mess at a minimum.”

She puffed and glanced my way. “That’s all it took? I didn’t leave doodles, and you deciphered the rest?”

“Hardly,” I said. I told her about my mother’s affections for the sophisticated older woman, and years later, the compliment delivered to her cousins. After that came the notorious meeting with parents who confessed just enough to a couple angry, disbelieving kids.

“Walter and his second wife,” I said. “You told them everything, or enough. Didn’t you?”

She shrugged, saying, “I fell apart on their kitchen floor. Then three minutes later, I rang their doorbell.”

When she talked, I stared at the amazing world.

How could you not?

“The Universal Museum of Sagacity,” I said.

“I was selected,” she said, her voice flat and a little hard. “I was six and nobody told my parents, because why would they? They came to my room at night, installed me in the Everywhere Chamber . . . ”

“That’s the name?” I interrupted.

“No, that’s just a miserably poor translation.”

“And you’re still trapped there,” I said.

Which made her laugh. One hand and then the other crushed the burning log, and she admitted, “In me, they see potential. And for the sake of honesty, let’s just admit that I often have some very strong doubts about ever accomplishing any shit that will mean anything in the end. To the universe, or even to me.”

“True for us all,” I said.

This time she stared at me when I spoke, and afterwards, quietly, she asked, “So what do you do for a living, Colin?”

I confessed.

“Well, you do remind me of my Walter,” she said. “He was passionate about numbers, and I bet you are too.”

I never thought of it that way.

“So yes, now humanity is free to roam the universe,” she said, breaking into a smug little laugh.

No, I didn’t like her that much.

“Who built the first Everywhere Chamber?” I asked.

“Nobody knows,” Maddy said.

I sat there for a few moments longer, wondering how this conversation would end.

Then she said, “I guess I must have met her.”

“Who’s that?”

“Your mom. When she was twelve or so, at the Christmas parties.”

“All right,” I said.

“But I don’t remember her. Sorry.”

I looked at Maddy one last time. And then without another word, I made myself fall back into water and gas and all those other simple ingredients that mean nothing without Us inside.

About the Author

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

Breathe

Cassandra Khaw

Breathe.

The water is cold.

Breathe.

Lightless, the ocean is without dimension, only a blackness unyielding. There is no sound, no movement. Nothing but the percussion of ventricles in labor and the frayed rasp of your breath as you suck in stale, processed air.

Breathe.

Ah. There. You see it in the distance, a speckling of iridescence; indigo and motes of searing cyan, adrift on hoarfrost filaments no bigger than the width of a hair. Noctiluca Janus, the only color in this alien world and somehow, the only life.

The theory of its biology is faultless; unicellular simplicity, self-devouring, self-sustaining, both predator and prey, alternatively cryptobiotic and savagely proliferative, a perfect answer to an imperfect world. But it is still bizarre to you that nothing else exists in tandem. Not even a divergent subspecies differentiated by a single genome. Nothing but this gasp of cold light in that endless dark.

Breathe.

Like floating in God’s womb, Lisa had joked. The others laughed and you laughed with them, nervous, unwilling to admit to miscalculated bravado ten thousand light-years away from viable resolution. The truth is you’re terrified. No matter how hard you try, you cannot participate in the communion of your crewmates’ rapture, cannot decipher their willingness to plunge into the abyss, over and over, pirouetting like children unburdened by parents, or atheists untethered by scripture.

Breathe.

The water is black, cold. Eternal.

Breathe.

You glide fingertips over the equipment on your belt, enumerating them by touch: flash light, flare gun, nitrox analyzer, knives, strobe. Their presence is a benediction, the solidity of the rosary beads you abandoned with religion.

You breathe; you shudder.

You press a button on your com-unit, hear the rustle of static. It takes only a minute before the noise resolves into your communication officer’s clear, deep voice. You remember joking with him over tasteless mugs of warm, re-hydrated soup that he’d missed his calling as a radio host. You remember other things too: the way his laugh hummed against your skin, the texture of his fingertips on the juncture between your waist and hip.

You push those memories down.

“This is Poseidon. What’s your status?”

“Persephone-035573 . . . ” The numbers roll easily from your tongue. You won’t admit it to anyone, especially not after your lecture on the commercialization of Grecian myth, but you’ve developed a fondness for your call sign. Persephone, Hades’ grudging spouse, doomed to darkness by momentary weakness. Just like you. “Noctiluca Janus appears to have just initiated its breeding cycle. Everything looks on track. If current conditions hold, I estimate that we’d be able to begin harvest in six hours.”

“Six hours,” an incredulous noise. “That thing moves fast.”

“Yeah.” You consider a lie but dismiss it with the next breath. Bubbles knife through the water, obscuring your vision, and briefly, you’re wracked by a terror almost biblical in stature. You clench pelvic muscles, try not to piss your suit.

Breathe.

“When can I get out of here?”

“Soon.”

Breathe.

“How soon is ‘soon?’ Two minutes? Three hours? Sixteen days? How long before I can get the fuck out of here?” The words thump hot against your throat, your skull, the basin of your eye sockets. Every syllable invokes another spasm of localized anguish, the pinpoint magnesium-white sparking of a migraine. Your throat swells with panic.

Breathe.

“Soon, okay? I promise. We’ll get you out of there before you know it. Just think about fuzzy blankets and hot cocoa. Talk to me. Come on. What’s the first thing you want to do when you get out of there?” he says. His voice is warm and rich, maple-smoke and summer nights; you wish you could spoon it into a jar, keep it on a table beside your bed so you could dole it out across a lifetime of three AM terrors, of waking up and realizing you’re alone.

“A hot shower.” Your laugh cracks and your voice is thick and caked with dread, but it doesn’t matter. He swaddles you in the rolling cadence of his answering laugh, forest-scent, the muffled sweetness of your father’s old radio, an effortless thing that almost convinces you that everything will be okay.

Breathe.

“Really? You’d think that you’d be tired of being wet already? But I promise. Soon,” He says for the third time and you’re not sure if it is the mythic quality prescribed to the number three, or the fact you two shared a moment that does it, but something loosens in your ribs.

You breathe.

“I don’t understand why I need to be out here.”

“Because humans have something called ‘instinct’ and it’s far easier to have a surveyor present than to pick out through a thousand pages of dry, cold facts.” You hear the crinkle of plastic wrap and rhythmic mastication, teeth pulping chocolate-lined biscuits. It’s an incongruous, ludicrous noise, so domestic and out-of-place that you laugh, a bark of sound that cuts itself short on the knife of your desperate delight.

“What’s so funny?” He asks and you hear the weight of a pout caught in the lower octaves.

“Nothing.” Your attention diverts to the Noctiluca Janus, it’s denser now, no longer improbably ethereal, but a nebulae spiraling outwards, tendrils of variegated cyan outstretched in silent supplication. “It’s just—should you be eating that?”

“I know it’s not the best lunch—”

“No.” You laugh and this time, it is strong and clear and real. “God. You’re the absolute worst.”

Breathe.

It staggers you as to how quickly you invoke his name, how easily it slips from your throat like the voice of a frightened child, naïve and needful, conscious that no one is listening but unable to resist the impulse to reach out. You might not be able to will a hope into existence but if you believe hard enough, perhaps you can keep it suspended between being and not-being.

Schrödinger’s deity, you think, mouth clumping into a smile.

“Am not,” He retorts, petulant, voice muffled, and you laugh out loud again. For the gap of a heartbeat, the water is not as cold as you recall, not as terrible.

You breathe.

“Are too.”

“Am not.” You hear a gulp, a sigh of pleasure, the noise of a table being resequenced for function; porcelain and plastic sliding over metal, paper being crumpled, the creak of an aging desk chair. “You know, I could probably do this all day.”

Breathe.

“Can not.”

“Can too.”

“How does it look?”

Breathe.

“Beautiful.”

Reverence chokes your lungs. It leaves no room for dread, no space for misgivings. There is only awe, cold and sharp, an austere worship like the cathedrals of your childhood. But where those were stone, Noctiluca Janus is life effervescent, enormous.

Everywhere.

You scoop fingers through the teeming light and the algae pulses brighter, rivulets of turquoise and ultramarine. You close a fist. The strands disparate into motes, into starbursts; phantasmagoric shapes like a hallucination of heaven. It is the most incredible thing you’ve seen. It is the most terrible.

“Cultivable state?”

You pause, riveted by the incandescence, transfixed by a single, sobering thought: what would happen if this gets loose? You picture the waters of Earth, the lakes and the tributaries, the streams and the seas, swelling with the luminous eukaryotes. Mid-way, your imagination mutates, and the rivers become arteries, become veins like blue-green fronds. You can see it clearly: the Noctiluca Janus carousing with red platelets, shading to teal in currents of plasma. Growing. Growing. Growing. Until it infiltrates every tissue, infests every tendon, invades every delicate, pustulant alveoli.

Breathe.

“Persephone-035573?”

Breathe.

“Persephone-035573. Report.”

Breathe.

“Alice!”

The sound of your name tows you back to awareness. Around you, the algae crowds closer, burns brighter. Your eyes water from their effulgence. And it is all you can do not to scream.

“Alice? Are you there?”

Breathe.

Inhale. Exhale. You count the seconds between each action, lengthen the intervals, slow the wheezing palpitation of your lungs. Inhale. Exhale. “Yes.”

“What happened?”

“N-nothing. Nothing at all,” Your voice quivers through the lie but he does not call you out. Instead, he grunts affirmation, falls silent. And then, a telomere of music drips through the com-link, too soft at first to decipher. But slowly, it clarifies into saxophone and bass guitar, the rhythmic thump of heel on wood, an old bluesman’s smoke-scratched voice. He’s singing about the deal he made with the devil and you can’t help but think you’ve walked that same mile too. “Line got cut.”

Breathe.

“Okay.” He cups the word in his mouth for a second before he lets go. “Well, if it’s any consolation, we’re about ready to start rolling out the welcome mat. You’ve done your time. You can come home now.”

Home. The word is an ache in your ribs, is a hurt like a tumor wedged between your bones or the arms of someone who is no longer your own. The submersible is not home. The ship isn’t home. None of it is home in the way you know home to be. But you don’t argue. You’ve embarrassed yourself enough already. Instead, you grope for the line that tethers you to your drone and pull yourself along, fist over fist, a newborn retracing its pilgrimage from the womb.

Relief boils as you make contact with the steel and you’re on the verge of popping open the hatch when you turn, clumsy in the skin of your suit, flesh prickling with unease. One last look around. One last check. You’re not sure what it is but something tugs like a hook in your lip. You scan the myriad of dazzling, scintillant blues, search it for clues. The algae has grown astronomically in the last few hours, seething and churning, mobilized by the ocean currents. Where once there was only blackness, now there is only light.

Wait.

Your eyes adjust. You begin to pick out anomalies in the effulgent topology, fibrous tissue incongruent with your knowledge of the Noctiluca Janus. Slowly, too slowly, you assemble an epiphany out of the dangling cnidocytes, the clusters of ganglia, almost invisible against that backdrop of searing cyan.

Breathe.

You were wrong.

You were all wrong.

There was another life here. There had always been another life, a predatory counterpart, nameless but no less dangerous for its anonymity. You arrive at this realization just as the communication channels are flung open and the shrill hysteria of the crew blares through the frequency. In horror, you watch as medusae gather like a funeral caul over the submersible, clotting engines and vents, a frenzy of glowing, diaphanous bodies.

Breathe.

The world compresses into individual heart beats. Between every contraction, you make an inventory of your circumstances, of possible escape routes and survival plans. You turn them, over and over, dissect them, splay them, empty them in pursuit of a solution. But nothing satisfies. Your pulse roaring in your ears, you arrive again at the truth you’d known from the start: none of you will survive this.

Breathe.

“Alice! Alice? Are you there?”

“Theo!” You scream back. “What is going on there?”

“Fuck me—” A raw-throated shriek of rage. No, more a bellow, a foghorn challenge, still deep and percussive despite the madness. Metal screeches. Glass breaks. In the distance, the ship judders and convulses, fighting to disentangle from the creatures that are bearing it down, down, down into the blackness, pseudopods searching. “—fuck. Get the fuck off me! Fucking hell, you—Alice. Are you still listening!”

“Yes!”

“We’re—we’re dead here.” His voice, thinned to a knife-point, shakes. “The ship’s going down. But—but I think I can get something out to you. Supplies. It should be enough—god, you might need to eat your leg or something. But it’s a shot.”

“No, no, no. You’re going to let those things in—”

“So? Alice, we’re all—there’s no—” Another crash, another scream. “—point in trying to prolong the inevitable. We’re dead.”

“No.”

No. The word repeats. No. No. No. Not after all these weeks of adjustment, these nights of flensing the desire from your affection, of learning to make holy a love that was once written in bare skin and salt-kissed heat and the tickle of his stubble against the cool of your skin. No.

He’s shouting at you now, firing trajectories, demanding calibration, intent on making you listen. But you refuse. There’s only a sixteen-percent chance, anyway, of you surviving long enough for a rescue to matter. You’re all going to die.

Breathe.

You gulp air in quick, ragged bursts, but it doesn’t seem to be enough. Nothing seems to be enough. Desperate, you run your gaze over your drone, over the noose of tools around your waist. Not enough. Not enough. There’s not enough time to think, to feel, to plan. Not enough.

Nerveless, your fingers spasm close over the flare gun.

“I have an idea.”

You have no idea if it will work. Theories like this are developed over months of meticulous research, of interpretation, of cross-checking and fact-checking, of scientific journals and peer review. But there is no time for anything but impulse and instinct and does it matter, anyway?

“Tell the crew to kill everything they can. The engines, the lights, the—the breathing machines or, or whatever. Power down as far as you can go.”

“This is fucking insane. What the fuck do you—”

“They’re drawn by heat, right? Or light? They have to be. That’s the only way they could identify the Janus in the dark.” Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. You try to not think about what you’re doing, what it means. If you linger too long on the ramifications of your endeavor, self-preservation will kick in. So, you don’t. You breathe instead. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. “I’m going to make an explosion. Hopefully, there’ll be enough time for them to drift over, and you’ll be able to get out—”

“You’re kidding me—”

“No. I haven’t been more serious about anything else in my life.”

“You can’t—”

“I love you.” The words dart free before you can stem their escape, and you can’t tell if the sound that follows is a laugh or a sob, only that it wrenches at your core like it’d turn you inside out. “I love you so much. And I wish everything that happened had not happened and you better fucking survive this and get out of here and have kids and grow old and—”

“Alice.”

“—and you better name this other shit after me and—”

“Alice!”

“And I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you. And oh, god. It feels so good to say that. I love you. I love you.”

Breathe.

“Goodbye.”

The world erupts into chemical fire.

Breathe.

Everything burns. Every sensory receptor, every atom of your being, every cell is alive with pain. You feel amorphous, formless, bereft of shape. There is no you that is not also agony, also the crisping of your skin, the cooking of your muscle. You are anguish. You burn.

Breathe.

Except you can’t. You splutter and gasp, but there is no air to consume. Nothing but the water that floods your lungs, salt-taste in your nose and on your tongue. You choke.

Breathe.

You hold that last imperative like a prayer. Your heart strains, sings it with every desperate contraction. Already, you can feel consciousness ebbing, your oxygen-starved brain writing haphazard paeans to a life adequately spent, neurons misfiring, recalling memories out of chronological order. A light grows, striated by humanoid silhouettes. What is that? You begin to think, only to stop yourself. No. No time for that. Focus on breathing. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Focus on staying alive.

Breathe.

The blackness closes in and for a moment, you think you feel a pressure around your wrist, arms about your body, and a voice that is not your own telling you to breathe, breathe, breathe.

About the Author

Cassandra Khaw is the business developer for Singaporean video games publisher Ysbryd Games. She also writes for Ars Technica UK whenever possible. When not doing either of those things, she practices muay thai, tries to find time to dance, and reads voraciously. She also writes a variety of fiction, and has a novella entitled Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef out with Abaddon Books.

Jonas and the Fox

Rich Larson

For Grandma

A flyer thunders overhead through the pale purple sky, rippling the crops and blowing Jonas’s hair back off his face. Fox has no hair to blow back: his scalp is shaven and still swathed in cling bandages from the operation. He knows the jagged black hunter drones, the ones people in the village called crows, would never recognize him now. He still ducks his head, still feels a spike of fear as the shadow passes over them.

Only a cargo carrier. He straightens up. Jonas, who gave the flyer a raised salute like a good little child of the revolution, looks back at him just long enough for Fox to see the scorn curling his lip. Then he’s eyes-forward again, moving quickly through the rustling field of genemod wheat and canola. He doesn’t like looking at Fox, at the body Fox now inhabits, any longer than he has to. It’s becoming a problem.

“You need to talk to me when we’re in the village,” Fox says. “When we’re around other people. Out here, it doesn’t matter. But when we’re in the village, you need to talk to me how you talked to Damjan.”

Jonas’s response is to speed up. He’s tall for twelve years old. Long-legged, pale-skinned, with a determined jaw and a mess of tangled black hair. Fox can see the resemblance between Jonas and his father. More than he sees it in Damjan’s face when he inspects his reflection in streaked windows, in the burnished metal blades of the harvester. But Damjan’s face is still bruised and puffy and there is a new person behind it, besides.

Fox lengthens his stride. He’s clumsy, still adjusting to his little-boy limbs. “It looks strange if you don’t,” he says. “You understand that, don’t you? You have to act natural, or all of this was for nothing.”

Jonas mumbles something he can’t pick up. Fox feels a flash of irritation. It would’ve been better if Jonas hadn’t known about the upload at all. His parents could have told him his brother had recovered from the fall, but with brain damage that made him move differently, act differently. But they told him the truth. They even let him watch the operation.

“What did you say?” Fox demands. His voice is still deep in his head, but it comes out shrill now, a little boy’s voice.

Jonas turns back with a livid red mark on his forehead. “You aren’t natural,” he says shakily. “You’re a digital demon.”

Fox narrows his eyes. “Is that what the teachers are telling you, now?” he asks. “Digital storage isn’t witchcraft, Jonas. It’s technology. Same as the pad you use at school.”

Jonas keeps walking, and Fox trails after him like he really is his little brother. The village parents let their children wander in the fields and play until dusk—it seems like negligence to Fox, who grew up in cities with a puffy white AI nanny to lead him from home to lessons and back. Keeping an eye on Jonas is probably the least Fox can do, after everything the family has done to keep him safe. Everything that happened since he rapped at their window in the middle of the night, covered in dry blood and wet mud, fleeing for his life.

They pass the godtree, the towering trunk and thick tubular branches that scrape against a darkening sky. Genetically derived from the baobobs on Old Earth, re-engineered for the colder climes of the colony. Fox has noticed Jonas doesn’t like to look at the tree, either, not since his little brother tumbled out of it.

The godtree marks the edge of the fields and the children don’t go past it, but today Jonas keeps walking and Fox can only follow. Beyond the tree the soil turns pale and thick with clay, not yet fully terraformed. The ruins of a quickcrete granary are backlit red by the setting sun. Fox saw it on his way in, evaluated it as a possible hiding place. But the shadows had spooked him, and in the end he’d pressed on towards the lights, towards the house on the very edge of the village he knew belonged to his distant cousin.

“Time to go back, Jonas,” Fox says. “It’ll be dark soon.”

Jonas’s lip curls again, and he darts towards the abandoned granary. He turns to give a defiant look before he slips through the crumbling doorway. Fox feels a flare of anger. The little shit knows he can’t force him to do anything. He’s taller than him by a head now.

“Do you think I like this?” Fox hisses under his breath. “Do you think I like having stubby little legs and a flaccid little good-for-nothing cock?” He follows after Jonas. A glass bottle crunches under his foot and makes him flinch. “Do you think I like everything tasting like fucking sand because that patched-up autosurgeon almost botched the upload?” he mutters, starting forward again. “I was someone six months ago, I drew crowds, and now I’m a little shit chasing another little shit around in the country and . . . ”

A sharp yelp from inside the granary. Fox freezes. If Jonas has put an old nail through his foot, or turned his ankle, he knows Damjan’s little arms aren’t strong enough to drag him all the way home. Worse, if the ruin is occupied by a squatter, someone on the run like Fox who can’t afford witnesses, things could go badly very quickly. Fox has never been imposing even in his own body.

With his heart rapping hard at his ribs, he picks up the broken bottle by the stem, turning the jagged edge outward. Maybe it’s nothing. “Jonas?” he calls, stepping towards the dark doorway. “Are you alright?”

No answer. Fox hesitates, thinking maybe it would be better to run. Maybe some desperate refugee from the revolution has already put a shiv through Jonas’s stomach and is waiting for the next little boy to wander in.

“Come and look,” comes Jonas’s voice from inside, faint-sounding. Fox drops the bottle in the dirt. He exhales. Curses himself for his overactive imagination. He goes into the granary, ready to scold Jonas for not responding, ready to tell him they are leaving right now, but all of that dies in his throat when he sees what captured Jonas’s attention.

Roughly oblong, dark composite hull with red running lights that now wink to life in response to their presence, opening like predatory eyes. The craft is skeletal, stripped down to an engine and a passenger pod and hardly anything else. Small enough to slip the blockade, Fox realizes. So why had it been hidden here instead of used?

Fox blinks in the gloom, raking his eyes over and around the pod, and catches sight of a metallic-gloved hand flopped out from behind the craft’s conical nose. His eyes are sharper now. He supposes that’s one good thing. Jonas hasn’t noticed it yet, too entranced by the red running lights and sleek shape. He’s even forgotten his anger for the moment.

“Is it a ship?” he asks, voice layered with awe.

Fox snorts. “Barely.”

He’s paying more attention to the flight glove, studying the puffy fingers and silvery streaks of metal running through the palm. It’s not a glove. Bile scrapes up his throat. Fox swallows it back down and steps around the nose of the craft.

The dead man tore off most of his clothing before the end. His exposed skin is dark and puffy with pooled blood, and silver tendrils skim underneath it like the gnarled roots of a tree, spreading from his left shoulder across his whole body. Fox recognizes the ugly work of a nanite dart. The man might have been clipped days or even weeks ago without knowing it. He was this close to escaping before it ruptured his organs.

“What’s that?” Jonas murmurs, standing behind him now.

“Disgusting,” Fox says.

But there’s no time to mourn for the dead when the living are trying to stay that way. A month hiding in the family cellar, then Damjan’s accident, the tearful arguments, the bloody operation by black-market autosurgeon. Uploading to the body of a braindead little boy while his own was incinerated to ash and cracked bone to keep the sniffers away. It was all for nothing.

His chance at escape had been waiting for him here in the ruins all along.

“You can’t tell anyone about this, Jonas,” Fox says. “None of your friends. Nobody at school.”

Jonas’s nostrils flares. His mouth opens to protest.

“If you tell anyone about this, I’ll tell everyone who I really am,” Fox cuts him off. He feels a dim guilt and pushes through it. This is his chance to get off-world, maybe his only chance. He can’t let anyone ruin it. He needs to put a scare into the boy. “Your parents will be taken away to prison for helping me,” he says. “They’ll torture them. Do you want that, Jonas?”

Jonas shakes his dark head. His defiant eyes look suddenly scared.

“Don’t tell anyone,” Fox repeats. “Come on. Time to go home.”

Fox thought himself brave once, but he is realizing more and more that he is a coward. He leads the way back through the rustling fields, past the twisting godtree, as dusk shrouds the sky overhead.

Don’t tell anyone. It’s the refrain Jonas has heard ever since the morning he came into the kitchen to find all the windows shuttered, their one pane of smart glass turned opaque, and a strange man sitting at the table, picking splinters from the wood. When he looked up and saw Jonas, he flinched. That, and the fact that his mother was scrubbing her hands in the sink as if nothing was out of the ordinary, made Jonas brave enough to stare.

The man was tall and slim and his hands on the table were soft-looking with deep blue veins. There were dark circles under his eyes and the tuft of hair that wasn’t hidden away under the hood of father’s stormcoat was a fiery orange Jonas had never seen before. Everyone in the village had dark hair.

Damjan, who had followed him from his bunk how he always did, jostled Jonas from behind, curious. Jonas fed him an elbow back.

Their mother looked up. She dried her scalded red hands in her apron. “Jonas, Damjan, this is your uncle who’s visiting,” she said, in a clipped voice. But this uncle looked nothing like the boisterous ones with bristly black beards who helped his father repair the thresher and drank bacteria beer and sometimes leg-wrestled when they drank enough of it.

“Pleased to meet you, what’s your name?” Jonas asked.

The man tugged at the hood again, pulling it further down his face. He gave a raspy laugh. “My name is nobody,” he said, but Jonas knew that wasn’t a real name.

“What’s uncle’s name?” he asked his mother.

“Better you don’t know,” she said, still twisting her fingers in her apron. “And you can’t tell anyone uncle is visiting us. Same for you, Damjan.”

But Damjan hardly ever spoke anyways, and when he did he stammered badly. Jonas was going to tell his new uncle this when the front door banged open. His uncle flinched and his mother did, too, cursing under her breath how Jonas wasn’t allowed to. He didn’t know what they were scared of, since it was only father back from the yard. He stank like smoke.

“Burned everything,” he said. “The gloves too, I’ll need new ones.” His eyes flicked over to Jonas and Damjan, slightly bloodshot, slightly wild. “Good morning, my beautiful sons,” he said, crossing the room in his long bouncing stride to ruffle Jonas’s hair how he always did, to kiss Damjan on his flat forehead.

“Wash first!” Jonas’s mother hissed. “Damn it. Wash first, you hear?”

Father’s face went white. He swallowed, nodded, then went to the basin and washed. “You’ve met your uncle, yes, boys?” he asked, slowly rinsing his hands. “You’ve said hello?”

Jonas nodded, and Damjan nodded to copy him. “Is uncle here because of the revolution?” he asked.

Lately all things had to do with the revolution. Ever since the flickery blue holo-footage, broadcast from a pirate satellite, that had been projected on the back wall of old Derozan’s shop one night. The whole village had crowded around to watch as the rebels, moving like ghosts, took the far-off capital and dragged the aristos out from their towers. Jonas had cheered along with everyone else.

“He is,” father said, exchanging a look with Jonas’s mother. “Yes. He is. A lot of people had to leave the cities, after the revolution. Do you remember when the soldiers came?”

Jonas remembered. They came in a roaring hover to hand out speakaloud pamphlets and tell the village they were Liberated, now. That they could keep the whole harvest, other than a small token of support to the new government of Liberated People.

“Some of them were looking for your uncle,” father said. “If anyone finds out he’s here, he’ll be killed. So don’t talk about him. Don’t even think about him. Pretend he’s not here.”

Jonas’s new uncle had no expression on his gaunt face, but on top of the wooden table his hands clenched so hard that the knuckles throbbed white.

After supper is over and Jonas goes to bed, Fox stays behind to speak to his parents. There is a new batch of bacteria beer ready and Petar pours each of them a tin cup full. It’s dark and foamy and the smell makes Fox’s stomach turn, but he takes it between his small hands. His cousin Petar is tall and handsome in a way Fox never was, but he has aged a decade in the weeks since Damjan fell. There are streaks of gray at his temples and his eyes are bagged. He slumps when he sits.

His wife Blanka conceals it better. She is the same mixture of cheery and sharp-tongued as she was before. In public she holds to Fox’s hand and scolds and smiles as if he really is Damjan, so realistic Fox worried for her mind at first. But he knows now it’s only that she’s a better actor than her husband, and more viscerally aware of what will happen if someone discovers the truth: that Damjan’s brain-dead body is inhabited by a fugitive poet and enemy of the revolution. She drinks the stinking bacteria beer every night, even when Petar doesn’t.

“Jonas and I found something in the field today,” Fox says, hating how his voice comes shrill and high when he’s trying to speak of something so important. “A ship.”

Petar was using his thumb to wipe the foam off the top of his cup, but now he looks up. “What kind of ship?” he asks.

“Just a dinghy,” Fox says. “Small. One pod. But everything’s operational. It only needs a refuel.” He takes a swallow of beer too big for his child’s throat, and nearly chokes. “Someone was going to use it to break the blockade before a nanodart finished them off,” he says. “Now that someone could be me. If you help me again. With this one last thing.”

His chest is tight with hope and fear. Petar looks to Blanka.

“You would leave,” Blanka says. “In Damjan’s body.”

Fox nods his bandaged head. “The transfer was a near thing,” he said. “Even if we could find that bastard with the autosurgeon again, trying to extract could wipe me completely.”

That isn’t true, not strictly true. He would probably survive, but missing memories and parts of his personality, the digital copy lacerated and corrupted. That might be worse than getting wiped.

“So, we would have another funeral,” Petar says. “Another funeral for Damjan, but this time with all the village watching and with no body to bury.”

“You can tell people it was a blood clot,” Fox says. “An after-effect from the fall. And the casket can stay closed.”

Petar and Blanka look at each other again, stone-faced. People are different out here in the villages. Hard to read. It makes Fox anxious.

“Then you can be at peace,” he says. “You don’t have to see . . . This.” He encompasses his body with one waving hand. “You just have to help me one more time. It might be the best shot I’ll ever have at getting off-world.”

“Maybe the ship was put there as a trap,” Blanka says. “Did you think of that, poet? To draw you or other aristos out of hiding.”

Fox hadn’t thought of that, but he shakes his head. “They wouldn’t go to that much trouble,” he says. “Not for me or anyone else that’s left. All the important people digicast out before the capital fell.” He leans forward, toes barely scraping the floor. “I’ll never forget what your family has done for me.”

“Family helps family,” Petar mutters. “Family over everything.” He looks up from his beer and Fox sees his eyes are wet. “I’ll need to see the ship,” he says. “You’ve been safe like this, in Damjan’s body. Maybe now you can escape and be safe forever. Maybe that is why Damjan fell. His life for your life.”

His shoulders begin to shake, and Blanka puts her arm across them. She pulls Fox’s beer away and pours it slowly into her empty cup. “It’s time for you to go to bed,” she tells him, not looking into his eyes—into Damjan’s eyes.

Fox goes. The room he shares with Jonas is tiny, barely big enough to fit the two quickfab slabs that serve as beds. Jonas isn’t asleep, though. He’s sitting upright with his blanket bunched around his waist.

“You’re going to take the ship, aren’t you?” he says. “You’re going to go up into space and visit the other worlds and see all the stars up close. That’s what aristos do.” The penultimate word is loaded with disdain.

“I’m going to get away from the people who want me executed,” Fox says.

Jonas slides down into his bed, turned away facing the wall. “Aristos go up and we sit in the mud, teacher says. Aristo bellies are full of our blood.”

“Your teacher spouts whatever the propaganda machine sends him,” Fox says wearily. “Bellies bloated with the blood of the masses. That was my line. Bet your teacher didn’t tell you that.”

Jonas doesn’t reply.

Fox undresses himself and climbs into bed. He tries, and fails, to sleep.

Jonas doesn’t sleep right away either. He’s wary of bad dreams since the day he climbed the godtree. The day they learned, in school, about the smooth white storage cone embedded in the backs of the aristos’ soft-skinned necks.

Their new teacher was a tall stern man dressed all in black, replacing the chirping AI that had taught them songs and games, but everyone got brand new digipads so they didn’t mind. All the lessons were about the revolution, about the aristos who’d kept their boot on the throat of the people for too long and now were reaping the harvest, which made no sense to Jonas because the teacher also said aristos were weak and lazy and didn’t know how to work in the fields.

One day the teacher projected a picture on the wall that showed a man without skin or muscles, showing his gray skeleton, and a white knob sunk into the base of the skull.

“This is where aristos keep a copy of themselves,” the teacher said, pointing with his long skinny finger. “This is what lets them steal young healthy bodies when their old ones die. It’s what lets them cross the stars, going from world to world, body to body, like a disease. Like digital demons.”

Jonas thought of his uncle who stayed in the basement, the hood he always wore. That, and his soft hands, his way of speaking that swallowed no sounds, made it obvious.

He was an aristo. It made Jonas frightened and excited at the same time. Had he lived in a sky-scraping tower in the city and eaten meat and put his boot on the throat of the good simple people? Had he skipped through the stars and been to other worlds?

When Jonas came home from school, he tried to ask his father, but his father shook his head.

“Whatever he was, he’s family,” he said. “Family over everything. So you can’t talk about him. Don’t even think about him. Promise me, Jonas.”

But it was hard to not think about. Especially hard to not think about the stars and the other worlds. Jonas knew the branches of the godtree were the best place to watch the stars from. To dream from. Sometimes they looked close enough to touch, if he could only climb high enough and stretch out his arms. Jonas was a good climber. Feeling electric with new excitement, he dodged his mother’s chores that day and went out to the fields.

He barely noticed Damjan following, how he always followed.

Fox is waiting outside the small quickcrete cube of a building that serves as the village school. The pocked gray walls are painted over with a mural, a cheery yellow sun and blooming flowers. All the children streamed out a few minutes ago, chattering, laughing. Some of them came over to touch Fox gingerly on the head and ask if he was better yet. Fox encounters this question often and finds it easiest to nod and smile vaguely. He knows Damjan was never much of a talker.

But the last of the children have gone home now, and Jonas still hasn’t come out. It’s making Fox anxious. He stands up from his squat—he can squat for ages now, Damjan’s small wiry legs are used to it more than they are to chairs—and walks around the edge of the building, towards the window. The smart glass is dimmed, and scratched, besides, but when he stands on tip-toe he can see silhouettes. One is Jonas and the other a tall, straight-backed teacher with his arms folded across his chest. The conversation is muffled.

Fear prickles in Fox’s stomach again, the fear that’s threatened to envelop him ever since a friend woke him in the middle of the night and showed him his face on the blacklist, declared an enemy of the Liberated People. The new government isn’t stupid. They know to start with the children. Jonas’s head is full of the vitriol Fox helped spark not so long ago, back when he’d fooled himself into thinking the violence of the revolution would be brief and justified.

Fox’s heart pounds now. He sees Jonas’s silhouette turn to leave, and he quickly darts back to his usual waiting place outside the main door. The boy comes out with a scowl on his face that falters, then deepens, when he catches sight of Fox. He gives only the slightest jerk of his head as acknowledgement, then goes to walk past.

Fox doesn’t let him. “What did you tell him?” he demands in a whisper, seizing Jonas’s arm.

Jonas wrests it away. His expression turns hard to read, like his parents’. Then a hesitant smirk appears on his face.

Fox feels the panic welling up. “What did you do?” he demands, grabbing for him again.

Jonas grabs back, pinching his hand hard with his nails. “Come on, Damjan,” he says with a fake cheeriness, tugging him along. “Home time, Damjan.”

“You stupid little shit,” Fox rasps, barely able to speak through the tightness in his chest. “They’ll take your parents, you know that? They’ll take them away for helping me. You’ll never see them again.” He can already hear the whine of a hunter drone, the stamp of soldiers’ boots. His head spins. “The fall wasn’t my fault,” he says, with no aim now but lashing out like a cornered animal. “It was yours.”

Jonas’s face goes white. His hand leaps off Fox’s like it’s been burnt. “He followed me,” Jonas says. “I told him to wait on the low branch. But he didn’t.” He’s gone still as a statue. A sob shudders through him. “I didn’t tell teacher anything.”

“What?” Fox feels a wave of relief, then shame.

“I didn’t tell teacher about you,” Jonas hiccups, and then his eyes narrow. “I should have. I should tell him. If I tell him, they’ll forgive my parents. They aren’t aristos. They’re good. They’re Liberated People.”

Suddenly, Jonas is turning back towards the school, his jaw set like his father’s. The red mark on his forehead is back.

“Wait,” Fox pleads. “Jonas. Let me explain myself.”

Jonas stops, turns. Giving him a chance.

Fox’s mind whirls through possibilities. “The fall wasn’t your fault,” he says slowly. “And Damjan knows that.”

“Damjan is dead,” Jonas says through clenched teeth. “His brain had no electric in it.”

“But when they did the transfer,” Fox says. “You remember that, yes? The surgery? When they put my storage cone into Damjan’s brainstem, I got to see his memories. Just for a moment.”

Jonas’s eyes narrow again, but he stays where he is. He wipes his nose, smearing snot across the heel of his hand.

“I saw Damjan wanted to follow you up the tree,” Fox says slowly, feeling his way into the lie. “Because he always wanted to be like you. He knew you were strong and brave and honest. He was trying to be like you, even though he knew he should have waited on the lower branch. And when he fell, he didn’t want you to feel bad. He didn’t want you to feel guilty.” Fox taps the back of his bandaged head, where the storage cone is concealed. “That was the last thing Damjan thought.”

Tears are flowing freely down Jonas’s cheeks now. “I wanted to go higher,” he says. “When I go high enough, it feels like I can touch the sky.”

Fox reaches up and puts his hand on Jonas’s shoulder, softly this time. His panic is receding. He has Jonas solved now. There’s a bit of guilt in his gut, but he’s told worse lies. He would tell a dozen more to make sure nothing goes wrong, not now that Petar has seen the ship and agrees it will fly. Not now that he’s so close to escaping.

Jonas’s father has forbidden him to go near the granary again, but he still goes out to the fields the next day. He has always bored quickly of the games the other children play, even though he can throw the rubber ball as hard as anyone and dodges even better. He’s always preferred to wander.

His nameless uncle is with him. It’s still hard to look at Damjan’s face and know Damjan is not behind it, but talking comes a little easier since what happened yesterday. When his uncle asks why he was kept behind after school by the teacher, Jonas tells him the truth.

“We’re learning about the revolution,” he says. “About the heroes. Stanko was my favorite. He took the capital with a hundred fighters and he’s got an eye surgery to see in the dark. But yesterday the lesson changed on my pad.” He motions with his hand, trying to capture how the text all dissolved and then reformed, so quick he barely noticed it. “Now it says General Bjelica took the capital. It says Stanko was a traitor and they had to execute him. So I told teacher it wasn’t right.”

Damjan’s face screws up how it does before he cries, but no tears come out, and Jonas knows it’s because grown-ups don’t cry. “I met Stanislav once,” his uncle says. “He was a good man. Maybe too good. An idealist.”

“You met Stanko?” Jonas demands. “What did his eyes look like?”

His uncle blinks. “Bright,” he says. “Like miniature suns.”

Jonas stops where he is, the tall grass rustling against his legs, as he envisions Stanko tall and strong with eyes blazing. “Like stars,” he murmurs.

His uncle nods. “Maybe he got away,” he says. “There’s a lot of false reports. Maybe he’s in hiding somewhere.”

Jonas asks the question, then, the one that has been bubbling in the back of his mind for days. “The revolution is good,” he says. “Isn’t it?”

His uncle gives a laugh with no happiness in it. “I thought it was,” he says. “Until the bloodshed. Until cynics and thugs like Bjelica took over. After everything I did for their cause—all the rallies, all the writing—they turned on me. Ungrateful bastards.”

“Why did you want the revolution if you’re an aristo?” Jonas asks plainly.

“Because there weren’t meant to be aristocrats or underclass after the revolution,” his uncle says, with a trace of anger in Damjan’s shrill voice. “Everyone was meant to be equal. But history is a wheel and we always make the same mistakes. The only difference is who gets crushed into the mud.” He picks anxiously at a stalk. “The ruling families were bad,” he says. “The famines, and all that. But this is worse.”

Jonas considers it. The teacher told them that there would be no famines anymore. They would keep their whole crop, except for a small token of support to the government of Liberated People. “Did you lose many in the famine?” he asks, because it’s a grown-up question. “I had a little sister who died. And that’s why Damjan is different. Was different. Because mother couldn’t feed him well enough.”

Damjan’s mouth twists. For a moment his uncle doesn’t respond. “No,” he finally says. “Not many.” Damjan’s face is red, and Jonas realizes his uncle is ashamed of something, though what he can’t guess. “I wrote a poem series about the famine,” he says. “Years ago. I still remember it. Do you want to hear some of it, maybe?”

Jonas hesitates. He doesn’t know if he likes poetry. But maybe if he listens to the poetry, he can ask more questions about Stanko and the capital, and then about the stars and the other worlds his uncle will soon go to.

“Alright,” he agrees. “If it’s not really long.”

The week passes at two speeds for Fox, agonizingly slow and terrifyingly fast. Petar has spread word that the old granary past the edge of the terraform has broken glass and an old leaking oil drum inside it, to ensure the other parents keep their children away. Fox’s nights are spent poring over schematics with Blanka or else sneaking out to the ship itself with Petar.

During the day, he spends most of his time with Jonas. The boy is bright and never runs dry of questions, and ever since Fox’s first recitation he’s been devouring poetry. Not necessarily Fox’s—he prefers it when Fox recites the older masters, the bolder and more rhythmic styles. He has even started scribbling his own poem using charcoal on the wall of their bedroom, which made Petar and then Blanka both shake their heads.

He reminds Fox a little bit of himself as a child. Too clever to get along with the other children, too brash and too stubborn, worryingly so. But Fox has other concerns. The ship is tuned and refueled and finally ready to fly, and the village’s weather probe predicts a rolling storm in a fortnight. That’s when Fox will launch, while the thunder and lightning masks the take-off. His days in the village, his days in Damjan’s body, are finally numbered.

Fox is in the cramped bedroom, laboring with a piece of Jonas’s charcoal. The boy’s favorite poem is a short one, but even so it takes a long time for Fox to transcribe it onto the clear stretch of wall. He’s only halfway finished the memento, his small hands smeared black, when he hears Jonas arrive home from the school. A moment later, he hears a shriek from Blanka.

Fox goes stiff and scared, ears strained for the thump of soldiers’ boots, but there’s nothing but Blanka’s angry voice and Jonas’s near-inaudible reply. He wipes his hands on his trousers and goes to the kitchen.

Jonas is standing sullenly with his shirt knotted in his hands. Blanka is in a rage, and Fox realizes why as soon as he sees the bruises on Jonas’s bare back.

“That spindly bastard, I’ll snap him in halves,” she’s snarling. “What happened, Jonas? What happened, my beautiful boy?”

Jonas lifts his head. “Teacher switched me,” he says. “For telling lies.” He turns as he says it, and his eyes catch on Fox. He gives a smile that fills Fox with pure dread. Fox knows, somehow, what’s coming. “We learned about enemies of the revolution today,” Jonas says. “There was one aristo who tried to convince the Liberated People to let all the aristos go without getting punished. They called him the Fox because he had red hair.”

“Oh, no,” Blanka murmurs. “Oh, Jonas. What did you say?”

“I said he helped the revolution,” Jonas says defiantly, looking Fox in the eye. “I said he wrote the poem, the one about aristo bellies full of our blood.”

“You should not have done that, Jonas,” Fox says, surprised he can speak at all. “That was dangerous. That was very dangerous.” His panic is welling up again, numbing him all over. “They have gene records. They know that I’m a cousin to your father.”

Jonas bites at his lip, but his eyes are still defiant. “I wanted to be brave,” he says. “Strong and brave and honest. Like Damjan thought I am.”

Fox feels adrift. He knows Jonas, no matter how sharp he seems, is still a child. There’s no way he can understand what he’s just done. Maybe it’s Fox’s own fault, for filling his head with all the poems.

Maybe they’ll be lucky, and the teacher will keep Jonas’s transgression to himself. Fox has been lucky before.

When father comes home mother tells him what happened, and his whole body seems to sink a little. Jonas feels the disappointment like he feels the welts on his back, and worse, he can tell that his father is scared. There is a brutal silence that lasts all evening until he goes to bed, lying on his stomach with a bit of medgel spread over his back. He knows he made a mistake. Even though he didn’t say his uncle was with them, he said too much.

Jonas tries to apologize to his uncle, who is lying very straight and very still, staring up at the ceiling, and Damjan’s voice mutters something about everything being fine and not to worry about anything. It doesn’t sound like he believes it. Between the aches in his back and the thoughts in his head, Jonas takes a very long time to fall asleep. Halfway through a bad dream, his mother’s hands shake him awake.

“Up, Jonas. You, too, Damjan.”

Jonas wrenches his eyes open. It’s still dark through the window and he hears a high whining noise he recognizes coming from outside. A hover. Jonas feels a spike of cold fear go all the way through him.

“I need to pee,” he says.

“Later,” mother says. “There are some men here to speak with your father. To look around the house.” Her voice is strained. “If they ask you anything, think three times before you say anything back. Remember that uncle was never here.”

Then she’s gone again, leaving Jonas alone with his uncle. In the light leaking from the hall, Jonas can see Damjan’s small round face is etched with terror, so much that he almost wants to take his hand and squeeze it. As if he really is Damjan, and not the Fox. Jonas listens hard to the unfamiliar voices conversing with his father. One of them sounds angry.

Loud stomping steps in the hall, then the door opens all the way and two soldiers come in with mother and father close behind. They are not as tall as father but their black coats and bristling weapons make them seem bigger, more frightening, like flying black hunter drones that have turned into men.

“Good morning, children,” one of them says, even though it is the middle of the night. He gives a small smile that doesn’t crinkle his eyes and raises one fist in the salute of the Liberated People.

Jonas returns it, and shoots his uncle a meaningful look, but Damjan’s little fists are stuck to his sides. Fortunately, the soldier is focused on him, not his uncle.

“You must be the older,” he says. “Jonas, isn’t it? You told our friend the teacher something very strange today, Jonas. What did you tell him?”

Jonas’s mouth is dry, dry. He looks to mother, who is framed between the men’s broad shoulders, and she starts to speak but the second soldier puts a warning finger to his lips.

“We want to hear from Jonas, not from you,” the first one says. “What did you tell your teacher, Jonas?”

Jonas knows it is time to be brave, but not honest. “I said that the Fox helped the revolution,” he says. “I was confused. I thought he was Lazar. Lazar makes the songs for the satellite to play.” He looks at both the soldiers, trying to gauge if they believe him. He lifts his nightshirt and turns so he won’t have to look them in the eye. “Teacher was mad and didn’t let me explain,” he says. “He just started to switch me. Look how bad he switched me.”

“A few stripes never killed anyone,” the soldier says. “It’ll make you look tough. Your little girlfriends will like that, right? Turn around.”

Jonas drops his shirt and turns back, ready to meet the soldiers’ gaze again. His uncle gives an encouraging nod where they can’t see him.

“Did you know that this Fox, this enemy of the revolution, is a relative of yours?” the soldier asks. “A cousin to your father?”

“Yes,” Jonas says. “But we don’t know him. He’s never come here.”

The other soldier, who hasn’t spoken yet, barks a short and angry laugh. “We’ll see about that,” he says, in a voice like gravel. “We’ll have a sniff.” He pulls something from his jacket and fits it over his mouth and nose like a bulbous black snout.

Jonas has heard of sniffer masks—his uncle explained them when they were in the field one day, how each person born had a different odor, because of their genes and their bacteria, and you could program a sniffer mask to find even the tiniest trace of it—but he has never seen one before now. It makes the soldier look like a kind of animal. When he inhales, the sound is magnified and crackling and makes Jonas shudder.

Behind the soldiers, mother has her hands tucked tight under her armpits. Her face is blank, but Jonas imagines she is thinking of all the scrubbing, all the chemicals she used anywhere uncle sat or ate. But uncle’s old body has been gone for weeks now, and the smells would be too, wouldn’t they?

As the sniffer moves around the room, the first soldier leans in close to the wall to look at the charcoal lettering. “What’s this?” he asks. “Lessons?”

“Yes,” Jonas says quietly.

“Good,” the soldier says, and Jonas sees his eyes moving right to left on it, instead of left to right, and realizes he’s like most of the older people in the village who can’t read. It gives him a small sense of relief.

That only lasts until he looks over and sees the sniffer has stopped beside his uncle. “What happened to the boy’s head?” the sniffer asks, voice distorted and grating.

“He fell,” father says from the doorway. “A few weeks ago. He isn’t healed in the brain yet. He’s a little slow.”

“Are you, boy?” the sniffer demands.

Jonas clenches his thumbs inside his fists. There is no part of uncle’s body left in Damjan’s, only his digital copy, his soul, but Jonas wonders if the sniffer might somehow be able to detect that, too.

His uncle looks up with a confused smile and reaches to touch the sniffer mask. The sniffer jerks back, then pushes him towards the door, more gently than Jonas would have expected, and continues searching the room. Jonas releases a breath he didn’t know he was holding.

The sniffer works through the rest of the house, too, and Jonas and his family drift slowly along with him to open doors and cupboards, to make sure there are no traps or surprises. The horrible sucking sound of the sniffer mask sets Jonas’s teeth on edge. It feels like a strange dream, a bad one. His eyes are sore and his bladder is squeezing him.

When they finally finish with the cellar, the sniffer looks irritated but the other soldier is relieved. “We’ll be off, then,” he says. “Remember, if he ever contacts you in any way, it’s your duty to report him. He’s not one of us. He cut ties with you and with all decent people the day he had his storage cone implanted.”

Father nods, his mouth clenched shut, and shows the soldiers out. Jonas follows, because he wants to make sure, really sure, that the nightmare is over. Father doesn’t send him back in. The soldiers are out the door and past the bushes when the sniffer suddenly stops. His mask is still on, and the sucking noise comes loud in the still night air.

Jonas remembers that the last charred bits of uncle’s old skeleton are buried underneath the bushes. His father is not breathing, only staring. The sniffer lingers.

Jonas braces himself. He reminds himself that he is brave. Then he darts away from the door before father can pull him back, jogging up behind the sniffer and tugging his arm. “Can I see the hover?” he asks loudly.

The sniffer whirls and shoves him backward. Jonas squeals, loud and shrill how mother hates it, and he lets his piss go in a long hot stream that soaks his legs, splatters the bushes and the soldier’s boots. It’s very satisfying. Especially when the sniffer yanks his mask down and curses.

“I thought the other boy was the slow one,” he says.

“He’s frightened,” father says, coming and gripping Jonas by the arm. “You frightened him. Please, just go.”

As Jonas watches, the soldiers climb into their hover. They go.

The instant the whine of the hover fades away into the distance, Fox tells Petar and Blanka that it has to be tonight. His heart is still pounding away at his tiny ribcage, so hard he imagines the bones splintering. He’s sweating all over.

“That was too close,” he says. “Too close. I have to launch tonight.”

Everyone is in the kitchen. Blanka is wetting a rag for Jonas to clean himself; Petar is standing behind a chair and gripping it tightly, rocking it back and forth on its legs. They all turn their heads to look at Fox.

“There’s no storm tonight,” Blanka says, handing Jonas the rag. “Someone will see the exhaust burn. It’ll be loud, too.”

Fox shakes his head. “Nobody around here knows what a launch looks or sounds like,” he says. “And Petar, you told everyone there was oil in the granary, didn’t you?”

His cousin blinks. “Yes.” He pauses, then looks to his wife. “We could set fire to the granary. That should be enough to cover the noise and the light so long as he goes up dark.”

Blanka slowly nods. “Alright. Alright. You’ll need help moving the ship out. I’ll come as well.”

“I want to come,” Jonas says, wide-eyed, wringing the rag between his hands. Fox realizes he never did finish the poem on the wall.

“Bring Jonas, too,” he says. “To say goodbye.”

Bare minutes later, they are dressed and out the door, moving quickly through the crop field. The night air is cold enough to sting Fox’s cheeks. Fear and anticipation speed his short legs and he manages to keep pace with Petar and Blanka, who are lugging the gas. Jonas skips ahead and then back, electric with excitement, already forgetting the fear.

“I pissed on a soldier,” he whispers.

“I saw from the window,” Fox grunts. “But a sniffer can’t read DNA from ashes and bone. He had nothing.”

“Oh.” Jonas’s face reddens a bit. “I’ll do it again, though. I hate the soldiers as bad as the aristos. I want everyone equal, like you said.”

Blanka puts a finger to her lips, and Jonas falls silent. Fox is glad to save his breath. They pass under the godtree, its twisted branches reaching up towards a black sky sewn with glittering stars. For a moment Fox dares to imagine the future. Slipping through the blockade and into the waiting arms of civilization. Telling his tale of survival against all odds. Maybe he’ll be famous on other worlds how he so briefly was here.

And he’ll be leaving Jonas’s family to suffer through whatever comes next. The thought gnaws at him so he shoves it away. He reminds himself that Petar and Blanka are clever people. They know how to keep their heads down. They know how to keep silent and survive.

At the entrance to the abandoned granary, Fox switches on the small lantern he brought from the kitchen and lights the way for Petar and Blanka. They haul the tiny ship out on wooden sledges Petar made for it a day ago. Jonas puts his small shoulder into it and pushes from behind.

Fox checks everything he remembers, moving from the nosecone to the exhaust, then yanks the release. The ship shutters open, revealing the waiting passenger pod. Its life support status lights glow a soft blue in the dark. Ready. In the corner of his eye Fox sees Jonas staring up at the stars.

The ones who survive will be the ones who can keep their heads down. Fox knows it from history; he knows in his gut it’s happening here. Jonas isn’t one of those. Maybe he’ll learn to be, but Fox doesn’t think so.

Before he can stop himself, he turns to Blanka. “Jonas should go,” he says. “Not me.”

Jonas’s head snaps around, but Fox doesn’t look at him. He watches Blanka’s face. She doesn’t look shocked, the way he thought she would, but maybe it’s just that people are different in the village. Harder to read.

“What do you mean?” Petar demands.

“Jonas should take the ship,” Fox says, because why else would he have told them to bring Jonas? He must have known, in the back of his mind, that this was what he needed to do. One brave thing, and then he can go back to being a coward. “He’s already pissed off the teacher and pissed on a soldier,” Fox continues. “He’s going to keep putting himself in danger here. And the two of you, as well.”

“You’re the one who put us in danger,” Petar snaps. “You would take another son from me now, cousin?”

“He’s never fit right here, Petar,” Blanka says, and for the first time Fox sees tears in her eyes. “He’s always had his head up in the sky. We used to say that, remember?”

“He would be safer somewhere else,” Fox says. “Let him take the ship. It’s all automated from here on in.” He pauses. Breathes. “Let him take the ship, then you can burn down the granary and say he was playing in it. You can use what’s left of my bones if you need proof.”

Petar looks at his son. “Is this what you want to do, then, Jonas?” he asks hoarsely.

Jonas chews his lip. Turns to Fox. “Could I come back? Will I be able to come back?”

“Not soon,” Fox says. He knows there are still too many factions scrabbling in the power vacuum, knows things will get worse before they get better. “But some day. When things stabilize. Yes.” He can feel himself losing his nerve. He almost hopes Jonas will refuse.

“I want to go,” Jonas says solemnly. Petar gives a ragged cry and wraps him in his arms. Blanka hugs him from behind, putting her cheek against his cheek. Fox feels ashamed for watching. He looks away.

“What about uncle?” Jonas asks, his voice muffled by the embrace. “Will he be Damjan forever?”

Fox swallows as his cousin straightens up, and tries to look him in the eye. “You could say I was in the fire, too,” he says. “That Damjan was in there. And I could leave again. Try my luck going north. You wouldn’t have to look at me and remember all the time.”

Petar looks sideways to Blanka. Slowly, they both shake their heads. “You can never be Damjan and you can never be Jonas,” Blanka says. “But you are family. We’ve kept you safe this long, haven’t we?”

Fox dares to imagine the future again, this time in the village, slowly growing again in Damjan’s body. He did used to dream of retiring to the countryside one day. And he’s learned how to keep his head down. Soon the bandages will be off and his storage cone, shaved down and covered over with a flap of skin by the autosurgeon, will be undetectable.

Maybe the violence will be over in a few years’ time. Maybe Damjan will become a poet, a better one than Fox ever was.

“Thank you,” he says. “All of you.”

He stands aside while Jonas’s parents say their goodbyes. Jonas does his best to be sad, but Fox sees his eyes go to the ship over and over again, an excited smile curling his lips. He hugs his mother fiercely, then his father, then comes to Fox.

“You can have my bed,” he says. “It’s bigger.” He raises his arms. Pauses. He sticks out one hand instead to shake.

Fox clasps it tight. “I’ll do that,” he says.

Then Jonas is clambering into the pod, the restraints webbing over him to hold him in place during launch, and it’s too late for Fox to take it all back even if he wanted to. The ship folds shut. The smell of gas prickles Fox’s nose and he realizes Petar is dousing one side of the granary to ensure it burns. When he’s finished, Blanka takes his gas-slicked hand in hers, and takes Fox’s with the other. They walk the agreed-upon distance with a few steps extra to be safe.

The ship squats on the pale soil, rumbling through its launch protocols, and then the engine ignites. Fox feels it in his chest, vibrating through his bones. Riding a bonfire of smelting orange flame, the ship begins to rise, one fiery tongue catching the roof of the granary on the way up. The engine burns even brighter, stamping itself onto Fox’s retinas, and by the time he blinks them clear the ship is only a pinpoint of light disappearing into the sky.

The crackling flames leap high, consuming the granary and making it hard to see the stars. Fox can imagine them, though. He can imagine Jonas slipping through the blockade to freedom. In the corner of his eye, Petar lifts his hand high, but open, not the clenched fist of the soldiers.

Fox raises his arm. He does the same.

About the Author

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

Away from Home

Luo Longxiang

I. New San Francisco

Planetship Phaeton, New San Francisco City, sunny skies.

A young man with a flat top and an earring sat in the Chinatown substation, face to face with the station chief. Zhao had seen his type before—old enough to dress like a thug, but not quite ballsy enough to act like one.

“Quit looking at me like I’m a criminal,” he said. “I’m here to file a report. My motorcycle was stolen.”

Chief Zhao logged onto the police network and entered the license plate number. After a short pause, the current location of the motorcycle appeared on the screen.

“Zheng Weihan,” Zhao said. “This bike of yours must really be a piece of junk! This is the second time it’s been picked up by the cleaning crews . . . Looks like they thought it was abandoned. Leave a note that says ‘Not Trash’ next time, you hear?”

Weihan laughed. “You guys must get pretty bored around here, huh?”

New San Francisco wasn’t all that large, after all. From Hsia Street, Shang Street, Chow Street to Chinatown and Sung Street—you could count the number of streets in the whole dang city on two hands. Compared to some cities it was an easy beat.

“We have our days,” Zhao said. “There was an accident on Shang Street—two bicycles collided. That was the only ‘incident’ this month. How about you? Argue with your dad again last night?”

“Old bastard is going nuts from boredom over on Planetship Europa,” Weihan said. “He keeps coming over here and trying to force me to sign up for the graduate exam for military school.”

Determined to stay out of military school, Weihan had run away from home and came to New San Francisco to live with his uncle. Wei’s uncle had been Zhao’s neighbor, before he died. Zhao remembered that he was a big drinker. He’d charged through several marriages, failing at them all, finding himself alone in the end, without even a child of his own to keep him company . . . Then, one winter two years back, he’d gone out to the bars right before a big snowstorm hit town. They didn’t find his body under the snow until the next morning.

“Speaking of joining up . . . Well, I can’t say I didn’t think about it when I was your age,” Zhao said. “Back then, I really admired guys who enlisted, so that’s why I decided to enroll in military school. Took the test same year as your dad, actually. Only, he passed and I flunked. So I went to the police academy instead.” He patted his belt holster. “It’s been twenty years now, but this gun hasn’t fired a single bullet in all that time.”

“Dad only went to military school because his family was poor and they could give him room and board. Plus, they didn’t charge him any money to go. He always said being in the military was like gambling with your life. Fifteen years ago, his whole class of fifty guys went into combat. Only five came back . . . I don’t get it! It’s like he wants me to go get myself killed!”

“You want my two cents? Your dad is thinking that it wasn’t easy for him to get promoted to the top brass, but now that he’s there he’s got lots of friends. If you go and get your degree, he’ll be able to arrange a civilian post for you. Way safer than being out on the front lines like the other grunts. And you’re more likely to get promoted, too.”

“That’s got nothing to do with me,” Weihan said. “Anyways, my motorcycle’s gone. When you get off work don’t forget you’ve got to give me a ride home, okay?”

II. Teahouse

Chinatown had a lot of fake historical things that seemed out of place in the modern age, like traditional characters on the signs, banks that were made up to look like old-fashioned pawn shops, and ’verse-famous Chinese restaurants. And of course, there were the teahouses.

The Camel Teahouse had a name all its own, though. There was a storyteller, and Master Tunwuge, who’d show up every day without fail, holding a palm-leaf fan, dressed in the long robes of an old-timey aristocrat. Sometimes there’d even be a group of “foreigners” (ETs). Business had been even better lately, after the Hump-backed Horse had gone out of business. Once news had gotten out that they’d been using android wait staff their customers had dried right up. People who came to places like this were paying for tradition. Going to a teahouse to drink tea had become a status symbol—whether the tea was any good or not wasn’t important.

Worried that their son wasn’t making enough to take care of himself, Weihan’s grandma and grandpa had put Weihan’s uncle in charge of the teahouse. Receipts weren’t enough to make him rich by any means, but he hadn’t had to struggle so much either.

I should probably hire some more performers, Weihan thought to himself. That erhu player at the job fair didn’t seem half bad. They were saying he’d retired from some art academy—only problem was that he wanted too much money.

Later that evening Weihan was surprised to hear a soft voice call out to him as he locked the front door to the teahouse:

“Excuse me sir, are you hiring?”

Weihan almost let the door slam on his foot. In the cold light of the man-made moon he would have sworn the girl looked like a living succubus.

She was wearing a loose robe, with long hair. She seemed a little shy, with an erhu slung over her shoulder. He guessed she was still a student, looking for part-time work.

He composed himself and said, “Play ‘Moonlight on the Second Spring’ for me.”

The girl sat on a stone seat near the doorway. As the strings began to hum with the melody of the ancient tune, a stately story flowed forth:

A long, long time ago, during the Age of Earth, a blind man sat on a street corner, calmly playing the erhu. His clouded eyes stared blankly out at the masses of people, many passing out broadsheets. Deliberately ignoring the noisy excitement of the crowded street, the blind man could feel the coming storm deep in his bones, but he still he sat, in silent reverence, like a silent spring full of the dark reflections of gathering clouds. A storm is all sound and fury, but clouds are mute—and so even on the verge of a raging tempest, the spring remains as silent as ever.

The girl’s voice suddenly pulled Weihan back to the real world.

“That’s all there is to that tune. Can you give me a job or not?”

“Hrm? Oh, yes, a great tune, very impressive,” Weihan said, distracted. “I’m afraid I can’t offer you much money, though . . . If you don’t mind moving in with us, we can at least take care of your room and board.”

He was surprised to find himself trying to win her over. “Oh, that’s right, what’s your name?”

“Han Dan.”

Weihan quickly justified his concern: how would he ever be able to bear the thought of a defenseless woman wandering around an unfamiliar city?

“Have we met before?” He really did think she looked a little familiar.

Han Dan was carrying an old notebook, the kind with an e-ink display that could be rolled up when not in use. The notebook looked just like an ancient scroll. To attract customers, the manufacturer had painted the outside to look like fancy writing paper—it was rather convincing.

Later, in the privacy of her room, she unrolled the notebook and began to type, her fingers dancing lightly across the screen:

 . . . I’ll probably live here for a while making a few bucks doing this and that. If I stay too long he’ll start asking questions . . . and then I’ll be right back where I started, on the road again . . .

III. Meteor Shower

During the next month at the Camel, Han Dan performed daily. The teahouse was open from eleven to ten. Decent work had been hard to find lately, so it was good enough for the time being.

Around closing time, Weihan said he had to go out to take care of something. After about an hour he still hadn’t come back, so Han Dan went up to her room and switched on the computer. Entering her long password with practiced elegance, a 3D map filled the screen. Han Dan quickly located New San Francisco on the map, using the mouse to manipulate the image. Continuing to zoom in on the web of streets and alleyways, she enlarged the map until even stray leaves from the greenbelts were visible. She soon found him, standing in line in a 24-hour convenience store.

The Meteorology Board had put out a meteor shower warning earlier that day, so Weihan wasn’t alone. All the stores had had lines out the door, full of people rushing to buy supplies.

Han Dan fretted nervously, wanting to do something to get prepared. She went down into the storeroom and found some pieces of wood she thought she might use to board up the windows. But then she realized it was pointless.

She thought about the old Earth Age tradition: Close your eyes, wish on a star, and all your dreams will come true! Nowadays people wished under the stars too—they just wished that the damn meteor showers would end sooner rather than later!

Weihan came back at eleven-thirty carrying two bottles of purified water and some other things.

“We’re staying in the basement tonight,” he said, catching sight of Han Dan.

The bunker underneath Weihan’s home had two bedrooms connected by a main room. Aside from the stairway that led up to the living room of the house, there was also a blast door that led to the air raid shelter under the street.

When the meteor shower finally began at three-thirty in the morning, its arrival was announced with a violent shaking. Great fragments of rock broke and splintered through the air like artillery shells, and buildings collapsed with a deafening roar. Weihan tossed and turned in the pale light of the emergency shelter, unable to sleep.

“Can’t sleep too, huh?” he asked when he saw Han Dan enter the room.

Weihan sat up and switched on the TV. The signal was cruddy, but through the static they could just make out the meteor’s great swath of destruction—it was an up-to-the-minute report. Countless meteors were falling into the atmosphere, leaving long tails of material in their wake which fell to ground like great torrents of rain, smashing the city under a hail of debris. The extreme temperatures had set everything that could burn aflame, leaving the night sky illuminated by the blaze of New San Francisco.

Despite the powerful air conditioners and oxygen recyclers that had been installed in the bunker, they could already feel the heat of the conflagration above radiating through the ceiling. A minor meteor shower might make for a good school-girl romance, but a major meteor shower like this had the potential to carpet bomb a city back to the Stone Age.

“I heard that way back when we were still in the Solar System, Jupiter and Saturn helped block the Earth from all sorts of dangerous flying objects,” Han Dan said.

“We sure ain’t in the Solar System anymore . . . ” Weihan muttered, taking out an old photograph of a group of men in military uniforms.

“I had two uncles,” he said after a long pause. “The older one was an officer in the Seventeenth Fleet, he died back in ’fifteen. Second uncle was in the closest rescue ship. They’d gotten their engines knocked out by a meteor, though, so all second uncle could do was watch his brother’s ship go down in flames. Afterwards second uncle was a total wreck. He started drinking and pretty soon that was it for him, too . . . ”

The TV crackled with a final burst of static before going silent. A great rumble echoed from above their heads and dust rained down from the ceiling.

“Yep! This has got to be just about the worst meteor shower I’ve ever seen,” Weihan mused with obvious detachment. Meteors showers were, after all, a fact of life for the residents of New San Francisco, coming once every couple of years.

A sudden explosion shook the bunker, with a roar that seemed to crack the heavens and split the earth. Moments later, urgent knocking could be heard outside the blast doors. Weihan opened the doors, coming face to face with Police Chief Zhao. His two hairy legs sticking out from under his nightshirt, he waved a still-holstered pistol in Zheng’s face, shouting, “You have to get to the emergency escape pods! The meteor shower broke the sun!”

Every planetship had its own massive, fusion-powered artificial sun that orbited in a fixed path, providing a never-ending stream of light and heat. Without its sun, a planetship would freeze solid.

“T-that’s impossible!” Weihan sputtered. But from Zhao’s expression he knew that the old geezer wasn’t kidding around.

Zhao left them to notify others of the evacuation order. Weihan and Han Dan, meanwhile, rushed to the nearest emergency pods. From the thick layer of dust, it was obvious that no one had been here in a long, long time. They were just like the life rafts on a boat—you couldn’t do without them, but nobody thought that you’d ever actually need them. The ancient LCD screens flickered with the latest news: Chow Street’s bunker had suffered a direct hit, bringing the lake of fire from above directly into the oxygen-rich shelter below. More likely than not, all lives in the sector had been lost—at any rate no one was willing to open the blast doors to check for survivors. Experience had taught them that if they opened it even a crack, smoke and flames would pour out into the next sector, killing even more people.

The ground shook like a massive beast shaking from the pain of some great wound.

The escape pods were in the process of refueling. In accordance with the ancient protocols detailed in the “Emergency Escape Plan for Planetships,” infants, children, and teenagers were boarding ahead of older residents. Of course, renowned scholars, professors, and other ‘mission critical’ personnel could board the first wave of pods along with the children. Although the police in charge of maintaining public order kept stressing that there was more than enough space for everyone, they all knew that the later you left your chances for survival were that much lower.

One man tried to push his way onto a pod, shouting, “I’ll give half of all my money—all hundred million dollars of it—to the man who gives me his spot on this escape pod!”

The only response was the dull thud of a policeman’s bullet.

The oldest among them volunteered to stay behind to help the police, telling their children and grandchildren to hurry onto an escape pod. Saying goodbye, they promised that they would catch one of the later pods.

Of course, there was a good chance that the last wave of escape pods might very well never take flight.

When it was Weihan’s turn to board an escape pod, he discovered a young woman weeping behind him. Her two children had already boarded the previous wave, but she’d been separated from them. By now, the flames had nearly reached the launch bay.

“Can I let her board in my place?” Zheng shouted at a nearby police officer. Unspeaking, the man simply pointed the gaping black hole of his gun directly at Weihan’s chest. Zheng hurriedly averted his gaze and boarded the escape pod.

Han Dan had boarded just before him, and was now sitting by his side. He was surprised to see her fasten the thin metal restraints with practiced efficiency.

“Put on your seatbelt! An old spacecraft like this won’t have artificial gravity or any of the other comforts of those passenger barges you’re probably used to!”

The escape pod suddenly lurched into motion, the painful acceleration pinning them into their seats and the hull creaking like it was going to fall apart. The mouths of the launch silos were located directly under the streets and public squares of New San Francisco—rather than build blast doors they had opted to blow up the surface structures if it ever became necessary for the escape pods to be put into use.

While the city gave into the inferno, the rain of meteors continued to fall across the face of the great planetship. From the escape pod window they watched the flow of spacecraft issuing forth from the silos that pocked the landscape like volcanos. Along the bustling thoroughfares of New San Francisco grand old buildings stood like sentinels over the looping greenbelts . . . and then one by one they fell in upon themselves, turning to ash under the searing blaze.

IV. Planetships

More than a ship, Phaeton had been a planet unto itself, equivalent in size and mass to the Earth of old, with an atmosphere, azure seas, and vast continents—a complete biosphere. Of course, befitting a planetship, it was also outfitted with a massive engine, capable of pushing the artificial world through the galaxy. Unlike a real planet, Phaeton had therefore never been bound to orbit a single star—earning it the title of “planetship.”

Planetship Phaeton was by no means alone in the universe: after Planetship Europa had been completed, mankind had built two more ships, with Planetship Asia and Planetship America gradually taking shape. Since the original Earth only had seven continents, by the eighth planetship they had run out of names, and so they began to borrow the names of mythical figures from the various nations of Earth—Gaea, Phaeton, Perseus, Kronos.

Enormous, with wispy white clouds under the thin atmosphere hanging over great oceans and wide continents, the planetships were vessels of not only incomparable beauty, but also great fragility—in the boundless expanse of the universe, thin planetary atmospheres are as fleeting as soap bubbles. Viewed in this light, it was unsurprising that the Planetship Alliance had established a great military, with ring upon ring of defensive lines designed to protect the ships of the alliance.

Sadly, this massive military and its many lines of defense had been unable to prevent the onslaught of the meteor shower on Planetship Phaeton. The losses were too great this time—according to news reports, when the massive asteroid had entered the airspace of the Planetship Alliance the government had sent out a strike team to change the trajectory of the great rock. Its velocity proved too great, however, and so they tried instead to break it apart into smaller pieces. According to the data provided by the news channels, the asteroid struck with a level of force that would have pushed Earth out of its orbit.

And so the military had done their best to pulverize the object, and as Han Dan gazed down upon fragments floating outside the window of the escape pod, she caught sight of the wreckage of military ships, even the remains of some unknown war heroes . . . The planetship of course had its own anti-meteor system—but if the damage became too great, then the only remaining option was to fall back on the military.

After losing its artificial sun, the temperature of Planetship Phaeton had plummeted abruptly. The sudden shift in temperature had created tremendous windstorms, while torrential rains froze in midair, falling to the ground as hail. The inclement weather had slowed the passage of the escape pods, leaving a great number of people behind on the planetship. Not long after the torrential floods covering the surface of the great ship froze, trapping men and ships alike in solid ice.

As the temperature continued to drop, the temperature on the surface of the ice quickly became lower than below the ice, the hundred-meter-thick sheet of frozen water began to rupture with great thundering cracks. Long fissures in the ice stretched from one end of the planetship to the other, the stress forming great valleys and high mountains from the once level ice sheet, utterly destroying the cities, fields, forests, and even the oceans. Finally, great flakes of snow began to fall—frozen C0₂. After a few days, blue snow would begin to fall—oxygen and nitrogen. Without the artificial sun, the entire atmosphere would freeze solid.

In the escape pods, some of the refugees were crying while images of old Earth played on the screens, as if to remind them that this was not the first time humanity had lost its home. In a strange way, it did seem to lessen the blow of losing Planetship Phaeton a little.

Han Dan turned on her notebook and wrote a few lines:

As refugees, we seem to have completely forgotten our former lives of leisure . . . We’ve gone back to the way our ancestors lived—running from disaster to disaster. The moment we boarded this escape pod we were making a gamble with our lives. We were putting our lives in the hands of this ship, giving up our control over our ability to escape. Just behind us, two escape pods just collided with a meteor fragment and exploded. So many parents who will never see their children again, so many children who have lost their parents forever . . .

V. Chang’an, “Europe”

Older folks were used to calling Planetship Europa by its old Earth name “Europe.” The oldest of all the planetships, Europa was home to Chang’an, the largest city in the universe, and capital of the Planetship Alliance.

Downtown Chang’an was thronged with rescue workers and medical personnel gazing up at the towering minaret of the Sky Tower—Europa’s primary space elevator. To keep the crowds and journalists out, the police had cordoned off the public square with bright yellow tape. Meanwhile, wave after wave of refugees were brought down from space via the Sky Tower.

After Weihan left the escape pod, a doctor examined him to see if he had been injured during his escape from the Phaeton. A nearby clerk pulled up his record from the Ministry of Civil Affairs database and printed his temporary ID card, which could be used as both a credit card and driver’s license.

“According to our records, your parent’s house is on Planetship Europa, right? Looks like you won’t be needing a bed in the refugee camp, then. Sorry to say so, but our space is limited.”

When the clerk pulled up Han Dan’s records, however, his jaw dropped, leaving his mouth open wide enough to stuff an ostrich egg inside.

After emerging from the Sky Tower into Chang’an’s main square, the refugees ignored the calls of the rescue workers and began a crazed search for their relatives.

Weihan saw Police Chief Zhao’s wife standing with her two children by the Sky Tower exit. Policemen had left the Phaeton last of all, so it was unlikely that Zhao’s family would ever see him again.

VI. Countryside

There was a certain lane in the outskirts of Chang’an, beside which was a certain village. Opposite the village was a watermelon patch, the melons still far from ripe. Most of the young people had left to find work in the big city, leaving fewer and fewer behind in countryside. To earn a few bucks in his retirement, an old man had opened a small restaurant in the front part of his house. Gaunt and malnourished, the old man seemed to be suffering from a case of rickets.

This was Weihan’s grandfather. After arriving at the Zheng family house, Weihan and Han Dan had volunteered to help out in the restaurant. Although the old man loved his grandson dearly, Han Dan knew better than bring up Zheng Dong, his unfilial son. Twenty years ago, Grandpa Zheng had fiercely opposed his son’s decision to enter military school. It was a dangerous career to embark on—one could never say for sure whether or not you’d end up taking a bullet on the front line. Better to have a living son farming a few barren acres, quietly making do.

There were hundreds of thousands of acres of good land in the countryside, their crops nurtured by the artificial sun and irrigated by the (nearly) natural rains and snows. They were far more expensive than the synthetic foodstuffs from the factories, but the taste wasn’t much better.

“I’ve never taken one cent of his money, you know. I do well enough to take care of myself,” Zheng’s grandfather said out of nowhere one day. “I have nothing but respect for those who serve. I just didn’t want to see my flesh and blood taking those kinds of risks.”

An all-terrain SUV modeled on the automobiles of the Earth Age had just parked in front of the little shop. The license plate indicated that it was a military vehicle. Having seen it coming from a long way away, the old man had pulled a “Closed” sign from under the counter and hung it on the door before going back into the house.

A soldier stepped out of the SUV. He was perhaps fifty, with grey hair around his temples. Han Dan recognized him right away as Weihan’s father.

Zheng Dong walked to the front gate of the house and stood there, stiffly. He made no move to enter, however, and Han Dan wasn’t about to invite him in. She’d heard Weihan say that fifteen years ago his grandfather had gotten so mad that he told dad to leave and never come back. Even though all of that was in the distant past now, and Grandpa Zheng had long since forgiven him, the old man had never been willing to swallow his pride and say it out loud.

It was obvious that they were two stubborn old bulls. It was even said that every New Year’s eve Zheng Dong would leave his wife and son to celebrate alone while he stood out in the wind and snow, waiting for his father to finally say what he already felt.

“How many years has it been then?” Zheng Dong asked Han Dan, who quietly set aside her work.

“Too many. Weihan wasn’t even a year old when I left.”

They left the restaurant one after the other, walking along a quiet country lane.

“So in all these years you never settled down?” Zheng Dong asked finally.

“It wasn’t so bad. I’ve gotten used to it.”

“Run into old acquaintances much?”

“Now and again. Ten years ago, or maybe it was twenty, or even fifty . . . An old man grabbed me by the arm claiming that I was his childhood sweetheart from eighty years ago. His great-grandson apologized for him, saying that his great granddad was always getting confused.”

“You’re not planning to have my son to play the same role as that old man, are you?” Zheng Dong asked anxiously.

Han Dan stooped to pick a wild chrysanthemum from the edge of the field, placing it in her long hair.

“Your son reminds me of my brother.”

“I’m afraid I can’t see how,” Zheng Dong said. Her brother had been assassinated many years ago for political reasons.

“My little brother was one of a kind,” Han Dan said with a smile. She’d always been proud of him. “How about you? Thinking about becoming a general?”

“If fate wills it. That’s not the sort of thing you go asking for. These days, there aren’t many people who hang up their stars, even after they retire.”

Insiders all knew the two hardest ranks to get promoted to in the military were from high-level officer to brigadier general, and from major general to lieutenant general. As far as the highest ranks, like marshal, it wasn’t even worth dreaming about it. Most people only got promoted that high posthumously.

“I always thought that soldiers who didn’t want to become generals weren’t worth their salt as soldiers,” Han Dan said. “Anyways, we have other things to talk about, don’t we?”

“Did you know that I was responsible for coordinating the rescue mission on Planetship Phaeton? I sent my best troops to evacuate the government first,” Zheng Dong said, clenching his fists. “When the head of the local administration saw them all he did was light a goddamn cigarette. He turned to the window to watch the frozen C0₂ fall in great big flakes from the sky, and you know what he said to them? He said, ‘Go rescue the people first. I’m not leaving until each and every one of my people has been evacuated.’ He froze to death on Phaeton.”

“Even if he had survived the disaster, he would have just been counting the days until they sent him to prison,” Han Dan scoffed. “Planetships are supposed to have anti-meteor systems, aren’t they? Something went wrong and stopped the intercept system from kicking in. Nobody thought things were going to get as bad as they did—your son was sitting in the underground bunker watching the meteor shower like it was a TV show.”

“Another corrupt official,” Zheng Dong scoffed. “Everyone is saying that he was plundering the special fund for the anti-meteor system.”

“We live in special times,” Han Dan replied, feeling a vague fury rise within her chest as she spoke. “The only way to deal with these bastards is to give ’em the old one-two. Natural disasters don’t scare me half as bad as man-made ones! You’ve seen the internal military report that’s been circulating, right? We’ve got more meteor showers coming our way—we can’t afford to make any mistakes!”

The report has been handed out to all of the top-level commanders in the armed forces. As the captain of a warship, Zheng Dong had of course been provided a copy.

“As a soldier, I’ll follow my orders, whatever they are, unconditionally. But as a civilian, I want to know what the hell they were thinking when they chose this route!”

Han Dan crouched by the edge of the field and peered into the crystal clear water of the irrigation ditch. Duckweed grew in the muddy channel bottom, and small fish played in the thick grass. Bucolic scenes like this made it hard to believe that they were on a planetship wandering the universe.

“In the vastness of the universe, technology is our one and only defense,” Zheng Dong said, suddenly recalling the favorite saying of the famous General Han Lie, passed down by the men and women of the military for millennia.

“That’s exactly right,” Han Dan said. “The universe is so big—who knows what dangers might lie in store for us? Better to invest our resources in the development of more perfect technology, rather than find ourselves unable to affect a rescue in our darkest hour of need.”

Weihan had been out all day on the old motorcycle he’d bought at the flea market, delivering food from the restaurant. He’d wasted a lot of time swapping out the old battery, so it was late when he got back. Most of the vehicles on the planetships were powered by antimatter, but spacecraft used fusion reactors. Batteries had been getting more and more expensive lately. There hardly seemed anything to them—palm-sized cylinders with powerful magnets to keep their tiny antimatter crystals trapped inside a vacuum. Even so, they still cost eight bucks—about as much as a meal in Chang’an.

When he got back, Weihan saw his dad standing in the field, talking to Han Dan.

“You two know each other?”

“Just met,” Zheng Dong lied. “Is this your girlfriend?”

“We’re more than friends, but I can’t say we’ve got that kind of relationship going on.”

Weihan was telling the truth. Han Dan was a melancholy sort. The girls he fell for tended to be more like him—full of vim and vinegar.

“Ah, well. That’s probably for the best,” Zheng Dong said, relieved. “Oh, that reminds me. Have you thought at all about going to grad school? Or military school?”

Weihan frowned. “Even if you pointed a gun at my chest I wouldn’t go! Not on my life!”

Well, at least I know where he got his stubborn streak from, Han Dan thought to herself.

VII. Seventh Avenue Square

The most exciting thoroughfare in all of Chang’an was Seventh Avenue, running from North to South. Along the northern stretch of the broad street one could find the very highest government offices: consulates, offices of the military, legislative buildings, and in the center of them all the most important structure in the entire Planetship Alliance: the mysterious “All Planetship High Command.” The southern stretch of Seventh Avenue, meanwhile was known as the “Golden Mile,” a place of endless activity and never-ending crowds. Located in the nexus of the two was the Seventh Avenue Square, said to be the largest in all the cities of the planetships. A massive statue of General Han Lie towered off to one side. Some said that he had been a cruel dictator, while others said he was a leader of great skill and intelligence. Even though more than a thousand years had passed since his death, even now he remained a controversial figure.

In the southern part of the great square was the Chang’an Municipal Theater. For reasons immediately obvious to anyone who saw it, locals called it the “steamed bun theater.” Today’s scheduled performance was the opera Wandering Earth, an adaption of Liu Cixin’s ancient science fiction tale. Thanks perhaps to the striking similarity of the real life experiences of the people of the planetships to the plot of this hoary old story, the thousand-year-old opera was as popular as ever.

Just past nightfall Weihan and Han Dan emerged from the theater and walked out into the square. Owing to the recent disaster on Phaeton there was less activity in the square than usual, which was filled with countless funeral wreaths commemorating the dead, along with collection stations where concerned citizens could donate to the ongoing relief efforts. The nearby shops seemed as busy as ever, however. Refugees and death had already become an unavoidable part of their long journey through the universe and the people of Europa had become accustomed to the presence.

Han Dan, however, seemed incredibly moved by the opera, and it was a long time after they left the theater before she stopped brushing the tears from her eyes.

“Alright already, here,” Weihan said, handing her an ice cream cone he’d just bought. “Don’t cry.”

Suddenly feeling self-conscious, Han Dan stopped crying and took a small bite of ice cream.

“Oh! It’s really good. When I was little, I wouldn’t have dreamed it could have tasted this good!”

“When you were little?” he asked, looking puzzled. “Did your parents not let you eat junk food or something?”

“They didn’t have this sort of thing on the spaceship . . . ” she said quietly.

“I’d heard that before we built the planetships all mankind lived on spaceships,” Weihan said, looking up at the imposing statue of General Han Lie. “I even visited some of the actual ships from the Age of Exile that were saved as historical relics. Twenty thousand people crammed onto a single busted down ship just over one kilometer long. Their rooms were like narrow little pigeon cages—families of four had to find a way to fit into a room that must have been, what? Twenty square meters? They say General Han Lie grew up on a ship like that . . . ”

While Han Dan waited for him in the square, Weihan went and fetched his motorcycle.

“Hop on. We should be getting back.”

As the motorcycle sped down the broad avenue, the street lights on either side of the street swept past. Chang’an at night was splendid to behold, with its myriad of lights zipping about like snakes of liquid silver or dancing fire—or shooting stars, a perfect mirror of the heavens above.

According to the Bureau of Meteorology, the shooting stars which had been appearing in the skies of the planetships were coming from a small but incredibly dense asteroid belt which they happened to be passing through at the moment. Whirling around a massive neutron star with truly unsettling velocity, the asteroid belt was the kind of place that few civilizations dared to tread. But humanity wasn’t just any civilization.

Han Dan held Weihan tightly around the waist, resting against his firm back, her eyes softly closed. She couldn’t remember when she last had someone like this—someone who set her mind at ease. In a dreamlike voice she said, “When I was a little girl, it was my favorite thing in the whole world to hold my dad just like this . . . He was a miner. Every day I would lie on the floor of the spaceship by one of the viewing windows and watch the mining ships moving the asteroids around, building planetships from nuclear slag, or repairing broken down spacecraft . . .

The year I turned ten, there was an accident. Dad’s ship was pulling an asteroid to install into a prototype planetship that was taking shape—the future Planetship Asia—when there was sudden movement in the molten magma on the surface . . . Later on mom remarried and found me a stepdad, but he didn’t make much of an impression. He was an engineer who always left for work before I woke up and got back after I was asleep. That’s how life was for a while, until mom got sick and died. Stepdad found a stepmom, and found me a job, too, doing odd chores in the research center where he worked . . . When I finally left home my little brother was only five months old . . . ”

Han Dan would have been surprised to see that Weihan was hanging on her every word, despite the loud roar of his clunky old motorcycle and the softness of her voice. Perhaps she’d kept these secrets for too long and found herself unconsciously longing for the opportunity to share them with someone.

“The next time I saw my brother, he was already an old man, gray at the temples, with general’s epaulets on his shoulders. He had no idea I was his older sister . . . Or maybe he knew after all. I can’t say for sure . . . When I asked why he had joined the military he just said, ‘There are some things that you have to be willing to put your life on the line for.’ ”

Hearing these words, Weihan felt something twitch inside his chest.

His mother, Qin Weiyue, was a teacher in the history department of one of Chang’an’s universities. In her free time, she liked to write light-hearted short essays for current affairs websites.

It was Friday, and already quite late. Since she didn’t need to work the next day, she was sitting in front of her computer thinking about what to write on next.

When Weihan got back home, he was drunk, leaning on Han Dan. He had originally been planning to ply her with booze—the better to extract the secrets of her past. He had become convinced that there was more to this young girl than met the eye. Only, Han Dan had quickly turned the tables on him—the living incarnation of the God of Drinking, that girl!

For her part, Weihan’s mother was shocked to see the state her son was in—well, probably any mother would be shocked to see her own son bringing back some floozy from the bar with him. But she was even more shocked to see who he had come home with.

“Is it really you?”

VIII. Home

Weihan woke to find himself lying on the couch with a splitting headache from the booze.

The moon hung low in the sky outside the window, a smoldering coal ember giving off a soft red glow. Only, the clock in the kitchen said that it was already nine o’clock in the morning.

“You up? Here, hangover cure,” his mother said, handed him some pills.

Weihan suddenly realized that the “moon” was actually the extinguished artificial sun. The engineers had turned it off for an inspection. Artificial suns like this usually needed regular repairs every three years or so.

Weihan hadn’t been back in over a year, but even after all this time, the carnations that he’d given his mother for his last visit were still sitting in the imitation Kangxi vase. The flowers had been specially treated so that they’d never wilt.

“Mom, will the Earth’s sun ever go out?” He sighed. “Never mind. Who knows what the Earth is like now . . . ” In school, Weihan had been on the science and math track, so he hadn’t learned much history.

After a long pause, his mother finally said: “Many years ago, the Earth starting using robots on a massive scale. Employees were fired and a long spell of high unemployment led to an even longer crime wave. After the ‘criminals’ were exiled to space only two types of ‘people’ were left on Earth: rich people and robots. And that’s all I want to say about that.”

“In the end, though, didn’t the robots rise up—like the slaves of Sparta?” he asked. “I heard that by the time our military got there to save the day there wasn’t much of anything left to save.”

His mother blanched.

“Where did you hear about the rebellion?”

“No wall is without chinks through which the wind may pass,” Weihan said. “Just look at our planetships and you can figure it out. Even though we’ve obviously already developed advanced artificial intelligence we still use human operators for all of the most critical jobs. Even steering the planetships themselves! It’s hard to think of a more complicated job than that.”

Not having succeeded in prying anything out of Han Dan the night before, Weihan was forced to resort to plan B: stealing her notebook.

He quietly opened the door to her room and, hearing nothing in response, tiptoed inside where he discovered Han Dan deep in thought in front of the computer.

All the girls in the alliance seemed to be going nuts for the 3D mapping apps. They used them to zoom in on different locations and find where they could buy the cutest stuffed animals, or which pedestrian mall had the best snacks. Shopping destination set, off they’d go.

Han Dan was looking for a place to buy instruments—she’d lost her erhu on Phaeton.

Han Dan chose the first erhu that caught her fancy and paid via their website. After carefully typing in the address of the restaurant she closed out the purchase window and zoomed out. The bustling streets flashed by, quickly becoming a spider’s web of lanes and alleyways. Gradually, the flat plane of the map gave way to the convex outline of the planetship. Chang’an had long since disappeared from sight, leaving only the blue of the ocean, the green of the continents, the white of the North Pole, and red-hot glow of the thrusters of the South Pole, as innumerable as they were massive.

Continuing to zoom out, the planetship shrank into a tiny globe, small enough to be held in the palm of one’s hand, with a long tail of ions streaming out behind it. Some of these, charged with electricity, lingered in the atmosphere of the South Pole, forming majestic auroras of green light. As the planetship continued to shrink, now the size of a soybean, other planetships began to appear on the screen, dozens of them, all moving through space in unison with Europa. Countless spacecraft scarcely the size of sesame seeds could be seen swimming in schools, as if fish, between the planetships.

Han Dan manipulated the map with practiced ease, becoming so absorbed in the task at hand that she failed to detect Weihan’s presence behind her.

In the middle of the planetships a mass of what appeared to be a pool of mist or clouds could be seen. This was the famous “Shipyard” of the Planetship Alliance. Outfitted with its own propulsion system, the Shipyard could move through the universe along with the planetships—truly, they built nothing stationary.

Han Dan zoomed in, and the clouds gradually resolved into distinct forms: countless fragments of ice and asteroids, along with space stations, and engineering ships. A large group of spacecraft were in the process of collecting nuclear waste, garbage, and chunks of space rock which another group was forming into an object the size of a small asteroid, perhaps ten kilometers in diameter. Of course, this wasn’t the only planetship under construction in the Shipyard at the moment—others were almost halfway complete, having begun to compress under the force of their own gravitational pull. The extreme heat of these embryonic planetships gave rise to rivers of liquid magma around continents of jet black rock, with their immature atmospheres rich in sulfur and carbon dioxide.

On the more complete planetships, meanwhile, artificial suns had already been installed and seas of the deepest blue could be made out. Although their surfaces were still scalding hot, thunderstorms were already brewing in the dark clouds blocking their skies, the better to cool the nearly complete planetships. Rings of engineering ships could be made out, apparently preparing to impregnate the primordial seas with blue-green algae, origin of all life, while massive earthmovers prepared to move into action. In the distance, the badly damaged Phaeton could be seen limping back to the Shipyard to undergo repairs.

Han Dan changed locations on the map so that she was now facing outward, toward the asteroid belt. Beyond it, further asteroid belts could be made out, not to mention a handful of planets. Most star systems had more than one asteroid belt—the Solar System where they had come from had three. So broad, and so far-reaching, they seemed more like horizontal walls in the fabric of space and time itself, lacking clearly defined limits. A large number of warships could be seen stationed there, ready to destroy any asteroid that might threaten the planetships at a moment’s notice.

From the images on the screen it was doubtless that they found themselves in the wreckage of a massive supernova: in the midst of the ice-cold interstellar dust a collapsed neutron star spun in absolute isolation. From time to time they had been known to discover the remains of alien civilizations in places like this.

It was starting to look like the meteor shower which had fallen on Planetship Phaeton several days earlier was but a drizzle before the storm. Han Dan opened her inbox where she found a new message waiting for her, addressed to her official station, “All Planetship High Command.” Just as Han Dan was about to open the email, she finally realized that someone had been standing behind her all along. She spun around, feeling a cold shock run from her toes to her fingertips.

Weihan froze, nailed to the spot.

IX. The Alliance Awakens

After the incident, it became obvious their remaining time together would not be long. In way of apology, Weihan pooled his meager savings from the previous week to buy a cheap necklace from a famous Chang’an hawker’s market.

Under the star-filled sky of Riverside Park, the waters were silent and seemingly unmoving.

“Close your eyes,” he said. Han Dan obliged him, and he fastened the necklace around her neck. Her skin was cold to the touch, practically corpse-like.

“I want to know who you are,” he said.

“If you want to know that, then you’ll need to go way back at the beginning,” Han Dan said. “When mankind first began building the planetships, the nightmares of the recent past set the planners against the idea of building high-powered robots ever again . . .

“Eventually they arrived at a compromise: they would develop an advanced cyborg operating system so that these augmented men might become the ‘brains’ of the planetships. The experiments were incredibly dangerous—in the months before they found me, I was told that over one hundred volunteers died had for the cause. When the lead scientist reached out to me though, I said, ‘Sure, why not? I’m all alone in the world anyway, so it’s not like anyone will miss me when I’m gone.’ ”

Weihan understood what she meant. Han Dan was a drifter, so for her it might not be the worst thing in the world if the experiment failed. But instead it was a success . . . To live as a young girl without companionship for over a thousand years—was this a blessing or a curse?

After a long pause, Weihan said: “There’s a neutron star just beyond the asteroid belt that we’re passing through. But we aren’t changing course.”

Neutron stars were known to rotate extremely quickly, sending off powerful radiation and having powerful electromagnetic fields. Although the gravitational pull of a neutron star was considerably less than that of a black hole, it was still enough to tear apart any spacecraft foolish enough to approach. Getting this close to a neutron star was an extremely dangerous maneuver to undertake on a whim.

“We’ve been studying neutron stars in our labs for a long time now. Our scientists are stuck, so we decided to capture a neutron star, study it, and make use of it. Just like when we opened the moon up for development thousands of years ago, or when we first landed on Mars, or when we finally completed our first-hand explorations of Jupiter. Each served as catalyst to propel our technological advancement ever higher.”

Weihan couldn’t help himself. “But our tech is already good enough . . . We’ve survived this far in the universe, haven’t we? It’s stupid to risk everything like this for something that we don’t even need!”

“If humanity had been willing to stay in the Stone Age eating raw flesh and drinking blood then there would have been no need for us to develop the technology to make fire, either,” Han said, seeming to have been expecting his outburst. “I once read that in before the 18th century the French Academy of Sciences was dead set on denying the existence of meteors. According to their best of science at the time, they believed that all of the stars and planets (including the sun) were made of gas, since solid objects were obviously heavier than air and therefore had no way of floating way up in the middle of nothing. Later on, when they developed better science not only did they accept the existence of asteroids, but they also came to understand that asteroids are incredibly common in the universe. Most terrifying of all, they discovered that the Earth, previously presumed to be a safe home for humanity, had actually been struck by asteroids many times in the past . . . And then, even later, without the ‘unnecessary technology’ of astronomy, when disaster struck in Czechoslovakia they wouldn’t have had any idea what happened, never mind making the necessary preparations.”

Weihan paused. “I-I think of you like a sister, Han Dan.”

“That’s an honor I can’t accept,” Han Dan replied after a long silence. In the moonlight, Weihan saw that Han Dan’s eyes were filled with tears.

He walked her to the bus stop and watched her get on a bus bound for North Seventh Avenue.

After sending off Han Dan, Weihan went home to pack his bags. Walking past his parents’ door he saw that it was shut tight. Instead of waking them, he tore a sheet of paper off the pad in the kitchen and scratched out a few lines. He stuck it on their door: “Dad, I’m off to apply to military school.”

Looking up at the sky that night, the planetships seemed to have come alive. Their massive forms were suddenly as lively as a school of fish. Great thrusters accelerated in fits and starts, moving this way and that, weaving through the dense asteroid belt encircling the neutron star.

X. Neutron Star

After graduating from military school, Zheng Weihan became a pilot. Sitting in the cockpit of his star fighter and looking out on the crowded launch bay, he always felt as if at one with the planetship, depending on it for survival but also protecting it from danger.

The planetships would soon emerge from the asteroid belt and the neutron star could be seen directly ahead now. Not surprisingly, the substantial gravity of the neutron star had attracted a number of large celestial bodies to its immediate proximity, indicating its advanced age.

A fleet of research vessels were in orbit around the star, sending probe after probe into its yawning maw, while technicians hurriedly scrutinized the data sent back by the autonomous craft before they were completely destroyed. The gravitational pull was truly terrible to behold, strong enough to tear apart the very atomic bonds of any matter known to man, giving birth to the neutron by forging an unbreakable union of proton and electron.

Only a short while earlier a research vessel had been lost, disappearing stern first into the great star without a trace. The scientists had borrowed a battle cruiser from the military, loosing firepower sufficient to destroy a planet onto the surface of the neutron star in the hope of studying its interior structure.

To the naked eye, the explosion managed only to blast a shallow depression into the neutron star. Even so, the blast managed to badly upset its internal balance. Although it was only a tiny area it had a gravitational pull equivalent to that of the Earth. The celestial bodies formerly in orbit around the neutron star were thrown into disarray, with some flying off into the abyss like kites with cut strings while others crashed back into the neutron star as if on a sudden whim; most terrifying of all was when a planet roughly the size of Jupiter suddenly changed course, heading directly for Europa, home to the central command of the Planetship Alliance. It was only after a great investment of resources that the military had been able to avoid disaster.

On the mothership, meanwhile, the logistics crew had just completed their overhauls. One by one, the fighters ignited their thrusters and blasted out of the hangar, tracing graceful trajectories in the inky black of the void as they waited to make formation. From his vantage point in the cockpit, Weihan enjoyed the view of the Odin, nucleus of the entire fleet. In mass, it was the size of the moon of old Earth, home berth to innumerable battle ships—a great hornet’s nest of military vessels of all shapes and size. Even so, Odin’s impressive resources could not guarantee the safety of the planetships.

XI. Return to Life

On Planetship Europa, a long, narrow rupture had split Chang’an into two separate cities. Some decades earlier, a fragment of a neutron star had grazed the outer crust of the planetship, nearly splitting the planetship in two with the force of its powerful kinetic energy. The wound had healed, but the scar remained, having since been transformed into a mighty river cutting horizontally through Chang’an to the sea. The people of the city had built bridges spanning the wide gap, and planted trees and flowering shrubs along its banks, with grassy meadows in between. A great many planetships were marked with similar scars. Under the snowy blanket of each and every mighty peak, and below the thick forest canopy of every mountain dell, meteorite scars pocked the surface of the planetships.

In the courtyard of a traditional Chinese home near Chang’an’s seaside district, a gray-haired Zheng Weihan sat in a rocking chair under a parasol tree, his eyes shut tight in quiet meditation. The epaulets on his military uniform bore the gold stars of a general. A young girl ran up from the seashore, carrying a glass jar filled with seawater.

“Grandfather,” she said. “Tell me your life story.”

“There’s nothing to tell, really,” Weihan said with a sigh. “If a regular soldier experiences enough war then he’ll advance through the ranks, sure enough; as long you’re able to survive to fight another day, then it’s not anything out of the ordinary to be awarded the rank of general. Take Napoleon’s Saint-Cyr Military School for example: of the four hundred or so graduates, the ones who didn’t die on the battlefield pretty much all became generals.”

He wasn’t wrong—but of all the students who graduated from military school the same year as Weihan, only three or four were still alive today.

The little girl winked mischievously.

“I heard grandma say that you only risked your life so that your rank would be high to go into the All Planetship High Command . . . ”

Weihan thought back to his first day in that dark underground bunker: at the time he was so scared that he sat staring at the complex web of cables, strung like spider webs through the so-called “brain center” of the Planetship Alliance—and the one hundred or so people, known as the “pathfinders” to which the cables led.

If a planetship could be said to be a living organism, then the pathfinders were its brain—a brain made up of over a hundred brains linked up to form a single super-brain. Han Dan’s sleeping form was easy to pick out among the pathfinders. In the cavernous hall of the “brain center” she seemed even scrawnier than usual. Weihan wasn’t trained in medicine, so he didn’t have even the faintest clue what they’d done to make it possible for Han Dan to stay alive for over a thousand years.

The people who worked here were already used to thinking of the planetships more as evolved humans, rather than spacecraft. For the sake of survival, some of their number had no choice but to allow themselves to be transformed into a cyborg command center. Innumerable fiber optic cables and signal towers were arranged like nerves in the human body, linking them directly to every spacecraft in the fleet and joining the entire Planetship Alliance into an enormous, unified organism.

In the ancient Earth Age, whether one looks at the goddess Gaea in the occidental tradition, or great spirit of Pangu in the oriental tradition, the people of the world all saw the land itself as an embodiment of the spiritual realm. History had taken a strange turn here, because the “land” beneath their feet—the planetship—was actually an embodiment of man himself, weaponized and developed with the most cutting-edge technology.

After dissecting the neutron star, the Planetship Alliance had continued their slow journey through space, with a skeleton crew of “pathfinders” staying behind in the “brain center.” Han Dan had proudly shouldered her beat-up old erhu and set off to wander the alliance—as some might put it, she was “observing popular sentiment.” Two months earlier she had returned from Planetship Africa to Europa, where she had been getting to know Weihan’s granddaughter.

It was the fifth day of the fifth lunar month—Dragon Boat Festival. Some thousands of years earlier on this very day, Qu Yuan, educator and head of the three noble clans of the kingdom of Chu, had been driven to suicide. To celebrate his memory, the Zheng family had made a great many zongzi—sticky rice balls with date or meat filling. Tradition held that the heartbroken people of Chu could throw zongzi into the river where Qu drowned himself, to entice the fish away from his corpse.

And so, on a planetship drifting through space, Han Dan found herself throwing zongzi into the sea.

“Sometimes I think it’s a shame that after old school master Qu wrote Questions to Heaven with all those important scientific questions, nobody thought to take him seriously and figure out the answers. Otherwise our tech would’ve developed way past where we are right now . . . ”

“You’re supposed to throw zongzi into a river, not the ocean, you know,” Weihan said.

“I know, I know. But the river is full of dragon boats today, and the banks are full of people. No room for little old me.”

“Haven’t you ever thought about finding somewhere to settle down?”

“Isn’t everywhere home on a planetship?” Han Dan said with a smile. “The planetships are my home. Our home.”

“Grandpa, what’s in here?” Weihan’s granddaughter said, handing him the jar of seawater.

“Nothing right now,” Weihan said.

“Wrong!” Han Dan said. “There’s blue-green algae, humanity’s oldest ancestor.”

“Looks like grandpa should listen to big sis Han,” his granddaughter said. “When I grow up I wanna be a biologist.”

“Why’s that?” Weihan asked.

His granddaughter leaned forward onto the armrest of the rocking chair and propped up her face with two hands.

“I’ve been thinking about how that Earth planet we’re always hearing about was like a desert island in the sea of space . . .

“But we were also like a single-celled organism, you know? The whole ecosystem was one single cell. And now we’ve evolved so that we can move around the universe and go wherever we want, like one great big space-dust eating animal. 

“Aren’t you curious where we’ll go next?”

Originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, 2007.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Luo Longxiang was born in 1981, deep in the mountains of Guangxi province on the China’s southern border, where he studied Chemical Engineering at Guangxi University. After publishing his first sci-fi story in 2003, his fans began to refer to the mysterious author as “Master Luo,” in reference to his hermit-like existence far away from the crowded cities of the coast and northern plains. Of the eleven stories he was written over the past decade, six have earned a Milky Way Award. His works are known for their massive scope, dealing almost exclusively with the question of humanity’s eventual survival in space. Since 2007, he has been working to complete the Planetship Alliance series�an epic space opera recounting the tragic history of mankind’s colonization of the universe.

Tough Times All Over

Joe Abercrombie

Damn, but she hated Sipani.

The bloody blinding fogs and the bloody slapping water and the bloody universal sickening stink of rot. The bloody parties and masques and revels. Fun, everyone having bloody fun, or at least pretending to. The bloody people were worst of all. Rogues every man, woman, and child. Liars and fools, the lot of them.

Carcolf hated Sipani. Yet here she was again. Who, then, she was forced to wonder, was the fool?

Braying laughter echoed from the mist ahead and she slipped into the shadows of a doorway, one hand tickling the grip of her sword. A good courier trusts no one, and Carcolf was the very best, but in Sipani, she trusted . . . less than no one.

Another gang of pleasure-seekers blundered from the murk, a man with a mask like a moon pointing at a woman who was so drunk she kept falling over on her high shoes. All of them laughing, one of them flapping his lace cuffs as though there never was a thing so funny as drinking so much you couldn’t stand up. Carcolf rolled her eyes skyward, and consoled herself with the thought that behind the masks they were hating it as much as she always did when she tried to have fun.

In the solitude of her doorway, Carcolf winced. Damn, but she needed a holiday. She was becoming a sour arse. Or, indeed, had become one and was getting worse. One of those people who held the entire world in contempt. Was she turning into her bloody father?

“Anything but that,” she muttered.

The moment the revelers tottered off into the night, she ducked from her doorway and pressed on, neither too fast nor too slow, soft boot heels silent on the dewy cobbles, her unexceptional hood drawn down to an inconspicuous degree, the very image of a person with just the average amount to hide. Which, in Sipani, was quite a bit.

Over to the west somewhere, her armored carriage would be speeding down the wide lanes, wheels striking sparks as they clattered over the bridges, stunned bystanders leaping aside, driver’s whip lashing at the foaming flanks of the horses, the dozen hired guards thundering after, streetlamps gleaming upon their dewy armor. Unless the Quarryman’s people had already made their move, of course: the flutter of arrows, the scream of beasts and men, the crash of the wagon leaving the road, the clash of steel, and finally the great padlock blown from the strongbox with blasting powder, the choking smoke wafted aside by eager hands and the lid flung back to reveal . . . nothing.

Carcolf allowed herself the smallest smile, and patted the lump against her ribs. The item, stitched up safe in the lining of her coat.

She gathered herself, took a couple of steps, and sprang from the canal-side, clearing three strides of oily water to the deck of a decaying barge, timbers creaking under her as she rolled and came smoothly up. To go around by the Fintine bridge was a quite the detour, not to mention a well-traveled and well-watched way, but this boat was always tied here in the shadows, offering a shortcut. She had made sure of it. Carcolf left as little to chance as possible. In her experience, chance could be a real bastard.

A wizened face peered out from the gloom of the cabin, steam issuing from a battered kettle. “Who the hell are you?”

“Nobody.” Carcolf gave a cheery salute. “Just passing through!” and she hopped from the rocking wood to the stones on the far side of the canal and was away into the mold-smelling mist. Just passing through. Straight to the docks to catch the tide and off on her merry way. Or her sour arsed one, at least. Wherever Carcolf went, she was nobody. Everywhere, always passing through.

Over to the east, that idiot Pombrine would be riding hard in the company of four paid retainers. He hardly looked much like her, what with the moustache and all, but swaddled in that ever-so conspicuous embroidered cloak of hers, he did well enough for a double. He was a penniless pimp who smugly believed himself to be impersonating her so she could visit a lover, a lady of means who did not want their tryst made public. Carcolf sighed. If only. She consoled herself with the thought of Pombrine’s shock when those bastards Deep and Shallow shot him from his saddle, expressed considerable surprise at the moustache, then rooted through his clothes with increasing frustration, and finally, no doubt, gutted his corpse only to find . . . nothing.

Carcolf patted that lump once again, and pressed on with a spring in her step. Here went she, down the middle course, alone and on foot, along a carefully prepared route of back streets, of narrow ways, of unregarded shortcuts and forgotten stairs, through crumbling palaces and rotting tenements, gates left open by surreptitious arrangement and, later on, a short stretch of sewer which would bring her out right by the docks with an hour or two to spare.

After this job, she really had to take a holiday. She tongued at the inside of her lip, where a small but unreasonably painful ulcer had lately developed. All she did was work. A trip to Adua, maybe? Visit her brother, see her nieces? How old would they be now? Ugh. no. She remembered what a judgmental bitch her sister-in-law was. One of those people who met everything with a sneer. She reminded Carcolf of her father. Probably why her brother had married the bloody woman . . .

Music was drifting from somewhere as she ducked beneath a flaking archway. A violinist, either tuning up or of execrable quality. Neither would have surprised her. Papers flapped and rustled upon a wall sprouting with moss, ill-printed bills exhorting the faithful citizenry to rise up against the tyranny of the Snake of Talins. Carcolf snorted. Most of Sipani’s citizens were more interested in falling over than rising up, and the rest were anything but faithful.

She twisted about to tug at the seat of her trousers, but it was hopeless. How much do you have to pay for a new suit of clothes before you avoid a chafing seam just in the worst place? She hopped along a narrow way beside a stagnant section of canal, long out of use, gloopy with algae and bobbing rubbish, plucking the offending fabric this way and that to no effect. Damn this fashion for tight trousers! Perhaps it was some kind of cosmic punishment for her paying the tailor with forged coins. But then Carcolf was considerably more moved by the concept of local profit than that of cosmic punishment, and therefore strove to avoid paying for anything wherever possible. It was practically a principle with her, and her father always said that a person should stick to their principles—

Bloody hell, she really was turning into her father.

“Ha!”

A ragged figure sprang from an archway, the faintest glimmer of steel showing. With an instinctive whimper, Carcolf stumbled back, fumbling her coat aside and drawing her own blade, sure that death had found her at last. The Quarryman one step ahead? Or was it Deep and Shallow, or Kurrikan’s hirelings. . . but no one else showed themselves. Only this one man, swathed in a stained cloak, unkempt hair stuck to pale skin by the damp, a mildewed scarf masking the bottom part of his face, bloodshot eyes round and scared above.

“Stand and deliver!” he boomed, somewhat muffled by the scarf.

Carcolf raised her brows. “Who even says that?”

A slight pause, while the rotten waters slapped the stones beside them. “You’re a woman?” There was an almost apologetic turn to the would-be robber’s voice.

“If I am, will you not rob me?”

“Well . . . er . . . ” The thief seemed to deflate somewhat, then drew himself up again. “Stand and deliver anyway!”

“Why?” asked Carcolf.

The point of the robber’s sword drifted uncertainly. “Because I have a considerable debt to . . . that’s none of your business!”

“No, I mean, why not just stab me and strip my corpse of valuables, rather than giving me the warning?”

Another pause. “I suppose . . . I hope to avoid violence? But I warn you I am entirely prepared for it!”

He was a bloody civilian. A mugger who had blundered upon her. A random encounter. Talk about chance being a bastard! For him, at least. “You, sir,” she said, “are a shitty thief.”

“I, madam, am a gentleman.”

“You, sir, are a dead gentleman.” Carcolf stepped forward, weighing her blade, a stride length of razor steel leant a ruthless gleam from a lamp in a window somewhere above. She could never be bothered to practice, but nonetheless she was far more than passable with a sword. It would take a great deal more than this stick of gutter trash to get the better of her. “I will carve you like—”

The man darted forward with astonishing speed, there was a scrape of steel, and before Carcolf even thought of moving, the sword was twitched from her fingers and skittered across the greasy cobbles to plop into the canal.

“Ah,” she said. That changed things. Plainly her attacker was not the bumpkin he appeared to be, at least when it came to swordplay. She should have known. Nothing in Sipani is ever quite as it appears.

“Hand over the money,” he said.

“Delighted.” Carcolf plucked out her purse and tossed it against the wall, hoping to slip past while he was distracted. Alas, he pricked it from the air with impressive dexterity and whisked his sword-point back to prevent her escape. It tapped gently at the lump in her coat.

“What have you got . . . just there?”

From bad to much, much worse. “Nothing, nothing at all.” Carcolf attempted to pass it off with a false chuckle, but that ship had sailed and she, sadly, was not aboard, any more than she was aboard the damn ship still rocking at the wharf for the voyage to Thond. She steered the glinting point away with one finger. “Now I have an extremely pressing engagement, so if—” There was a faint hiss as the sword slit her coat open.

Carcolf blinked. “Ow.” There was a burning pain down her ribs. The sword had slit her open too. “Ow!” She subsided to her knees, deeply aggrieved, blood oozing between her fingers as she clutched them to her side.

“Oh . . . oh no. Sorry. I really . . . really didn’t mean to cut you. Just wanted, you know . . . ”

“Ow.” The item, now slightly smeared with Carcolf’s blood, dropped from the gashed pocket and tumbled across the cobbles. A slender package perhaps a foot long, wrapped in stained leather.

“I need a surgeon,” gasped Carcolf, in her best I-am-a-helpless-woman voice. The Grand Duchess had always accused her of being over-dramatic, but if you can’t be dramatic at a time like that, when can you? It was likely she really did need a surgeon, after all, and there was a chance that the robber would lean down to help her and she could stab the bastard in the face with her knife. “Please, I beg you!”

He loitered, eyes wide, the whole thing plainly gone further than he had intended. But he edged closer only to reach for the package, the glinting point of his sword still leveled at her.

A different and even more desperate tack, then. She strove to keep the panic out of her voice. “Look, take the money, I wish you joy of it.” Carcolf did not, in fact, wish him joy, she wished him rotten in his grave. “But we will both be far better off if you leave that package!”

His hand hovered. “Why, what’s in it?”

“I don’t know. I’m under orders not to open it!”

“Orders from who?”

Carcolf winced. “I don’t know that either, but—”

Kurtis took the packet. Of course he did. He was an idiot, but not so much of an idiot as that. He snatched up the packet and ran. Of course he ran. When didn’t he?

He tore down the alleyway, heart in mouth, jumped a burst barrel, caught his foot and went sprawling, almost impaled himself on his own drawn sword, slithered on his face through a slick of rubbish, scooping a mouthful of something faintly sweet and staggering up, spitting and cursing, snatching a scared glance over his shoulder—

There was no sign of pursuit. Only the mist, the endless mist, whipping and curling like a thing alive.

He slipped the packet, now somewhat slimy, into his ragged cloak and limped on, clutching at his bruised buttock and still struggling to spit that rotten-sweet taste from his mouth. Not that it was any worse than his breakfast had been. Better, if anything. You know a man by his breakfast, his fencing master always used to tell him.

He pulled up his damp hood with its faint smell of onions and despair, plucked the purse from his sword and slid blade back into sheath as he slipped from the alley and insinuated himself among the crowds, that faint snap of hilt meeting clasp bringing back so many memories. Of training and tournaments, of bright futures and the adulation of the crowds. Fencing, my boy, that’s the way to advance! Such knowledgeable audiences in Styria, they love their swordsmen there, you’ll make a fortune! Better times, when he had not dressed in rags, or been thankful for the butcher’s leftovers, or robbed people for a living. He grimaced. Robbed women. If you could call it a living. He stole another furtive glance over his shoulder. Could he have killed her? His skin prickled with horror. Just a scratch. Just a scratch, surely? But he had seen blood. Please, let it have been a scratch! He rubbed his face as though he could rub the memory away, but it was stuck fast. One by one, things he had never imagined, then told himself he would never do, then that he would never do again, had become his daily routine.

He checked once more that he wasn’t followed, then slipped from the street and across the rotting courtyard, the faded faces of yesterday’s heroes peering down at him from the newsbills. Up the piss-smelling stairway and around the dead plant. Out with his key, and he wrestled with the sticky lock.

“Damn it, fuck it, shit it—Gah!” The door came suddenly open and he blundered into the room, nearly fell again, turned and pushed it shut, and stood a moment in the smelly darkness, breathing hard.

Who would now believe he’d once fenced with the king? He’d lost. Of course he had. Lost everything, hadn’t he? He’d lost two touches to nothing and been personally insulted while he lay in the dust but, still, he’d measured steels with his August Majesty. This very steel, he realized, as he set it against the wall beside the door. Notched, and tarnished, and even slightly bent towards the tip. The last twenty years had been almost as unkind to his sword as they had been to him. But perhaps today marked the turn in his fortunes.

He whipped his cloak off and tossed it into a corner, took out the packet to unwrap it and see what he had come by. He fumbled with the lamp in the darkness and finally produced some light, almost wincing as his miserable rooms came into view. The cracked glazing, the blistering plaster speckled with damp, the burst mattress spilling foul straw where he slept, the few sticks of warped furniture—

There was a man sitting in the only chair, at the only table. A big man in a big coat, skull shaved to graying stubble. He took a slow breath through his blunt nose, and let a pair of dice tumble from his fist and across the stained table top.

“Six and two,” he said. “Eight.”

“Who the hell are you?” Kurtis’ voice was squeaky with shock.

“The Quarryman sent me.” He let the dice roll again. “Six and five.”

“Does that mean I lose?” Kurtis glanced over towards his sword, trying and failing to seem nonchalant, wondering how fast he could get to it, draw it, strike—

“You lost already,” said the big man, gently collecting the dice with the side of his hand. He finally looked up. His eyes were flat as those of a dead fish. Like the fishes on the stalls at the market. Dead and dark and sadly glistening. “Do you want to know what happens if you go for that sword?”

Kurtis wasn’t a brave man. He never had been. It had taken all his courage to work up to surprising someone else, being surprised himself had knocked the fight right out of him. “No,” he muttered, his shoulders sagging.

“Toss me that package,” said the big man, and Kurtis did so. “And the purse.”

It was as if all resistance had drained away. Kurtis had not the strength to attempt a ruse. He scarcely had the strength to stand. He tossed the stolen purse onto the table, and the big man worked it open with his fingertips and peered inside.

Kurtis gave a helpless, floppy motion of his hands. “I have nothing else worth taking.”

“I know,” the man said, as he stood. “I have checked.” He stepped around the table and Kurtis cringed away, steadying himself against his cupboard. A cupboard containing nothing but cobwebs, as it went.

“Is the debt paid?” he asked in a very small voice.

“Do you think the debt is paid?”

They stood looking at one another. Kurtis swallowed. “When will the debt be paid?”

The big man shrugged his shoulders, which were almost one with his head. “When do you think the debt will be paid?”

Kurtis swallowed again, and he found his lip was trembling. “When the Quarryman says so?”

The big man raised one heavy brow a fraction, the hairless sliver of a scar through it. “Have you any questions . . . to which you do not know the answers?”

Kurtis dropped to his knees, his hands clasped, the big man’s face faintly swimming through the tears in his aching eyes. He did not care about the shame of it. The Quarryman had taken the last of his pride many visits before. “Just leave me something,” he whispered. “Just . . . something.”

The man stared back at him with his dead fish eyes. “Why?”

Friendly took the sword too, but there was nothing else of value. “I will come back next week,” he said.

It had not been meant as a threat, merely a statement of fact, and an obvious one at that, since it had always been the arrangement, but Kurtis dan Broya’s head slowly dropped, and he began to shudder with sobs.

Friendly considered whether to try and comfort him, but decided not to. He was often misinterpreted.

“You should, perhaps, not have borrowed the money.” Then he left.

It always surprised him that people did not do the sums when they took a loan. Proportions, and time, and the action of interest, it was not so very difficult to fathom. But perhaps they were prone always to overestimate their income, to poison themselves by looking on the bright side. Happy chances would occur, and things would improve, and everything would turn out well, because they were special. Friendly had no illusions. He knew he was but one unexceptional cog in the elaborate workings of life. To him, facts were facts.

He walked, counting off the paces to the Quarryman’s place. One hundred and five, one hundred and four, one hundred and three . . .

Strange how small the city was when you measured it out. All those people, and all their desires, and scores, and debts, packed into this narrow stretch of reclaimed swamp. By Friendly’s reckoning, the swamp was well on the way to taking large sections of it back. He wondered if the world would be better when it did.

. . . seventy-six, seventy-five, seventy-four . . .

Friendly had picked up a shadow. Pickpocket, maybe. He took a careless look at a stall by the way and caught her out of the corner of his eye. A girl with dark hair gathered into a cap and a jacket too big for her. Hardly more than a child. Friendly took a few steps down a narrow snicket and turned, blocking the way, pushing back his coat to show the grips of four of his six weapons. His shadow rounded the corner, and he looked at her. Just looked. She first froze, then swallowed, then turned one way, then the other, then backed off and lost herself in the crowds. So that was the end of that episode.

. . . thirty-one, thirty, twenty-nine . . .

Sipani, and most especially its moist and fragrant Old Quarter, was full of thieves. They were a constant annoyance, like midges in summer. Also muggers, robbers, burglars, cut-purses, cut-throats, thugs, murderers, strong-arm men, spivs, swindlers, gamblers, bookies, moneylenders, rakes, beggars, tricksters, pimps, pawnshop owners, crooked merchants, not to mention accountants and lawyers. Lawyers were the worst of the crowd, as far as Friendly was concerned. Sometimes it seemed that no one in Sipani made anything, exactly. They all seemed to be working their hardest to rip it from someone else.

But then, Friendly supposed he was no better.

. . . four, three, two, one, and down the twelve steps, past the three guards, and through the double doors into the Quarryman’s place.

It was hazy with smoke inside, confusing with the light of colored lamps, hot with breath and chafing skin, thick with the babble of hushed conversation, of secrets traded, reputations ruined, confidences betrayed. It was as all such places always are.

Two Northmen were wedged behind a table in the corner. One, with sharp teeth and long, lank hair, had tipped his chair all the way back and was slumped in it, smoking. The other had a bottle in one hand and a tiny book in the other, staring at it with brow well-furrowed.

Most of the patrons Friendly knew by sight. Regulars. Some come to drink. Some to eat. Most of them fixed on the games of chance. The clatter of dice, the twitch and flap of the playing cards, the eyes of the hopeless glittering as the lucky wheel span.

The games were not really the Quarryman’s business, but the games made debts, and debts were the Quarryman’s business. Up the twenty-three steps to the raised area, the guard with the tattoo on his face waving Friendly past.

Three of the other collectors were seated there, sharing a bottle. The smallest grinned at him, and nodded, perhaps trying to plant the seeds of an alliance. The biggest puffed himself up and bristled, sensing competition. Friendly ignored them equally. He had long ago given up trying even to understand the unsolvable mathematics of human relationships, let alone to participate. Should that man do more than bristle, Friendly’s cleaver would speak for him. That was a voice that cut short even the most tedious of arguments.

Mistress Borfero was a fleshy woman with dark curls spilling from beneath a purple cap, small eyeglasses that made her eyes seem large, and a smell about her of lamp oil. She haunted the anteroom before the Quarryman’s office at a low desk stacked with ledgers. On Friendly’s first day, she had gestured towards the ornate door behind her and said, “I am the Quarryman’s right hand. He is never to be disturbed. Never. You speak to me.”

Friendly, of course, knew as soon as he saw her mastery of the numbers in those books that there was no one in the office, and that Borfero was the Quarryman, but she seemed so pleased with the deception that he was happy to play along. Friendly had never liked to rock boats unnecessarily. That’s how people end up drowned. Besides, it somehow helped to imagine that the orders came from somewhere else, somewhere unknowable and irresistible. It was nice to have an attic in which to stack the blame. Friendly looked at the door of the Quarryman’s office, wondering if there was an office, or if it opened on blank stones.

“What was today’s take?” she asked, flipping open a ledger and dipping her pen. Straight to business without so much as a how do you do. He greatly liked and admired that about her, though he would never have said so. His compliments had a way of causing offence.

Friendly slipped the coins out in stacks, then let them drop, one by one, in rattling rows by debtor and denomination. Mostly base metals, leavened with a sprinkling of silver.

Borfero sat forward, wrinkling her nose and pushing her eyeglasses up onto her forehead, eyes seeming now extra small without them.

“A sword, as well,” said Friendly, leaning it up against the side of the desk.

“A disappointing harvest,” she murmured.

“The soil is stony hereabouts.”

“Too true.” She dropped the eyeglasses back and started to scratch orderly figures in her ledger. “Tough times all over.” She often said that. As though it stood as explanation and excuse for anything and everything.

“Kurtis dan Broya asked me when the debt would be paid.”

She peered up, surprised by the question. “When the Quarryman says it’s paid.”

“That’s what I told him.”

“Good.”

“You asked me to be on the lookout for . . . a package.” Friendly placed it on the desk before her. “Broya had it.”

It did not seem so very important. It was less than a foot long, wrapped in very ancient stained and balding animal skin, and with a letter, or perhaps a number, burned into it with a brand. But not a number that Friendly recognized.

Mistress Borfero snatched up the package, then immediately cursed herself for seeming too eager. She knew no one could be trusted in this business. That brought a rush of questions to her mind. Suspicions. How could that worthless Broya possibly have come by it? Was this some ruse? Was Friendly a plant of the Gurkish? Or perhaps of Carcolf’s? A double bluff? There was no end to the webs that smug bitch span. A triple bluff? But where was the angle? Where the advantage?

A quadruple bluff?

Friendly’s face betrayed no trace of greed, no trace of ambition, no trace of anything. He was without doubt a strange fellow, but came highly recommended. He seemed all business, and she liked that in a man, though she would never have said so. A manager must maintain a certain detachment.

Sometimes things are just what they seem. Borfero had seen strange chances enough in her life.

“This could be it,” she mused, though, in fact, she was immediately sure. She was not a woman to waste time on possibilities.

Friendly nodded.

“You have done well,” she said.

He nodded again.

“The Quarryman will want you to have a bonus.” Be generous with your own people, she had always said, or others will be.

But generosity brought no response from Friendly.

“A woman, perhaps?”

He looked a little pained by that suggestion. “No.”

“A man?”

And that one. “No.”

“Husk? A bottle of—”

“No.”

“There must be something.”

He shrugged.

Mistress Borfero puffed out her cheeks. Everything she had she’d made by tickling out people’s desires. She was not sure what to do with a person who had none. “Well, why don’t you think about it?”

Friendly slowly nodded. “I will think.”

“Did you see two Northmen drinking on your way in?”

“I saw two Northmen. One was reading a book.”

“Really? A book?”

Friendly shrugged. “There are readers everywhere.”

She swept through the place, noting the disappointing lack of wealthy custom and estimating just how dismal this evening’s profits were like to be. If one of the Northmen had been reading, he had given up. Deep was drinking some of her best wine straight from the bottle. Three others lay scattered, empty, beneath the table. Shallow was smoking a chagga pipe, the air thick with the stink of it. Borfero did not allow it normally, but she was obliged to make an exception for these two. Why the bank chose to employ such repugnant specimens she had not the slightest notion. But she supposed rich people need not explain themselves.

“Gentlemen,” she said, insinuating herself into a chair.

“Where?” Shallow gave a croaky laugh. Deep slowly tipped his bottle up and eyed his brother over the neck with sour disdain.

Borfero continued in her business voice, soft and reasonable. “You said your . . . employers would be most grateful if I came upon . . . that certain item you mentioned.”

The two Northmen perked up, both leaning forward as though drawn by the same string, Shallow’s boot catching an empty bottle and sending it rolling in an arc across the floor.

“Greatly grateful,” said Deep.

“And how much of my debt would their gratitude stretch around?”

“All of it.”

Borfero felt her skin tingling. Freedom. Could it really be? In her pocket, even now? But she could not let the size of the stakes make her careless. The greater the payoff, the greater the caution. “My debt would be finished?”

Shallow leaned close, drawing the stem of his pipe across his stubbled throat. “Killed,” he said.

“Murdered,” growled his brother, suddenly no further off on the other side.

She in no way enjoyed having those scarred and lumpen killers’ physiognomies so near. Another few moments of their breath alone might have done for her. “Excellent,” she squeaked, and slipped the package onto the table. “Then I shall cancel the interest payments forthwith. Do please convey my regards to . . . your employers.”

“Course.” Shallow did not so much smile as show his sharp teeth. “Don’t reckon your regards’ll mean much to them, though.”

“Don’t take it personally, eh?” Deep did not smile. “Our employers just don’t care much for regards.”

Borfero took a sharp breath. “Tough times all over.”

“Ain’t they, though?” and Deep stood, and swept the package up in one big paw.

The cool air caught Deep like a slap as they stepped out into the evening. Sipani, none too pleasant when it was still, had a decided spin to it all of a sudden.

“I have to confess,” he said, clearing his throat and spitting, “to being somewhat on the drunk side of drunk.”

“Aye,” said Shallow, burping as he squinted into the mist. At least that was clearing somewhat. As clear as it got in this murky hell of a place. “Probably not the bestest notion while at work, mind you.”

“You’re right.” Deep held the baggage up to such light as there was. “But who expected this to just drop in our laps?”

“Not I, for one.” Shallow frowned. “Or for . . . not one?”

“It was meant to be just a tipple,” said Deep.

“One tipple does have a habit of making itself into several.” Shallow wedged on that stupid bloody hat. “A little stroll over to the bank, then?”

“That hat makes you look a fucking dunce.”

“You, brother, are obsessed with appearances.”

Deep passed that off with a long hiss.

“They really going to score out that woman’s debts, d’you think?”

“For now, maybe. But you know how they are. Once you owe, you always owe.” Deep spat again, and, now the alley was a tad steadier, tottered off with the baggage clutched tight in his hand. No chance he was putting it in a pocket where some little scab could lift it. Sipani was full of thieving bastards. He’d had his good socks stolen last time he was here, and worked up an unpleasant pair of blisters on the trip home. Who steals socks? Styrian bastards. He’d keep a good firm grip on it. Let the little fuckers try to take it then.

“Now who’s the dunce?” Shallow called after him. “The bank’s this way.”

“Only we ain’t going to the bank, dunce,” snapped Deep over his shoulder. “We’re to toss it down a well in an old court just about the corner here.”

Shallow hurried to catch up. “We are?”

“No, I just said it for the laugh, y’idiot.”

“Why down a well?”

“Because that’s how he wanted it done.”

“Who wanted it done?”

“The boss.”

“The little boss, or the big boss?”

Even drunk as Deep was, he felt the need to lower his voice. “The bald boss.”

“Shit,” breathed Shallow. “In person?”

“In person.”

A short pause. “How was that?”

“It was even more than usually terrifying, thanks for reminding me.”

A long pause, with just the sound of their boots on the wet cobbles. Then Shallow said, “we better hadn’t do no fucking up of this.”

“My heartfelt thanks,” said Deep, “for that piercing insight. Fucking up is always to be avoided when and wherever possible, wouldn’t you say?”

“Y’always aim to avoid it, of course you do, but sometimes you run into it anyway. What I’m saying here is, we’d best not run into it.” Shallow dropped his voice to a whisper. “You know what the bald boss said last time.”

“You don’t have to whisper. He ain’t here, is he?”

Shallow looked wildly around. “I don’t know. Is he?”

“No he ain’t.” Deep rubbed at his temples. One day he’d kill his brother, that was a foregone conclusion. “That’s what I’m saying.”

“What if he was, though? Best to always act like he might be.”

“Can you shut your mouth just for a fucking instant?” Deep caught Shallow by the arm and stabbed the baggage in his face. “It’s like talking to a bloody—” He was greatly surprised when a dark shape whisked between them and he found his hand was suddenly empty.

Kiam ran like her life depended on it. Which it did, o’ course.

“Get after him, damn it!” And she heard the two Northmen flapping and crashing and blundering down the alley behind, and nowhere near far enough behind for her taste.

“It’s a girl, y’idiot!” Big and clumsy but fast they were coming, boots hammering and hands clutching, and if they once caught a hold of her . . .

“Who fucking cares? Get the thing back!” And her breath hissing and her heart pounding and her muscles burning as she ran.

She skittered around a corner, rag-wrapped feet sticking to the damp cobbles, the way wider, lamps and torches making muddy smears in the mist and people busy everywhere. She ducked and wove, around them, between them, faces looming up and gone. The Blackside night-market, stalls and shoppers and the cries of the traders, full of noise and smells and tight with bustle. Kiam slithered between the wheels of a wagon, limber as a ferret, plunged between buyer and seller in a shower of fruit, then slithered across a stall laden with slimy fish while the trader shouted and snatched at her, caught nothing but air, and she stuck one foot in a basket and was off, kicking cockles across the street. Still she heard the yells and growls as the Northmen knocked folk flying in her wake, crashes as they flung the carts aside, as though a mindless storm was ripping apart the market behind her. She dived between the legs of a big man, rounded another corner, and took the greasy steps two at a time, along the narrow path by the slopping water, rats squeaking in the rubbish and the sounds of the Northmen now loud, louder, cursing her and each other. Her breath whooping and cutting in her chest and running desperate, water spattering and spraying around her with every echoing footfall.

“We’ve got her!” the voice so close at her heels. “Come here!”

She darted through that little hole in the rusted grate, a sharp tooth of metal leaving a burning cut down her arm, and for once she was plenty glad that Old Green never gave her enough to eat. She kicked her way back into the darkness, keeping low, lay there clutching the package and struggling to get her breath. Then they were there, one of the Northmen dragging at the grating, knuckles white with force, flecks of rust showering down as it shifted, and Kiam stared and wondered what those hands would do to her if they got their dirty nails into her skin.

The other one shoved his bearded face in the gap, a wicked-looking knife in his hand, not that someone you just robbed ever has a nice-looking knife. His eyes popped out at her and his scabbed lips curled back and he snarled, “chuck us that baggage and we’ll forget all about it. Chuck us it now!”

Kiam kicked away, the grate squealing as it bent. “You’re fucking dead, you little piss! We’ll find you, don’t worry about that!” She slithered off, through the dust and rot, wriggled through a crack between crumbling walls. “We’ll be coming for you!” echoed from behind her. Maybe they would be as well, but a thief can’t spend too much time worrying about tomorrow. Today’s shitty enough. She whipped her coat off and pulled it inside out to show the faded green lining, stuffed her cap in her pocket and shook her hair out long, then slipped onto the walkway beside the Fifth Canal, walking fast, head down.

A pleasure boat drifted past, all chatter and laughter and clinking of glass, people moving tall and lazy on board, strange as ghosts seen through that mist, and Kiam wondered what they’d done to deserve that life and what she’d done to deserve this, but there never were no easy answers to that question. As it took its pink lights away into the fog she heard the music of Hove’s violin. Stood a moment in the shadows, listening, thinking how beautiful it sounded. She looked down at the package. Didn’t look much for all this trouble. Didn’t weigh much, even. But it weren’t up to her what Old Green put a price on. She wiped her nose and walked along close to the wall, music getting louder, then she saw Hove’s back and his bow moving, and she slipped behind him and let the package fall into his gaping pocket.

Hove didn’t feel the drop, but he felt the three little taps on his back, and he felt the weight in his coat as he moved. He didn’t see who made the drop and he didn’t look. He just carried on fiddling, that Union march with which he’d opened every show during his time on the stage in Adua, or under the stage, at any rate, warming up the crowd for Lestek’s big entrance. Before his wife died and everything went to shit. Those jaunty notes reminded him of times past, and he felt tears prickling in his sore eyes, so he switched to a melancholy minuet more suited to his mood, not that most folk around here could’ve told the difference. Sipani liked to present itself as a place of culture, but the majority were drunks and cheats and boorish thugs, or varying combinations thereof.

How had it come to this, eh? The usual refrain. He drifted across the street like he’d nothing in mind but a coin for his music, letting the notes spill out into the murk. Across past the pie stall, the fragrance of cheap meat making his stomach grumble, and he stopped playing to offer out his cap to the queue. There were no takers, no surprise, so he headed on down the road to Verscetti’s, dancing in and out of the tables on the street and sawing out an Osprian waltz, grinning at the patrons who lounged there with a pipe or a bottle, twiddling thin glass-stems between gloved fingertips, eyes leaking contempt through the slots in their mirror-crusted masks. Jervi was sat near the wall, as always, a woman in the chair opposite, hair piled high.

“A little music, darling?” Hove croaked out, leaning over her and letting his coat dangle near Jervi’s lap.

Jervi slid something out of Hove’s pocket, wrinkling his nose at the smell of the old soak, and said, “Fuck off, why don’t you?” Hove moved on, and took his horrible music with him, thank the Fates.

“What’s going on down there?” Riseld lifted her mask for a moment to show that soft, round face, well-powdered and fashionably bored.

There did indeed appear to be some manner of commotion up the street. Crashing, banging, shouting in Northern.

“Damn Northmen,” he murmured. “Always causing trouble, they really should be kept on leads like dogs.” Jervi removed his hat and tossed it on the table, the usual signal, then leant back in his chair to hold the package inconspicuously low to the ground beside him. A distasteful business, but a man has to work. “Nothing you need concern yourself about, my dear.”

She smiled at him in that unamused, uninterested way which, for some reason, he found irresistible.

“Shall we go to bed?” he asked, tossing a couple of coins down for the wine.

She sighed. “If we must.”

And Jervi felt the package spirited away.

Sifkiss wriggled out from under the tables and strutted along, letting his stick rattle against the bars of the fence beside him, package swinging loose in the other. Maybe Old Green had said stay stealthy but that weren’t Sifkiss’ way any more. A man has to work out his own style of doing things, and he was a full thirteen, weren’t he? Soon enough now he’d be passing on to higher things. Working for Kurrikan maybe. Anyone could tell he was marked out special—he’d stole himself a tall hat that made him look quite the gent about town—and if they were dull enough to be entertaining any doubts, which some folk sadly were, he’d perched it at quite the jaunty angle besides. Jaunty as all hell.

Yes, everyone had their eyes on Sifkiss.

He checked he weren’t the slightest bit observed, then slipped through the dewy bushes and the crack in the wall behind, which honestly was getting to be a bit of a squeeze, into the basement of the old temple, a little light filtering down from upstairs.

Most of the children were out working. Just a couple of the younger lads playing with dice and a girl gnawing on a bone and Pens having a smoke and not even looking over, and that new one curled up in the corner and coughing. Sifkiss didn’t like the sound o’ those coughs. More’n likely he’d be dumping her off in the sewers a day or two hence but, hey, that meant a few more bits corpse money for him, didn’t it? Most folk didn’t like handling a corpse, but it didn’t bother Sifkiss none. It’s a hard rain don’t wash someone a favor, as Old Green was always saying. She was way up there at the back, hunched over her old desk with one lamp burning, her long gray hair all greasy-slicked and her tongue pressed into her empty gums as she watched Sifkiss come up. Some smart-looking fellow was with her, had a waistcoat all silver leaves stitched on fancy, and Sifkiss put a jaunt on, thinking to impress.

“Get it, did yer?” asked Old Green.

“Course,” said Sifkiss, with a toss of his head, caught his hat on a low beam and cursed as he had to fumble it back on. He tossed the package sourly down on the tabletop.

“Get you gone, then,” snapped Green.

Sifkiss looked surly, like he’d a mind to answer back. He was getting altogether too much mind, that boy, and Green had to show him the knobby-knuckled back of her hand ’fore he sloped off.

“So here you have it, as promised.” She pointed to that leather bundle in the pool of lamplight on her old table, its top cracked and stained and its gilt all peeling, but still a fine old piece of furniture with plenty of years left. Like to Old Green in that respect, if she did think so herself.

“Seems a little luggage for such a lot of fuss,” said Fallow, wrinkling his nose, and he tossed a purse onto the table with that lovely clink of money. Old Green clawed it up and clawed it open and straight off set to counting it.

“Where’s your girl Kiam?” asked Fallow. “Where’s little Kiam, eh?”

Old Green’s shoulders stiffened but she kept counting. She could’ve counted through a storm at sea. “Out working.”

“When’s she getting back? I like her.” Fallow came a bit closer, voice going hushed. “I could get a damn fine price for her.”

“But she’s my best earner!” said Green. “There’s others you could take off my hands. How’s about that lad Sifkiss?”

“What, the sour-face brought the luggage?”

“He’s a good worker. Strong lad. Lots of grit. He’d pull a good oar on a galley, I’d say. Maybe a fighter, even.”

Fallow snorted. “In a pit? That little shit? I don’t think so. He’d need some whipping to pull an oar, I reckon.”

“Well? They got whips don’t they?”

“Suppose they do. I’ll take him if I must. Him and three others. I’m off to the market in Westport tomorrow week. You pick, but don’t give me none o’ your dross.”

“I don’t keep no dross,” said Old Green.

“You got nothing but dross, you bloody old swindler. And what’ll you tell the rest o’ your brood, eh?” Fallow put on a silly la-de-da voice. “That they’ve gone off to be servants to gentry, or to live with the horses on a farm, or adopted by the fucking Emperor of Gurkhul or some such, eh?” Fallow chuckled, and Old Green had a sudden urge to make that knife of hers available, but she’d better sense these days, all learned the hard way.

“I tell ’em what I need to,” she grunted, still working her fingers around the coins. Bloody fingers weren’t half as quick as they once were.

“You do that, and I’ll come back for Kiam another day, eh?” And Fallow winked at her.

“Whatever you want,” said Green, “whatever you say.” She was bloody well keeping Kiam, though. She couldn’t save many, she wasn’t fool enough to think that, but maybe she could save one, and on her dying day she could say she done that much. Probably no one would be listening, but she’d know. “It’s all there. Package is yours.”

Fallow picked up the luggage and was out of that stinking fucking place. Reminded him too much of prison. The smell of it. And the eyes of the children, all big and damp. He didn’t mind buying and selling ’em, but he didn’t want to see their eyes. Does the slaughterman want to look at the sheep’s eyes? Maybe the slaughterman don’t care. Maybe he gets used to it. Fallow cared too much, that’s what it was. Too much heart.

His guards were lounging by the front door and he waved them over and set off, walking in the middle of the square they made.

“Successful meeting?” Grenti tossed over his shoulder.

“Not bad,” grunted Fallow, in such a way as to discourage further conversation. Do you want friends or money? he’d once heard Kurrikan say, and the phrase had stuck with him.

Sadly, Grenti was by no means discouraged. “Going straight over to Kurrikan’s?”

“Yes,” said Fallow, sharply as he could.

But Grenti loved to flap his mouth. Most thugs do, in the end. All that time spent doing nothing, maybe. “Lovely house, though, ain’t it, Kurrikan’s? What do you call those columns on the front of it?”

“Pilasters,” grunted one of the other thugs.

“No, no, I know pilasters, no. I mean to say the name given to that particular style of architecture, with the vine-leaves about the head there?”

“Rusticated?”

“No, no, that’s the masonry work, all dimpled with the chisel, it’s the overall design I’m discussing—hold up.”

For a moment, Fallow was mightily relieved at the interruption. Then he was concerned. A figure was occupying the fog just ahead. Occupying the hell out of it. The beggars and revelers and scum scattered round these parts had all slipped out of their way like soil around the plough ’til now. This one didn’t move. He was a tall bastard, tall as Fallow’s tallest guard, with a white coat on, hood up. Well, it weren’t white no more. Nothing stayed white long in Sipani. It was gray with damp and black-spattered about the hem.

“Get him out of the way,” he snapped.

“Get out of the fucking way!” roared Grenti.

“You are Fallow?” The man pulled his hood back.

“It’s a woman,” said Grenti. And indeed it was, for all her neck was thickly muscled, her jaw angular, and her red hair clipped close to her skull.

“I am Javre,” she said, raising her chin and smiling at them. “Lioness of Hoskopp.”

“Maybe she’s a mental,” said Grenti.

“Escaped from that madhouse up the way.”

“I did once escape from a madhouse,” said the woman. She had a weird accent, Fallow couldn’t place it. “Well . . . it was a prison for wizards. But some of them had gone mad. A fine distinction, most wizards are at least eccentric. That is beside the point, though. You have something I need.”

“That so?” said Fallow, starting to grin. He was less worried now. One, she was a woman, two, she obviously was a mental.

“I know not how to convince you, for I lack the sweet words, it is a long-standing deficiency. But it would be best for us all if you gave it to me willingly.”

“I’ll give you something willingly,” said Fallow, to sniggers from the others.

The woman didn’t snigger. “It is a parcel, wrapped in leather, about . . . ” she held up one big hand, thumb and forefinger stretched out. “Five times the length of your cock.”

If she knew about the luggage, she was trouble. And Fallow had no sense of humor about his cock, to which none of the ointments had made the slightest difference. He stopped grinning. “Kill her.”

She struck Grenti somewhere around the chest, or maybe she did, it was all a blur. His eyes popped wide and he made a strange whooping sound and stood there frozen, quivering on his tiptoes, sword half-way drawn.

The second guard—a Union man, big as a house—swung his mace at her, but it just caught her flapping coat. An instant later there was a surprised yelp and he was flying across the street upside down and crashing into the wall, tumbling down in a shower of dust, sheets of broken plaster dropping from the shattered brickwork on top of his limp body.

The third guard—a nimble-fingered Osprian—whipped out a throwing knife, but before he could loose it, the mace twittered through the air and bounced from his head. He dropped soundlessly, arms outstretched.

“They are called Anthiric columns.” The woman put her forefinger against Grenti’s forehead and gently pushed him over. He toppled and lay there on his side in the muck, still stiff, still trembling, still with eyes bulgingly focused on nothing.

“That was with one hand.” She held up the other big fist, and had produced from somewhere a sheathed sword, gold glittering on the hilt. “Next I draw this sword, forged in the Old Time from the metal of a fallen star. Only six living people have seen the blade. You would find it extremely beautiful. Then I would kill you with it.”

The last of the guards exchanged a brief glance with Fallow, then tossed his axe away and sprinted off.

“Huh,” said the woman, with a slight wrinkling of disappointment about her red brows. “Just so you know, if you run I will catch you in . . . ” She narrowed her eyes and pushed out her lips, looking Fallow appraisingly up and down. The way he might have appraised the children. He found he didn’t like being looked at that way. “About four strides.”

He ran.

She caught him in three, and he was suddenly on his face with a mouthful of dirty cobblestone and his arm twisted sharply behind his back.

“You’ve no idea who you’re dealing with, you stupid bitch!” He struggled but her grip was iron, and he squealed with pain as his arm was twisted even more sharply.

“It is true, I am no high thinker.” Her voice showed not the slightest strain. “I like simple things well done and have no time to philosophize. Would you like to tell me where the parcel is, or shall I beat you until it falls out?”

“I work for Kurrikan!” he gasped out.

“I’m new in town. Names work no magic on me.”

“We’ll find you!”

She laughed. “Of course. I am no hider. I am Javre, First of the Fifteen. Javre, Knight Templar of the Golden Order. Javre, Breaker of Chains, Breaker of Oaths, Breaker of Faces.” And here she gave him a blinding blow on the back of the head which, he was pretty sure, broke his nose against the cobbles and filled the back of his mouth with the salt taste of blood. “To find me, you need only ask for Javre.” She leaned over him, breath tickling at his ear. “It is once you find me that your difficulties begin. Now, where is that parcel?”

A pinching sensation began in Fallow’s hand. Mildly painful to begin with, then more, and more, a white hot burning up his arm that made him whimper like a dog. “Ah, ah, ah, inside pocket, inside pocket!”

“Very good.” He felt hands rifling through his clothes, but could only lie limp, moaning as the jangling of his nerves gradually subsided. He craned his neck around to look up at her and curled back his lips. “I swear on my fucking front teeth—”

“Do you?” As her fingers found the hidden pocket and slid the package free. “That’s rash.”

Javre pressed finger against thumb and flicked Fallow’s two front teeth out. A trick she had learned from an old man in Suljuk, and, as with so many things in life, all in the wrist. She left him hunched in the road, struggling to cough them up.

“The next time we meet, I will have to show you the sword!” she called out as she strode away, wedging the package down behind her belt. Goddess, these Sipanese were weaklings. Was there no one to test her anymore?

She shook her sore hand out. Probably her fingernail would turn black and drop off, but it would grow back. Unlike Fallow’s teeth. And it was scarcely the first fingernail she had lost. Including that memorable time she had lost the lot and toenails too in the tender care of the Prophet Khalul. Now there had been a test. For a moment, she almost felt nostalgic for her interrogators. Certainly she felt nostalgic for the feeling of shoving their chief’s face into his own brazier when she escaped. What a sizzle he had made!

But perhaps this Kurrikan would be outraged enough to send a decent class of killer after her. Then she could go after him. Hardly the great battles of yesteryear, but something to while away the evenings.

Until then, Javre walked, swift and steady with her shoulders back. She loved to walk. With every stride, she felt her own strength. Every muscle utterly relaxed, yet ready to turn the next step in a split instant into mighty spring, sprightly roll, deadly strike. Without needing to look, she felt each person about her, judged their threat, predicted their attack, imagined her response, the air around her alive with calculated possibilities, the surroundings mapped, the distances known, all things of use noted. The sternest tests are those you do not see coming, so Javre was the weapon always sharpened, the weapon never sheathed, the answer to every question.

But no blade came darting from the dark. No arrow, no flash of fire, no squirt of poison. No pack of assassins burst from the shadows.

Sadly.

Only a pair of drunk Northmen wrestling outside Pombrine’s place, one of them snarling something about the bald boss. She paid them no mind as she trotted up the steps, ignoring the several frowning guards, who were of a quality inferior even to Fallow’s men, down the hallway and into the central salon, complete with fake marble, cheap chandelier, and profoundly unarousing mosaic of a lumpy couple fucking horse-style. Evidently the evening rush had yet to begin. Whores of both sexes and one Javre was still not entirely sure about lounged bored upon the overwrought furniture.

Pombrine was busy admonishing one of his flock for overdressing, but looked up startled when she entered. “You’re back already? What went wrong?”

Javre laughed full loud. “Everything.” His eyes widened, and she laughed louder yet. “For them.” And she took his wrist and pressed the parcel into his hand.

Pombrine gazed down at that unassuming lump of animal skin. “You did it?”

The woman thumped one heavy arm about his shoulders and gave them a squeeze. He gasped as his bones creaked. Without doubt she was of exceptional size, but even so the casual strength of it was hardly to be believed. “You do not know me. Yet. I am Javre, Lioness of Hoskopp.” She looked down at him and he had an unpleasant and unfamiliar sensation of being a naughty child helpless in his mother’s grasp. “When I agree to a challenge, I do not shirk it. But you will learn.”

“I keenly anticipate my education.” Pombrine wriggled free of the crushing weight of her arm. “You did not . . . open it?”

“You told me not to.”

“Good. Good.” He stared down, the smile half-formed on his face, hardly able to believe it could have been this easy.

“My payment, then.”

“Of course.” He reached for the purse.

She held up one calloused hand. “I will take half in flesh.”

“In flesh?”

“Isn’t that what you pedal here?”

He raised his brows. “Half would be a great quantity of flesh.”

“I get through it. And I mean to stay a while.”

“Lucky us,” he muttered.

“I’ll take him.”

“An excellent choice, I—”

“And him. And him. And her.” Javre rubbed her rough palms together. “She can get the lads warmed up, I am not paying to wank anyone off myself.”

“Naturally not.”

“I am a woman of Thond, and have grand appetites.”

“So I begin to see.”

“And for the sun’s sake, someone draw me a bath. I smell like a heated bitch already, I dread to imagine the stink afterward. I will have every tom cat in the city after me!” And she burst out laughing again.

One of the men swallowed. The other looked at Pombrine with an expression faintly desperate as Javre herded them into the nearest room.

“. . . you, remove your trousers. You, get the bandages off my tits. You would scarcely credit how tightly I have to strap this lot down to get anything done . . . ”

The door snapped mercifully shut.

Pombrine seized Scalacay, his most trusted servant, by the shoulder and drew him close.

“Go to the Gurkish temple off the third canal with all haste, the one with the green marble pillars. Do you know it?”

“I do, master.”

“Tell the priest that chants in the doorway that you have a message for Ishri. That Master Pombrine has the item she was asking after. For Ishri, do you understand?”

“For Ishri. Master Pombrine has the item.”

“Then run to it!”

Scalacay dashed away, leaving Pombrine to hurry to his office with hardly less haste, the package clutched in one sweaty hand. He fumbled the door shut and turned the key, the five locks closing with a reassuring metallic clatter.

Only then did he allow himself to breathe. He placed the package reverently upon his desk. Now he had it, he felt the need to stretch out the moment of triumph. To weigh it down with the proper gravitas. He went to his drinks cabinet and unlocked it, took his grandfather’s bottle of Shiznadze from the place of honor. That man had lived his whole life waiting for a moment worthy of opening that bottle. Pombrine smiled as he reached for the corkscrew, trimming away the lead from the neck.

How long had he worked to secure that cursed package? Circulating rumors of his business failings when in fact he had never been so successful. Placing himself in Carcolf’s way again and again until finally they seemed to happen upon each other by chance. Wriggling himself into a position of trust while the idiot courier thought him a brainless stooge, clambering by miniscule degrees to a perch from which he could get his eager hands around the package, and then . . . unhappy fate! Carcolf had slipped free, the cursed bitch, leaving Pombrine with nothing but ruined hopes. But now . . . happy fate! The thuggery of that loathsome woman Javre had, by some fumbling miracle, succeeded where his genius had been so unfairly thwarted.

What did it matter how he had come by it, though? His smile grew wider as he eased the cork free. He had the package. He turned to gaze upon his prize again.

Pop! An arc of fizzy wine missed his glass and spurted across his Kadiri carpet. He stared open mouthed. The package was hanging in the air by a hook. Attached to the hook was a gossamer thread. The thread disappeared through a hole in the glass roof high above where he now saw a black shape spread-eagled.

Pombrine made a despairing lunge, bottle and glass tumbling to the floor and spraying wine, but the package slipped through his clutching fingers and was whisked smoothly upwards out of his reach.

“Guards!” he roared, shaking his fist. “Thief!”

A moment later he realized, and his rage turned in a flash to withering horror.

Ishri would soon be on her way.

With a practiced jerk of her wrist, Shev twitched the parcel up and into her waiting glove.

“What an angler,” she whispered as she thrust it into her pocket, and was away across the steeply-pitched roof, knee pads sticky with tar doing most of the work. Astride the ridge and she scuttled to the chimney, flicked the rope into the street below, was over the edge in a twinkling and swarming down. Don’t think about the ground, never think about the ground. It’s a nice place to be, but you wouldn’t want to get there too quickly . . .

“What a climber,” she whispered as she passed a large window, a garishly decorated and gloomily lit salon coming into view, and—

She gripped tight to the rope and stopped dead, gently swinging.

She really did have a pressing engagement with not being caught by Pombrine’s guards, but within the room was one of those sights that one could not simply slide past. Four, possibly five, or even six naked bodies had formed, with most impressive athleticism, a kind of human sculpture—a grunting tangle of gently shifting limbs. While she was turning her head sideways on to make sense of it, the lynch-pin of the arrangement, who Shev took at first glance for a red-haired strongman, looked straight at her.

“Shevedieh?”

Decidedly not a man, but very definitely strong. Even with hair clipped close, there was no mistaking her.

“Javre? What the hell are you doing here?”

She raised a brow at the naked bodies entwined about her. “Is that not obvious?”

Shev was brought to her senses by the rattle of guards in the street below. “You never saw me!” And she slid down the rope, hemp hissing through her gloves, hit the ground hard and sprinted off just as a group of men with weapons drawn came barrelling around the corner.

“Stop thief!”

“Get him!”

And, particularly shrill, Pombrine desperately wailing, “My package!”

Shev jerked the cord in the small of her back and felt the pouch split, the caltrops scattering in her wake, heard the shrieks as a couple of the guards went tumbling. Sore feet they’d have in the morning. But there were still more following.

“Cut him off!”

“Shoot him!”

She took a sharp left, heard the flatbow string an instant later, the twitter as the bolt glanced from the wall beside her and away into the night. She peeled off her gloves as she ran, one smoking from the friction, and flung them over her shoulder. A quick right, the route well-planned in advance, of course, and she sprang up onto the tables outside Verscetti’s, bounding from one to the next with great strides, sending cutlery and glassware flying, the patrons floundering up, tumbling in their shock, a ragged violinist flinging himself for cover.

“What a runner,” she whispered, and leaped from the last table, over the clutching hands of a guard diving from her left and a reveler from her right, catching the little cord behind the sign that said Verscetti’s as she fell and giving it a good tug.

There was a flash like lightning as she rolled, an almighty bang as she came up, the murky night at once illuminated, the frontages of the buildings ahead picked out white. There were screams and squeals and a volley of detonations. Behind her, she knew, blossoms of purple fire would be shooting across the street, showers of golden sparks, a display suitable for a baron’s wedding.

“That Qohdam certainly can make fireworks,” she whispered, resisting the temptation to stop and watch the show and instead slipping down a shadowy snicket, shooing away a mangy cat, scurrying on low for three dozen strides and ducking into the narrow garden, struggling to keep her quick breath quiet. She ripped open the packet she had secured among the roots of the dead willow, unfurling the white robe and wriggling into it, pulling up the cowl and waiting in the shadows, the big votive candle in one hand, ears sifting at the night.

“Shit,” she muttered. As the last echoes of her fiery diversion faded she could hear, faintly, but coming closer, the calls of Pombrine’s searching guards, doors rattling as they tried them one by one.

“Where did he go?”

“I think this way!”

“Bloody firework burned my hand! I’m really burned, you know!”

“My package!”

“Come on, come on,” she muttered. To be caught by these idiots would be among the most embarrassing moments of her career. That time she’d been stuck in a marriage gown half way up the side of the Mercers guildhall in Adua, with flowers in her hair but no underwear and a steadily growing crowd of onlookers below, would take some beating, but still. “Come on, come on, come—”

Now, from the other direction, she heard the chanting, and grinned. The Sisters were always on time. She heard their feet now, the regular tramping blotting out the shouting of Pombrine’s guards and the wailing of a woman temporarily deafened by the fireworks. Louder the feet, louder the heavenly song, and the procession passed the garden, the women all in white, all hooded, lit candles held stiffly before them, ghostly in the gloom as they marched by in unison.

“What a priestess,” Shev whispered to herself, and threaded from the garden, jostling her way into the midst of the procession. She tipped her candle to the left, so its wick touched that of her neighbor. The woman frowned across and Shev winked back.

“Give a girl a light, would you?”

With a fizzle it caught, and she fell into step, adding her own joyous note to the chant as they processed down Caldiche street and over the Fintine bridge, the masked revelers parting respectfully to let them through. Pombrine’s place, and the increasingly frantic searching of his guards, and the furious growling of a pair of savagely arguing Northmen dwindled sedately into the mists behind.

It was dark by the time she slipped silently through her own open window, past the stirring drapes, and crept around her comfortable chair. Carcolf was asleep in it, one strand of yellow hair fluttering around her mouth as she breathed. She looked young with eyes closed and face relaxed, shorn of that habitual sneer she had for everything. Young, and very beautiful. Bless this fashion for tight trousers! The candle cast a faint glow in the downy hairs on her cheek, and Shev felt a need to reach up and lay her palm upon that face, and stroke her lips with her thumb—

But, lover of risks though she was, that would have been too great a gamble. So instead she shouted, “Boo!”

Carcolf leaped up like a frog from boiling water, crashed into a table and nearly fell, lurched around, eyes wide. “Bloody hell,” she muttered, taking a shuddering breath. “Do you have to do that?”

“Have to? No.”

Carcolf pressed one hand to her chest. “I think you might have opened the stitches.”

“You unbelievable baby.” Shev pulled the robe over her head and tossed it away. “It barely broke the skin.”

“The loss of your good opinion wounds me more deeply than any blade.”

Shev unhooked the belts that held her thief’s tools, unbuckled her climbing pads, and started to peel off her black clothes, acting as if it was nothing to her whether Carcolf watched or not. But she noted with some satisfaction that it was not until she was slipping on a clean gown that Carcolf finally spoke, and in a voice slightly hoarse besides.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“It has always been a dream of mine to see a Sister of the White disrobe before my eyes, but I was rather wondering whether you found the—”

Shev tossed over the package and Carcolf snatched it smartly from the air.

“I knew I could rely on you.” Carcolf felt a little dizzy with relief, not to mention more than a little tingly with desire. She had always had a weakness for dangerous women.

Bloody hell, she really was turning into her father . . .

“You were right,” said Shev, dropping into the chair she had so recently frightened Carcolf out of. “Pombrine had it.”

“I bloody knew it! That slime! So hard to find a good expendable decoy these days.”

“It’s as if you can’t trust anyone.”

“Still. No harm done, eh?” And Carcolf lifted up her shirt and ever so carefully slid the package into the uppermost of her two cash belts.

It was Shev’s turn to watch, pretending not to as she poured herself a glass of wine. “What’s in the parcel?” she asked.

“It’s safer if I don’t tell you.”

“You’ve no idea, have you?”

“I’m under orders not to look,” Carcolf was forced to admit.

“Don’t you ever wonder, though? I mean, the more I’m ordered not to look, the more I want to.” Shev sat forward, dark eyes glimmering in a profoundly bewitching way, and for an instant Carcolf’s head was filled with an image of the pair of them rolling across the carpet together, laughing as they ripped the package apart between them.

She dismissed it with an effort. “A thief can wonder. A courier cannot.”

“Could you be any more pompous?”

“It would require an effort.”

Shevslurped at her wine. “Well, it’s your package. I suppose.”

“No it isn’t. That’s the whole point.”

“I think I preferred you when you were a criminal.”

“Lies. You relish the opportunity to corrupt me.”

“True enough.” Shev wriggled down the chair so her long, brown legs slid out from the hem of her gown. “Why don’t you stay a while?” One searching foot found Carcolf’s ankle, and slid gently up the inside of her leg, and down, and up. “And be corrupted?”

Carcolf took an almost painful breath. “Damn, but I’d love to.” The strength of the feeling surprised her, and caught in her throat, and for the briefest moment she almost choked on it. For the briefest moment, she almost tossed the package out of the window, and sank down before the chair, and took Shev’s hand and shared tales she had never told from when she was a girl. For the briefest moment. Then she was Carcolf again, and she stepped smartly away and let Shev’s foot clomp down on the boards. “But you know how it is, in my business. Have to catch the tide.” And she snatched up her new coat and turned as she pulled it on, giving herself time to blink back any hint of tears.

“You should take a holiday.”

“With every job I say so, and when every job ends, I find I get . . . twitchy.” Carcolf sighed as she fastened the buttons. “I’m just not made for sitting still.”

“Huh.”

“Let’s not pretend you’re any different.”

“Let’s not pretend. I’ve been considering a move myself. Adua, perhaps, or back to the South—”

“I’d much rather you stayed,” Carcolf found she had said, then tried to pass it off with a carefree wave. “Who else would get me out of messes when I come here? You’re the one person in this whole damn city I trust.” That was a complete lie, of course, she didn’t trust Shev in the least. A good courier trusts no one, and Carcolf was the very best. But she was a great deal more comfortable with lies than with truth.

She could see in Shev’s smile that she understood the whole situation perfectly. “So sweet.” She caught Carcolf’s wrist as she turned to leave with a grip that was not to be ignored. “My money?”

“How silly of me.” Carcolf handed her the purse.

Without even looking inside, Shev said, “and the rest.”

Carcolf sighed once more, and tossed the other purse on the bed, gold flashing in the lamplight as coins spilled across the white sheet. “You’d be upset if I didn’t try.”

“Your care for my delicate feelings is touching. I daresay I’ll see you next time you’re here?” she asked as Carcolf put her hand on the lock.

“I shall count the moments.”

Just then she wanted a kiss more than anything, but she was not sure her resolve was strong enough for only one, so though it was a wrench, she blew a kiss instead and pulled the door to behind her. She slipped swiftly across the shadowed court and out the heavy gate onto the street, hoping it was a while before Shevedieh took a closer look at the coins inside the first purse. Perhaps a cosmic punishment was thus incurred, but it was worth it just for the thought of the look on her face.

The day had been a bloody fiasco, but she supposed it could have been a great deal worse. She still had ample time to make it to the ship before they lost the tide. Carcolf pulled up her hood, wincing at the pain from that freshly stitched scratch, and from that entirely unreasonable ulcer, and from that cursed chafing seam, then strode off through the misty night, neither too fast nor too slow, entirely inconspicuous.

Damn, but she hated Sipani!

First published in Rogues,
edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, 2014.

About the Author

Joe Abercrombie is one of the fastest-rising stars in fantasy today, acclaimed by readers and critics alike for his tough, spare, no-nonsense approach to the genre. He’s probably best-known for his First Law trilogy, the first novel of which, The Blade Itself, was published in 2006; it was followed in subsequent years by Before They Are Hanged and Last Argument of Kings. He’s also written the related First Law World trilogy, Best Served Cold, The Heroes, and Red Country. His most recent novels are a new trilogy, Half a King, Half the World, and Half a War. Coming up is a collection, Sharp Ends. In addition to writing, Abercrombie is also a freelance film editor, and lives and works in London.

A Heap of Broken Images

Sunny Moraine

“Odette nodded at my notebook, where I was writing as she spoke. ‘Do the people in America really want to read this? People tell me to write these things down, but it’s written inside of me. I almost hope for the day when I can forget.’ ”

―Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families

“Are you going to take a picture?”

I ask it because it seems like a sensible question. The shorter of the two humans has brought his camera with him and since we entered the houses of the dead he has held it in his hands and a little close to his chest, as though he’s afraid that someone might snatch it away from him, or that he might drop it and it might shatter.

I ask it because I am their guide and it is my task to show them what they ask to see, and I am wondering, now, if they really wish to see this.

The shorter man—I have been told that his name is Jacob but the syllables feel strange in my mouth and I have to struggle with them a little—looks at me as though he is only just now seeing me. He nods once. He lifts the camera to his face and I hear the soft whir of its processor. And then, as though he performed the act entirely for my benefit, he shows me the image he has captured.

Here: It’s not well framed. He clearly gave little thought for the arrangement of it. Half a skull takes up the lower left-hand corner, pushed most of the way under a desk. The fractured curve of a broken spine extends into the middle-foreground, disappearing into a fold of old blue cloth from which ribs protrude. On the right, a severed arm stretches into the frame as if reaching for the skull and the spine. It clearly isn’t from the same corpse. It’s much too small. Draped and tangled over everything, heavy flowers in brilliant red and pink, green vines, and dried skin of no color whatsoever.

There are other bodies. Look closer and you will see that the floor is nothing but bodies. That you can’t see the floor at all. That you cannot, in fact, be absolutely sure that the floor is even there. If you walk into this room, you’ll walk on the dead. So we don’t invite them to walk inside, and without invitation they never do. We all stand in the doorway and I deliver the information I have to share about this place, and then there is silence.

I feel their discomfort. I was raised in the jodenja klimenji—the Way of Welcoming. It is our highest calling to give comfort to a guest, to put them at ease. But it is also our highest calling to give them whatever they ask for, within reason. And if they ask to come here, I cannot do anything for what I know they must feel. I cannot unmurder the murdered. I cannot change who did the murdering. And I cannot tell them how they should feel, a generation after the fact. There are things I wish I could say, things I would say if everything were different, but I also cannot change who I am. So we stand in silence, and the dead are also silent, and I wait for one of the living to speak.

The first sun is low and tosses our shadows out in a long diagonal across the room. The second sun is rising behind us. The light is shifting and strange, and it makes it difficult to be sure just how big the room is. How much death it can hold.

The taller one—I think his name is Aaron—points to a stack of crates in one corner next to a row of bookshelves. Another corpse is slumped against it, scraps of dried paper skin, the head gone. “Shairoven, what are those?”

“Goods,” I say. “Clothes, probably. Foodstuffs. They thought that they could buy their lives from their attackers. You must understand that such things are not strange to us; in our culture there is an idea of a blood price. Life has monetary value.”

“Why didn’t the colonists take them?”

I shrug—it is a very human gesture but I can’t help it. Five full cycles as a klimenjiani—what I have heard them call a tour guide—and I have adopted many human habits. “There are many things about what was done in those months that we do not understand.”

What I do not say is that I suspect that the killing distracted them. It must have been very distracting. It must have been very tiring, also. It’s said that all throughout the time of killing, the rank and file were urged on by overseers of death with bullhorns and amplifiers. They were given rhythms by which to work, to make it easier for their bodies to move without the burden of thought.

I have tried to understand this. When I run I think of the beating of my own heart. But then I think of blood and falling bodies and my imagination fails me. How can they be the same?

How could they have done it? Were they blind?

The flowers nod in the breeze that comes in through the open windows. It should not be as lovely as it is—all those long bones. The large, elongated skulls. The vines and the blossoms. Graceful and clean. Even the faded blood on the walls looks like an abstract mural in dark swoops and swirls. I have heard the humans say that our people are beautiful. I wonder if that is a truth that is not always true.

“We should go,” I say gently. At my sides, my hands are clenched into fists. I hope they will not see. It would shame me. “You will be late for supper at the hotel.”

Much like the killing itself, it remains a puzzle to us, that the humans come to Lejshethra for this. Why they come. Why they want to look. These are not their dead. They pay no respects, they make no offerings. They just stare with their tiny eyes, and I can never say for sure what they’re thinking.

They have told us that there are entire pathways of schooling back on Earth that deal with nothing but the killing, that try to pull it apart like a corpse and understand how it happened, why so much murderous hate could arise so suddenly in the human colonists. I have heard that they believe that it was not sudden. That it built over years, that there was tension where my people could perceive none. Two cycles ago when I first heard of this I took it to my body-sire and told her of it, and I think I was lucky to escape the back of her hand.

“Ignore such things, Shairoven,” she said to me. She turned back to the tijath she was cutting for the meal of second sun. “The humans fixate on what’s past, even after blood-price is paid. Mind your manners and ignore their habits. They can’t help what they are.”

My body-sire’s right arm is missing. Her back is a mass of crisscrossing scars. We were told—not by her, for she never speaks of those months—that she survived the massacre of her district by hiding herself under the corpses of her neighbors. There were many who survived that way, but we don’t speak much of the ones with visible scars. The blatantly accusing nature of the evidence they carry with them is a form of rudeness that can’t be erased or undone.

My body-sire makes her place secure through her denial.

I have never discovered how to tell her that this makes me so sad-angry-trapped all at once, that it makes me feel as though I am buried under a pile of corpses and I am being cut with long knives and I do not understand why. We have no word in our language for such an impolite emotion.

I arrive at the hotel after the meal of first sun to collect the humans. They have told me that today they wish to travel to the city center to see the memorial that the human government erected to the dead of the killings—or to the killings themselves, but the difference has never been adequately explained to me, and I am afraid to ask. I am afraid that my people would see it as overtly accusatory, and I am afraid of what the humans might say.

In the groundcar on the way from my home to the hotel, I think about all the questions I would like to ask and never will. Why do you remember? What do you think? Do you feel guilty? Do you think that you should? Do you hate us now? Will you hurt us again?

Their leaders said, of course, that they did not hate us and that the killings will never be repeated. But I am not sure I find this convincing. I am full of doubt both impolite and inconvenient and it pulls at me like a hungry child. Many hungry children. There were camps full of them after the killings, orphans all with no mate-sire or body-sire and often missing siblings. I have seen images, and in those images what stands out most are their enormous eyes. All the confusion of an entire people could be held inside such eyes. Why? This is what they would ask the humans I am going to see. In this we are alike.

I would also like to ask whether the humans live with ghosts as we do. I wonder whether it is forbidden for them to acknowledge or speak to the ghosts. I wonder whether they can put the ghosts here aside and leave them behind. In the end most of them return home to Earth; very few humans live here now. They thinned our numbers, but in the end they were the ones who ran.

In the groundcar, the humans and I ride in silence. My head is still buzzing with questions. My mouth is sealed by my raising.

Every time, this is a little more difficult.

“How long have you been a guide?” Jacob asks me eventually, and I am relieved because this is a question that I can answer without offense. I tell him five cycles, and he smiles and pats the knee of his companion.

“We’re lucky to get someone so experienced.”

I incline my head at the compliment.

“Aaron and I have been studying the massacre since college,” Jacob says after another few moments of silence. “We’re both writers—did we tell you that? We’re doing a series on what it’s like for the children of the colonists now, so this is excellent material.”

I nod again. “I am glad to be able to help,” I say, and inside the eyes of the hungry children are growing and growing and for an instant I am afraid they will swallow me. I am glad that the groundcar is on automatic because I could not see to direct it now. Everything is questions, beating against the inside of me, smothering me like a mound of corpses, and really all the questions are a single question: Why?

Why did you kill us? Why do you come here now? Why did you build the monument, why are you writing about it, why are you sitting here and smiling at me like that when my body-sire has lost her arm and my life is all of the ghosts I will never welcome, and instead I welcome you?

We keep the houses of the dead but we would never go there if it weren’t for you and every time I am there I feel that I might fall apart into hacked-up pieces and lie there among the dead because I cannot make any of these other pieces fit.

I smile at them, at these writer humans who walk oblivious among the ghosts. It is said among my people that the jodenja klimenji is the most demanding of all the disciplines, and the most pure, because it means the utter denial of self. And every moment of it I wonder if I am really strong enough.

And every moment of it I wonder if it is right for me to be so.

The memorial itself is a single black spike one hundred feet high. It impales the sky. Every time I come here, I think, It looks so angry. And I am never sure where the anger comes from or where it is going. Perhaps it is my anger that I am feeling. Inside the spike, it is apart from me and safe to face. It stabs and stabs blindly, forever.

The spike is bounded by a circular plaza dotted with stone benches. There are no trees. We three are the only ones there. We stay for a few minutes, and then we return to the hotel in silence.

There is a river that alternately circles around and cuts through our city. Its banks are part of what make this region so excellent for farming, and I understand why this was the initial locus for the human colonization. The river is the center of many things. After second sun, after I have returned to my home and bathed and oiled my skin, I dress in the lighter clothing of repose and walk down the broad path that leads from my street to the river where it touches the edge of my home district. The bank is paved here, lined with flowerbeds and hanging colored lanterns.

It is lovely. It is all that I remember seeing here, but I have been told by humans and by human texts that the paving and the flowerbeds and the lanterns are all recent additions. Before, this was all rich red soil and black rocks, like other points along the river’s bank, and then at the time of the killings it was paved with bodies as people tried to flee across it and were cut down or trampled or carried away and drowned.

There was a major sanitation problem in the weeks after the greatest bloom of killing, which added to the already rising tide of human refugees flooding back to Earth ahead of their fear and their shame. The water was choked with bloated corpses and undrinkable. This is what I have been told, by humans and by those of my own people to whom I know I should not listen. But though they tell the same story, the humans and a few of my people, the telling is so different that I cannot think of it as the same.

It is the river Laijan, which means purveyor of life. I stand at the edge of the paved bank and I look into its depths. In the twilight the water looks like black blood, calm and placid and flowing without a heart to pump it.

Tomorrow is the last day that the humans will be here, and before I said goodbye to them today they asked me for a favor. It is not the first time I have been asked for what they want. But I have always said no, impossible, it cannot be done, no one will agree to it.

And I have been lying.

And today I said that I would try.

I do not know if this is dishonor or a fulfilling of my raising. I am pulled between what I have been taught and what I have been taught; again I think I could fall to pieces, and then I think that maybe I have always been in pieces, broken apart from myself, and so there is no more damage to be done.

I look into the flowing black water and I think of empty eyes and outstretched hands reaching up from those depths and beckoning me. There were many bodies that were swept away by the river in the growing-season flood that year and many were never found. They are all still there in the life of the river. There are other people strolling, idling along the bank in the cool of the evening; I could call, Don’t you see them? Don’t you hear? How can we deny our own spilled blood, whatever price has been paid?

My mouth is full of ghosts. I place my hand against it and hold them in until they are silent again, and the ones in the water fall silent as well.

I am in pieces but I am alive. Tell me how this is a reasonable thing.

Before first sun I am awake and back in the streets, leaving my body-sire and my two siblings sleeping at home. They do not know what I intend; if they did they would try to stop me, for this is not shame of any accidental kind but shame that is sought for, and that is the most profound shame of all.

The streets are still mostly deserted but I keep to the shadows, moving as quietly as I can. I live in one of the more affluent districts and I am passing into places that are clearly less so, with waste uncollected by the entranceways and roofs in need of repair. And on, further, into a place of real destitution, where the cracked and dirty street is dotted here and there with people who have no roof at all but sleep surrounded by whatever they can carry with their mangled limbs—in whatever sleep their rage allows them.

This is the district of the self-exiled. They Who Will Not Release Their Grasp. I was taught to pity them and fear them, for they carry the specter of what was done to us in their minds and bodies like a plague and they will not give themselves over to denial as my body-sire has done. They stand and they insist that we look on them, and the pain is too great, and we fear what the humans would do or say, despite the fact that the humans themselves seem to want to see such things.

Sometimes I think our ways have become confused, like tangled limbs that no longer fit the body to which they were attached.

Three cycles ago I came here for the first time because of a request like the one that sends me here now. I turned away then, at the cusp of fulfilling what was asked of me. I could not bear it. I am not sure what has made me decide to try again, but I know that all night I tried to resist it and it would not be held back.

Down a narrow, stinking alley I find the door I am looking for. I lift my head at the same moment that I raise my hand to press the call-bell and I see the sky lightening for first sun, pale pink. I think of blood just under thin skin, warm and alive.

The door opens and the sky seems to fall away again.

She is missing an arm like my body-sire is, but there the resemblance of their scars ends: her face is practically half gone, twisted with scar tissue, hairless and purple and swollen. One of her eyes is not there at all. The scars wind down her long neck and vanish under her worn tunic but I know they continue. She is stooped with pain that never goes away. Her ghosts are vengeful and they tear at everything that comes near, including her.

“Shairoven,” she says. She sounds unsurprised to see me. I incline my head; I am not sure how much respect is due to her, and again my heart says one thing while my raising says another. She is lower than a beggar, lower than a criminal, because she has committed the unforgivable sin of inhospitality to those who have, in the end, observed the proper rites and dues, and paid the owed blood price.

And what I cannot tell anyone, not even her, is that my heart tells me that she is braver than anyone I have ever met.

“Jaishevkin,” I say. With clear effort, she stands aside from the door and invites me in.

Inside is dim and cramped and smelling strongly of old rotting grass. I can barely see the chair she motions me into. Thin light seeps in through the threadbare curtains that cover her single window. She sinks down onto the cot that serves as her bed and leans over her knees. Whenever she moves I am freshly reminded of how thin she is, as though she is already one of the dried corpses in the houses of the dead, animated by the sheer magnitude of her indignation. Whereas they remain quietly and unobtrusively dead, as is right. 

“You have come to ask me to meet them,” she says. I am not astonished that she should guess this; there is really no other reason for me to be here. So I nod.

“Before, you ran away.” She has only one remaining eye but it is like a knife, cutting away pieces of me and letting them fall to the floor. I cannot move under its edge. “Every time you run away. Will you run now?”

I am not sure how to answer that. The directness, the bluntness—close to brutality. No delicacy in her approach. It has been cut and burned out of her.

“I don’t wish to run,” I say finally. My hands are turning over and over each other in my lap, as though I am washing them.

“You all run,” she says. At last she looks away from me, turning her horribly scarred face to that thin light. “They run too, even if they think they do not. They study and they write and they talk, and they congratulate themselves on their bravery, but they are still running. And they are putting it all into little boxes with clear tops, so they can look at it without feeling any pain or dirtying their hands. They don’t feel.”

She turns back to me and her single eye is blazing. “None of you feel. You have forgotten how. We remember. And we frighten you.”

I did not come here for this. I came here to ask her to accompany me back to the hotel, and to offer her payment for her time and her effort. Now I am not sure why I am here at all. I am sitting under a knife; I am drowning in a river of old blood; I am buried under the pieces of myself and I cannot breathe, and I was never even part of this, does she understand that? I bear no scars. When it happened I was not even born.

I open my mouth to say I am sorry that I disturbed you. If you will not come with me I will go now. And then I think I am running again, and I don’t wish to, and what comes out of my mouth instead is, “Why?”

Jaishevkin looks at me for a long time. I cannot read her face under the scars and this is only part of why I have never felt easy around her. But her eye is still a heated knife and I am still trapped under its edge.

And, strangely, part of me is content to be so.

“They have very many reasons, don’t they?” she says at last. The words are accusing but all the bile has gone out of her voice and now she sounds only sad and very, very tired. I think that I have never been as tired as that. But I am beginning to feel how one becomes so. “They say that it was land restrictions. They say that talks broke down. They say that it was many accumulated cultural misunderstandings.” And there again is the bile, the bite, just for a moment and gone again, like something emerging briefly from black water before sinking back out of sight. “I have heard them say that it was the delayed mental strain of encountering a new sentient species. I have heard them say that it was simple fear, that they thought that we would attack them and so they struck at us first. I have heard every reason, Shairoven. I have heard them all.”

“And which do you believe?” My voice is very soft. Suddenly I feel breathless. I am afraid. I am on the edge of a great unknown expanse. I am spreading my arms because I am just mad enough to think that I might fly.

“I believe all of them,” she says. “Or I believe that they believe them. And now I think you will ask me what I really believe.”

Jaishevkin gets slowly to her feet and makes her way over to the little window, pushing aside the ragged curtains with her remaining hand. In the brightening light of first sun the scars on her face are sharper, darker, but their jagged lines are also smoothed out into something almost beautiful.

I wait. I don’t ask.

“I don’t know why,” she says softly. “I have thought and read and argued and I do not know. There are all the reasons. And then there is what happened. And in between . . . ” She falls silent.

And I am silent. I am trying to understand this. I have taken this—the Not Knowing—for granted, because while I have asked the question I have never seriously pursued an answer. It has never until now occurred to me that perhaps there is no answer, no one answer, that any one person can find.

And now I am wondering about the questions. About the right ones.

“Will it happen again?”

Again, she does not answer at once. Her fingers move across the curtains, dancing in a vague kind of pattern—it seems strangely appropriate that the hand they left her would be entirely unmarked, graceful, lovely.

“That all depends,” she says at last, “on how we remember.”

I want to ask more, because now I am full of new questions. How we remember? How should we remember? In the human way? In our way? In the houses of the dead or in their studies and writing? In the ghosts that float in the river Laijan and dance on their banks? In the flesh of my body-sire? In that black spike stabbing always up into the sky? In the way we make it so heavy and so big with our careful silence and our smiles and bows? In the way that I fear it might crush us one day, once it is too big and too angry with being ignored?

How do we remember?

But Jaishevkin is already shaking her head. “No more questions.” She turns away from the window and she is blanketed in shadows. “I will not meet with your humans.”

Everything in me sinks in disappointment. I am confused, I am breathless with fear, and I feel as though everything is slipping away from me and whirling into a mess of color and time, but I had hoped to at least be able to fulfill the jodenja klimenji and bring my guests what they want. I was holding to the idea of it like the one solid thing I can see. “I understand, Jaishevkin,” I say. “I will—”

“You should meet them instead.”

I stare at her. I do not understand this at all. Have I not already met with them? Have I not been meeting with them every day for over a week? Have we not spoken, do they not know my name and the pertinent details of my personal history, have I not given them all the information they require?

“You should meet with them,” Jaishevkin says again. “You should meet them as you are. You should let yourself feel.”

Our farewell is mostly silent. I am so confused as I make my way back through the dirty streets that I barely see them at all and more than once I nearly make a wrong turning. That I should meet with the humans? That I should meet them? I think about everything that Jaishevkin said, about what she might have said if she had agreed to meet them after all. About their writing. About how they smile at me.

About how they remember.

And I think, My body-sire will never be whole again.

I listen to the soft padding sound of my feet against the pavement and I think about that sound multiplied a hundred-fold, a thousand-fold, as we all ran for the river. For Laijan, for life, with death following behind.

When it happened, I was not yet born. From what I know of human lifespans, neither were Aaron and Jacob. We are looking back behind us at the death that follows us wherever we go, and we have all three been told here is how you are to look at so much death so that it never catches you and here is what you are never to do. And here is how you should look at the ghosts.

And here is how you should look at each other.

They smile at me that way because they are trying very hard to not see me at all.

When I am home I am still the only one awake. I bathe myself and dress in my formal klimenjiani clothing, light and softly hued. I do not know exactly what I will say or how I will find the words to tell what I feel. I do not know what my body-sire will say when she hears of it, and I do not know if I will be allowed to remain a klimenjiani. I do not know what will happen after today. I do not know if my body-sire will ever be whole, or if I will ever be whole, or if any of us will. I do not know what Aaron and Jacob will say to me. I do not know if the death that follows us will catch us someday, or if Laijan will carry life, or if the ghosts that surround us will ever truly be seen.

But I am going to meet the humans.

First published in
We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology,
edited by Djibril al-Ayad and F�bio Fernandes, 2013.

About the Author

Sunny Moraine is a humanoid creature of average height, luminosity, and inertial mass. They’re also a doctoral candidate in sociology and a writer-like object whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, and Shimmer, among other places. Their first novel Line and Orbit, co-written with Lisa Soem, is available from Samhain Publishing. Their solo-authored novel Crowflight is coming this fall from Masque Books.

Destination: Venus

Andrew Liptak

From antiquity, Venus has been watched from afar. Often praised for beauty, its close position to Earth and its reflective atmosphere made it stand out amongst the stars. Like Mars, Venus has played into our stories, becoming a destination for many science fiction authors. Unlike Mars, however, the planet has never quite matched that of its colder, smaller sibling, and has provided a different vision for human habitation in the solar system.

The present state of Mars allows for some hope for human habitation and numerous science fiction authors have lovingly detailed the mechanics and engineering of how a human settlement might look, alongside fantastic imagery of space-suit clad colonists exploring the wonders of the Red planet as they might the American Southwest.

Habitation on Venus, on the other hand, is far more unlikely. With an atmospheric pressure over ninety times that of the Earth’s, the surface temperature hovers around a balmy 735 K (462 °C; 863 °F), enough to turn solid lead into liquid. The atmosphere is acidic and completely blocks light from the sun from reaching the surface. It is one of the most hellish locations in the solar system. But, science fiction is an optimistic genre, and even as we’ve learned about the true nature of Venus, we still visit on occasion.

Venus provides an interesting counterpoint to Mars: it’s the only planet in the Solar System named for a female goddess, who represented such themes as love, sex, fertility, and desire, due to the planet’s brilliant appearance in the sky.

According to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, depictions of Venus have been closely linked to: “Athanasius Kircher’s Itinerarium Exstaticum (1656), Emanuel Swedenborg’s The Earths in our Solar System (1758), and George Griffith’s A Honeymoon in Space (January-July 1900 Pearson’s as “Stories of Other Worlds”; exp 1901), and were influenced by the planet’s longtime association with the goddess of love.”

By the mid-to-late 1700s, astronomers were beginning to examine the planet in earnest. Venus’ atmosphere was first discovered in 1761 by Mikhail Lomonosov of Russia. Thirty years later, German astronomer Johann Schröter directly observed the planet’s atmosphere with a telescope and documented several anomalies that led him to correctly guess that the planet was home to a thick atmosphere.

While the presence of such an atmosphere hindered direct study of the planet’s surface, it provided wonderful fodder for authors: with clouds hiding the planet’s surface, anything could exist on Venus.

Depictions of the world often included oceans or vast, steamy marshes, but always habitable, something that even scientists studying the planet couldn’t definitively rule out. It wasn’t just artists imagining this possibility: scientists such as Svante Arrhenius, who is known for his research into carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect, pushed a theory that Venus was an ideal candidate for harboring life, noting that a warm, wet environment might be similar to time periods in Earth’s past. Clouds potentially meant moisture, and a complete cloud cover might mean a lot of water.

Charles Greeley Abbot, who directed the Smithsonian Observatory, believed that Venus was essentially a twin of Earth. With plenty of moisture and similar temperatures, it was likely habitable. Should there exist life forms, humanity could enter “into fluent communication by wireless with a race brought up completely separate, having their own systems of government, social usages, religions, and surrounded by vegetation and animals entirely unrelated to any here on earth. It would be a revelation far beyond the opening of Japan, or the discoveries of Egyptologists, or the adventures of travelers in the dark continent.”

Thus, the idea of a wet Venus was grounded with some scientific backing: speculation from scientists, which in turn helped to inform public opinion and perceptions of the planet. For science fiction authors, looking to write stories about plausible science, this was a crucial component.

These perceptions carried over into the science fiction magazines. Pulp authors churned out a precursor to space opera called planetary romance, stories which featured adventures on our neighboring planets. The first to really use Venus as a setting was Planet of Peril, by Adelbert Kline, published in 1929, in which a man telepathically travels to Venus and goes on a variety of adventures.

Fellow author Edgar Rice Burroughs also went to Venus with his Amtor series.

The books followed the model of his well-known Baroom novels, but took place on Venus, following the adventures of Carson Napier. Early in the first entry in the series, Pirates of Venus, published in 1934, Burroughs introduces the planet:

“Yes, and I would prefer going to Venus,” he replied. “Enveloped in clouds, its surface forever invisible to man, it presents a mystery that intrigues the imagination; but recent astronomical research suggests conditions there inimical to the support of any such life as we know on earth. It has been thought by some that, held in the grip of the Sun since the era of her pristine fluidity, she always presents the same face to him, as does the Moon to earth. If such is the case, the extreme heat of one hemisphere and the extreme cold of the other would preclude life.”

Here, he hits all of the right notes, indicating the mysterious surface (and how it stimulates the imagination!), that it supports life, and that the planet is referred to in feminine terms.

Other authors followed in Burroughs’ footsteps with planetary romance stories: Leigh Brackett and C.L. Moore, each covered the planet in their proto-space opera fiction, and incorporated these early preconceptions into their fiction. Moore’s 1934 story, “Black Thirst,” originally published in Weird Tales, depicted Venus as a planet populated with beautiful aliens:

“A long black cloak hid her, but the light fell upon her face, heart-shaped under the little three-cornered velvet cap that Venusian women wear, fell on the ripples of half-hidden bronze hair; and by that sweet triangular face and shining hair he knew her for one of the Minga maids—those beauties that from the beginning of history had been bred in the Minga stronghold for loveliness and grace, as race-horses are bred on earth, and reared from earlier infancy in the art of charming men.”

This ties in nicely with the perceptions of the planet, and its classical history: Venus, a planet revered for its beautiful appearance in the sky, passed along these virtues to its inhabitants.

Leigh Brackett, in her story, ”The Enchantress of Venus” (Planet Stories, Fall 1949), followed with her own conventions: she focused not only with the climate, “The air was heavy with moisture, tainted with the muddy fecundity of the land that brooded westward behind the eternal fog,” but also with the sense of mystery and unknown: “Even on its own world, the red Sea is hardly more than legend. It lies behind the Mountains of White Cloud, the great barrier wall that hides away half a planet. Few men have gone beyond that barrier, into the vast mystery of Inner Venus. Fewer still have come back.”

Ray Bradbury, another practitioner of the Planetary Romance subgenre, visited the planet on occasion. One notable entry is “The Long Rain,” published in Planet Stories in May 1950. Four astronauts crash-land on Venus and seek safety amidst Venus’ endless rainstorms:

“The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men’s hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.”

As scientific interest began to heat up for the planet in the 1950s, so too did our perceptions of the world begin to change.  After the initial discoveries of the planet’s atmosphere in the late 1700s, astronomers conducted little research on the planet. It wasn’t until the 1940s that researchers took another look.

There were indications that the authors were correct: in the late 1930s and early 1940s, astronomer Rupert Wildt studied the Venetian atmosphere and concluded that there was likely a runaway greenhouse effect on the planet, caused by high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Later that decade, Harry Wexler, the head of the U.S. Weather Bureau, began a study of planetary atmospheres, and helped push research that established that Venus’ atmosphere was not breathable. Further studies published in the late 1950s found that not only was the composition of the atmosphere toxic to human life, it was incredibly hot. “It was very disappointing to many people,” one of the discoverers recalled, “who were reluctant to give up the idea of a sister planet and perhaps even the possibility of life.”

Interestingly, 1953’s novel The Space Merchants was also ahead of the curve on the popular perception of Venus and its atmosphere. With their novel Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth shifted away from the imaginative vision of Venus that other authors had played with.

And the closing question of their youngest babbler (“Mommy, when I grow up kin I take my littul boys and girls to a place as nice as Venus?”) cued the switch to a highly imaginative series of shots of Venus as it would be when the child grew up—verdant valleys, crystal lakes, brilliant mountain vistas.

“The commentary did not exactly deny, and neither did it dwell on, the decades of hydroponics and life in hermetically sealed cabins that the pioneers would have to endure while working on Venus’ unbreathable atmosphere and waterless chemistry.”

Kornbluth and Pohl’s novel does two things simultaneously: one, it recognizes the popular image that science fiction itself had created: an aspirational destination for spacefaring adventurers, and a potential new home to escape from Earth’s problems.

Two, it introduces a reality check. The Space Merchants is a satirical novel, taking a number of science fiction’s tropes and inverting them. The Venus imagined by science fiction authors never existed, except in speculative stories, written either by the aforementioned authors, or by marketing agents.

The Space Merchants predicted this to some degree—it’s unclear how: if it was dumb luck, or if Pohl and Kornbluth had been paying attention to the cutting edge research that had been conducted by Wildt. Either way, theirs was one of the first that depicted Venus accurately: inhabitable.

Other stories began to pick up on the science: Arthur C. Clarke’s short story ‘Before Eden’, published in the June 1961 issue of Amazing Stories, described the planet as having a “green auroral light, filtering down through clouds that had rolled unbroken for a million years, gave the scene an underwater appearance, and the way in which all distant objects blurred into the haze added to the impression.”

By the 1960s, research on Venus was beginning to heat up, and was about to shatter our collective image of the planet. NASA’s Goldstone Observatory carried out the first radar studies on the planet, discovering that the planet rotated in the opposite direction of its orbit around the sun, and confirmed its size and axis—Venus boasted a 6,052 kilometer radius, a near match perfect for Earth’s own 6,371 radii.

During this time, the space race was beginning to heat up between the United States and the Soviet Union. While popularly seen as the race to the moon, each superpower was intent on leaving their mark on other locations around the solar system—namely, Mars and Venus.

When it came to exploration, “Venus actually made good sense,” notes Jay Gallentine in his book Ambassadors from Earth: Pioneering Explorations with Unmanned Spacecraft. “Every eighteen months the two planets are closest, and flights between them only take about one hundred and fifty days.” This made Venus a much better candidate for the earliest space probes. The first probe to be attempted was Sputnik 7, launched on February 4th, 1961. The rocket reached orbit, but failed to leave, and eventually burned up in the atmosphere.

The Soviet Union was undeterred, however: Just days later, on February 12th 1961, they successfully launched the Venera 1 probe. The probe failed just weeks before it reached Venus, and eventually passed the planet in May.

NASA had similar bad fortune with its first mission as well: Its Mariner 1 probe launched on July 22nd, 1962, and was destroyed 294.5 seconds into its launch when it began to veer off course. It was on August 27th that the first mission to Venus succeeded when Mariner swept past Venus in December, coming within 22,000 miles of the plant. It provided us with our first look at our closest planetary neighbor.

Venus, as it turned out, was a hellish world. The probe discovered that Venus was home to very high temperatures, high surface pressures, an atmosphere made up of carbon dioxide, and no magnetic field. Any thought of easy human habitation went right out the window.

The United States might have had the honor of being the first to pass by the planet, but it was the USSR who landed hardware on the planet: They launched Venera 3 in November 1965, with a mission to land on the surface. The probe’s communications system failed before it reached the planet, and it likely crash-landed. The USSR’s next probe, Venera 7 was more successful: it crashed down on December 15th, 1970 and transmitted some data back, reporting temperatures of 887 °F on the surface before it failed. More than just being the first probe to land on Venus, it was the first probe to land anywhere. Two years later, Venera 8 touched down, and sent back even more information.

NASA’s Mariner 10 followed, passing by Venus on its way to Mercury in 1974, sending back some pictures of the planet and additional information about the planet’s atmosphere and magnetic field.

Over the next couple of years, the USSR sent a battery of probes to the planet and in 1978 with varying degrees of success NASA followed with two additional probes: the Pioneer Venus Orbiter and the Pioneer Venus Multiprobe. The orbiter arrived on December 4th and sent back observations on the atmosphere and surface until 1992, while the Multiprobe launched four small probes into the atmosphere on December 9th, one of which landed on the surface.

In more recent years, NASA, the European Space Agency, and Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency launched orbiters in 1990, 2006, and 2010, respectively. Magellan orbited the planet for four years and sent back detailed images of the surface of the planet and information about its geology.

The result of all of this exploration was a completely new vision of Venus. Like the revelations that Mars was inhospitable, stories about Venus began to adapt to the new reality. While Mars can likely be inhabited by people, Venus presents much greater challenges for human habitation, and even remote exploration.

As a result, Venus has become a far less hospitable destination for science fiction authors, especially when compared to Mars. Some books do use the planet for their stories. One notable example is 2000’s Venus, by Ben Bova. In this story, the son of a space transportation company died on a mission to Venus. A massive reward is offered to anyone who can recover the remains of the man. Another son, Alex, takes his father up on the reward, traveling to the planet to recover the reward. Bova plays with the possibility of life existing on the inhospitable planet, but incorporates modern research into his story.

Another author, Kim Stanley Robinson, is known for his realistic portrayal of the solar system, and he takes a more optimistic view of the state of Venus in his 2012 novel, 2312:

“Venus’ atmosphere was now so reduced in density from its native state that it was transparent, and even though the whole planet was in the shadow of its sunshield and therefore in perpetual night, one could make out the dim white dry ice seas, and the black rock of the two continents partially blown and scraped free . . . Venus and Titan were really the best remaining candidates to join Mars as fully terraformed worlds—shirtsleeve worlds, as some called them, with free atmospheres humans could breathe.”

As with most of Robinson’s novels, he takes a technologically optimistic view of the future. Here, even the solar system’s most hellish world can be bent to the will of humanity to become a habitable world that would fulfill the earliest imaginations of the early science fiction authors.

Despite these advances in our knowledge of Venus, the image of the planet as a mysterious world persists in science fiction. S.M. Stirling’s 2006 novel The Sky People, takes an alternate universe in which the solar system of the pulp stories really existed, including a populated Venus.

This pull towards nostalgic images is due in part to the attention that the planet gets: Mars and the outer solar system have been visited often and recently by robotic probes, while Venus has had a much smaller share of visitors.

Yet, there is an allure to the romance of the image that we have of Venus. Writing in the foreword for his anthology Old Venus, Gardner Dozois notes that “There have been plenty of stories about the New Venus in the last couple of decades . . . but some of us missed the Old Venus, the Venus of so many dreams over so many years.” There’s a sense of nostalgia for the stories of old, and Venus, ever the mysterious planet underneath its perpetual cloud cover.

About the Author

Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He is the Weekend Editor of Gizmodo/io9, and has has written for such places as Armchair General Magazine, Barnes and Noble, Clarkesworld Magazine, io9, Kirkus Reviews, Lightspeed Magazine, Tor.com and others. His fiction has appeared at Galaxy’s Edge Magazine, and he is the editor of War Stories: New Military Science Fiction.

Transcendent Transformation:
A Conversation with James Gunn

Chris Urie

Science fiction has always been a way to shrug off the shackles of our terrestrial imaginations and expand our minds out beyond the stars. Out there in the swirling heavens, the possibilities for life and the answers to its mysteries are endless. James Gunn’s newest novel explores the outer reaches of the galaxy while asking some questions that hit a bit closer to home.

Transgalactic is the sequel to Gunn’s 2013 novel Transcendental and the second in a trilogy that will culminate with Transformation. In Transcendental, we’re introduced to Riley, a roguish veteran with a mysterious AI implanted in his head, as he joins a group of alien pilgrims on their way to the Transcendental Machine. No creature is what they seem and everyone is hiding their true intentions, maybe even Asha, another human that joins him on his journey. Transgalactic picks up exactly where the previous book leaves off. This time though, Riley and Asha are surprised to find themselves light years away from each other with no way reconnect. After the mysteries and intrigue of the first novel, Transgalactic delivers a more intimate portrait of Asha and Riley as they traverse the vast nothingness between them and uncover more about the Transcendental Machine.

James Gunn is the author of numerous novels and non-fiction. He has won a Locus, Hugo, Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award, and has been inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. His newest novel Transgalactic was released from Tor Books this past March.

The universe in Transcendental and Transgalactic is one filled with history and ruins. What is it about a lived-in universe that appeals to you?

What I try to do in all my stories and novels is deal with situations as we would experience them if we were there (beginning as early as my first story, “Paradox” and my first novel This Fortress World). The Transcendental universe ought to be as real to its readers as the world they live in, and that means it has history and ruins and people’s lives and their individual histories. 

In these books, you’ve created a diverse array of alien cultures complete with histories, customs, and philosophies. While completely foreign, they somehow remain relatable to human readers. How do you develop a culture like this? Is there a kernel of human culture in each of these?

As an author, I begin with my own experiences and the various human cultures we all are heir to (what else do we have?) and build from there. With the imagination that humans are gifted with, they can then alter elements (appearance, circumstance, cultural history, evolutionary history, genetics, personal experiences) one by one and examine what changes these might bring to the species involved. In addition, there are certain influences that are common to all sapient species—all of those listed above—plus the universe of evidence and laws we share, particularly the laws of evolution. And since the Transcendental trilogy’s central theme is evolution, this common experience makes us all siblings.

How do you determine alien biology? Do you create the planet first or its people?

Sometimes the people, sometimes the planet, but mostly the planet, since the central belief system of the trilogy (and, it is my conviction, science fiction is essentially Darwinian in evaluating the human species as a product of its environmental history). But if it’s the alien first, then the challenge is to imagine the environment that would have produced a species such as this.

What are some difficult aspects of writing from the perspective of an alien species?

The most difficult part is shedding human assumptions, beginning with that Darwinian perspective I mentioned above—that is, realizing that nothing about human existence or history or qualities is inevitable or unquestionable. They all are a product of our evolutionary development, and they could have happened otherwise. It is in the “otherwise” that the science-fiction imagination operates.

Transcendental occasionally feels like a locked-room mystery novel where each character has a secret agenda. Was there one mystery writer that most influenced you in this aspect?

The Transcendental trilogy is a mélange of influences to which I have paid tribute in various large and small ways, as my way of crediting my predecessors and building on their accomplishments. I never thought of mystery novelists, although I was a great fan of detective novels in my younger days (of all kinds, including the British whodoneits and the American hard-boiled mysteries, but mostly the latter, beginning with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler) but they must have contributed.

In Transgalactic, you expand the already far-reaching universe and refocus the style of the novel by incorporating multiple viewpoints. Why make this choice to broaden your cast of perspective characters?

Each novel has its own dynamics. In Transcendental, because it was a mystery unfolding as well as a quest, it made sense to tell it from the viewpoint of my flawed hero Riley and discover the facts as he uncovers them (with multiple viewpoints the tension lessens). In Transgalactic, Asha and Riley have to find each other, and their mutual search requires alternating viewpoints and styles appropriate to each and to the aliens they encounter. In Transformation readers will encounter still other changes in viewpoint and styles as the challenge changes.

The end of Transgalactic left me on edge, waiting for the next book. Can you give us a little teaser of what we can expect in final installment of the trilogy?

I didn’t know how the trilogy would end when I began work a decade ago, or rather the concept changed as the earlier books unfolded. But it all makes sense of everything that has gone before. I can reveal that while the structure of Transcendental was based on the Canterbury Tales and the structure of Transgalactic on the Odyssey, Transformation uses the Argonauts as its structural model. And one more thing: readers want answers, but they should remember that science fiction is best with questions.

You mentioned that you began working on this trilogy a decade ago. Do you feel these books needed a bit of time to mature or evolve?

The first one, Transcendental, took longer because I had to develop the story universe and the narrative structure, and I was trying to market the concept on the basis of the first and last chapters and a proposal. And I was taking more time with each chapter as I felt my way along. The last two built on that and took about six months each, helped along by the fact that I had contracts before I started them and knew where I was going and what would happen when I got there.

You mentioned that science fiction is best with questions. What are a couple of your favorite questions that science fiction has asked? Who asked them?

I like the questions that ask us to consider who we are and what makes us who we are and how we can know either one. Sometimes that results in solipsism like Robert Heinlein’s “They” or most of Philip K. Dick. The ending of my novel The Joy Makers has a question at the end like that. But some of it questions the nature and quality of our humanity, like the works of Theodore Sturgeon. And some of it asks if the answer to all our problems isn’t thinking clearly and behaving rationally like the works of Isaac Asimov.

Ted Sturgeon once said that we could categorize writers by the statement that the world would be better “if only . . . . ” With Heinlein that might be “if only the incompetent people would get out of the way and let the competent among us save the world.” With Ted it might be “if only we really loved each other.” With Isaac, “if only we could think clearly and behave rationally.” I hope that the Transcendental trilogy is a contribution to Isaac’s “if only.”

What does your writing process look like? Do you keep notebooks filled with characters or bits of scenes? Do you have any rituals, such as using a favorite pen?

I try to avoid rituals and advised my writing students that they shouldn’t require special circumstances to do their writing. I used to write with my office door open to discipline myself in that way. Nevertheless, people develop certain ways of doing things that enhance production. I do a lot of research and print off documents, mostly from the internet, that provide information that I think I will need to refer to. I don’t do character sketches, because I think I know my characters well enough without that, but I give them back stories, as is evident in Transcendental.

With these novels I tried to enhance my productivity and avoid moments when I didn’t know what was going to happen next by writing a page of description about what would happen in each chapter before I started each one, a paragraph for each scene, so that I didn’t have to stop to invent anything during the writing itself, and I set a goal of writing a thousand words a day, a chapter a week.

Do you have a particular dislike of arachnids, or do you think that they simply make for great looking alien baddies?

I’m not quite sure why I settled on arachnids (or arachnoids, for they only resemble overgrown spiders), but I wanted creatures that were voracious, hard to stop, unemotional, and unromantic (not like animal predators).

Do you have a favorite alien that you’ve created in this trilogy? One that you would most like to share a coffee with?

I like Tordor, the pachyderm-like alien from Dor, and resurrected him for the final volume, Transformation. Though he might have difficulty drinking a cup of coffee, at least in the normal fashion.

Having chronicled the history and evolution of sci-fi in your series The Road To Science Fiction, where do you think the genre is heading?

I recently added a 14th chapter to my illustrated history of science fiction, Alternate Worlds, in the hope of getting some ambitious publisher to bring out a new, updated edition, and in that chapter I built on the conclusion I reached in the 1975 first edition; that science fiction and the mainstream would grow closer together until in the middle they became indistinguishable, and that is the way it has turned out.

The limitations on publication and readership that SF grew up with have been outgrown, but at the same time some of the revolutionary qualities that distinguished it have faded and a great deal of what is published today is better written but less inspiring, and perhaps less hopeful (Paul Di Filippo in his review of Transgalactic in Locus Online comments that it runs counter to the dystopian vision that is currently in vogue). But I also wrote in 1975 that a genre that is recognizably science fiction would remain distinguishable from the rest, and that has happened, too.

What was marvelous and remarkable about SF over its early history is that it was revolutionized about every twelve years as an editor and a magazine(s) came along that transformed the genre, from Hugo Gernsback to John Campbell to Boucher and McComas and Horace Gold to Michael Moorcock. But the magazines have lost their influence and books don’t create revolutions as easily, though Neuromancer and cyberpunk tried. What I continue to look for (and maybe secretly hope for) is a new revolution. That’s what SF is best at.

About the Author

Chris Urie is a writer and editor from Ocean City, NJ. He has written and published everything from city food guide articles to critical essays on video game level design. He currently lives in Philadelphia with an ever expanding collection of books and a small black rabbit that has an attitude problem.

Another Word:
Strange Stars

Jason Heller

Science fiction and fantasy took up residence in me at an early age, and so did music. I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, when pop culture had yet to divide itself into the billion tiny boxes you see today. It was a free-for-all, a game of mix-and-match, or at least it felt that way to me at the time. Being from a disadvantaged family, I didn’t have full access to all the pop culture I craved; my family couldn’t afford cable TV or a VCR or big collections of media. But I did possess two of the most potent resources a poor kid in the ’70s and ’80s could have: the public library and the radio.

It was a time when SFF and music were locked in a passionate embrace. I’d go to the small library in Port Charlotte, Florida, at least twice a week, where I’d load up my backpack with books culled from the science fiction section. (Now as then, “science fiction” was often shorthand for science fiction plus fantasy plus horror plus any other mode of storytelling that tested the membrane of reality.) Once home with my latest haul, I’d go to my room, crack open those crinkly, laminated hardcovers, and click on the thrift-store clock radio that sufficed as my stereo.

We’re talking 1983 or thereabouts. Music oozed out of the books. Science fiction seeped out of the radio. Amid all the authors whose worlds I tumbled into at the time—Frank Herbert, Fred Saberhagen, Roger Zelazny, Gordon R. Dickson, David Eddings, to name just a few—I discovered books that featured music as a main component.

In Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonsong, a teenage girl refuses to let her love of music be muffled by the close-minded society in which she lives. In John Varley’s Gaea Trilogy (Titan, Wizard, and Demon), a centaur-like race of aliens called Titanides speak a music-based language, use musical modes (Aeolian, Phrygian, Mixyloydian, etc.) as their middle names, and call their families “chords.” And in Alan Dean Foster’s Spellsinger, a young, aimless guitarist must harness the magic in his music to save the fantastical world in which he’s found himself.

Although the lighthearted Spellsinger wasn’t the deepest book I was reading at the time, it hit closest to home. Its hero, Jonathan Thomas Meriweather (or Jon-Tom for short), doesn’t hale from some far-off world or time. He’s a rock musician, from here and now—or rather, from there and then—the kind of post-hippie drifter that made up my mom’s social circle in the ’70s and ’80s. To summon magic, he’d whip out his magical ax, a guitar-like instrument called a duar, and shred some Hendrix riffs.

To me, rock music was a potent complement to magic. The mythology of rock took up prime real estate in my psyche, right next to Zelazny’s Amber or Herbert’s Arrakis. In the early ’80s, David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” resurrected his doomed astronaut Major Tom, the main character from his 1969 song “Space Oddity”—a song that was still very much in rotation on the radio when I was a kid. In 1983, a different artist, Peter Schilling, put a synth-pop spin on Bowie’s mythos was with his hit single “Major Tom,” which was basically fanfic in song form—the sleekest, slickest filk yet devised. From Styx’s “Mr. Roboto” to Gary Numan’s “Cars” to Devo’s “Whip It,” my clunky little one-speaker clock radio became a wormhole that opened up into the future.

Or what I imagined the future might look like, far away from the drab, muggy doldrums of southern Florida.

That sense of convergence between SFF and music has never left me. As I got older and became absorbed by the work of Michael Moorcock, I learned of his intimate involvement with the groups Blue Öyster Cult and Hawkwind, to the point where he actually wrote lyrics for them (as did John Shirley, in the case of BÖC). Parliament-Funkadelic’s music transfixed me with its hallucinatory, Afrofuturist spectacle.

Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks reimagined the Minneapolis music scene as a place where supernatural battles take place on the stages of rock concerts, pioneering urban fantasy in the process. Iron Maiden infused their operatic heavy metal with soaring fantasy, speculation, and myth.

And throughout her many novels and short stories, Elizabeth Hand fabricates bands of all genres and scatters them, creating a gradually unfolding alternate history of popular music. The list goes on and on. A conversation was being had between SFF and music, one that stretches back decades. The more I eavesdropped on it, the more I wanted to participate.

If you’ve read Clarkesworld lately, you may have noticed that I’ve been obsessing a bit about the crossover between music and SFF. Over the past year I’ve written essays on Hawkwind, on Poly Styrene of the punk band X-Ray Spex, and on Marc Bolan of the legendary glam act T. Rex—all of which focus on those artists’ visions of SFF, as heard in their music—not to mention an extensive piece about the late David Bowie and his love of SFF that I wrote for Pitchfork. That’s only the tip of the iceberg; there are dozens, hundreds, of musicians and bands to be written about, each with a unique connection to SFF.

From where I stand as both a music journalist and an author/reviewer of SFF, we’re in a bit of a golden age of SFF music, second only to that ’70s/’80s heyday. Recording artists of all genres such as Janelle Monáe, Vernian Process, Grimes, Pictureplane, Bal-Sagoth, and Blind Guardian are keeping the flame alive by deftly weaving SFF into their music, and they’re not alone.

In 2013, David Bowie was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, the first musician to be granted that honor. It had been 44 years since the release of “Space Oddity,” which crystallized the alchemy between science fiction and popular music. A few weeks after Bowie’s death earlier this year, Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane died; his 1970 solo record Blows Against the Empire, a science fiction concept album partly inspired by Robert A. Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children (with Heinlein’s blessing), became the first and only rock album nominated for a Hugo Award in the Best Dramatic Presentation category.

The recognition of SFF music still has a long way to go—but thankfully, recognition isn’t what fuels most of the writers and musicians who continue to carve out the liminal space between SFF and music. Or those of us who grew up with their nose in fantasy novels and their ears glued to science fiction songs on the radio. Pop culture gave us rock stars; SFF gave us strange stars.

About the Author

Jason Heller is a former nonfiction editor of Clarkesworld; as part of the magazine’s 2012 editorial team, he received a Hugo Award. He is also the author of the alt-history novel Taft 2012 (Quirk Books) and a Senior Writer for The Onion’s pop-culture site, The A.V. Club. His short fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine, Sybil’s Garage, Farrago’s Wainscot, and others, and his SFF-related reviews and essays have been published in Weird Tales, Entertainment Weekly NPR.org, Tor.com, and Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Time Traveler’s Almanac (Tor Books). He lives in Denver with this wife Angie.

Editor’s Desk:
Stress Relief

Neil Clarke

One of the things I do to get some downtime is play video games and for almost two years I have spent a lot of time playing Bungie’s Destiny on the Xbox One with Sean and Kate. The game’s latest update came out last month and it was particularly well-timed. We’ve spent a lot of hours trying out the new features and fighting our way towards higher light levels. As we battle aliens, rescue Russian AIs, and run over one another with sparrows—they are like the speeder bikes in Return of the Jedi—we often talk about Clarkesworld stuff. Even when I’m trying to relax, this place comes with me . . . that’s not a complaint, though!

We’ve had all sorts of things to talk about last month:

2015 BSFA Award for Best Short Story went to “Three Cups of Grief, By Starlight” by Aliette de Bodard (Clarkesworld #100, January 2015)

The 2015 Theodore A. Sturgeon Memorial Award Finalists were announced and included, “The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill” by Kelly Robson (Clarkesworld #101, February 2015)

The Nebula Award Weekend is this month—Kate and I will be there—and three Clarkesworld stories are in the running for Best Short Story: “Cat Pictures Please” by Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld #100, January 2015), “When Your Child Strays From God” by Sam J. Miller (Clarkesworld #106, July 2015), “Today I Am Paul” by Martin L. Shoemaker (Clarkesworld #107, August 2015)

Disney: pro, con, or cruise?

How a Destiny anthology is becoming a mini dream project

And my stressing out over editing the Nebula Award issue of The SFWA Bulletin.

We also spent a lot of time talking about the Hugo Awards. That said, I have no desire to fuel the fires of controversy that once again swirl around the process and some of the nominees. I’ve seen more than enough to last me. However I do want to say that I’m thrilled to be a finalist for Best Editor Short Form for the fourth time. It means a lot to me that I accomplished this without the real or imagined assistance of a special list or slate. It leaves me with no doubt that my readers put me on this ballot for nothing more than the work I’ve done here and at Forever Magazine. And for that, and your nomination, I thank you. I am proud to represent the stories we published last year.

A special thank you also goes to Bungie for providing me with a valuable stress-relieving tool. It’s been particularly handy this month, as perhaps my kill volume and 335 light level can readily attest to.

So, do any of you play?

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Forever Magazine, and Upgraded; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a four-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). The innagural edition of his Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology series will be published by Night Shade Books this June. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Cover Art:
Ananiel, Angel of Storms

Peter Mohrbacher

About the Artist

Peter Mohrbacher is an independent illustrator and concept artist living in the Chicago area.