Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 84

Table of Contents

Mar Pacifico

by Greg Mellor

The Promise of Space

by James Patrick Kelly

One Flesh

by Mark Bourne and Elizabeth Bourne

Out of Copyright

by Charles Sheffield

First Principle

by Nancy Kress

Aliens, Robots, Spaceships and . . . Popsicles? SF on American Radio, Then and Now

by Mark Cole

Organic Synthesis: A Conversation with Ken Liu

by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Another Word: I am an Endangered Species

by Alethea Kontis

Editor's Desk: Post-Apocalyptic Publishing

by Neil Clarke

Silent Oracle

Art by Matt Dixon

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2013

www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

Mar Pacifico

Greg Mellor

A pale dawn spread across the Pacific as my dead mother emerged from the waves.

The bloom of algeron must have crept closer to shore during the night, and now it shimmered in the sickly morning light all the way out to the horizon. The thing that had once loved me rose out of the bloom, slowly at first, like a column of black mercury. Then features emerged: a head, limbs and torso with skirts of algeron hanging like seaweed down to the foamy water at its feet. Finally the body shape that I knew so well came into being—a nightmarish simulacrum, but taller than her in real life, struggling one step at a time until it found land.

Its confidence seemed to grow when it saw Kelly with her back turned, playing with pieces of driftwood on the sand. It staggered up the beach and reached out awkwardly with impossibly long arms.

“Kelly!”

I had only turned away for a few seconds—like all the mothers down the ages—but now I was sprinting towards her, sand flicking up behind me.

Ripples spread for kilometers across the bloom and whispers lingered in the drafts of briny air—voices from something cavernous and deep. They rose in pitch and tone, unifying into a bleak chorus that threatened to overwhelm the sound of the ocean.

Kelly smiled as I approached, and smiled at the simulacrum. I reached out to Kelly, keeping my distance from the thing now watching my every move. “Time to go, honey.”

I could see Kelly was more curious than shocked as this wasn’t the first time we had seen forms flow out of the algeron. She confronted me with inevitable, innocent logic. “But it’s Grandma.”

I couldn’t bring myself to look into its eyes for fear I might see what Kelly saw. “I know, but we have to go. The bloom is getting bigger and I told you not to go out today.”

“But she called me.” Kelly stretched out her hand to the simulacrum. “They’re all calling me.”

“Stop.” I grabbed Kelly by the elbow. “Time to go, young lady.”

The chorus intensified—a susurrus of lost souls. A crude smile began to form on the simulacrum’s lips. Platelets of algeron shifted across its skin, turning its face into a pin-cushion mask of concentration. Its mouth moved, forming a single word: “Erin.”

I gritted my teeth and finally looked into its . . . into Mum’s eyes. The dark orbs reflected sky and sand, Kelly and I standing there, rag-tag and anorexic. Details became visible in the black juncture of its wrist, the tendons on the back of its hand, the long fingers ending in delicate nails—a mother’s hand that had once been caring yet firm.

We look for things in others we value most in ourselves. It was Mum, in a forgotten time when the world had color and nuance.

“I miss you, Mum,” I said, now feeling compelled to reach out to her. But as I did I realized there were details missing: the edges of her hands were crude and sharp so that the fingers looked like talons.

I shivered.

The talons came closer.

I snatched up a long piece of driftwood and clubbed the simulacrum on the jaw.

It froze; an obsidian statue with surprise etched on its imprecise face. The algeron’s chorus grew quiet against the ever present sound of the Pacific. Cracks spread across its face and then its features melted until it was a blank column collapsing under its own weight and slithering back into the bloom.

Kelly sobbed then swung wildly at me until I scooped her up and hugged her close.

“It’s okay, Kelly. We’ll be okay.”

More lies to sustain us.

Kelly whimpered in the crook of my neck as I carried her back to the ruins on the promontory. She craned her neck to look back over my shoulder, seemingly mesmerized by the sight of the bloom receding out to sea.

The skies were leaden the next morning.

Kelly sat on the dead grass in front of the building—once someone’s home, now an empty brick ruin like all the others on the Tathra headland. She was playing with her shell collection. She had been a skinny child anyway, but now I fretted as her bones and ribs protruded. I must have looked the same to her, for there were nights when we huddled in the ruins and her hands would trace my sunken cheeks and worry would fill her eyes. Soon to be replaced by innocent resilience and hushed words of reassurance that should never have come from a six year old, but I would accept them anyway and the strength they provided to face another day.

By mid-morning, bands of sunlight forced their way through the cloud, turning the Pacific into a patchwork of reflections that filled my heart with sadness. Once families had played along Tathra beach, sun-browned surfers had tried their skills on the modest waves, and a warm breeze had tugged my blouse and whisked sand around my feet. It felt like the blink of an eye against the history of an ocean that contained much of the world’s mystery. Ferdinand Magellan, on confronting the vast expanse of water for the first time, had named it mar pacifico—peaceful sea.

There were some days I still believed it, but today wasn’t one of them. I looked out to the horizon. The black line of algeron was still there, waiting. It had left a stain on the sand that ran the entire length of the bay. A small circular blotch marked the spot where the simulacrum had stood.

I wondered how long it would take for her to return.

I knelt down and picked up a fan-shaped shell from Kelly’s collection as she hummed to herself. It was covered in ridges and striations—the discarded home of some tiny creature, washed up over centuries—one and a billion others like it eroded by endless cycles of water and sun.

Then I caught a glimpse of something black in Kelly’s hand.

“What’s that?”

Kelly clamped her fingers around the object.

“Kelly. We don’t keep secrets.”

“It’s mine.”

I held out my hand. “Give it here.”

“Mine.”

“Kelly.”

Kelly reluctantly placed the inert algeron shell in my palm. It was sand-paper grainy, an imperfect replica. I’d seen something like it in a museum, a Paleozoic ammonite fossilized into shining pyrite—the minerals had slowly replaced the original shell over unimaginable spans of time.

And I had seen it happen in the space of heartbeats that day not so long ago when the world changed, Mum prone on the sand as the algeron nanotech crept up her legs, transmuting flesh. She had been trying to save the dolphins washed up on the beach. Their screams still haunted me when I was able to dream, but not as much as Mum’s mute agony.

Now the algeron seemed to call me again. Perhaps it would always be there, more terrifying yet different than before—for now it contained the lament of eight billion souls. A wave of euphoria had swept the world when the algeron was created to bring the carbon cycles back into balance and enhance the power of the oceans to absorb more carbon from the polluted air. But the nanotech quickly evolved, overrunning its safeguards with mutating algorithms, and in the space of several months—with a stunned world helpless and watching—it had washed inland over the continents, absorbing just about every living thing on the planet.

I doubted that I would ever hear the untainted sound of the Pacific again. The ocean had given me comfort all my life, a sense of permanency that used to fill me with hope. But now all I could do was listen for hope in the songs of the dead. And the more I listened the more I could hear a strange cadence emerge from the algeron that hinted at plans and far reaching intentions. And somehow Kelly and I had a role to play—for why else would it bide it’s time when it could just as easily sweep the world for stragglers?

Then I shook my head, furious at being lulled into a survivor’s crude delusion that everything would be right again. Who was I kidding? I wiped the tears from my cheeks and hurled the replica shell out over the cliff edge.

Kelly got up and stormed inside the ruins. “I hate you.”

“Pack your bag,” I shouted. “We’re going inland. We need to find more food.”

And it’s no use waiting here, waiting for death in the house of the dead.

We made our way through old Tathra town where you could once buy fish and chips and relax with a beer in sleepy places. The wrecks of old cars glinted in the occasional thrust of sunlight, which made me wonder why the algeron could not absorb non-living things. It had washed over every car, building, fence and street sign leaving most things smeared with a residue of fine black powder. Maybe it was just attracted to the living carbon that was everywhere in our proteins and nucleic acids—the foundation of life.

With water bottles and rations in our backpacks, I led the way inland along the broken tarmac up towards Brown Mountain. Kelly followed, obedient and silent. The days were hot and the stench of rotting vegetation was still pungent—rain forests took a long time to die, and now the trees were ash-colored silhouettes.

We stopped every now and then to search the husks of vehicles, found some preserved food tins but all else had perished or been consumed. On the second day we left the highway and on the third and fourth nights, Kelly woke up screaming, but the sound was quickly muffled by the oppressive silence.

“Is Grandma dead?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Will she come back?”

“I don’t know. Go back to sleep.”

In the mornings Kelly was forgetful as she chewed on rations and exchanged vacant glances with me.

On the sixth day I was afraid she would never speak again until we found a ravine where water still ran and the foliage was still touched with color.

“Look, Mum.”

The words were as startling as the sight of spongy green moss around a small pool at the base of the ravine. I frowned, insulted by the strange palette invading our monochrome world. Crying now, wondering what a bleak thing I had become.

Kelly turned and sat on the ground.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart.” I reached down to comfort her then paused as an inky stain spread through the pool. High above the ravine where the dead rainforest clung to the slopes, the last runoff was black with tendrils of algeron.

I quickly filled the plastic bottles from the clear water at the edges of the pool then swept Kelly up and was about to turn away when I noticed the algeron trickling down an exposed rock wall. There was a deep history there in each weathered layer. Life and time and wind and rain had wrapped the world in hard veils, shrouding the past for all but the tenacious and providing a foundation for the future. The algeron spread down, almost deliberately, pausing at every evolutionary nook and cranny on the way. It flowed as if cautious, as if exploring. For the first time I saw different hues in the black, hints of purple and gray, pin-point flashes of yellow and orange. It looked like a dark hand blotched with years of experience caressing the lost layers of the earth, curious, respectful.

I turned away as the pool transmuted to black and tiny fingers of algeron stretched towards us. Scrambling back down the path now, Kelly bouncing in my arms. A sense of fear and wonder as I ran: had any human being in all the history of the world ever paused at this place and touched the rock in the same way as the algeron?

My energy levels plummeted during the long days as I carried Kelly back to the promontory. The bloom was in with the tide when we arrived, a terrible slick in the dwindling light. Something tired and perverse inside me felt good to be home.

Kelly started pulling her shells out of her backpack.

“Don’t unpack those, Kelly. It’s time for bed. We’ll go to Kianinny in the morning. You can play in the boats.”

I expected some retort, but Kelly put the shells away quietly and found the old mattress in the shadows of the ruin and was soon asleep.

I stayed outside and watched for signs of change in the algeron, but I couldn’t see anything in the twilight and there was no way of seeing much at all beneath such heavy eyelids.

Waking to darkness, the rush of blood loud in my ears and something more—the frantic sound of the algeron across the bay. I shivered at the thought that it was mimicking the painful pounding of my heart. Rubbing knuckles against sunken eyes didn’t improve things. Voices carried from the ruins and I got up from where I had fallen asleep on the grass.

Kelly was standing in the shadow of the doorway talking to the flowing black figure of Grandma, an umbilical of algeron trailing from its long skirts out over the edge of the headland. They were playing a game, Kelly laughing and puffing her small chest in and out in exaggerated breaths. Then the simulacrum copied the move, breathing out a rush of air that sounded more like a whinny.

Kelly giggled.

I approached cautiously. “Step away, Kelly.”

The simulacrum whipped its head around. I had seen that look a thousand times as a child, but I stood defiant—some things never changed. Even in such poor light I could see patches emerging across its body like radiant flecks in opal.

I took a step forward, fists raised. “Leave us alone.”

Kelly peered beneath the algeron that trailed from the simulacrum’s arm like an antique sleeve. “Mum, Mum. Guess what? Grandma says that the world used to breathe the way we breathe.”

“Did she now?” I couldn’t stop the vitriol in my voice.

Kelly puffed out her shrunken cheeks. “Breathe in for summer, breathe out for winter. That’s how the air worked with the trees and the water. The Earth was like a big round body.”

I turned to the simulacrum. “Stay away from us.” I waved my arm back to the ocean. “All of you. Just leave us alone.”

To my surprise, the simulacrum suddenly collapsed and swept away back along the umbilical until it disappeared over the cliff edge.

Kelly screeched once but seemed to have little energy for any other protest.

We didn’t sleep for the rest of the night, and I think we were both wondering how many times we would have to go through this same ritual. Kelly eventually cradled in my arms as I leant against the ruins and a brooding silence descended over the ocean.

Kianinny Bay was once a rocky, sheltered cove just south of Tathra headland, circled overhead by white gulls and surrounded by the native flora extending into the expanse of the Bournda National Park. An old concrete ramp used to provide a perfect spot for launching boats captained by Sunday fishermen keen to escape the bustle when the world allowed such indulgences.

Now the cove was littered with boats tilted at angles and rusting SUVs sat on flat tires. There were no gulls. The trees lay like decayed matchsticks and the rocks were powdered with granules of inert algeron.

We held hands as we walked down the cracked bitumen, the panorama of the cove spreading out before us, the bloom somehow flattening the water so that no waves came to shore. It was like watching one of those old silent movies in three-d.

Kelly looked up at me and made a cranky face. “I think Grandma is angry.”

I was so lost in fatigue I couldn’t even raise a half-smile at the grim humor of it all.

She let go of my hand and ran down to the boat at the top of the launch ramp. It was a small, tin thing with a seized up outboard motor. She climbed aboard and stretched up to peer over the steering wheel. “What were pirates like?”

“I don’t know, sweetheart. What else did Grandma say?”

Kelly grabbed the wheel and tried to turn it. Then she blew air through her lips and made engine noises. “Ahoy!”

“What did she say?”

Kelly ran her hands over the wheel. “They are going to fix the Earth.”

I fell to my knees, recalling the purpose in the algeron’s song. I’d tried so hard to deny it, thinking that it was just my stubbornness and refusal to accept what I had known all along.

Some things were inevitable.

Kelly frowned. “Mum, do you think it can copy us? It copied Grandma; it copied lots of people and the animals. Why won’t you let it copy us?”

I was thunderstruck that Kelly had become so accepting. Then my stomach growled, reminding me that I had forgotten the last time I ate anything or did anything that really mattered. What the hell did anything matter now? The carbon cycles were broken, the air was stale, and the oceans were clogged. How could it possibly repair all that? Natural evolution was blind, and not even humanity had been able to turn around its own fatal evolutionary curve within the biosphere. So how could something as crude and technological as the algeron think it could achieve it?

I recalled that place by the pool: layers of rock, life evolving over eons, intent upon leaving a legacy . . . maybe I had misread the algeron’s intentions.

Maybe something else was happening.

Something that defied all reason.

My tired limbs wrenched into action and I stood up on shaky legs and stepped up to the boat. “Stay inside, honey.”

Kelly hesitated. “Where are we going?”

I pushed the boat hard until it began to slide down the launch ramp.

With no power and no tide, the boat rocked dangerously in the water as the algeron propelled it along, leaving a strange luminescent wake.

Kelly had kept hold of the wheel all this time and pointed ahead, shouting at the top of her lungs. I couldn’t hear because the algeron had resumed its roar so I looked instead to where Kelly was pointing and saw stray sunlight filtering across the bloom. The algeron was indeed changing, and now there were strange rainbow refractions across its surface.

The boat slowed and came to rest, bobbing gently on preternatural currents. A familiar hand reached out from the bloom. There was more detail this time, skin tones filtering through the black. I sensed the enormous effort required as the algeron strived to bring more texture and shape to Elizabeth Hendrie, mother of Erin, grandmother of Kelly.

I reached out and grabbed Mum’s hand as the face and body rose up, more lifelike than ever, blue eyes emerging, the reds of her favorite skirt that I used to hide behind.

An electrical current jolted through me as the algeron flowed into my veins. I had thought about this moment so much, expecting nothing but terror as I gave up all resistance and let it consume my living cells. But perhaps I had mistaken Mum’s pain for awe as the algeron now flowed up my shoulders and neck and something impossibly wide flowered into my mind. It was like standing in a subterranean cavern that had never been touched by light or sound. At first it felt dreamlike, but as the hollow spaces filled with texture, blossoming networks and connections blossomed like the overlapping opal flecks I had seen earlier, but magnified beyond perception across a canvas that seemed to stretch out forever. It was the collective of humanity, and much of the world’s flora and fauna, copied into the nanotech host.

Mum opened her mouth, but I reached out and touched a finger to her lips.

“It’s okay.” I whispered. “You are sorry. I understand.”

Mum nodded and held my hand against her soft cheek.

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes as the collective mind reached out. It was in its nature to scan and replicate, but there was something different going on now, an urgent need to connect and unify. There were new forces at play—the remnants of humanity emblazoned into a crude collective consciousness.

Now I knew what Magellan and all the explorers felt like when faced with overwhelming frontiers. The nascent ocean mind opened up fully in all directions, west and east, nadir and zenith. I reached out with my own mind and touched the myriad souls out there in all their tones and subtleties—they were still capable of human desire and still full of human frailty. Blended with the algeron, they were beginning to connect and evolve into something wondrous.

I opened my eyes and saw Kelly watching me intently.

“Can we fix the Earth?”

“I’m not sure, honey.”

“Maybe we don’t need the sky and the water anymore.” Her shoulders lifted a little. “Maybe we can make our own now.”

“Maybe.”

I pictured the world as it once was, a lacing together of saline ocean and loamy ground and oxygen sky. Perhaps we didn’t need those things anymore. Maybe Kelly was right and the algeron would evolve new layers over the Earth, connecting generations of living things and human souls in the ocean memory—something that could learn from the past and rise above blind evolution, something that was more self-guided as the world aged.

Kelly slipped her hand into mine, reassuring as ever, and then she reached out and took hold of her Grandma’s hand. The three of us swayed in tune to the motion of the bloom beneath the boat as the algeron flowed between us. My last breath exhaled from tired lungs as the algeron worked through my body.

There was a single stab of pain as I was reborn into light and sound and color. Kelly was there on the other side, laughing; Mum, crying; a new world, waiting. For the first time in a long time I smiled. I wondered if the collective dreams could ever really come to fruition, but I knew it wouldn’t be through lack of trying, and that fact alone filled me with peace.

About the Author

Greg Mellor is an Australian author with 50 published short stories. “Mar Pacifico” is his second story to appear in Clarkesworld Magazine. He is also a regular contributor to Cosmos Magazine and Aurealis as well as independent press anthologies in Australia and the United States. Wild Chrome, his debut collection introduced by Damien Broderick, was published in October 2012,

Greg holds degrees in astrophysics and technology management. He is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).

The Promise of Space

James Patrick Kelly

Capture 06/15/2051, Kerwin Hospital ICU, 09:12:32

. . . and my writer pals used to tease that I married Captain Kirk.

A clarification, please? Are you referring to William Shatner, who died in 2023? Or is this Chris Pine, who was cast in the early remakes? It appears he has retired. Perhaps you mean the new one? Jools Bear?

No, you. Kirk Anderson. People used to call you that, remember? First man to set foot on Phobos? Pilot on the Mars landing team? Captain Kirk.

I do not understand. Clearly I participated in those missions since they are on the record. But I was never captain of anything.

A joke, Andy. They were teasing you. It’s why you hated your first name.

Noted. Go on.

No, this is impossible. I feel like I’m talking to an intelligent fucking database, not my husband. I don’t know where to begin with you.

Please, Zoe. I cannot do this without you. Go on.

Okay, okay, but do me a favor? Use some contractions, will you? Contractions are your friends.

Noted.

Do you know when we met?

I haven’t yet had the chance to review that capture. We were married in 2043. Presumably we met before that?

Not much before. Where were you on Saturday, May 17, 2042? Check your captures.

The capture shows that I flew from Spaceways headquarters at Spaceport America to the LaGuardia Hub in New York and spent the day in Manhattan at the Metropolitan Museum. That night I gave the keynote address at the Nebula Awards banquet in the Crown Plaza Hotel but my caps were disengaged. The Nebula is awarded each year by the World Science Fiction Writers . . . .

I was nominated that year for best livebook, Shadows on the Sun. You came up to me at the reception, said you were a fan. That you had all five of my Sidewise series in your earstone when you launched for Mars that first time. You joked you had a thing for Nacky Martinez. I was thrilled and flattered. After all, you were top of the main menu, one of the six hero marsnauts. Things I’d only imagined, you’d actually done. And you’d read my work and you were flirting with me and, holy shit, you were Captain Kirk. When people—friends, famous writers—tried to break into our conversation, they just bounced off us. Nobody remembers who won what award that night, but lots of people still talk about how we locked in.

I just looked it up. You lost that Nebula.

Yeah. Thanks for reminding me.

You had on a hat.

A hat? Okay. But I always wore hats back then. It was a way to stand out, part of my brand—for all the good it did me. My hair was a three act tragedy anyway, so I wore a lot of hats.

This one was a bowler hat. It was blue—midnight blue. With a powder blue band. Thin, I remember the hatband was very thin.

Maybe. I don’t remember that one. Nice try, though.

Tell me more. What happened next?

Jesus, this is so wrong . . . No, I’m sorry, Andy. Give me your hand. You always had such delicate hands. Such clever fingers.

I can still remember that my mom had an old Baldwin upright piano that she wanted me to learn to play, but my hands were too small. You’re crying. Are you crying?

I am not. Just shut up and listen. This isn’t easy and I’m only saying it because maybe the best part of you is still trapped in there like they claim and just maybe this augment really can set it free. So, we were sitting at different tables at the banquet but after it was over, you found me again and asked if I wanted to go out for drinks. We escaped the hotel, looking for a place to be alone, and found a night-shifted Indonesian restaurant with a bar a couple of blocks away. It was called Fatty Prawn or Fatty Crab—Fatty Something. We sat at the bar and switched from alcohol to inhalers and talked. A lot. Pretty much the rest of the night, in fact. Considering that you were a man and famous and ex-Air Force, you were a good listener. You wanted to know how hard it was to get published and where I got my plots and who I like to read. I was impressed that you had read a lot of the classic science fiction old-timers like Kress and LeGuin and Bacigalupi. You told me what I got wrong about living in space, and then raved about stuff in my books that you thought nobody but spacers knew. Around four in the morning we got hungry and since you’d never had Indonesian before, we split a gado-gado salad with egg and tofu. I spent too much time deconstructing my divorce and you were polite about yours. You said your ex griped about how you spent too much time in space, and I made a joke about how Kass would have said the same thing about me. I asked if you were ever scared out there and you said sure, and that landings were worse than the launches because you had so much time leading up to them. You used to wake up on the outbound trips in a sweat. To change the subject, I told you about waking up with entire scenes or story outlines in my head and how I had to get up in the middle of the night and write them down or I would lose them. You made a crack about wanting to see that in person. The restaurant was about to close for the morning and, by that time, dessert sex was definitely on the menu, so I asked if you ever got horny on a mission. That’s how I found out that one of the side effects of the anti-radiation drugs was low testosterone levels. We established that you were no longer taking them. I would have invited you back to my room right then only you told me that you had to catch a seven-twenty flight back to El Paso. There still might have been enough time, except that I was rooming with Rachel van der Haak, and, when we had gotten high before the banquet, we had promised each other we’d steer clear of men while our shields were down. And of course, when I thought about it, there was the awkward fact that you were twenty years older than I was. A girl has got to wonder what’s up with her when she wants to take daddy to bed.

I am nineteen years and three months older than you.

And then there was your urgency. I mean, you had me at Mars, Mr. Space Hero, but I had the sense that you wanted way more from me than I had to give. All I had in mind was a test drive, but it seemed as if you were already thinking about making a down payment. When you said you could cancel an appearance on Newsmelt so you could be back in New York in three days, it was a serious turn-on, but I was also worried. Blowing off one of the top news sites? For me? Why? I guessed maybe you were running out of time before your next mission. I didn’t realize that you were . . . .

Go on.

No, I can’t. I just can’t—how do I do this? Turn the augment off.

Zoe, please.

You hear me? That was the deal. They promised whenever I wanted.

Capture 06/15/2051, Kerwin Hospital ICU, 09:37:18, Augment disengaged by request

Andy? Look at me, Andy. Over here. Good. Who am I, Andy?

You are . . . it’s something about science fiction. And a blue hat.

What’s my name?

Come close. Let me look at you . . . oh, it’s on the tip of my tongue. Nacky Martinez? First officer of the Starship Sidewise?

She’s a character, Andy. Made up. Someone I wrote about.

You’re a writer?

Capture 06/17/2051, Kerwin Hospital Assisted Care Facilty, 14:47:03

. . . because I was too infatuated to be suspicious about your secret back then. I know you don’t remember this, Andy, but I was stupid in love with you when we were first married. Maybe the augment can’t see that, but anyone who looks at your captures can. On the record, as you would say. So, yeah, the fact that you always wore caps and recorded almost everything that happened to you didn’t bother me back then. I guess I told myself that it was some reputation management scheme that Spaceways had ordered up. And of course, you were writing the sequel to your memoir. What do Mr. and Ms. Space Hero do on their days off? Why look, they sit together on the couch when they write! And she still uses her fingers to type—isn’t that quaint, a science fiction writer still pounding a keyboard in the era of thought recognition!

You never published that book.

No.

Or any other. Why?

You know, people message me about that all the time, like it was some kind of tragedy. I had something to say when I was young and naive. I said it. And pretty damn well: eight livebooks worth. Fifty novas. It’s just that after I met you, I needed to make the most of our time together. And since you launched into the Vincente Event, I’ve been busy being the good wife.

I was the best qualified pilot, Zoe. And I was already compromised, so I had the least to lose. In a crisis like that, there were no easy answers. I consulted with Spaceways and we weighed the tradeoffs and we reached a decision. I had friends on that orbital. Drew Bantry . . .

Drew was already dead. He just hadn’t fallen down yet. And you were not a tradeoff, Andy. You were my fucking husband.

I can see now how hard it must have been for you.

Oh, you saw it then, too. Which is why you never asked my permission, because you knew . . .

Go on.

What the hell were we talking about? How I had no suspicions about what the captures meant. That you were sick. I remember thinking how boring ten thousand hours of unedited recordings were going to be. Even to us, even when we were old. Old and forgetful . . . .

Zoe?

I’m fine. I’m just not feeling very brave today. Anyway, I did have a problem with all the captures of us making love. I mean, the first couple of times, I’ll grant you it was a turn-on. We’d lose ourselves in bed, and then afterwards watch ourselves doing it and sometimes we were so beautifully in sync that we’d get hot and go back for seconds. But what bothered me was that you were capturing us watching the captures. I didn’t get why you would do that. When I realized that recording wasn’t just a once-in-a-while kink, that you wanted to capture us every time we had sex, it wasn’t erotic anymore. It was kind of creepy.

I can’t locate any sex captures after 2045. Did we stop having sex?

No. I just made you check the caps at the bedroom door. So stop looking. You want to know what we were like back then, try scanning some of our private book clubs. We’d both read the same book and then we’d go out to dinner at a nice restaurant and talk about it. I remember being surprised at some of your choices. The Marvelous Land of Oz. Lolita. Wolf Hall. A Visit From the Goon Squad. They didn’t seem like the kinds of reading an Air Force jock would choose. You were a Hemingway and Heinlein kind of guy.

Was I trying to impress you?

I don’t know why. I was already plenty impressed. Maybe you were trying to send me a message with all of those plots about secret pasts and transformations.

Go on. This was where? When?

At first in Brooklyn, where I was living when we met. There’s another reason I should have been suspicious your urgency. You claimed you didn’t care where we lived as long as we spent as much time as possible together. Wasn’t true—you hated cities. But most of my friends were in New York and most of yours had moved to space or Mars. Your folks were dead and your sister had disappeared into some Digitalist coop, waiting for the Singularity. So when my mother died and left me the house in Bedford, we moved up there in the spring of 2045. You had the second installment of your book deal to write and when I switched to your agent, I started seeing celebrity level advances too, so there was plenty of money. By then you were showing early symptoms. You claimed you’d left Spaceways, although you still flew out here to Kerwin five or six times a year for therapy. It seemed to be working, you said we would still have years together. My mom had been into flowers but she had an asparagus patch and some raspberries and you started your first vegetable garden that summer. You were good at it, said you liked it better than space hydroponics. Spinach and lettuce and asparagus in the spring, then beans and corn and summer squash and tomatoes and melons. You were happy, I think. I know I was.

Capture 06/25/2051, Kerwin Hospital Assisted Care Facilty, 16:17:53

. . . you were so skeptical about the Singularity is why.

The Kurzweil augmentation has nothing to do with the Singularity.

Yeah, sure. It’s just a cognitive prosthesis, la-la. A life experience database, la-la-la. An AI mediated memory enchancement that may help restore your loved one’s mental competence la-la-la-dee-da. I’ve browsed all the sites, Andy. Besides, I was writing about this shit before Ray Kurzweil actually uploaded.

Ray Kurzweil is dead. I’m still alive.

Are you, Andy? Are you sure about that?

I don’t know why you are being so cruel, Zoe.

Because you made so many decisions about us without telling me. Maybe you didn’t know just how sick you were when we met, but you could easily have found out. I had a right to know. And maybe you were hoping that you’d never get that call from Spaceways, but you knew exactly what you would do if it did come.

I was an astronaut, Zoe. That was never a secret.

No, what was a secret was all that fucked-up cosmic ray research. Because nobody but crazy people with a death wish would ever have volunteered to go to space if they knew that there was no real protection against getting your telomeres burned off by the radiation. Sure, you can duck and cover from a solar flare, but what about the gajillions of ultra-high energy ions? Theoretically you can generate a magnetic shield. Or maybe you can stuff your astronauts with anti-radiation wonder drugs? But just in case it doesn’t work, better make sure that everyone on the Mars crew is over forty. That way if Captain Kirk falls apart in twenty or thirty years, Spaceways won’t look so bad.

Go on.

I will. Maybe you hadn’t checked out the secret radiation assessments from the first Mars mission when we first met. Maybe you didn’t want to know. But once I was your wife, I did. Let me read the executive summary to you. “Exposure to radiation during the mission has had significant short and long impacts on the central nervous systems of all crew members. Despite best mitigation practices, whole body effective doses ranged from .4 to .7 sieverts. Galactic cosmic radiation in the form of high-mass, energetic ions destroyed an average of 4% of the crew’s cells, while 13% of critical brain regions have likely been compromised. Reports of short term impairments of behavior and cognition were widely noted throughout the three year mission. Longitudinal studies of the astronaut corps point to a significant increase in risk of degenerative brain diseases. In particular, there appears to have been an acceleration of plaque pathology associated with Alzheimer ’s disease.” Let’s do the math, Andy. You get an estimated dose of between .4 to .7 sieverts during your first mission and you go to Mars twice. So call it a sievert and change. Which is why you were one grounded astronaut.

All that’s on the record.

What’s EPA’s maximum yearly dose for a radiation worker here on earth?

I don’t have immediate access to that data. I can look it up.

Yes, you can—it’s on the record. Fifty millisieverts. How about for emergency workers involved in a lifesaving operation?

Zoe, I . . . .

Two hundred and fifty millisieverts.

There are always risks.

For which you make tradeoffs, I get that. So the tradeoff here is X number of years of your life for two tickets to Mars. Which you decided before you met me, so I’ll give you a pass on that. Once you walked me through it, I sort of got how that was the price you paid to become who you wanted to be. Although you waited long enough to let me in on your little secret. But that wasn’t your last tradeoff. Because Spaceways fell down on their project management during the outfitting of Orbital Seven. They didn’t lift enough solar flare shelters to house everybody on the construction crew. So when Professor Vincente predicted an X2 class flare that would cook half the people onboard in a storm of hot protons, management turned to sixty-year old Captain Kirk, even though he’d been grounded. They pointed out that since he didn’t have all that much time before the Alzheimer’s plaques chewed what was left of his memory, maybe he might consider riding the torch one last time to ferry an emergency shelter up to save their corporate asses. Or maybe our Space Hero checked in all on his own and volunteered for their fucking suicide mission.

It wasn’t a suicide mission , Zoe. I came back.

And here you are, Andy. And here I am. But it’s not working.

Capture 06/30/2051, Kerwin Hospital ICU, 11:02:53

. . . or are you too busy with your life review? Ten thousand hours of captures is a lot to digest, even on fast-forward.

The record is eleven thousand two hundred and eighty-four hours long, not including the current capture.

Noted. Find anything worth bookmarking?

It would be a dull movie if it wasn’t all about me.

I heard about your ex yesterday on Newsmelt. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize she’d emigrated to Mars.

Apparently she wanted to get to space as much as I did. I don’t know why I didn’t know that. It’s odd, but none of the pix and vids I have look like her.

You remember her then?

Just flashes, but they’re very vivid. Like she was lit up by a lightning strike.

They’re talking about bringing the rest of the colonists back home.

Maybe. But they’ll have to handcuff them and drag them kicking and screaming onto the relief ships—I know those people. And why bother? Many of them won’t survive the trip back.

Space will kill you any which way it can. You told me that on our third date.

I try not to pay attention. It’s been a long time since there’s been any good news from outer space. I think we need to start over on Mars. The thing to do is capture a comet, hollow it out and use it as a colony ship. The ice shields you from cosmic rays on the outbound. Send the colonists down in landers and then crash the comet. Solves both the water and the radiation problem.

Capture a comet? And how the hell do we do that? With a tractor beam? A magic lasso?

Get your science fiction friends working on it. If it’s crazy enough, the engineers will come sniffing around.

I’ll see what I can do. I met the Zhangs on the way in today. I thought I was your only visitor. We had a nice chat. And the baby was cute. What’s her name again?

Andee. A-N-D double E

That’s what I thought they said. After you.

Kristen was lucky. They pushed her to the front of the line so she was one of the first into the shelter. The last three in got a significant dose. One of them died on the way back down.

Drew Bantry.

They were his people. He waited until they were all safe.

You and he saved a lot of lives that day, Captain Kirk. It’s on the record for all to see.

Enough, Zoe. What do you have for me today?

Apologies.

Go on.

I’m sorry for the way I spoke to you last time. That’s why I missed the last few visits. I don’t trust myself to say the right thing anymore. I can’t filter out my feelings when I see you like this. I just blurt. Spew. It’s not good.

Noted.

But here’s the thing. I don’t think I’ll be accessing your augment after you’re . . . gone. Dead. You know, now I can visit the hospital here, and see you. Your face, your body, arms, hands. But some avatar, no. It’s too hard. There have been times the last few weeks when I felt like you’re here with me, but that’s only because I want you back. But mostly I don’t think this thing that talks to me is you. I’m sorry.

Why not?

There’s still too much missing, even if the augment can review your captures and all that input from before you started wearing the caps. Yes, we can talk about our lives together, but I still have to tell you things you should know. And now you’re cracking jokes, so it’s even harder. How can I tell whether what’s sad or happy or angry is you or clever algorithms? I don’t know, Andy. When are you going to say I love you? How will I know whether you really do, or if it’s just something else you needed to be reminded of?

I do, Zoe. Here, I’ll turn the augment off, so you can hear it from me. From this body, as you say. These lips.

No, honey, you don’t need to . . . .

Capture 06/30/2051, Kerwin Hospital ICU, 11:15:18, Augment disengaged by request

Okay? Here I am. And I know who you are. I do. You’re my famous wife, the writer. Nackey Martinez. You want to go. I don’t want you to go. Give me your hand.

Aye, Captain.

Stay with me. Will you do that?

For a while.

And write more books. You know, about your adventures in space. That’s important. And maybe . . . could get me my snacks? The food here is horrible. You know the ones. Mom always used to make banana slices with a smear of peanut butter when I got home from school. My snacks. Are you crying, Nackey? You’re crying.

Yes.

About the Author

James Patrick Kelly is pleased to have another story in Clarkesworld. If all goes according to his ingenious master plan, it won’t be his last. Jim has published over a hundred stories, five novels and four short story collections. He has won several awards, all of which need dusting. He writes a column on the internet for Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and teaches at the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. He lives on a lake in New Hampshire where he enjoys gardening, kayaking, snowshoeing and listening to stories read aloud by Kate Baker.

One Flesh

Mark Bourne and Elizabeth Bourne

And your very flesh shall be a great poem.

—Walt Whitman

Jupiter’s immense horizon appears flat as a flitter, stretching beyond the reach of vision. Cloud banks the size of continents drift in what might be sky. Organic molecules paint them in autumn colors: oranges and browns and peach and gold. Behind the clouds, the rising sun shines like a silver coin.

Lightning flashes.

Jen’s eight eyes close reflexively. The purple afterimage glows against her eye lids. She feels nine again, with that same gut-clenching mix of elation and fear she always had watching a storm approach. She hasn’t been nine in a long time.

One one-thousand, two one-thousand . . . Jen counts to herself. At twenty-three, thunder booms and the air tastes metallic.

She keeps her upper eyes closed as she reopens the four on her underside, where she senses phantom breasts. Her real breasts wait back at the station on her bipedal body. For the next few days Jen is the first human to skate the winds of Jupiter’s biosphere, the thin (by Jupiter’s standards) concentric shell nested between the freezing upper and hellish lower domains.

No. Not the first. The body she inhabits is proof of that, even if nothing like it ever existed among the thunderheads of Earth.

Kilometers below, burnt orange clouds stretch to infinity. For over an hour she’s observed a yawning vortex opening in the mottled cloudsea. Now it’s wide enough to swallow Arkansas, and Kansas for good measure. Deeper down, it’s fifty-seven thousand kilometers to a pressure of forty-five million Earth atmospheres, a temp of twenty thousand K, and a realm where hydrogen becomes monatomic.

For the hundredth time in the seventy-two hours since she left Callisto station, Jen thinks of her husband. How the curl of his black hair falls into his dark brown eyes. The dimple in his chin that he keeps because she likes it. The beak of a nose he refuses to fix, clinging to a vestige of ethnicity. She also thinks he wouldn’t want her out here.

This was our only chance, Ras. I wish we could’ve talked. But I’ll be back soon.

Clusters of colored beads rise from the Stygian depths. The creatures ride the updraft from the growing storm system. Eventually, they level off at an altitude just above hers, then float toward a finger of salmon-hued vapor budding from a cloud deck a hundred kilometers away.

Excitement flutters Jen’s hearts. This is it. She stretches into the cool hydrogen wind.

Pumping a gust of hydrogen from her anus, she jets toward the swarm. The looming cloud mass reminds Jen of the Tower of Babel. It was a seminal tale for the girl who’d grow up to become the premiere authority on interspecies communication. But these aren’t primates and cetaceans floating among the clouds.

Ras paced outside the office door. A wall plaque bore the ubiquitous tree-and-stars logo of NanCon, Inc. Beyond the door, some desk-bound cog was taking plenty of time before acknowledging him.

Every muscle ached. Ras’s neck cracked as he twisted it to ease the soreness. He wondered if he’d slept wrong. He dimly remembered a nightmare about suffocating and an urgent desire for home. Home was where Jen was, and she was away on vacation. Perhaps that was the answer.

Hurry back. He repeated the thought, wishing that it could travel the cold distances to Io. I don’t like sleeping alone.

He squared his shoulders and rubbed his bristly chin. His reflection glared back at him in the door’s shiny red surface, like an old Earth devil. Then the door chimed and his image shimmered as the permeable membrane allowed him entrance. Ras set his face in a grim frown, the one Jen called his “bad daddy” face. After years with university faculties on two worlds, Ras knew exactly how pissed to look.

The office inside included one mahogany desk, one Louis Quinze chair, a variety of irises growing from the carpet—in bloom no less, and a wall-sized window featuring a framed view of Callisto’s stark, rover-tracked landscape. Jupiter was rising over Valhalla Basin.

Ras confronted the assistant. “Well? You kept me waiting long enough.” He tried to control his irritation. Jen said it turned him into an asshole, and he knew she was right, dammit. She should be here to stop him acting like an idiot.

The assistant retorted, “Dr. Bodogom, you can’t demand to see Dr. Douglas!”

Anton Douglas’s assistant was either genuinely young, or else an old-timer tripping the faddie parade: illusory three-dee stars freckled his shiny indigo skin; his eyes—golden cat eyes—took up half his face. Shimmering lumiafields accentuated the assistant’s smooth blue groin. He—the male voice was probably original—stroked his bare crotch seductively.

Ras ignored the attempt at provocation. He liked being an old-style human. It gave him the right to be cranky. And at least the boy wasn’t a herm. The current trend of displaying a double set of massively enhanced, neon-colored genitalia was tiresome.

Young, Ras decided. We’ve created a lost generation. The irony of the thought was obvious.

The assistant’s golden eyes closed. “He knows you’re here.” When the young man opened them again, they were bright blue. “Dr. Douglas appreciates your patience. He’s waiting for you inside.” The green outline of a door appeared on a far wall.

Few people saw Anton Douglas. Ras and Jen hadn’t met him even when Douglas recruited them. The old man hadn’t netted in since he quarantined the Jupiter system for his own private purposes three years ago. Ras ignored the rumors that NanCon was run by an impostor. Or an AI. Or Douglas’s clone. Or gray-skinned aliens. You heard all sorts of things.

The other flyers haven’t noticed her. Yet. Jen studies them. They’re still heading for the cloud-mountain rising dozens of kilometers from far below. The scenery is achingly beautiful. Even though everything she sees, thinks, and feels is being recorded within a crystalline chip embedded in her skull, she won’t need sensemem playback to recall this. Jupiter will be part of her forever.

A powerful gust sends her reeling. She fights to maintain stability. Her wings are not at all like arms and legs. Pain tears through her flesh—flesh that now feels like what it is: nonhuman, and not meant for girls from Arkansas.

She falls, and between one second and the next remembers:

Rags of mist streaked the fjord’s cobalt water. If she walked off the cliff’s edge, she could touch them as she fell. The view from Preikestolen was spectacular, no doubt about it. Ras had taught her gliding, both in virt and in short-distance sessions. Still, the fear was surprisingly primal.

“You’ll love it,” he said, a huge grin illuminating his face. “It’s the closest you can get to heaven.”

“What does an atheist know about heaven?” she replied. “That water looks like it’d hurt.”

“Only if you hit it. Which you won’t.” Ras examined Jen’s straps and harnesses again. His touch reassured her.

She hesitated, then blew him a kiss as she launched herself into the wind, and then she was flying. She spotted Ras behind her, a silver hawk in pursuit. Laughter bubbled up as she dove to frighten him, before turning, as he’d taught her, to rise into the clouds.

That night, at home in the Canadian Rockies, they made love until they were exhausted, waking hours later in a bright patch of morning sunlight feeling as if they were gods.

Now Jen struggles to wrestle control away from the largest planet in the solar system. She drops like a rock. The cloud tops are no more substantial than fog, and she rips through them. If she doesn’t stop falling, the pressure and heat will crush the life from her. Her eyes, top and bottom, clench shut.

A voice rises from a place she can’t identify. Home. Remembering.

It speaks in images that touch her mind the way a child touches a butterfly: delicate, trying to be gentle. The creature, for all their care to remove its cognition, flows through her—seeing, feeling, and tasting what it finds. Jen trembles at the unexpected intimacy.

Carefully, it presses her aside and fills her body, their body. Home. Its longing is so strong Jen cries out, or tries to. Its thoughts are ill-fitting, yet unbound by language, she understands. Free. Released.

Impressions intrude into her mind. Jen stops struggling. Spread yourself on the Breath of the World. Feel the Winds. Allow them into you as your Old Ones allowed you into them at the Remembering.

Her wings change angle and the air pushes her up. She is flying, fast, faster than she’s ever flown on Earth. This colossal world lifts Jen higher with each stroke. Someone else—someone both blood-close and completely strange—shares her flesh. Together they rise, toward the other flyers.

Hormones flood her system sparking a physical reaction, orgasmic in its intensity, that she doesn’t understand. Something that was closed has been opened. Her body is readying itself for a Remembering.

Terror overwhelms her. A chittering noise clacks from her vocal cords. A sign of nerves? The consciousness tries to soothe her. Jen realizes she can’t manage, so she releases control, taking on the familiar role of observer. The green indicators hovering in her vision announce that data is being recorded and analyzed.

You taught me to glide, Jen pictures for Ras. Now let me teach you to fly. Just be alive when I get back.

Ras was alone in a suite that could have been a showroom for the Nostalgianet. Chairs and a fireplace built for an English country manor stood solidly on real wood floors; an Ormolu clock ticked on the mantel; ornately framed neo-impressionist paintings brightened the walls.

The largest painting was a portrait of a dark-eyed woman and four children, toddler to teenager. The artist had captured a haunted look in her eyes, even among her children, even surrounded by the accouterments of vast wealth. It was a study of loneliness.

Forty years ago, Tessa Douglas, wife to the most powerful man both on and off Earth, underwent a private suicide ceremony for reasons her biographers still couldn’t agree upon and her husband never spoke about.

Painting was Jen’s obsession, and Ras wondered what she would think. He strolled across the hardwood floor to pull drapes away from the floor-to-ceiling windows. Callisto’s panorama contrasted sharply with the room’s quaintness. Jupiter loomed, flanked by Ganymede’s and Io’s bright points.

Io. Jen was there in a NanCon soloship. Ras could visualize her, nude (as was her habit), her red hair pulled back, paintbrush in hand, working on her landscapes. Ras loved her boldness. Sometimes he feared it. Nothing fazed her.

Hurry back, sweetheart. Ras pressed his palm to the window. Even after all the decades of their togetherhood, she still thrilled him. Her touch on his body; the smell of her skin; the taste of her mouth. The morning before they left for Callisto, Jen had stood before their window, naked and fragrant with the scent of their lovemaking.

I need you.

Ras turned around, then inhaled sharply.

The aged man in the center of the room looked just as startled. “There you are,” he said, kneeling to set an armload of wood into the fireplace.

What Ras noticed first wasn’t his clothing (a stained Tharsis Dust Devils sweatshirt, shorts fashioned from cut-off plaid trousers), but the flesh he was wearing.

The jowly, hang-dog face with folds under the eyes that looked deep enough to hold water. Cottony white hair dabbed the back of his bald head, which reminded Ras of a chocolate egg. The topography of veins beneath the skin of his hands. Skinny brown legs that didn’t look strong enough to carry their owner.

Anton Douglas was a forceful reminder of how people used to age: wrinkled skin hanging like taffy; the pains accompanying cellular breakdown and the failure of subcellular functions; genetically programmed senescence.

That was before the biotech renaissance a century ago. Ras’s own legions of intercellular ribots kept his apparent age at thirty-five Earthyears, and had for four decades. Ras hadn’t seen anyone who looked old since he was a child.

If Douglas were still on Earth, he’d be approaching his 132th birthday. The oldest person in human history. Why would he, of all people, let this happen to himself? What terrible sin needed such awful restitution? Ras glanced at the portrait, wondering what tales she could tell.

The old man wiped his hands on his shorts. “Oak logs burn best, don’t you think? Burn longer.” He pulled a wooden match from a pocket and scraped it across the fireplace stonework. The stick flared and Ras caught an acrid whiff of burning powder.

The man grinned at his expression. “When was the last time you smelled that, eh? Probably never, I’d say. Pity. ’Course, these aren’t from oak trees. Grew ’em in the fablabs upstairs. Can’t tell the difference, though. I can’t anyway, so I s’pose no one else can either.” He stood slowly, pushing himself up by pressing his hands on his knees.

Ras realized he’d been holding his breath. He stepped toward the old man and offered his hand. “Dr. Douglas. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

Douglas shook Ras’s hand, but his grip carried no enthusiasm. He examined Ras as if he were a newly created life form. “So. Welcome. I hope my assistant didn’t annoy you. I took him on as a political favor,” he continued. “The boy’s as harmless as he is brainless. Take the ‘con’ out of ‘contemporary’ and what have you got?”

“It was fine, Dr. Douglas. I’ve taught too many of his ilk to be bothered.”

“Glad to hear it. Call me Anton.”

Despite the invitation, Ras could never call this man by his first name. it would be like calling God ‘Jo,” if he believed in God.

Douglas sat in the bentwood rocker next to the fireplace. With a simple gesture he commanded Ras to sit in the chair beside him. “I’ve been following your work, Dr. Bodogom. You were born in Aresopolis with a back yard view of Olympus Mons.”

He paused, and Ras couldn’t tell if it had been a question or not. “That’s right,” he finally said.

Douglas continued, his eyes unblinking. “You moved to Earth with a full scholarship to Harvard. Terminal degrees from Harvard and Copernicus U. You returned to teach at U. Mars with high commendations as well as a Nobel Prize for discoveries in Martian paleontology, specializing in the remains of water-dwelling forms from the Sigerson-Sachter deposits.”

He looked at him the way Lars Sigerson had so long ago at the base camp near Lowell Ridge. Annoyed and a little disbelieving. “You shared another Nobel sixteen years later for research on molecular manufacturing applications.”

So the Great One wasn’t infallible. “No,” Ras said. “For developments in neuronanology and their applications to cerebral interfaces, cognitive science, and neuronet augmentation. With Dr. Jen Kangeledes. Our cytext on neuronautics is still a primary source.”

Douglas nodded. “You’re good,” he said.

Of course I am, Ras thought, a little affronted. “Thank you. And my name’s Ras.”

“I know. What’s on your mind, Ras?”

He leaned toward Douglas. The man even smelled old. “Four months ago you hired us to head up your biotech team for a project we were forbidden to write about even in our personal files. To keep the creature alive at all costs—”

“Not ‘creature,’ Ras, the native life form.”

Ras talked over the interruption. “But this morning, I walk into my office to discover my task files are locked.” He fought to keep his voice even. “My lab door refused my ID. My PA was reassigned. What the hell is going on?”

Douglas answered calmly. “Have you been dissatisfied here?”

Ras blinked. He cursed himself for it. “No. It’s been the most rewarding work of my career. Our studies of the cre—, native life form’s genome verify its common Earth ancestry, and its genetic match with homo sapiens is purely astonishing. The implications for biology alone are enough to—”

Douglas’s hand waved through the air as if swatting gnats. “Yes, yes. Yet another revolutionary breakthrough. Have you any idea how many of those I’ve seen?”

Anton Douglas was a legend. He controlled NanCon when the corporation brushed aside government bureaucracy, corporate power-mongering, and scientific caution to pull the cork from the bottle of nanotech.

Here was the man who had either liberated the human race, or enslaved it. He’d loosed wonders, and terrors that didn’t bear thinking about. Of course Ras didn’t know.

Reflected firelight danced in Douglas’ dark eyes. “I thought not.”

He reached toward the cherry wood table beside him and lifted the lid off a round glass plate. “Would you like a slice of lemon cake? I made it myself.”

Ice crystals high in the cerulean sky paint a misty halo around the bright sun. With the short ten hour Jovian day-night cycle, local noon arrives quickly. In a few more hours, darkness will return to this side of Jupiter.

At night, the spherical creatures glow against the shadowed cloudscape, like spirit lights spied in the Ozark darkness. She follows them.

Jen is ten kilometers from the herd. Close enough to discern individual markings on the largest bodies. Each bulbous orb is a being at least two dozen meters across. Living hot air balloons with long threads fringing the bottom orifice. The filaments ripple in slow waves.

These leviathan jellyfish float surrounded by other life forms. They drift on the wind or bob up and down on waves of undulating flanges. From the first computer-enhanced images provided by probes, the Jovias research teams dubbed them ballooners. The ballooners probably metabolize cellular life, retaining and heating stores of pure hydrogen while utilizing heavier gases and molecules for tissue generation. As Jen watches, their colors change to match the brownish-orange and beige patterns of the towering cloud structure. Protective camouflage, Jen guesses. An unspoken Yes bubbles up.

The pressure of her companion’s damaged consciousness troubles her, but not enough to abort the mission. Its communications are simple, yet vibrant with meaning. They had miscalculated the effect of the brainstem remnant. She feels its thought, They’re like us, one flesh remembered.

She records the thought to the crystal embedded within. The Jovians have mind. Intelligence. And they can communicate. Given what she knows about life in Jupiter’s troposphere, the confirmation comes with little surprise. Of course they’re like us. They are us. Closer than chimps for all their unearthly shapes.

What do they think about? What does identity mean to them? Or death? Or love? The other doesn’t answer.

Smaller balloon forms, variations that might be young or perhaps sub-species, huddle in packs. Colors and patterns flow over their skins like oil on water.

There! Flitting among the colossal floaters. Manta ray-shaped flyers like herself. She watches them swoop and dive in random flight paths. No. Not random. They soar in an intricate dance that says—what? It’s a message that she can almost understand, like a word just out of reach.

There is only one solution. Move closer.

Then she realizes with a start her body is already taking her in, faster than she would like. Home. Remembering.

“Follow me.”

Douglas led Ras out of his suite and into an adjacent hallway.

The passageway stopped at an opaque field door. Douglas took Ras’s hand and walked into the reflective surface. The door recognized Douglas and flowed around them. Ras felt the tingle of reduced stunners as he passed through. He recognized the octagonal compartment they entered. He had arrived in a similar one, though less sumptuously furnished. They were in a private car in the ground-to-orbit tower. He and Douglas sat on opposite ends of an overstuffed couch behind a long glass-topped table.

“Top floor,” Douglas announced. He activated a display on the tabletop. “Goodness! It’s past lunch. Here’s the menu. We have time.”

Ignoring his suggestion, Ras tuned in a Solweb news channel. He had just come down from the labs. Why go back up?

Ras deliberately kept his eyes on the news while Douglas settled in with eggs and grits, watching him appraisingly. Weight slowly drained away from them as the car rose 4500 kilometers.

The Callisto orbital was an all-purpose complex. Its primary body perched atop the elevator tower like a four-kilometer-wide sombrero spinning at .6 gee at its rim. Its axis hub nursed a brood of modules and fablabs.

The car announced their arrival with a slight bump. Once the field doors shimmered, they drifted out. Douglas indicated they should access a flyway leading to the outer carousels. It was one of twenty radial connections between the station’s hub and the outer ring.

Ras stayed close as they headed for Main Bio. Passersby—even members of Ras’s team—ignored him. Kamilla Juarez stepped out of Xenomorphology, attention locked on the datapad she carried. She smacked into Ras. At least that was typical. Kami never noticed where she was going.

“Oh, sorry.” She laughed as always. A shadow crossed her broad, freckled face, “Everything’s ready, Doctor Douglas.” Kami then gave Ras a quick hug. “I heard you came through this morning. I’m so glad.” Douglas frowned and shook his head, and Kamilla actually blushed.

Fear speared through Ras. “Kami, what’s going on?”

She turned beet-red and walked, almost ran, down the sterile corridor. The old man took Ras’s arm and squeezed. “This way.”

They proceeded to the main lab. The place had been tidied since last night. Ras was never this neat. Of the ten people milling about, people he worked with every day—joked with, ate lunch with—none acknowledged him.

Ras checked the environment tank, then cried out. “What have you done?” he shouted. “Who killed it?”

Everyone hushed. He ran to the console. His hand halted in midair as the time readout snared his attention. “What the hell?”

According to the flashing date, last night’s research session—his most recent study of the now-gutted corpse splayed in the tank—occurred more than four weeks ago.

Across hundreds of cubic acres of sky, ballooners slew among the mists. Their tendrils sway like kite tails. Colored patterns slide across their huge translucent bodies. Orange, tan, gold, pink, creamy white. Jen wonders if it’s language.

Smaller floaters counter vagrant winds by belching from their underbellies. Flyers dart through the herd. The ballooners’ echolocation pulses rumble through her. It’s not unpleasant. Flyers chirp and whistle, reminding her of dolphins.

Night slides over the cloudsea. Far to the south, ghost light ripples—an aurora larger than a planet. The air quivers with impending thunder. A whiff of carbon monoxide and phosphorous compounds—rust and violets.

A change electrifies Jen; her skin shudders with pleasure as flyers gather near the huge ballooners. Their brilliantly colored wings almost touch the ballooners’ pictogram sides. Peristaltic waves ripple the ballooners’ bodies.

From within, the other sings. Joy. Rebirth. Remembering. Emotions pour into her. Jen feels a little frightened by her companion’s enthusiasm. But this is his world. These are his people.

As a scientist, she’s fascinated by the alien mind emerging from the Jovian’s cortex fiber linked to her brain. As an artist, she thrills to the spill of imagery. She’s already wondering how to paint this. As the girl who grew up in Arkansas, she’s terrified.

Comfort comes in a memory of Ras’s scent. She suspects the other dredged it up to calm her. Longing sweeps through her. I wish you were here. The chip traps the emotion in the amber of precise neurographic matrixes. Ras. Don’t leave me.

She releases control to the other.

In its way, it’s grateful. Know and be Remembered. Before the end we will all remember.

Her body inhales, and heats the air to maintain buoyancy. She’s carried toward a warmth of community. If she were on Earth, this would be a big ol’ picnic. As the world darkens, the floaters glow with a pale yellow light that shines through their flesh. For kilometers in all directions, hundreds of paper lanterns hang in the blue-black night.

Then it begins.

“Everyone leave,” Douglas said.

Everyone did except Ras. “Where’s Jen?” he asked. “Dr. Kangeledes. My wife.”

Douglas met his eyes. No emotion showed on his ancient face as he activated the console. “Four weeks ago there was an accident involving the native life form. You died. Here, let me show you.”

They are welcomed by a congregation of flyers whose great wings glisten with reflected light from the floaters’ bioluminescence. The nearest ballooner, as big as a barn, ripples its tendrils. Pale orange fog drifts from its opening. All the ballooners are releasing mist into the air. New scents surround her. Wood smoke. Mushrooms. Jasmine. Musky aromas she can’t identify, but they speak to her companion, and so to her.

The Remembering.

Patterns play across the skin of the ballooners forming intricate pictures. Children are born. Hunters seek their prey, food-sharers raise new generations while flyers explore, always pushing further across the cloudsea. The ballooners keep memories, etched in light, preserved in flesh, enhanced with hormonal cues. It is as rich a history as any she knows from Earth.

Anton Douglas keyed in a playback sequence and Ras watched himself die.

The person working in the e-tank was definitely him. The figure, wearing a smartskin life suit and helmet, entered the tank where the creature lay suspended in a simulated Jovian troposphere. Its streamlined body was flattened dorsoventrally and almost four meters long. Each of its broad triangular wings could stretch to twelve meters. It hung with a Surrealist droop, resting on a cushion of utility fog. Alive, but not responsive.

Ras watched himself study the screens monitoring the probes and neurolinks woven into the life form’s brain. A fleshy lip just behind the upper eye pairs covered a natural, though puzzling, vent into its braincase.

Ras didn’t recall what he saw.

The image froze as Douglas said, “This is your breakthrough.” He indicated the computer graphics the “other” Ras was studying. “I mean that sincerely. A method of directly interfacing with the native life form’s brain is a major advance.”

Ras leaned in close to the screen. He shoved Douglas’ hands away to augment the image.

“You succeeded,” Douglas said. “Your neural mapping identified enough analogs to human cerebral functions that it was possible to directly access memories stored in the Jovian’s cortex.”

Skeptical, Ras looked at Douglas.

“You proved it,” Douglas said. “It is descended from Earth’s genomes. Human issue all the way down to the right-hand spiral of its DNA. The Jovian brain matches Homo Sapiens 98% and pocket change, even though analysis proves this species has existed here for fifty thousand years.

“You called me in the middle of the night. I told you—ordered you—to wait for your full support team.”

“Where’s Jen?”

“On Io, around Jupiter’s far side. We tight beamed a message to her. By the time she arrived, it was too late.”

“Where is she now? She should be here.”

Douglas resumed playback. Ras closed his eyes against a sudden dizziness. He knew he would never do what happened next. He just wouldn’t. With the back of his hand, he wiped a sheen of sweat from his lip and forced himself to look.

Ras watched himself load a new program into the peabrain fiber linked to the life form’s brain; instruct it to rearrange node clusters intertwined with the limbic area; interface his own cranial links to the new config; then engage the program. He watched as he removed his helmet, and inhaled the high-pressure, hydrogen-dominant air. His face changed from an expression of calm, to exhilaration, then horror. The person on screen folded to the floor, blood pooling over his bloated lips.

He would never do this.

“The alarm sounded,” Douglas said. “By the time we reached you, you’d been dead for six minutes. Apparently, you thought you should be breathing Jupiter’s atmosphere.”

Ras hugged his body against a chill. He looked into Douglas’s eyes. “Where’s Jen?”

Memory is shared through a psychotropic hormonal mist, enhanced by moving colors conjuring pictures on breathing flesh. The hormone-laden smoke calls up a global disaster. Streaks of fire explode in light and sound and heat. Millions die. Jen lives the Remembered horror.

In a few hours, the species is condemned. The Wind Singers disappear—how they die is uncertain. The Hunters are killed. The food-sharers die protecting the young. Without the food-sharers, the children can’t survive. Mated adults try to feed their offspring, but that’s not the path evolution chose for them. Infant after infant starves. The loss is devastating. The adults stop breeding.

Jen weaves emotions into the memories, and records them. She remembers a story from her world of surface and solidity. October 1995. Comet Shoemaker-Levi 9. A broken necklace of ice mountains trapped by Jupiter’s embrace impacts the planet.

Mushroom clouds thousands of kilometers tall explode. The released energy was deadlier than that Earth civilization’s entire nuclear arsenal. The shock waves rang Jupiter like a bell.

From the floaters comes a final exhalation of mist. We will be forgotten.

“We placed you in regen biostasis. Your lungs were gone. There was extensive tissue damage, especially around the skull. You were in stasis for three of the past four weeks. You’ll be glad to know that your wife stayed with you every moment.

“You had significant brain damage. Dr. Niall was able to excise and regrow the necrotic tissue. Once that was done, he overwrote your neural map. You’ve become your own advertisement for nanolevel neural mapping.

“I had you returned to your suite where you woke up this morning.”

Rage made Ras’s bones feel light. “That’s why you recited my résumé. You were testing me. You’re a bastard, Douglas. You should’ve told me.”

“This is the first time anyone has undergone such an ordeal. Your insights on death and regeneration will be valuable. I have a particular interest in such things.

“Your own published texts say that every memory, emotion, thought, and scrap of self identity can be reduced to a color-coded model. Well, you’ve been rebuilt pretty much from scratch. Are you still you? And if not, who are you?”

“I’d like to see her.” It was all Ras could do not to punch this complacent old man in the face.

Panic hit him so hard he had to lean against the wall. What if he wasn’t himself anymore? What if Jen sensed a change? What if she didn’t love him? Ras touched his face as if that would tell him who he was. Douglas kept talking.

“You lost a few short-term memories, but nothing important. With safety precautions, Jen kept working with the Jovian. She determined the organism was self-aware, and wanted to die. Perhaps that’s why you did what you did.

“She proposed a way of expanding our knowledge of its kind. It took two weeks to prepare the equipment and develop the programs for the procedure.”

“What procedure?”

“She volunteered to field test the new consciousness-to-consciousness interface by physically transferring her brain into the life form’s body. Xiao was disappointed. He said you had him in mind for the initial studies.”

Ras didn’t want to hear anymore.

“We modified the life form’s braincase, then designed neural pathways to its limbs and bio systems. Jen created linkages between their cortex, thalamus, hippocampus, and limbic system. After several adaptation sessions, we released her into Jupiter’s atmosphere.”

“You let her?”

“We hoped to wait until you were recovered before proceeding.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“The Jovian was dying. Dr. Kangeledes determined that it was a now-or-never situation. She knew it was risky, but she hoped to be back inside her own body if you revived.”

Ras started to shake. “She should’ve told me this. She should’ve waited.”

“I wish she had. I truly do.”

I must tell them, Jen decides. They will be remembered. The ballooners’ memories are preserved in durable crystalline matrices. You will not be forgotten, she pictures to her companion.

By now, the division between her mind and the other’s is an abstract concept better saved for later discussions with Ras, Xiao, and a lengthy cytext article in the Journal of Cognitive Sciences. She is pleased. She thinks of Ras—his warmth, his smell, the feel of his skin. Soon, Jen promises.

The other moves them toward the ballooners. We will Remember you. Others will know. They’re too close. Jen struggles to reclaim her abdicated control. There’s a shudder, but the borrowed body isn’t hers anymore. She transmits the Emergency Retrieve beacon; in minutes the orbiting drone will take her home.

Throughout the sky floaters offer their tendrils, and flyers accept the embrace. Jen observes the ballooner-flyer unions. A transparent, sharp-tipped tube slides from the ballooner into the now-open cranial vent above the flyer’s braincase. The flyer’s wings twitch. A milky fluid slides up the tendril. After the fluid is consumed, the ballooner detaches, and the flyer’s corpse falls until it’s lost in the cloud deck below.

A nearby ballooner tenderly wraps filaments around Jen’s body. Its transparent tubule descends. Her companion holds their body rigid in ecstasy. The eyes refuse to close. Helplessly, Jen sees the knife-like tube penetrate her cranial vent.

Ras.

Douglas walked to the tank. Ras followed. The life form was a gutted carcass except for the damaged mass of residual brainstem.

“The drone picked up her auto-retrieve,” Douglas said. “It brought the body home. There wasn’t much left inside the braincase.”

Ras refused to fall apart in front of the man who killed his wife. Douglas should have stopped her.

Jen, that was stupid.

Then: Jen. How could you leave me?

Douglas’s voice broadcast his discomfort. “The so-called ballooners secrete an enzyme solution that dissolves cortical tissue. They digest the semi-fluid mass, assimilate the memories, then distribute them throughout the species. It’s an astonishing method of information exchange.” Emotion surfaced on Douglas’s features. Anger. Grief. “It might succeed with human tissue. The biochemistries match that well.”

Ras stood hugging himself, shaking uncontrollably. He wanted to scream, to hit something, to die. Douglas opened his mouth to speak, and Ras walked away.

He waited by the door. It wouldn’t open without Douglas. From behind him the old man placed a hand on his shoulder. “Come talk to me when you’re ready. I know what it is to lose someone. Not a thing that happens much anymore. Psych ware is at your disposal. Her body is in Main Med.”

He placed something small in Ras’s hand. “This contains the sensemem record of her thoughts and experiences in Jupiter’s atmosphere. She loved you very much. She would want you to have it.”

The door opened. Ras tasted blood where he’d bitten his lip. When Douglas left, he was absolutely, irrevocably alone.

Capping Callisto station’s “north pole,” the EVA bay was loaded with sixteen serviced and readied off-station craft, from tiny scooters to soloships to a deep-space outrider recently returned from the Oort Cloud.

The vessels floated in their bays, tethered by umbilicals to far-away walls. Ras looked “up” at them from the bay’s master control station.

“I wasn’t expecting you, Dr. Bodogom,” the attendant said. “I don’t see your authorization in my log.”

Ras adjusted his grip on a handhold, re-orienting his perspective to the garage bay with just enough clumsiness to appear awkward in the local microgravity. The diversion allowed him time to consider the situation.

He nodded at the fair-haired man. “Just routine.” He pointed toward a craft that looked like an egg stuck to the top of an elaborate candlestick. “Dr. Kangeledes and I never got a chance to test the skyrider. Not before my . . . my accident, and Jen’s—”

He stopped. Pain swelled inside his chest. He pressed it down as he had so often during the past twenty-eight hours. The effort left hum gasping for breath.

“Oh. Jeez,” stammered the attendant, whose name patch said, “Bob Ngo.” “Condolences. I’m surprised to see you here. I’m so sorry.”

The look on Ras’s face stopped Bob’s nervous yammer as thoroughly as a slap. Ras worked to relax his clenched fist. He would not strike this man who’d done nothing but offer sympathy. Douglas would be another story.

“I’m sorry,” Bob apologized for the third time.

“It’s all right.” The hell it was.

Bob looked relieved. “I thought you were in psych, you know, after all you’ve gone through, who wouldn’t be?”

He meant well. Ras just couldn’t manage to care. And Bob Ngo was in his way. Ras said, “Dr. Niall advised me that work would help me deal with the grief. Who am I to argue?” He patted Bob’s arm. The young man smiled gratefully.

Ras had ignored Dr. Niall’s attempts to contact him. “So this is just doctor’s orders. I left something inside the skyrider’s pod there time I used it.”

“I need to see your authorization.”

Shit. “Mr. Ngo. Bob. Just let me pop over there, comb through the pilot pod, then we can both get on with our day.”

“I’d like to, Dr. Bodogom. But it’s my ass out an airlock if I don’t confirm.” He reached toward the console. Ras whipped a device from his pocket. The quick movement surprised Bob. He stared right into the pink mist Ras shot at him. Bob’s eyes glazed and he drifted away, loose-limbed in the low G.

Biobrains are easily tampered with, Ras thought with satisfaction. After inserting the coded wafer into the console, he launched himself toward the skyrider with acrobatic precision. Its hull puckered open. He slid into the pilot pod, then harnessed himself into one of the two control seats. Ras enabled the fusion engine. A multitude of thimble-sized thrusters fired and the craft moved into space.

Stars languorously revolved around Ras as if he were the galaxy’s center. Callisto was already diminished by distance. Here, he was shielded from the despair, grief, and anger that threatened to consume him.

Jupiter grew in his view screen, the only hint of momentum. The ship would hit the south temperate zone on the dawn side of the planet’s terminator, near the reproachful eye of the Great Red Spot.

As Ras moved his right forefinger, data displays and instrument screens annotated the view. One hour, sixteen minutes until atmosphere. He fingered the gold medallion attached to the front of his life suit. Within nestled a crystalline mnemochip, its contents uploaded and analyzed and cross-referenced by people who couldn’t look Ras in the eye.

Kami had retracted the top of Jen’s biostasis cell into the Main Med wall. Ras asked for her because she was kind. After Jen’s body emerged, Kami touched his shoulder, then stepped back to give him privacy.

Jen’s body lay on the translucent blue tabletop. Her naked flesh was warm. Ras knew her every curve, from her breasts to the belly she complained bulged. Her open eyes gazed sightlessly at the ceiling. They were left open to accept the gel that kept them moist. A futile care now.

A blue cloth shielded Jen’s open cranium. Ras squeezed her hand, waiting for her to squeeze back. Of course she didn’t. Ras asked, “Why didn’t they use her neural map? She had an update.”

“You know the limitations. We can fix it, we can augment it. We can’t create a working brain from scratch. Not yet.” Kami measured her words carefully. “We’ll keep her until you decide what to do.”

“Do what you like.” Ras dropped Jen’s hand. “There’s nothing here I care about.”

The pod’s comm shattered the hush. Douglas’s voice came through. “Dr. Bodogom. We’re sending a drone to retrieve you.” Pause. “Unless you come back. This won’t help. Nothing helps but time. I know this.” Ras clicked off the commlink. It was a futile gesture since Douglas could reestablish it, but it gave him satisfaction.

Jupiter centered itself in a trajectory display as the skyrider initiated a course adjustment burn. The skyrider’s hull skin hardened, protecting him from the planet’s monstrous radiation belts.

There were three hours till atmosphere. Ras tapped up a screen and enlarged its frame to encompass sixty percent of the forward view. There was only one thing left to do. He inserted the mnemochip from the medallion. Her voice embraced him. Excited, wistful, and a little frightened. He gasped, but kept listening.

At midcourse turnaround, gravity-like pressure returned and the ship decelerated ass-backwards on a spike of fusion fire. Ras opened his bloodshot eyes. Snot and tears slicked his face. His hands were puffy with bruises from pounding the solid arm rest. It was built to withstand forces greater than merely human.

The instruments could handle descent. Cloud formations lumbered like great armadas across the view screen. The pod’s walls darkened to filter out the sun and illuminate the instruments. Artificial synapses shot preprogrammed instructions fore and aft, and sections of the capsule’s body reconfigured. Soon Ras sat within something part airship, part bathyscaphe, created for this unearthly environment.

The mnemochip was warm against his fingers. With his free hand he tapped controls and adjusted the view projected around him. This is where they’d been seen many times before. Where Jen had been one of them. His fingers squeezed the medallion hard.

Be here.

Douglas looked over Xiao’s shoulder. The fool’s actions weren’t entirely unexpected. He could have had him restrained. He could have required the psych treatment.

Tessa insisted Anton treat people with decency. “It’s not right to play with people’s lives.” That was their forever argument. Forever until Tessa decided he could bend the whole human race to his will, but not her. Douglas sighed.

That was a hole that nothing could fill. Ras was learning the dimensions of his particular hole, a Jen Kangeledes-sized emptiness. Douglas had his own abyss. Xiao glanced his way, worry creasing his forehead. Douglas put a fatherly hand on the man’s shoulder. At least he could act as if he cared.

Bodogom’s ’rider was at the proper coordinates. Situation normal.

They approached. Slow. Possibly fearful. The ballooners arrived, their skins shifting in patterns of bright colors. Jen thought it was a language. Each living airship possessed a cardiovascular system and a nervous system and digestion and . . . what? A brain? Certainly. Mind? Demonstrably.

Some part of Jen? To be determined.

He recorded, “There’s a herd ahead of me. They’re closer now than they were when I arrived an hour ago. I believe they know I’m here.”

Of course they did. The ballooners’ echolocation pulses ponged out of the computer like the beats of a kettle drum. External mics tracked the high-frequency chatter of the manta ray-like flyers.

“The herd is comprised of fifty-four ballooners ranging in size from ninety meters across down to just under fourteen. I make out three, possibly four, distinct somatic variations. Several varieties of flyers move among them in a roughly spherical halo with defined boundaries.”

They were not a “herd.” It was a tribe with hierarchies and language and history and protocols. They had needs and emotions. Jen had felt those needs, carried by a winged sentience that should never have existed.

Why were they here? Who were they? Ras rolled the questions around his brain, just as he had every day since Douglas first told him why he had brought him and Jen to Jupiter. What did these creatures mean to humanity? What did they mean to Ras?

Fifty-something thousand years ago.

During the Late Pleistocene, humanity hunted, fished, painted their bodies and gathered in caves and around fires. They carved wood and bone and stone. They loved each other and taught their children. They spoke in languages long forgotten. And they killed each other. In love. In anger. Sometimes to appease spirits Ras didn’t believe in.

His ancestors, and the ancestors of these creatures, shared the same long, chaos-twisted bloodline with all the generations that had fucked and bred and died until he was spat out into the world. These beings were lost strands of humanity’s genetic cloth. But fifty thousand years ago, their thread was pulled.

Ras expanded the image projected around him. To his eyes, he sat suspended in the Jovians’ home environment, on a chair with only a paper-thin console in front of him. He rotated the chair 360°, and endless cloudscapes revealed themselves. He could imagine himself as alone in the universe. He was alone.

Except for a faint upright rectangle of green light. It marked the pod’s door. Acid burned the back of his throat. He needed to know if any of Jen’s neural patterns still existed within the Jovian host. Did she live on in this alien community in some biochemical transcendence?

If yes, could Ras forgive her?

Tapping the console, he brought up a three-dee box near his left shoulder. Centered in the box was a realtime exterior view floating at arm’s length. Again he tapped the console. The model’s colors changed. Programmed images formed on the airship’s skin mimicking images recorded by Jen.

“I have initiated contact sequence. The program is based on a sim-version from the retrieved recording. He couldn’t say Jen’s name out loud. “They continue to close. Otherwise, no response.”

His hands shook. Good thing he disabled the psych monitors. For several minutes now Ras had a finger on the firing controls of the onboard laser emitter. Useful for both back-up communications and spectroanalysis, the free-variable laser could also burn through flesh at a hundred kilometers. The finger quivered.

He could destroy them. Watch their fragile bodies scorch and burst. Count the seconds as they fell into the deep atmosphere. They murdered his wife.

Were the ballooners and flyers paying attention to the display? Could they recognize Jen’s final memories playing out on the hovering metal alien?

He unlocked the firing program. The laser was set for a single narrow beam, maximum intensity. At a finger stroke, the image of the emitter gun appeared. A narrow blade would slice through as many targets as he chose. It would be so easy.

There was nothing left of his wife. Jen had never believed it, but deep down, he knew she was wrong. And now, wasn’t he standing, walking proof that when you die, you’re gone? Was he Ras Bodogom any more? No. He was a neuronet copy of the man Jen had loved, and would never love again.

He eyed the life forms. The ballooner’s skin colorings flowed against each other. Deep sea creatures with no more brains than snails could do that trick. The target display centered on the creature’s vast body.

He pressed the firing pad.

Nothing happened.

Ras smiled. He had deactivated the laser before launch. A chill passed over Ras’s body, like a fever breaking, as he “shot” Jovian after Jovian, imagining shrieks and gouts of blood splattering the clouds. It felt good. Panting, he tapped the console. The laser control display vanished.

“Dr. Bodogom, this is Jovias project.” Douglas’s voice. “Our system discerns no intelligible pattern in the native life forms’ dermal colorings. Come back home now.”

Ras floated among the cloud-castles. Jen would love this. She had loved this. The sun tinted the cloudscape peach and pale yellow. The beings out there waited for his next move.

“Jovias, don’t worry about me. I’m going to step outside for a while.”

He stood. The rhythm of his heart beat loud in his ears. Ras walked across the invisible floor to the upright rectangle of green light and stepped though it, vanishing into the Jovian morning.

About the Author

Elizabeth Bourne lives in Seattle surrounded by books and yarn. Her super power is always having exact change and she loves waking up to the smell of salt water. Bourne enjoys the companionship of a large malamute named Kai, who helps with her writing by eating the bad pages. Previously published in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine, Interzone, and Black Lantern, Bourne was a finalist in the 2012 Pacific Northwest Writers novel competition for her historical novel, The Seventy. She is currently working on a second-world fantasy.

Elizabeth Bourne’s late husband Mark was a film critic and science fiction writer whose work was published in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine, Asimov’s, and a number of anthologies. Mark was a renowned expert on classic sci-fi films and silent comedy. If he could have been anyone, it would have been Buster Keaton. Mark Bourne’s criticism can be found on IMDB.

Out of Copyright

Charles Sheffield

Troubleshooting. A splendid idea, and one that I agree with totally in principle. Bang! One bullet, and trouble bites the dust. But unfortunately, trouble doesn’t know the rules. Trouble won’t stay dead.

I looked around the table. My top troubleshooting team was here. I was here. Unfortunately, they were supposed to be headed for Jupiter, and I ought to be down on Earth. In less than twenty-four hours, the draft pick would begin. That wouldn’t wait, and if I didn’t leave in the next thirty minutes, I would never make it in time. I needed to be in two places at once. I cursed the copyright laws and the single-copy restriction, and went to work.

“You’ve read the new requirement,” I said. “You know the parameters. Ideas, anyone?”

A dead silence. They were facing the problem in their own unique ways. Wolfgang Pauli looked half-asleep, Thomas Edison was drawing little doll-figures on the table’s surface, Enrico Fermi seemed to be counting on his fingers, and John von Neumann was staring impatiently at the other three. I was doing none of those things. I knew very well that wherever the solution would come from, it would not be from inside my head. My job was much more straightforward: I had to see that when we had a possible answer, it happened. And I had to see that we got one answer, not four.

The silence in the room went on and on. My brain trust was saying nothing, while I watched the digits on my watch flicker by. I had to stay and find a solution; and I had to get to the draft picks. But most of all and hardest of all, I had to remain quiet, to let my team do some thinking.

It was small consolation to know that similar meetings were being held within the offices of the other three combines. Everyone must be finding it equally hard going. I knew the players, and I could imagine the scenes, even though all the troubleshooting teams were different. NETSCO had a group that was intellectually the equal of ours at Romberg AG: Niels Bohr, Theodore von Karman, Norbert Weiner, and Marie Curie. MMG, the great Euro-Mexican combine of Magrit-Marcus Gesellschaft, had focused on engineering power rather than pure scientific understanding and creativity, and, in addition to the Soviet rocket designer Sergey Korolev and the American Nikola Tesla, they had reached farther back (and with more risk) to the great nineteenth-century English engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He had been one of the outstanding successes of the program; I wished he were working with me, but MMG had always refused to look at a trade. MMG’s one bow to theory was a strange one, the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, but the unlikely quartet made one hell of a team.

And finally there was BP Megation, whom I thought of as confused. At any rate, I didn’t understand their selection logic. They had used billions of dollars to acquire a strangely mixed team: Erwin Schrodinger, David Hilbert, Leo Szilard, and Henry Ford. They were all great talents, and all famous names in their fields, but I wondered how well they could work as a unit.

All the troubleshooting teams were now pondering the same emergency. Our problem was created when the Pan-National Union suddenly announced a change to the Phase B demonstration program. They wanted to modify impact conditions, as their contracts with us permitted them to do. They didn’t have to tell us how to do it, either, which was just as well for them, since I was sure they didn’t know. How do you take a billion tons of mass, already launched to reach a specific target at a certain point of time, and redirect it to a different end point with a different arrival time?

There was no point in asking them why they wanted to change rendezvous conditions. It was their option. Some of our management saw the action on PNU’s part as simple bloody-mindedness, but I couldn’t agree. The four multinational combines had each been given contracts to perform the biggest space engineering exercise in human history: small asteroids (only a kilometer or so across—but massing a billion tons each) had to be picked up from their natural orbits and redirected to the Jovian system, where they were to make precise rendezvous with assigned locations of the moon Io. Each combine had to select the asteroid and the method of moving it, but deliver within a tight transfer-energy budget and a tight time schedule.

For that task the PNU would pay each group a total of $8 billion. That sounds like a fair amount of money, but I knew our accounting figures. To date, with the project still not finished (rendezvous would be in eight more days), Romberg AG had spent $14.5 billion. We are looking at a probable cost overrun by a factor of two. I was willing to bet that the other three groups were eating very similar losses. Why?

Because this was only Phase B of a four-phase project. Phase A had been a system design study, which led to four Phase B awards for a demonstration project. The Phase B effort that the four combines were working on now was a proof-of-capability run for the full European Metamorphosis. The real money came in the future, in Phases C and D. Those would be awarded by the PNU to a single combine, and the award would be based largely on Phase B performance. The next phases called for the delivery of fifty asteroids to impact points on Europa (Phase C), followed by thermal mixing operations on the moon’s surface (Phase D). The contract value of C and D would be somewhere up around $800 billion. That was the fish that all the combines were after, and it was the reason we all overspend lavishly on this phase.

By the end of the whole program, Europa would have a forty-kilometer-deep water ocean over all its surface. And then the real fun would begin. Some contractor would begin the installation of the fusion plants, and the seeding of the sea-farms with the first prokaryotic bacterial forms.

The stakes were high; and to keep everybody on their toes, PNU did the right thing. They kept throwing in these little zingers, to mimic the thousand and one things that would go wrong in the final project phases.

While I was sitting and fidgeting, my team had gradually come to life. Fermi was pacing up and down the room—always a good sign; and Wolfgang Pauli was jabbing impatiently at the keys of a computer console. John von Neumann hadn’t moved, but since he did everything in his head anyway, that didn’t mean much.

I looked again at my watch. I had to go. “Ideas?” I said again.

Von Neumann made a swift chopping gesture of his hand. “We have to make a choice, Al. It can be done in four or five ways.”

The others were nodding. “The problem is only one of efficiency and speed,” added Fermi. “I can give you an

order-of-magnitude estimate of the effects on the overall program within half an hour.”

“Within fifteen minutes.” Pauli raised the bidding.

“No need to compete this one.” They were going to settle down to a real four-way fight on methods—they always did—but I didn’t have the time to sit here and referee. The important point was that they said it could be done. “You don’t have to rush it. Whatever you decide, it will have to wait until I get back.” I stood up. “Tom?”

Edison shrugged. “How long will you be gone, Al?”

“Two days, maximum. I’ll head back right after the draft picks.” (That wasn’t quite true; when the draft picks were over, I had some other business to attend to that did not include the troubleshooters, but two days should cover everything.)

“Have fun.” Edison waved his hand casually. “By the time you get back, I’ll have the engineering drawings for you.”

One thing about working with a team like mine—they may not always be right, but they sure are always cocky.

“Make room there. Move over!” The guards were pushing ahead to create a narrow corridor through the wedged mass of people. The one in front of me was butting with his helmeted head, not even looking to see whom he was shoving aside. “Move!” he shouted. “Come on now, out of the way.”

We were in a hurry. Things had been frantically busy Topside before I left, so I had cut it fine on connections to begin with, then been held up half an hour at reentry. We had broken the speed limits on the atmospheric segment, and there would be PNU fines for that, but still we hadn’t managed to make up all the time. Now the first draft pick was only seconds away, and I was supposed to be taking part in it.

A thin woman in a green coat clutched at my arm as we bogged down for a moment in the crush of people. Her face was gray and grim, and she had a placard hanging round her neck. “You could wait longer for the copyright!” She had to shout to make herself heard. “It would cost you nothing—and look at the misery you would prevent. What you’re doing is immoral! TEN MORE YEARS.”

Her last words were a scream as she called out this year’s slogan. TEN MORE YEARS! I shook my arm free as the guard in front of me made sudden headway, and dashed along in his wake. I had nothing to say to the woman; nothing that she would listen to. If it were immoral, what did ten more years have to do with it? Ten more years; if by some miracle they were granted ten more years on the copyrights, what then? I knew the answer. They would try to talk the Pan-National Union into fifteen more years, or perhaps twenty. When you pay somebody off, it only increases their demands. I know, only too well. They are never satisfied with what they get.

Joe Delacorte and I scurried into the main chamber and shuffled sideways to our seats at the last possible moment. All the preliminary nonsense was finished, and the real business was beginning. The tension in the room was terrific. To be honest, a lot of it was being generated by the media. They were all poised to make maximum noise as they shot the selection information all over the System. If it were not for the media, I don’t think the PNU would hold live draft picks at all. We’d all hook in with video links and do our business the civilized way.

The excitement now was bogus for other reasons, too. The professionals—I and a few others—would not become interested until the ten rounds were complete. Before that, the choices were just too limited. Only when they were all made, and the video teams were gone, would the four groups get together off-camera and begin the horse trading. “My ninth round plus my fifth for your second.” “Maybe, if you’ll throw in $10 million and a tenth-round draft pick for next year . . . .

Meanwhile, BP Megation had taken the microphone. “First selection,” said their representative. “Robert Oppenheimer.”

I looked at Joe, and he shrugged. No surprise. Oppenheimer was the perfect choice—a brilliant scientist, but also

practical, and willing to work with other people. He had died in 1967, so his original copyright had expired within the past twelve months. I knew his family had appealed for a copyright extension and been refused. Now BP Megation had sole single-copy rights for another lifetime.

“Trade?” whispered Joe.

I shook my head. We would have to beggar ourselves for next year’s draft picks to make BP give up Oppenheimer. Other combine reps had apparently made the same decision. There was the clicking of data entry as the people around me updated portable databases. I did the same thing with a stub of pencil and a folded sheet of yellow paper, putting a check mark alongside his name. Oppenheimer was taken care of, I could forget that one. If by some miracle one of the four teams had overlooked some other top choice, I had to be ready to make an instant revision to my own selections.

“First selection, by NETSCO,” said another voice. “Peter Joseph William Debye.”

It was another natural choice. Debye had been a Nobel prizewinner in physics, a theoretician with an excellent grasp of applied technology. He had died in 1966. Nobel laureates in science, particularly ones with that practical streak, went fast. As soon as their copyrights expired, they would be picked up in the draft the same year.

That doesn’t mean it always works out well. The most famous case, of course, was Albert Einstein. When his copyright had expired in 2030, BP Megation had had first choice in the draft pick. They had their doubts, and they must have sweated blood over their decision. The rumor mill said they spent over $70 million in simulations alone, before they decided to take him as their top choice. The same rumor mill said that the cloned form was now showing amazing ability in chess and music, but no interest at all in physics or mathematics. If that was true, BP Megation had dropped $2 billion down a black hole: $1 billion straight to the PNU for acquisition of copyright, and another $1 billion for the clone process. Theorists were always tricky; you could never tell how they would turn out.

Magrit-Marcus Gesellschaft had now made their first draft pick, and chosen another Nobel laureate, John Cockroft. He also had died in 1967. So far, every selection was completely predictable. The three combines were picking the famous scientists and engineers who had died in 1966 and 1967, and who were now, with the expiration of family retention of copyrights, available for cloning for the first time.

The combines were being logical, but it made for a very dull draft pick. Maybe it was time to change that. I stood up to announce our first take.

“First selection, by Romberg AG,” I said. “Charles Proteus Steinmetz.”

My announcement caused a stir in the media. They had presumably never heard of Steinmetz, which was a disgraceful statement of their own ignorance. Even if they hadn’t spent most of the past year combing old files and records, as we had, they should have heard of him. He was one of the past century’s most colorful and creative scientists, a man who had been physically handicapped (he was a hunchback), but mentally able to do the equivalent of a hundred one-hand push-ups without even breathing hard. Even I had heard of him, and you’d not find many of my colleagues who’d suggest I was interested in science.

The buzzing in the media told me they were consulting their own historical data files, digging farther back in time. Even when they had done all that, they would still not understand the first thing about the true process of clone selection. It’s not just a question of knowing who died over seventy-five years ago, and will therefore be out of copyright. That’s a trivial exercise, one that any yearbook will solve for you. You also have to evaluate other factors. Do you know where the body is—are you absolutely sure? Remember, you can’t clone anyone with a cell or two from the original body. You also have to be certain that it’s who you think it is. All bodies seventy-five years old tend to look the same. And then, if the body happens to be really old—say, more than a couple of centuries—there are other peculiar problems that are still not understood at all. When

NETSCO pulled its coup a few years ago by cloning Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the other three combines were envious at first. Leibniz was a real universal genius, a seventeenth-century superbrain who was good at everything. NETSCO had developed a better cell-growth technique, and they had also succeeded in locating the body of Leibniz in its undistinguished Hanover grave.

They walked tall for almost a year at NETSCO, until the clone came out of the forcing chambers for indoctrination. He looked nothing like the old portraits of Leibniz, and he could not grasp even the simplest abstract concepts. Oops! said the media. Wrong body.

But it wasn’t as simple as that. The next year, MMG duplicated the NETSCO cell-growth technology and tried for Isaac Newton. In this case there was no doubt that they had the correct body, because it had lain undisturbed since 1727 beneath a prominent plaque in London’s Westminster Abbey. The results were just as disappointing as they had been for Leibniz.

Now NETSCO and MMG have become very conservative, in my opinion, far too conservative. But since then, nobody has tried for a clone of anyone who died before 1850. The draft picking went on its thoughtful and generally cautious way, and was over in a couple of hours except for the delayed deals.

The same group of protesters were picketing the building when I left. I tried to walk quietly through them, but they must have seen my picture on one of the exterior screens showing the draft-pick process. I was buttonholed by a man in a red jumpsuit and the same thin woman in green, still carrying her placard.

“Could we speak with you for just one moment?” The man in red was very well-spoken and polite.

I hesitated, aware that news cameras were on us. “Very briefly. I’m trying to run a proof-of-concept project, you know.”

“I know. Is it going well?” He was a different type from most of the demonstrators, cool and apparently intelligent. And therefore potentially more dangerous.

“I wish I could say yes,” I said. “Actually, it’s going rather badly. That’s why I’m keen to get back out.”

“I understand. All I wanted to ask you was why you—and I don’t mean you, personally; I mean the combines—why do you find it necessary to use clones? You could do your work without them, couldn’t you?”

I hesitated. “Let me put it this way. We could do the work without them, in just the same way as we could stumble along somehow if we were denied the use of computer power, or nuclear power. The projects would be possible, but they would be enormously more difficult. The clones augment our available brainpower, at the highest levels. So let me ask you: Why should we do without the clones, when they are available and useful?”

“Because of the families. You have no right to subject the families to the misery and upset of seeing their loved ones cloned, without their having any rights in the matter. It’s cruel, and unnecessary. Can’t you see that?”

“No, I can’t. Now, you listen to me for a minute.” The cameras were still on me. It was a chance to say something that could never be said often enough. “The family holds copyright for seventy-five years after a person’s death. So if you, personally, remember your grandparent, you have to be pushing eighty years old—and it’s obvious from looking at you that you’re under forty. So ask yourself, Why are all you petitioners people who are in their thirties? It’s not you who’s feeling any misery.”

“But there are relatives—,” he said.

“Oh yes, the relatives. Are you a relative of somebody who has been cloned?”

“Not yet. But if this sort of thing goes on

“Listen to me for one more minute. A long time ago, there were a lot of people around who thought that it was wrong to let books with sex in them be sold to the general public. They petitioned to have the books banned. It wasn’t that they claimed to be buying the books themselves, and finding them disgusting; because if they said that was the case, then people would have asked them why they were buying what they didn’t like. Nobody was forcing anybody to buy those

books. No, what the petitioners wanted was for other people to be stopped from buying what the petitioners didn’t like. And you copyright-extension people are just the same. You are making a case on behalf of the relatives of the ones who are being cloned. But you never seem to ask yourself this: If cloning is so bad, why aren’t the descendants of the clones the ones doing the complaining? They’re not, you know. You never see them around here.”

He shook his head. “Cloning is immoral!”

I sighed. Why bother? Not one word of what I’d said had got through to him. It didn’t much matter—I’d really been speaking for the media anyway—but it was a shame to see bigotry masquerading as public-spirited behavior. I’d seen enough of that already in my life.

I started to move off toward my waiting aircar. The lady in green clutched my arm again. “I’m going to leave instructions in my will that I want to be cremated. You’ll never get me!”

You have my word on that, lady. But I didn’t say it. I headed for the car, feeling an increasing urge to get back to the clean and rational regions of space. There was one good argument against cloning, and only one. It increased the total number of people, and to me that number already felt far too large.

I had been gone only thirty hours, total; but when I arrived back at Headquarters, I learned that in my absence five new problems had occurred. I scanned the written summary that Pauli had left behind.

First, one of the thirty-two booster engines set deep in the surface of the asteroid did not respond to telemetry requests for a status report. We had to assume it was defective, and eliminate it from the final firing pattern. Second, a big solar flare was on the way. There was nothing we could do about that, but it did mean we would have to recompute the strength of the magnetic and electric fields close to Io. They would change with the strength of the Jovian magnetosphere, and that was important because the troubleshooting team in my absence had agreed on their preferred solution to the problem of adjusting impact point and arrival time. It called for strong coupling between the asteroid and the 5-million-amp flux tube of current between Io and its parent planet, Jupiter, to modify the final collision trajectory.

Third, we had lost the image data stream from one of our observing satellites, in synchronous orbit with Io. Fourth, our billion-ton asteroid had been struck by a larger-than-usual micrometeorite. This one must have massed a couple of kilograms, and it had been moving fast. It had struck off-axis from the center of mass, and the whole asteroid was now showing a tendency to rotate slowly away from our preferred orientation. Fifth, and finally, a new volcano had become very active down on the surface of Io. It was spouting sulfur up for a couple of hundred kilometers, and obscuring the view of the final-impact landmark.

After I had read Pauli’s terse analysis of all the problems—nobody I ever met or heard of could summarize as clearly and briefly as he did—I switched on my communications set and asked him the only question that mattered: “Can you handle them all?”

There was a delay of almost two minutes. The troubleshooters were heading out to join the rest of our project team for their on-the-spot analyses in the Jovian system; already the light-travel time was significant. If I didn’t follow in the next day or two, radio-signal delay would make conversation impossible. At the moment, Jupiter was forty-five light-minutes from Earth.

“We can, Al,” said Pauli’s image at last. “Unless others come up in the next few hours, we can. From here until impact, we’ll be working in an environment with increasing uncertainties.”

“The PNU people planned it that way. Go ahead—but send me full transcripts.” I left the system switched on, and went off to the next room to study the notes I had taken of the five problem areas. As I had done with every glitch that had come up since the Phase B demonstration project began, I placed the problem into one of two basic categories: act of nature, or failure of man-made element. For the most recent five difficulties, the volcano on Io and the solar flare belonged

to the left-hand column: Category One, clearly natural and unpredictable events. The absence of booster-engine telemetry and the loss of satellite-image data were Category Two, failures of our system. They went in the right-hand column. I hesitated for a long time over the fifth event, the impact of the meteorite; finally, and with some misgivings, I assigned it also as a Category One event.

As soon as possible, I would like to follow the engineering teams out toward Jupiter for the final hours of the demonstration. However, I had two more duties to perform before I could leave. Using a coded link to Romberg AG HQ in synchronous Earth orbit, I queried the status of all the clone tanks. No anomalies were reported. By the time we returned from the final stages of Phase B, another three finished clones would be ready to move to the indoctrination facility. I needed to be there when it happened.

Next. I had to review and approve acquisition of single-use copyright for all the draft picks we had negotiated down on Earth. To give an idea of the importance of these choices, we were looking at an expenditure of $20 billion for those selections over the next twelve months. It raised the unavoidable question, Had we made the best choices?

At this stage of the game, every combine began to have second thoughts about the wisdom of their picks. All the old failures came crowding into your mind. I already mentioned NETSCO and their problem with Einstein, but we had had our full share at Romberg AG: Gregor Mendel, the originator of the genetic ideas that stood behind all the cloning efforts, had proved useless; so had Ernest Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron, our second pick for 1958. We had (by blind luck!) traded him along with $40 million for Wolfgang Pauli. Even so, we had made a bad error of judgment, and the fact that others made the same mistake was no consolation. As for Marconi, even though he looked like the old pictures of him, and was obviously highly intelligent, the clone who emerged turned out to be so indolent and casual about everything that he ruined any project he worked on. I had placed him in a cushy and undemanding position and allowed him to fiddle about with his own interests, which were mainly sports and good-looking women. (As Pauli acidly remarked, “And you say that we’re the smart ones, doing all the work?”)

It’s not the evaluation of a person’s past record that’s difficult, because we are talking about famous people who have done a great deal; written masses of books, articles, and papers; and been thoroughly evaluated by their own contemporaries. Even with all that, a big question still remains: Will the things that made the original man or woman great still be there in the cloned form? In other words, Just what is it that is inherited?

That’s a very hard question to answer. The theory of evolution was proposed 170 years ago, but we’re still fighting the old Nature-versus-Nurture battle. Is a human genius decided mainly by heredity, or by the way the person was raised? One old argument against cloning for genius was based on the importance of Nurture. It goes as follows: an individual is the product of both heredity (which is all you get in the clone) and environment. Since it is impossible to reproduce someone’s environment, complete with parents, grandparents, friends, and teachers, you can’t raise a clone that will be exactly like the original individual.

I’ll buy that logic. We can’t make ourselves an intellectually exact copy of anyone.

However, the argument was also used to prove that cloning for superior intellectual performance would be impossible. But of course, it actually proves nothing of the sort. If you take two peas from the same pod, and put one of them in deep soil next to a high wall, and the other in shallow soil out in the open, they must do different things if both are to thrive. The one next to the wall has to make sure it gets enough sunshine, which it can do by maximizing leaf area; the one in shallow soil has to get enough moisture, which it does through putting out more roots. The superior strain of peas is the one whose genetic composition allows it to adapt to whatever environment it is presented with.

People are not peas, but in one respect they are not very different from them: some have superior genetic composition to others. That’s all you can ask for. If you clone

someone from a century ago, the last thing you want is someone who is identical to the original. They would be stuck in a twentieth-century mind-set. What is needed is someone who can adapt to and thrive in today’s environment—whether that is now the human equivalent of shade, or of shallow soil. The success of the original clone-template tells us a very important thing, that we are dealing with a superior physical brain. What that brain thinks is the year 2040 should be different from what it would have thought in the year 1940—otherwise the clone would be quite useless. And the criteria for “useless” change with time, too.

All these facts and a hundred others were running around inside my head as I reviewed the list for this year. Finally I made a note to suggest that J.B.S. Haldane, whom we had looked at and rejected three years ago on the grounds of unmanageability, ought to be looked at again and acquired if possible. History shows that he had wild views on politics and society, but there was no question at all about the quality of his mind. I thought I had learned a lot about interfacing with difficult scientific personalities in the past few years.

When I was satisfied with my final list, I transmitted everything to Joe Delacorte, who was still down on Earth, and headed for the transition room. A personal shipment pod ought to be waiting for me there. I hoped I would get a good one. At the very least, I’d be in it for the next eight days. Last time I went out to the Jovian system, the pod’s internal lighting and external antenna failed after three days. Have you ever sat in the dark for seventy-two hours, a hundred million miles from the nearest human, unable to send or receive messages? I didn’t know if anyone realized I was in trouble. All I could do was sit tight—and I mean tight; pods are small—and stare out at the stars.

This time the pod was in good working order. I was able to participate in every problem that hit the project over the next four days. There were plenty of them, all small, and all significant. One of the fuel-supply ships lost a main ion drive. The supply ship was not much more than a vast bag of volatiles and a small engine, and it had almost no brain at all in its computer, not even enough to figure out an optimal use of its drives. We had to chase after and corral it as though we were pursuing a great lumbering elephant. Then three members of the impact-monitoring team came down with food poisoning—salmonella, which was almost certainly their own fault. You can say anything you like about throwing away spoiled food, but you can’t get a sloppy crew to take much notice.

Then, for variety, we lost a sensor through sheer bad program design. In turning one of our imaging systems from star sensing to Io-Jupiter sensing, we tracked it right across the solar disk and burned out all the photocells. According to the engineers, that’s the sort of blunder you don’t make after kindergarten—but somebody did it.

Engineering errors are easy to correct. It was much trickier when one of the final-approach-coordination groups, a team of two men and one woman, chose the day before the Io rendezvous to have a violent sexual argument. They were millions of kilometers away from anyone, so there was not much we could do except talk to them. We did that, hoped they wouldn’t kill each other, and made plans to do without their inputs if we had to.

Finally, one day before impact, an unplanned and anomalous firing of a rocket on the asteroid’s forward surface caused a significant change of velocity of the whole body.

I ought to explain that I did little or nothing to solve any of these problems. I was too slow, too ignorant, and not creative enough. While I was still struggling to comprehend what the problem parameters were, my troubleshooters were swarming all over it. They threw proposals and counterproposals at each other so fast that I could hardly note them, still less contribute to them. For example, in the case of the anomalous rocket firing that I mentioned, compensation for the unwanted thrust called for an elaborate balancing act of lateral and radial engines, rolling and nudging the asteroid back into its correct approach path. The team had mapped out the methods in minutes, written the necessary optimization programs in less than half an hour, and implemented their solution before I understood the geometry of what was going on.

So what did I do while all this was happening? I continued to make my two columns: act of nature, or failure of man-made element. The list was growing steadily, and I was spending a lot of time looking at it.

We were coming down to the final few hours now, and all the combines were working flat out to solve their own problems. In an engineering project of this size, many thousands of things could go wrong. We were working in extreme physical conditions, hundreds of millions of kilometers away from Earth and our standard test environments. In the intense charged-particle field near Io, cables broke at loads well below their rated capacities, hard-vacuum welds showed air-bleed effects, and lateral jets were fired and failed to produce the predicted attitude adjustments. And on top of all this, the pressure, isolation, and bizarre surroundings were too much for some of the workers. We had human failure to add to engineering failure. The test was tougher than anyone had realized—even PNU, who was supposed to make the demonstration project just this side of impossible.

I was watching the performance of the other three combines only a little less intently than I was watching our own. At five hours from contact time, NETSCO apparently suffered a communications loss with their asteroid-control system. Instead of heading for Io impact, the asteroid veered away, spiraling in toward the bulk of Jupiter itself.

BP Megation lost it at impact minus three hours, when a vast explosion on one of their asteroid forward boosters threw the kilometer-long body into a rapid tumble. Within an hour, by some miracle of improvisation, their engineering team had found a method of stabilizing the wobbling mass. But by then it was too late to return to nominal impact time and place. Their asteroid skimmed into the surface of Io an hour early, sending up a long, tear-shaped mass of ejecta from the moon’s turbulent surface.

That left just two of us, MMG and Romberg AG. We both had our hands full. The Jovian system is filled with electrical, magnetic, and gravitational energies bigger than anything in the Star System except the Sun itself. The two remaining combines were trying to steer their asteroid into a pinpoint landing through a great storm of interference that made every control command and every piece of incoming telemetry suspect. In the final hour I didn’t even follow the exchanges between my troubleshooters. Oh, I could hear them easily enough. What I couldn’t do was comprehend them, enough to know what was happening.

Pauli would toss a scrap of comment at von Neumann, and, while I was trying to understand that, von Neumann would have done an assessment, keyed in for a databank status report, gabbled a couple of questions to Fermi and an instruction to Edison, and at the same time be absorbing scribbled notes and diagrams from those two. I don’t know if what they were doing was potentially intelligible to me or not; all I know is they were going about fifty times too fast for me to follow. And it didn’t much matter what I understood—they were getting the job done. I was still trying to divide all problems into my Category One-Category Two columns, but it got harder and harder.

In the final hour I didn’t look or listen to what my own team was doing. We had one band of telemetry trained on the MMG project, and more and more that’s where my attention was focused. I assumed they were having the same kind of communications trouble as we were—that crackling discharge field around Io made everything difficult. But their team was handling it. They were swinging smoothly into impact.

And then, with only ten minutes to go, the final small adjustment was made. It should have been a tiny nudge from the radial jets; enough to fine-tune the impact position for a few hundred meters, and no more. Instead, there was a joyous roar of a radial jet at full, uncontrolled thrust. The MMG asteroid did nothing unusual for a few seconds (a billion tons is a lot of inertia), then began to drift lazily sideways, away from its nominal trajectory.

The jet was still firing. And that should have been impossible, because the first thing that the MMG team would do was send a POWER-OFF signal to the engine.

The time for impact came when the MMG asteroid was still a clear fifty kilometers out of position, and accelerating away. I saw the final collision, and the payload scraped along the surface of Io in a long, jagged scar that looked nothing at all like the neat, punched hole that we were supposed to achieve.

And we did achieve it, a few seconds later. Our asteroid came in exactly where and when it was supposed to, driving in exactly vertical to the surface. The plume of ejecta had hardly begun to rise from Io’s red-and-yellow surface before von Neumann was pulling a bottle of bourbon from underneath the communications console.

I didn’t object—I only wished I were there physically to share it, instead of being stuck in my own pod, short of rendezvous with our main ship. I looked at my final list, still somewhat incomplete. Was there a pattern to it? Ten minutes of analysis didn’t show one. No one had tried anything—this time. Someday, and it might be tomorrow, somebody on another combine would have a bright idea; and then it would be a whole new ball game.

While I was still pondering my list, my control console began to buzz insistently. I switched it on expecting contact with my own troubleshooting team. Instead, I saw the despondent face of Brunel, MMG’s own team leader—the man above all others that I would have liked to work on my side.

He nodded at me when my picture appeared on the screen. He was smoking one of his powerful black cigars, stuck in the side of his mouth. The expression on his face was as impenetrable as ever. He never let his feelings show there. “I assume you saw it, didn’t you?” he said around the cigar. “We’re out of it. I just called to congratulate you—again.”

“Yeah, I saw it. Tough luck. At least you came second.”

“Which, as you know very well, is no better than coming last.” He sighed and shook his head. “We still have no idea what happened. Looks like either a programming error, or a valve sticking open. We probably won’t know for weeks. And I’m not sure I care.”

I maintained a sympathetic silence.

“I sometimes think we should just give up, Al,” he said. “I can beat those other turkeys, but I can’t compete with you. That’s six in a row that you’ve won. It’s wearing me out. You’ve no idea how much frustration there is in that.”

I had never known Brunel to reveal so much of his feelings before.

“I think I do understand your problems,” I said.

And I did. I knew exactly how he felt—more than he would believe. To suffer through a whole, endless sequence of minor, niggling mishaps was heartbreaking. No single trouble was ever big enough for a trouble-shooting team to stop, isolate it, and be able to say, there’s dirty work going on here. But their cumulative effect was another matter. One day it was a morass of shipments missing their correct flights, another time a couple of minus signs dropped into computer programs, or a key worker struck down from a few days by a random virus, permits misfiled, manifests mislaid, or licenses wrongly dated.

I knew all those mishaps personally. I should, because I invented most of them. I think of it as the death of a thousand cuts. No one can endure all that and still hope to win a Phase B study.

“How would you like to work on the Europan Meta-morph?” I asked. “I think you’d love it.”

He looked very thoughtful, and for the first time, I believe I could actually read his expression. “Leave MMG, you mean?” he said. “Maybe. I don’t know what I want anymore. Let me think about it. I’d like to work with you, Al—you’re a genius.”

Brunel was wrong about that, of course. I’m certainly no genius. All I can do is what I’ve always done—handle people, take care of unpleasant details (quietly!), and make sure things get done that need doing. And of course, do what I do best: make sure that some things that need doing don’t get done.

There are geniuses in the world, real geniuses. Not me,

though. The man who decided to clone me, secretly—there I’d suggest you have a genius.

“Say, don’t you remember, they called me AL . . . .”

Of course, I don’t remember. That song was written in the 1930s, and I didn’t die until 1947, but no clone remembers anything of the forefather life. The fact that we tend to be knowledgeable about our originals’ period is an expression of interest in those individuals, not memories from them. I know the Chicago of the Depression years intimately, as well as I know today; but it is all learned knowledge. I have no actual recollection of events. I don’t remember.

So even if you don’t remember, call me Al anyway. Everyone did.

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May, 1989.

About the Author

As well as being one of the best “hard science” writers of his generation, the late Charles Sheffield was a theoretical physicist who worked on the American space program and was the chief scientist of the Earth Satellite Corporation. He won the Hugo Award in 1994 for his story, “Georgia on My Mind.” His books included the bestselling non-fiction title Earthwatch, the novels Sight of Proteus, The Web Between the Worlds, Hidden Variables, My Brother’s Keeper, Between the Strokes of Night, The Nimrod Hunt, Trader’s World, Proteus Unbound, Summertide, Divergence, Transcendence, Cold As Ice, Brother To Dragons, The Mind Pool, Godspeed, The Ganymede Club, and the collections Erasmus Magister, The McAndrew Chronicles, Dancing With Myself, and Georgia on My Mind and Other Places. Born in Britain, he was living at the time of his tragically early death in Silver Spring, Maryland, and married to writer Nancy Kress.

First Principle

Nancy Kress

He was even bigger than I expected. All three of them were. Barb and I watched on the link screen as they waited for the transport bay to pressurize, as they climbed out of the rover. Dr. Langley, in his rotation as council leader, made a welcome speech. The parents managed exhausted smiles, but the boy scowled.

“He’s so ugly,” Barb said. “And look at him—he hates us already.”

“He’s scared,” I said. “Wouldn’t you be, if you got taken away to Earth?”

Barb made a vomiting sound and folded her small arms across her chest. “Don’t be so good all the time, Gina. It’s wearying.”

I didn’t answer her. I’m not “good,” just reasonable. If Mom had ever dragged me to Earth from Mars, I’d be just as scared as this boy looked. Not that anyone would be so insane as to leave Mars for Earth.

Barb said, “They should stay where they belong. Hell, Gina, that reco we saw just last night!”

“We don’t know that this kid watches that sort of reco.”

“We don’t know that he doesn’t.”

Now Dr. Langley and the “immigrants”—such a strange word, we haven’t had immigration to Mars in decades and never to Mangala—walked through the rover bay and into Level 1. More people to greet them, more speeches. I tugged on Barb’s hand, and we moved to the boy to do our part. “It would be nice if someone his own age were there to greet David Hansen,” my mother had said, in the tone that meant “You’re elected.” I’d made Barb go with me. Now that didn’t seem like such a good idea. She radiated contempt.

Maybe David Hansen felt it. Or maybe he was just stupid. This was our world; he was the outsider, and he didn’t even try to fake good manners. After the adults’ introductions, while the officials chatted warily, stumbling over each other’s strange accents, David and Barb and I stared at each other, silent. But the message in his eyes was clear. You’re ugly, you’re deformed, you’re monsters, you’re not even human. Last night’s reco lay on my mind.

Does he have any idea how he looks to us?

“Hello,” I said finally. “I’m Gina Mellit and this is Barb Fu. I understand you play chess.”

He wasn’t stupid. He had manners when he chose to use them, although even then a sneer underlay the polite phrases. He was a better chess player than I am, and I’d been Valles Marineris junior champion. He hated Mars, and I hated him.

But not at first. “He’s scared,” I said to Barb and Hai-Yan and Andre and Ezra until I was tired of saying it and they were tired of hearing it. David wasn’t scared, he was a sick, supercilious son-of-a-bitch. But at first he was just plain sick. They took his family down to Level 2 and gave them a room on the terrace—which Mom and I wouldn’t get until our rotation came up next year—and specially designated a bot to take care of him while his parents, who weren’t sick, went to work in the labs. And then they urged me to play chess with him.

“Why can’t he play against the computer?” I said.

“He can,” Mom said. “He does. But I’m sure he needs human company, Gina. Wouldn’t you, in his place?”

I didn’t say, I’m not in his place. I didn’t say, I wouldn’t ever be in his place. I didn’t say, His place made those recos about us. All those things were true, but you didn’t say them to Mom, who was a Spiritual Guide when she wasn’t a geneticist. The First Principle was even stronger in our family than in my friends’, especially since my father was killed a year ago in an accident on the surface. So I didn’t say any of it. I went to play chess with David Hansen.

The bot let me in. I nodded to it and said, “Gina Mellit to visit David Hansen. Chessboard, please.”

From his bed David said, “Why are so polite to it? It’s just a machine.”

“Why not be polite?” I said.

He did something with his tongue that I knew from the recos meant extreme contempt. And because that kind of reco was the only Earth feed where I’d ever seen that tongue thing, I knew then that he watched them.

The bot handed me an old-fashioned chess set, carved of some heavy Terran wood. I put it on the table beside David’s bed, he sat up shakily, and I held out my closed fists. “Right one,” he said. It held the white pawn. He opened with the Sicilian, I responded, and we played in a thick, ugly silence. He was a romantic player, making bold attacks and sacrifices, and I should have been able to counter that style of play. But somehow the advantage eluded me. Two pawns down, I lifted my eyes from the board to rest them on Mars.

The terrace rooms on Level 2 have a wonderful view. Mangala, a fairly new settlement although I’ve lived in it my whole life, is built against a south-facing cliff. The cliff face is terraced in four levels, each set back from the one below, with steps on the outside that mean you don’t have to wait for the elevators if you don’t want to. Pots on the terraces hold genemod flowers designed by my mother, and at the bottom is the park, full of the genemod plants and trees that the wizards are always improving. The clear plastic of the shield slants down from the top of the cliff, Level 1, to the ground, and then beyond that is the shallow dome of the farm. From David’s bed he could see the green of the park and the farm, and beyond them the red landscape and glorious pink sky.

David followed my gaze. “It’s so ugly.”

“Ugly?” My and Mom’s current quarters were in the worst part of our rotation, at the back of Level 4 where the sound of the excavation bots droned, night and day, even through the stone.

“You don’t even know how ugly it is, do you? You’ve never seen the ocean, or a beach, or mist at morning . . . .” He stopped, bent over the board, and coughed. My anger morphed into pity. Despite being so big—he must top 170 centimeters!— he looked frail. I was never sick.

I said, “Did you live near an ocean? With mists at morning? I’ve seen recos.”

“You’ve seen nothing. A reco can’t capture it.”

“Maybe not. But I know that—”

“You know nothing.”

I stood up. “Finish the game by yourself.”

“Leaving because you’re losing?” he taunted.

I glared at him. But I sat down again.

The First Principle governs Mars. It’s a spiritual principle, not a legal one, and absolutely necessary for survival in any closed environment with limited resources: Put yourself in the other person’s place. David was sick, uprooted, longing for the pestilence that was Earth, despite how hard that was for me to imagine. I advanced my bishop.

We finished the game in silence. He won. I left without looking at him. But as the bot let me out, I heard him breathe behind me, so soft that maybe he didn’t mean for me to hear. But I think he did mean it.

“Bug.”

I didn’t turn around. Neanderthal, I wanted to say, but didn’t.

Don’t be so good all the time, Gina. It’s wearying.

We don’t look like bugs. He does look like a Neanderthal. Too big, too hairy, too few arms.

My great-great-great-grandfather was on the initial genemod team. I’m proud of that, and why wouldn’t I be? On Mars there is no room for waste or excess or stupid ostentation. Form follows function. The beauty which that creates is so much better than any Earth beauty; it’s filled with unity and grace. We have softer colors—through a telescope Earth always looks to me too gaudy, all that bright blue and white. On Mars variations are fashioned with subtlety and for the beauty of perfect fit with the environment. My genes are exactly what they need to be for this gravity, this level of radiation, this type of light. And I am a pretty girl. I see it in the eyes of my friends, my mother, other people. The thick, short bones of my legs don’t lose calcium and strength in this gravity, as David Hansen’s will. My big arms, engineered for strength, could break his too-long neck. The flexible tentacles of my small arms can manipulate objects that his clumsy fingers would crush. The light green of my epidermal photosynthetic cells uses the weak Martian sunlight to augment the energy from my food intake. I can see farther than David Hansen, hear better, use fuel more efficiently. Who the hell is he to presume to condescend?

“I’m not going to play any more chess with David,” I said to my mother. We were on our way to the women’s baths, walking along a corridor deep inside the Level 3 rock. I had my coming-of-age ceremony several weeks ago, and most of my friends have already moved into their adult quarters, but I’m in no hurry. I like my mother. It’s pleasant to have someone to come home to, and there’s no one yet that I’d like to set up a partnership with.

“I wish you would continue the chess, Gina.”

“No. He’s awful.”

“He’s dying.”

I stopped cold. She said it quietly, factually, the way she recites genetic data. I blurted, “Why would anybody bring a dying man all the way to Mars? Especially one who doesn’t even want to be here?”

“David isn’t yet a man.”

“He’s the same age I am!”

“But it’s different there, you know that. David can’t make any decisions on his own and his parents wanted to be here. Earth is dying. You know that, too.”

Of course I knew that. We all knew that. It was the reason immigration had resumed at all. Three generations of arrivals at Mars, five generations when Earth was in too much crisis to fund expeditions and we were left to become ourselves in peace. And now another desperate influx by people frantic to get away while they still could. A phrase from literature came to mind: rats leaving a sinking ship. But I had never seen a rat nor a water ship, and Earth literature mostly bored me.

I said, “Mom—”

“Put yourself in David’s place, Gina.”

David’s place was watching bug recos. Vile, stomach-turning things. And the computer games were worse. Win points by pulling tentacles off the “bugs.” Crush them under big robotic feet. Hit them with “pesticides” that make that tough green skin blister and molt. Tie the girl bugs down and rape them. Pack them naked into a “bug jar” and see how many you can fit. But Mom didn’t know my friends and I had seen bug recos and bug games, and I couldn’t tell her. We had them off an illegal feed that Ezra, who was some sort of electronic genius, had cobbled together during a mapping expo in a surface rover and then narrow-beamed to his receiver.

In my opinion, Earth should die.

“I think,” Mom said carefully, “that maybe there’s a little xenophobia going both ways here. Will you promise me to think about that, Gina?”

“All right,” I said, without enthusiasm. “I’ll think about it. What’s David Hansen dying of?”

“Brain blight.”

She had me, and she knew it. We’d all learned about brain blight. Earthers caught it from one of the microbes that had been engineered in the Second Bio Wars; it created neurotoxins that ate away at the cerebral areas that controlled basic bodily functions. You got weaker and weaker, until your heart or lungs just gave out for good. It was not contagious and not curable, not even by us. Mars has been far more daring in its genetic engineering than has Earth. We had to be, in order to survive, once the reinforcement ships stopped coming. And we’ve been incredibly lucky, with only minor failures or side effects. But much as we’d modified the human body, we still didn’t know enough to do much with the brain. David Hansen’s brain was essentially the same as mine, and it was killing him. He’d been in cold sleep for the voyage out and that had halted the blight, but now he couldn’t have much time left.

Put yourself in his place. Eight years old—sixteen in E-years—and exiled, dying.

I shuddered.

“Don’t do it,” Barbara said. “You’re an adult, your mom can’t make you.”

“My mom doesn’t make me do anything,” I said, which was true. “She only reminds me about the First Principle. Gently.”

“That’s worse.”

“Much worse.”

“How many times did you play him?”

“Six.”

“How many did you lose?”

“Six.”

Barb grimaced. “Did he ever mention . . . you know . . . .”

“The bug recos? No. He doesn’t mention anything, not directly. He just hints at nasty stuff. His parents are never around because they leave him alone all the time.”

“I’d leave him alone, too. He’s shit.”

“While we play he has the link screen on an Earther news feed. It shows disaster after disaster. Yesterday it was all these children dying in some settlement called Africa and the bodies just stacked in a huge pit—you can’t imagine how big—and set on fire to—”

“Don’t tell me. The Earthers are all rotten, we already knew that. Gina, you should—oh, number three bot’s hit something!”

We were on excavation duty. First-year workers always do jobs in pairs, even when the job mostly consists of watching screens and adjusting bot performance. Barb and I sat in the dusty little Level 6 control room, deep underground, near the end of our shift. She had her boots up on the back of my chair. Two chairs and the control console nearly filled the space, but Barb had jammed in Jiji’s bed as well. The mebio lay asleep, his tail curled around him. I’d left FuzzBall at home. This was a work shift, after all; sometimes Barb can seem a little immature.

The excavation bots were a mile away, at the end of the new tunnels. Excavation goes on all the time on Mars. We dig out new rooms shielded by tons of rock from the planet’s yearly ten rems of radiation. We dig wells to the underground aquifers. But this particular project was a first: a ten-mile tunnel from Mangala to the nearest town, Kasei. Eventually the tunnel would have a little train running along it. Someday underground trains would connect all the settlements in the Valles Marineris.

I studied the data from the bot. “Whatever it hit is harder than the surrounding rock. An igneous form we haven’t cataloged yet? Look at this Cixin-scale reading, it—”

Barb’s boots left the back of my chair and hit the floor with a resounding thump! “Let’s go see!”

“You know we’re not supposed to do that. For any anomaly we’re supposed to call Dr. Alvero and—”

“Oh, for once don’t be such a good girl, Gina!”

Barb’s eyes sparkled. Her comment rankled. And somewhere deep inside, I felt—even while knowing it made no sense—that I had already paid out enough goodness by playing chess with David Hansen. Besides, I was curious to go into the tunnel, too. I’d never seen it live. And it wasn’t as if we didn’t know everything about proper suiting up for unpressurized areas. We’d had that drill since we were five.

“Okay,” I said, “but let me run the diagnostics first to make sure it’s not just a bot malfunction.”

It wasn’t. The bot had hit something too hard even to dent, although it kept on trying, its diamond-fiber arm scrabbling against the whatever-it-was. Excavation bots are pretty stupid. I turned it off and we took the suits from their closet. Behind the closet was a small air lock, and behind that the start of the tunnel.

The ceiling was higher than it looked on the control screen, and a lot dustier. Minuscule particles of rock choked the air. Fines, we called them on the surface, but I couldn’t remember if it was the same for underground particulates. All at once this didn’t seem like such a good idea.

“Barb—”

“Come on!” she said over her suit radio. She bolted forward, and I followed.

The tunnel was about three meters wide. The first part had been reinforced by a construction bot, which we passed, busily working, about two-thirds of the way along. After that the walls were rough rock, sometimes with different colored strata briefly lit by my headlamp before we moved on. My uneasiness grew, although I couldn’t have said why.

A mile underground seems a lot longer than a mile on the surface.

When we reached the end, we both stood silent until Barb breathed, “Look at that.”

“It’s got to be a . . .” A what? Inspiration came to me. “A piece of exploratory junk from a few centuries ago. You know, Precollapse, when Earth was sending those piddly little bots to Mars and maybe one of them fell into a hole and then the tectonic plates shifted and it got squashed—”

“Into a perfectly flat impenetrable wall?” Barb said scornfully. She uses scorn as a shield. She always has.

The excavation bot stood frozen in the position I’d turned it off, which somehow made it look as dumbstruck as we were. It had uncovered a square meter of metal. The metal, which should have been scarred by tectonic shifts and rusted by aquifer drips and canted by erosion, gleamed a smooth dull gold. Without thinking I put my glove on it. The gloves are heated, of course, but not as well as the suits, or they’d be too inflexible. Crisscrosses of heating element lace the supple metallic fabric. Through my glove I could feel the metal’s piercing cold.

Of course it was cold. This was deep underground in the Martian autumn. Everything was cold.

This was colder.

That made no sense.

“This makes no sense,” Barb said scornfully. “Is there some part of the tunnel project we weren’t told about?”

The tunnel project was open knowledge, like nearly every other project on Mars. You can’t build trust any other way among scientific groups, among settlements, among variations in Martian culture. That’s why we have the First Principle. Put yourself in their place.

“I think,” I said, “we better go back and call Dr. Alvero.”

For once, Barb didn’t argue.

Mom wasn’t home when I got off shift, which is rare. She generally wants to hear about my day. Well, she would hear soon enough. Dr. Alvero had called half the xenologists on Mars and they were all rushing to the excavation tunnel by elevator or rover or dirigible. Those that were too far away were glued to the link.

“Is it—what is it?” Barb had asked, and I was glad because I couldn’t speak myself.

“How could we know yet?” Dr. Alvero said sternly. I could read that sternness; he was a friend of Mom’s, and I’d sat with him at dinner in the mess hall lots of times. He was excited and hiding it; he was insisting on proper scientific skepticism; he was aware that Barb and I had seriously violated regs during his shift as captain.

Barb didn’t believe in proper scientific skepticism. She blurted, “Is it ancient Martians? Or aliens?”

Irritation replaced sternness. “Don’t be premature, young woman. And don’t finish your shift; that’s not necessary now. Sign out and, please, don’t say anything to anyone about this, at least for now.”

“But will you tell us if it turns out to be—”

“Come on, Barb!” I said, tugging on her arm before Dr. Alvero could lose his temper. And if the smooth gold wall did mean aliens, everybody would know soon enough—

Aliens.

Halfway back to our rooms, I stopped dead. The terraces around me seemed to waver. Aliens. Was that possible? Microbial fossils had been found on Mars, but only microbial fossils. Somewhere in the long distant past, life had started here, and then had shivered to a halt. Climate change or radiation or something—my mind had gone numb. The life on Mars was us. This was our planet, my home. Arrivals from Earth were bad enough. But aliens—

It was one of those ideas too big and all-encompassing for the mind to hold onto. Like one’s own death.

I had stumbled the rest of the way back to our rooms, as if I were as clumsy in Martian gravity as David Hansen. Now I didn’t want to be alone. I scooped FuzzBall from her basket and squeezed her tight. But she didn’t like that and yelped. And anyway, a mebio wasn’t what I wanted. What did I want?

I wanted my life to stay the same.

Maybe it would. Maybe the smooth gold wall wasn’t anything that would change anything. After all, it had probably been there already for a long, long time, doing nothing. Maybe our life on Mars could just go on the way it always had, unlike life on Earth that just got worse and worse, rising oceans and dying oceans and too much CO_2 and stupid ugly biowars and—

Put yourself in their place. And I want things to stay the same.

I went to play chess with David Hansen.

The first thing he said was, “What’s that?” Until he did, I hadn’t realized I was still holding FuzzBall.

“Oh, hell, you might be allergic, I shouldn’t bring her in here, sorry . . . .”

“No, let me see it. Bring it here.”

I didn’t like his commanding tone but I brought FuzzBall to him anyway. David was out of bed, sitting in a chair with the chess set on a little table beside him. He’d been waiting for me. He looked stronger than last time. When he held out his arms for FuzzBall, I gave her to him.

“What is it?”

“A mebio. Part mechanical, part genetically engineered biological. Not a ‘bug.’” I thought he might react to that, but he was too busy petting FuzzBall, who purred in his arms, little traitor. Well, she was pretty cute, even to an Earther.

“It looks sort of like a cat. Is it a cat?”

“I don’t know what genes they started with, but DNA is amazingly adaptable. She eats fines.”

He looked up. I’d never seen that expression on his face before: open and gentle. He looked almost like a Martian. He said, “What are fines?”

“The bits of dust that get into everything, no matter how hard you try to make a tight seal. Mebios keep it under control.”

“You force her to eat dust?”

“Nobody forces her to do anything. She’s engineered to lick them up, and the saliva-fines mass is shunted to the mechanical part of her crop, where it can easily be removed. Here, I’ll show you.”

“No! Don’t!” Abruptly he dropped FuzzBall to the floor. She yelped in protest, then began licking the polished stone. “Get it out of here. It’s just another freak. Like you.”

The gentle look was gone. David stared at me like he hated me. I knew he was going to say it a full three seconds before he did.

“Bug.”

Something inside me snapped. The find in the tunnel, the repulsive recos, even the chess games I’d lost, one after another. The big and the small all mixed up, and all sauced with David’s contempt and my fear. My vision went red. I picked up the chessboard and threw it at him.

The board struck the side of his head in a rain of pawns and rooks and bishops. FuzzBall ran for the door, snarling. But David smiled. Blood streamed down his neck and soaked into his shirt. He said quietly, “Too bad you couldn’t throw it harder.”

I stared at him, stomped out, and burst into tears.

When Mom finally arrived home from her lab, she rushed straight into my alcove. “Gina! Are you all right?”

I hadn’t been able to sleep, but the sudden light disoriented me. Blinking, I tried to see if she knew about Barb and me breaking regs. Of course she knew. Her face wrinkled into dozens of concerned little crevasses.

“I’m fine, Mom. And I know we shouldn’t have—”

“But are you all right? I couldn’t leave earlier, the oocytes—”

I held out my arms, like I was three years old again. She sat on the edge of my bed and held me. That was what I needed, what David Hansen didn’t have; someone who cared more about him than about work, or even about Mars. My voice came out thick. “Is it . . . aliens, Mom?”

She laughed, a strangled sort of laugh, but I understood it. The situation was too weird to be quite real—even though it was real. She said, “They don’t know. And I don’t think we’ll know for a long time. Maybe not ever.”

That hadn’t occurred to me. “Why not?” Mom was calmer now, and that made me calmer. I let go of her, a little ashamed of my lapse back into childhood.

“Well, think about it, Gina. From its position, that thing has lain deep underground for a long time—we’ll know how long once we date the metal, if we can, or at least the rock seal over it. A very long time, and if it is alien, no aliens have emerged from it. So probably there’s nothing biologically complex in there, or there was once and isn’t anymore. But unless the thing spontaneously opens, we’re not going to open it. Would you? Who knows what contaminating microbes we might let out, or what effect they’d have? Our Mars is fragile, you know that.”

I did. Humans didn’t evolve here—school studies constantly emphasized that, and so did everybody else—and we had to be careful. One slip and the “planet not indigenous to us” would snatch at a life, a town, the entire human population. I knew it, but I had trouble feeling it deep in my bones. Mars didn’t feel “not indigenous” to me. It felt like home.

I said, “So the council will just leave the . . . the alien thing there at the end of the tunnel? Forever?”

She smiled. “Forever is a long time. But, probably, yes.”

“Mom—”

“Yes, honey?”

But all at once I didn’t want to tell her about David Hansen, the bug recos, throwing the chessboard. After all, I wasn’t really three years old. “Nothing.”

“All right.” She hugged me and left.

The alien artifacts, or biologicals, or whatever they were, would stay sealed. David Hansen would not want any more chess, not after I’d clobbered him with the board. Dr. Alvero would, as shift captain, discipline Barb and me, but that was minor. Mom wasn’t angry. I was able to sleep.

I was wrong about David. He called the next day. “You’re supposed to be here to play me.”

My belly sank.

“Gina? Did you hear me? Your mother said.”

“You sound like a baby when you say that.”

“Get up here.”

And I did. From guilt, from duty, from training: Put yourself in his place. The problem was, the First Principle was correct. It was the only way to make a Martian settlement work. But I didn’t have to like it.

David looked stronger than I’d ever seen him. To my surprise, his elaborate chessboard was already in midgame. As usual there was no sign of either of his parents. I said, “You playing someone else?”

“No, stupid. This is a famous game—the ‘Immortal Game’ between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky hundreds of years ago. White to move. Go ahead.”

Despite myself, I studied the board. “Pawn to d4.”

“No. Anderssen played knight to d5.”

The move didn’t make sense. This unknown “Anderssen” was ignoring the upcoming threat to his rook. David grinned. “Want to see the rest of it?”

I nodded. He played out the game. White gave away both rooks, his queen, and a bishop—and still got a checkmate, using only minor pieces. It was unexpected. It was beautiful.

David said, “He used a suicide tactic. Kill everything he has to get all the way home.”

“I can see that.”

“Can you? Gina, I want you to do something for me. I think I might have been wrong about Mars. I want to see it. Take me outside.”

Talk about unexpected! “I can’t do that.”

“Yes, you can. You’re an adult here, and so am I. I researched it. We don’t need permission to suit up and go out, but I don’t know the way or the air lock codes. There are codes, aren’t there, so that little kids can’t get out by mistake.”

“I’m not taking you outside. Ask your parents.”

He did that contemptuous thing with his tongue, and then a hand gesture I knew was considered really filthy on Earth. I hated that I was shocked. He said, as if the word was killing him, “Please.”

“No.”

He started to curse me then, using some words I knew, some I’d only seen in bug recos, some I’d never heard. I was glad. His foulness finally dissolved my duty, set me free. Nobody ever has to put up with that kind of abuse. I shouted at the top of my voice, startling him, “I could never be in your place!”

In the momentary silence that followed, I left.

The dull gold artifact was measured, photographed, assayed, and put through every possible test to see what was inside. Nothing yielded any useful information, not even internal imaging, which revealed only indistinct shadows. Bots carefully scraped away the rock on the thing’s six sides, none of which bore any markings. A perfect cube, the artifact was made of a substance unknown to either Earth or Martian scientists. Geologists determined that rock around it had shifted several thousand years ago; before that the artifact had lain on or near the Martian surface. Images of it became the most accessed data in the solar system.

On Earth a rising ocean, clogged with the out-of-control algal blooms that had killed the rest of its marine life, broke through the levees around a major settlement called New York. The water rushed in. In the floods and panic and contamination, two million people died.

I played and replayed the Anderssen-Kieseritzky Immortal Game, looking for something I could not have named. The stupid game even invaded my dreams. Knight takes g7 King to d8. . . Not that I was sleeping all that well anyway.

I didn’t see David Hansen, but I heard about him. In a settlement as small as Mangala, gossip is as pervasive as fines. His mother was out on a long-explore; she would not return for the rest of the year. David’s father was in Mangala but spent all his days and most of his nights at the lab. After all, wasn’t his son supposed to be an adult, here on Mars? I looked up the Hansens on the link. They did not come from New York. They had lived somewhere called Illinois, a place that had undergone rapid desertification during the recent round of massive climate shifts. The link, calling up Earther feeds from its data base, showed me kilometer after kilometer of dry, cracked, withered ground leading to a barren lakeshore.

“Gina,” Mom said one day over a very late dinner, just before mess closed down, “there’s talk of . . . of certain recos that have been fed illegally to Mars.”

I picked up a forkful of soypeach and kept my gaze on it. Ordinarily I like soypeach.

“You saw them,” Mom said flatly.

“Yes.”

She put down her fork. “‘Bug’ recos.”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

I shrugged. I was an adult; I didn’t have to tell her everything.

“Vile, ugly, stupid things—that’s what those recos are. From ignorant and diseased minds.”

“Yes,” I said for the third time, and finally I could look up at her. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry? Dear heart, you have nothing to be sorry for. It’s the people who made those recos who should be—is that why you’ve been looking so tense and preoccupied the last few weeks? I’ve been worried about you. Ever since you stopped playing chess with David Hansen—was it David who showed you those recos? Was it?”

“No, Mom. I saw them before he even arrived.” All at once the tension in my head—and of course Mom had noticed it, she loved me—shot up several levels.

“So David Hansen had nothing to do with it?”

How to answer that? It was too complicated. I said, “Mom—is the council really never going to open that alien thing?”

She stared at me. “What’s that got to do with David Hansen?”

“Nothing—I just—never mind. How is he?”

“Doing really well. His brain blight might even be in remission. There are a few rare cases of that on record. If he’s one, it’s a great chance for up-close study, maybe even to learn something significant about the immune system. DNA is infinitely adaptable.”

My linkcom sounded. When I accessed the message, David Hansen’s face stared at me, surrounded by waist-high plants. I recognized them: my mother’s genemod wheat, modified for nutrient-enhanced Martian soil. David was out in the farm.

Instead of speaking, he used the linkcom’s text function, which no one ever does except for data transmission. I had to squint at the tiny letters: “Come right now and alone or bishop to e7.”

I stood, my legs shaky, and said, “Barb wants me. See you later?”

“Sure,” Mom said. “Have fun.”

I made myself not run out of the mess. Bishop to e7 was the last move in Anderssen’s immortal game with Kieseritzky. David’s words filled my head: “He used a suicide tactic. Kill everything he has to get all the way home.”

I raced along the underground tunnel from Level 5 to the farm, then up the stairs instead of taking the elevator to the air lock. The farm is pressurized, but the atmospheric mix is different from the town, with more CO_2 to aid plant growth. People can breathe it, but just barely and not for too long. Suits hang along the wall beside the air lock. I hesitated, knowing I should put one on, but I didn’t want to take the time. Instead I just grabbed a helmet and rushed into the air lock. It filled agonizingly slowly with the farm air. Come on come on fill . . .

Dusk filled the hot air of the farm, steamy and rich with the scents of plants, loam, water. No one else was around at this hour, and without a suit I had no headlamp. It didn’t matter. I had played here, taken botany lessons here, done work shifts here my entire life. Mom was a plant geneticist. I knew every inch of the farm, and I raced sure-footed over the narrow paths between crop beds and mini-fields and hydroponic vats and dwarf fruit trees. The sky beyond the low plastic dome was clear, and Phobos shone above me amid the earliest and brightest stars.

David stood, also unsuited, between two mini-fields of Mom’s wheat, where the path ended at the far dome wall. Beyond the dome the Martian surface, rock and fines, was shrouded in shadows. David’s back was to the wall. He held the detached cutting arm of a bot, sharper than any razor.

“David,” I said softly, as if sound might somehow jar him into action.

“Don’t try to stop me.”

“You want me to stop you, or you wouldn’t have linked me. You’d have just done it.”

He laughed. The laugh shivered along my bones. “Is that what you think, Gina? You’re wrong. I linked you because I hate you, hate this place, hate all you bugs—do you know how repulsive you look to me? I can never belong here, never, and I can’t . . . can’t go . . . home . . .”

He started to cry. I moved faster than I have ever moved before. Somehow—how?—I knew that he could not let me see him cry.

Time seemed to stop, quiver, slow down. I had the weird sensation of seeing us both from the outside, each movement as clear and distinct as a coming-of-age dance: Gina leaps forward. David thrusts the cutter behind him at the dome wall. Gina closes the distance between them. The wall of tough piezoelectric plastic rips and air rushes out. Gina is upon David. He screams and whips around the arm holding the cutter. He’s clumsy in this gravity. She clutches his body in her big arms, so much stronger than his. Her small arms grasp at the cutter. She feels it slice deep into her thigh before he drops it. Gina screams. They both drop to the ground.

Time returned to normal. Alarms shrieked. A repair bot threw itself at the hole where the air whooshed out. With my small arms I clamped the helmet over David’s head and the emergency seal molded itself roughly to his shoulders. Then I saw my own blood streaming down my thigh, and everything went dark.

“Shock,” Barb said. “Your mom said it was only shock.” Her face was as white as the sheet that lay over me in the infirmary. She was my first visitor except for Mom, but I knew all my other friends would come as soon as they were allowed.

“David?” I croaked. My lungs needed more time to fully recover, but they would. You’re not supposed to run and fight and bleed while breathing that much CO_2.

Barb grimaced. “His father took the fucker to Kasei. They have psychiatric facilities there, you know, that we don’t. If you ask me, he doesn’t need psychiatric help, he needs—”

“Don’t.”

“All right.” She leaned closer. “But why did you do it, Gina? Why save his life? You could have been killed, and he’s worthless scum.”

“No.” I couldn’t say more. So we sat in silence, my friend and I, and she held my hand, and I could still feel my mother’s arms around me from before she left for her work shift, and I knew why the aliens, or their biologicals, or their machines, stayed inside the dull gold artifact.

It’s the same reason we won’t ever open it: Whatever is inside might cause contamination because it does not belong here. No one else believes this theory. “Gina, sweetheart,” Mom said gently when I’d croaked this out to her an hour ago, “think. If that were true, the aliens wouldn’t have taken all the trouble to come here in the first place. They must have meant to establish some sort of presence on Mars, or why bother?”

My throat wouldn’t let me reply, but I think I know the answer. The aliens did mean to establish themselves here. But once they arrived, they discovered that they couldn’t. It was not home. It would never be home. They discovered that they were not as adaptable as they’d hoped, and so they committed a sort of suicide, an act of despair.

Or maybe that isn’t it at all. Maybe it wasn’t an act of despair but of altruism. They landed and discovered they could not survive on Mars. Their craft was damaged, or there weren’t the right resources here, or they didn’t have the right science to adapt Martian resources to their needs. So they took the only kind of victory they could achieve: leaving Mars uncontaminated for those who could adapt to it. “A suicide tactic. Kill everything he has to get all the way home.” Maybe the aliens, too, gained a kind of win, that of doing the right thing for us, who would travel here from Earth so much later. Put yourself in their place.

I don’t know which idea is true, anymore than I know what will happen to David Hansen. His mind is indeed diseased, but not with brain blight. Maybe they can fix his hatred of us, maybe not. Maybe fix is the wrong word. DNA might be infinitely adaptable, but I don’t know if human minds are. If he returns to Mangala, I’ll play chess with him and take him places and try to help him adjust. Carefully. However, no matter what any of us do, David might always feel like an alien on Mars.

But I am a Martian, and this is my home, and I am in my right place.

“Oh, I meant to tell you,” Barb says, “the animal wizards have designed the next generation of mebios, and you won’t believe how cute they are.”

“Yes,” I croaked. “I would.”

First published in Life on Mars: Tales from the New Frontier, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

About the Author

Nancy Kress began selling her elegant and incisive stories in the mid-seventies. Her books include the novel version of her Hugo and Nebula-winning story, Beggars in Spain, and a sequel, Beggars and Choosers, as well as The Prince Of Morning Bells, The Golden Grove, The White Pipes, An Alien Light, Brain Rose, Oaths & Miracles, Stinger, Maximum Light, Crossfire, Nothing Human, The Floweres of Aulit Prison, Crossfire, Crucible, Dogs, and Steal Across the Sky, as well as the Space Opera trilogy Probability Moon, Probability Sun, and Probability Space. Her short work has been collected in Trinity And Other Stories, The Aliens of Earth, Beaker’s Dozen, Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories, The Fountain of Age, Future Perfect, AI Unbound, and The Body Human. Her most recent book is the novel Flash Point. In addition to the awards for “Beggars in Spain,” she has also won Nebula Awards for her stories “Out Of All Them Bright Stars” and “The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 2003 for her novel Probability Space, and another Hugo in 2009 for “The Erdmann Nexus.” Most recently, she just won another Nebula Award in 2013 for her novella “After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall.” She lives in Seattle, Washington with her husband, writer Jack Skillingstead.

Aliens, Robots, Spaceships and . . . Popsicles?

SF on American Radio, Then and Now

Mark Cole

It took a long time to heat up. It was nothing special, just an old plastic GE radio. First silence, then crackling and hissing static, and then—if you were very lucky, if the weather conditions were perfect, if the stars were in the right conjunctions, who knows—then came the faint strains of a familiar theme song and a voice crying “Johnny Chase . . . Secret Agent of Spaaaaaaace!”

What wonders then awaited a young listener back in 1978—a majestic space borne palace, time travel, aliens, a smug ship’s AI named Dante—and even a brief and highly debatable appearance by William Shakespeare himself. Perhaps it never quite took itself seriously, perhaps it wasn’t the best space opera ever written, but the combination of acting, sound effects and, yes, imagination made it far more vivid, far more fantastic, than any short story or television show.

It was this combination that made radio drama almost ideal for SF: a hint of description, a rush of stirring effects, and the listener saw vast interstellar vistas, gigantic spacecraft, and strange creatures. And yet these visions could be thrown on the screen of the viewer’s imagination for a fraction of what the most primitive visual effects would have cost.

Perhaps this is why in the early days of radio, when few people had yet encountered print SF and even fewer had seen SF in the theaters, SF found a home on the air.

Like the early days of radio drama itself, however, little is known about the birth of radio SF. Perhaps the legendary Carlton E. Morse, creator of I Love a Mystery, was the first to introduce SF elements into some of his stories, on the NBC Mystery Serial (1930-1932).

Then there are a few elusive references to what some claim was the first SF series: Ultraviolet. Supposedly it came from Detroit’s powerhouse radio station, WXYZ, and the pen of Fran Striker, creator of The Lone Ranger and The Green Hornet. It appears to have been a children’s show, but you won’t find anything about it in most of what’s been written about WXYZ, Striker, or station owner George W. Trendle.

It was another children’s show that is generally considered the first real SF radio show: Buck Rogers. It started its long run in 1932.

Buck was born in Amazing Stories, and his comic strip finally freed SF from the pulp magazine ghetto. While aimed at children, it was complex enough to attract adults and tried to keep its super-science believable. The same, however, cannot be said about the radio series.

The radio Buck Rogers was a fairly typical children’s serial. It had the familiar fifteen minute a day weekday format used by so many other shows, and an almost unhealthy obsession with Popsicles. As with most of these serials, the sponsor got almost as much airtime as the hero did, and their spokesman, Popsicle Pete, undoubtedly ranks as the most annoying corporate mascot ever.

Listeners unfamiliar with these shows would probably be surprised at the glacial pace. Very little happens, and it usually takes a week for any major development. The sound effects were minimal and there’s a lot of talk. Fortunately for CBS, children seemed to love it anyway, and it lasted off and on, in various formats, until 1947.

SF showed up in quite a few other children’s serials, most notably Jack Armstrong, All American Boy; Captain Midnight and the Secret Squadron; and Superman.

In 1935, Mutual launched their version of the year-old Flash Gordon strip. Vastly superior to Buck Rogers, its quarter-hour weekly episodes faithfully adapt the stories in the comics, with Gale Gordon (Mr. Mooney on The Lucy Show) as Flash. Oddly, the show moves far too rapidly, jumping from one incident borrowed from the strip to another. Twenty-six episodes later, Flash and his friends return to Earth and meet Jungle Jim (the hero of Flash’s “top strip”) just in time to launch Jim on his own radio show. Flash returned the next year, in original stories in a daily serial format.

But SF was not stuck in the narrow confines of children’s shows: adaptations of SF stories soon followed. Everyone remembers Orson Welles and the exaggerated stories told of the panic caused by his The War of the Worlds(1938), but few remember the 1932 serial adaptation of Frankenstein. Despite memorable efforts like the 1944 version of Donovan’s Brain on Suspense, however, SF remained rare throughout the forties.

SF did find a foothold in the horror shows, like The Witches Tale, Lights Out and Quiet Please, even though most of their stories dealt with the supernatural. SF remained rare, often poorly presented, and sometimes merely a decorative flourish. Perhaps The Mysterious Traveler (1943-1952) made the greatest contributions, thanks to the efforts of its two masterful scriptwriters, Robert A. Arthur and David Kogan (who, according to Arthur, wrote most of the SF). The variety of SF elements—from robots and computers to aliens, distant planets, environmental disasters and even apocalyptic destruction—was astounding, and the shows were among the best written on the air.

While most of them retained the familiar structure of the twist ending (found on horror shows long before the advent of The Twilight Zone), the surprises never came at the expense of the story. Some of these stories would reappear on other series, particularly on CBS’s Suspense in its later years. Most of them would have been right at home between the pages of Weird Tales (which ran many of Arthur’s stories).

The two produced several similar if less famous series (including Dark Destiny, The Strange Dr. Weird, and The Sealed Book), creating hundreds of wonderful stories, many of which still survive today—as do many SF stories from other horror shows.

And then the Fifties changed everything.

1950, of course, launched Destination Moon, and the surge of SF film that followed. But it also marked the debut of the first serious SF radio shows. While Dimension X is perhaps the best known of these shows, Mutual’s 2000 Plus actually aired two weeks earlier.

It is hard to judge the quality of 2000+ as so few shows have survived. They seem a wild potpourri of Fifties SF, everything from flying saucers, time travel, rockets, aliens, ancient Egypt, and even a journey into the “germ world”. It was well produced, and the scripts were reasonably intelligent—if nowhere near as good as those of the shows that followed. It was not particularly successful, running for two seasons—but then neither were any of the SF shows of the era. They all managed to attract loyal viewers, but never enough to keep them alive.

With legendary editor John W. Campbell Jr. of Astounding Magazine onboard as an advisor, CBS’s Beyond Tomorrow, officially debuted next, although an audition episode actually predates 2000+. However, no one is sure whether the three shows recorded ever aired.

Dimension X, while it wasn’t first, did something far greater: in an era when SF on the theater screen remained largely unaffected by the golden age of SF, it tore stories right out of the pages of Astounding Magazine and put them on the air.

Its special arrangement gave it access to Astounding’s best stories. Dimension X’s list of authors reads like a who’s who of golden age SF: Jack Williamson, Kurt Vonnegut, Fredric Brown, Murray Leinster, L. Ron Hubbard, Donald A. Wollheim, Robert Bloch, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Jack Vance, William Tenn, Clifford D. Simak, H. Beam Piper, and Isaac Asimov among others. The show’s staff writers did create a handful of originals, and adapted a few stories from other sources, but the bulk came from Astounding.

It was a remarkable achievement, one which later shows copied. But, despite its quality it would only last two seasons.

Not all the SF radio of the fifties aimed for adult listeners—although even children’s fare like The Planet Man and Captain Starr of Space failed to stay on the air for more than a year. Even radio versions of the popular TV shows Space Patrol and Tom Corbett: Space Cadet fared no better.

However, one of radio’s best SF shows actually came from television. Tales of Tomorrow—a half-hour anthology show—first flickered into life in 1951, in the midst of a host of simple children’s shows pretending to be SF. In one titanic leap, the electronic wasteland gained an SF show that was intelligent, serious and adult—and had access to the more than 2000 stories written by members of The Science Fiction League.

Two years later, in partnership with Galaxy Magazine, Tales of Tomorrow launched on radio. While it boasted some of the best SF writing on the air, it still lasted a mere fifteen episodes and was divided between two different networks!

Galaxy Magazine was also involved in what many consider the best SF show of the era, X Minus One. Essentially a 1955 revival of Dimension X, its first fifteen episodes recycled earlier scripts. With many of the same people involved, it is often hard to remember which series ran any given episode. It tended (particularly in its later seasons) towards more humorous episodes than its predecessor.

Sadly, while it lasted longer than any other SF radio show of the era and managed to produce 126 episodes, it found itself increasingly pressured by falling budgets. This forced them to make painful cuts and eventually left its writers and actors seriously underpaid. Radio drama had begun its slow death and advertising dollars became harder and harder to find. But somehow, thanks to the dedication of everyone involved, the later episodes still sound as good as the earliest ones.

After its untimely death in 1958, NBC would try to revive it in 1973 with a single new episode (“The Iron Chancellor”, by Robert Silverberg) and sporadic rebroadcasts of the originals. But it failed to generate enough interest for a full revival, thanks largely to NBC’s erratic scheduling.

Intelligent SF also made appearances on shows like Suspense, Escape, and even the experimental CBS Radio Workshop.

The final SF offering before the age of radio breathed its last was Exploring Tomorrow (1957), hosted (and probably script-edited) by John W. Campbell.It featured stories by some of the greatest SF authors, who apparently wrote their own adaptations. And yet, despite its heavy-hitting line-up, it isn’t as good as X Minus One—perhaps because its writers lacked scriptwriting experience. Still, it was an interesting experiment, even if it lasted only a year.

The last few network programs would limp on until 1962, with a few final SF stories appearing on Suspense.

We tend to think that television killed off radio drama. Yet many of those who worked in radio in those final days have said that it didn’t die, it was murdered: the Big Three cannibalized their radio networks to move into television. What is definitely true is that radio drama survived in other countries, notably in Great Britain.

But it wasn’t quite dead.

By the seventies, it was back on the air, thanks to a growing nostalgic interest in the Golden Age of radio. Hundreds of recorded shows suddenly became available on cassettes and LP, and Old Time Radio shows ran on many stations.

The first new show was Mutual’s The Zero Hour, a series of mystery and drama shows mostly adapted from novels. Despite having Rod Serling as its host, however, it wasn’t a fantasy show.

Other shows followed, most notably The CBS Radio Mystery Theater, which ran for eight years and almost 3000 daily episodes—including an incredible number of SF stories.

This boom produced no new SF series, although some American listeners did get to hear the CBC’s Johnny Chase, Secret Agent of Space (1978-1981) and their 1980 horror anthology, Nightfall.

Nor did it last long. Mutual never made any real effort to advertise The Zero Hour, and while The CBS Radio Mystery Theater was reasonably successful, CBS lost interest and killed it off. Radio drama would not return to the commercial networks again.

Public radio, however, has never quite given up on it. NPR has sporadically released drama shows, including some notable SF efforts, such as their epic series of radio adaptations of the Star Wars movies from the eighties.

Mike McDonough’s labor of love, Bradbury 13 (thirteen of the best Ray Bradbury adaptations ever made) followed in 1984. A series of classic SF stories ran as Sci Fi Radio in 1989 and in 2000, they created Beyond 2000(a.k.a., 2000X), a star-studded anthology of well-known SF stories. They have also rebroadcast many of the BBC’s best audio dramas.

A few SF shows—like Alien Worlds—have gained wide distribution in syndication, with the most successful being radio entrepreneur Carl Amari’s revival of The Twilight Zone. It began in 2002 and the mysterious door is still open.

The idea of audio drama is such a powerful one that it should come as no surprise that it continues to fascinate writers and artists. Many people have tried to find new ways to market it.

One of the most curious was that used by Ruby, the Galactic Gumshoe. While it was extremely difficult to find stations willing to play half-hour shows, it wasn’t hard to sell a feature that was only two or three minutes long although one imagines SF would be a harder sell than cooking tips or even The MAD Minute. Ruby now runs in twenty-three countries and, after thirty-one years on the air, just completed her ninth adventure.

As audiobooks became more popular, their manufacturers released a lot of OTR and BBC radio on cassette. Eventually, they released their own new dramas, but they remain rare. As Mike McDonough discovered, the big companies weren’t interested in shows like Bradbury 13 because they made their own efforts sound cheap (which they were). Still, with a little help from the Sci Fi Channel, a group of Star Trek actors could successfully market the excellent Seeing Ear Theater.

Fortunately, new technologies have given the radio drama new opportunities. Between Sirius XM radio, digital downloads, podcasts, and online radio stations there now are far more new audio dramas being recorded than at any time since Radio died.

Radio drama still remains rare. That isn’t about to change any time soon. But with reasonably priced digital recording equipment and software on the market, radio drama is easier to produce than ever before and far cheaper than filmmaking.

While universities and public radio continue to support small radio theater efforts, radio drama has blossomed in the world of podcasting. Shows like The Leviathan Chronicles, the steampunk drama 1918, or Dark Matter would never have been born without these new opportunities. With Americans busier than ever before, they watch fewer movies and TV shows, and listen more to their MP3 players. SF podcasts can be found on sites like Audible.com and iTunes: some, like SFF Audio, try to collect the best new shows available.

The future of radio drama looks promising at the moment, although ultimately it relies more than almost any other medium on the quality of its writing.

Whether we are heading for a new golden age of radio, or are merely experiencing yet another temporary surge remains to be seen. But hopefully, within today’s decentralized online market (and, with a little luck, free from the often arbitrary control of big corporations) it will have a chance to stand or fall on its own merits.

That would be a nice change.

About the Author

Mark Cole hates writing bios. Despite many efforts he has never written one he likes, perhaps because there are many other things he’d rather be writing. He writes from Warren, Pennsylvania, where he has managed to avoid writing about himself for both newspaper and magazine articles. His stories have appeared at Flash Fiction Online (”Reverse Engineering”) and Abyss And Apex (”I Expect There Will Be A Reason Soon”), and his musings on Science Fiction at IROSF.com.

Organic Synthesis: A Conversation with Ken Liu

Jeremy L. C. Jones

It’s very easy to like Ken Liu—to eagerly anticipate his e-mails, to smile knowingly while reading his fiction, to gasp in surprise, to feel your own view of the world twist and bend, loop and wrap around his in some wonderful flowering knot that both binds and opens outward.

“I tend to be an optimist when it comes to the ability for people to understand each other across cultural gaps,” says Liu below.

A lawyer and programmer by trade, Liu pushes the boundaries of the short form while drawing heavily on the languages of his vocational training, as well as that of his native China.

“I’ve written stories that readers have complained are not ‘stories’ at all; and sometimes I like to use the techniques of nonfiction in fiction, which doesn’t always work for every reader,” said Liu. “I do think the short form offers more room for experimentation because even if the experiment fails, you won’t have invested too much energy and time into it (which isn’t really possible with a novel). Even if I succeed in becoming a novelist, I think I’ll always have a yearning to do short fiction for this reason alone.”

Liu’s prose has a spontaneous, organic feel that is both deeply rooted and somehow delicate around the edges.

“I’m not a planner,” said Liu. “Most of my stories start with just a vague idea and some scene that feels compelling to me. I start writing and then see where the story goes. My first drafts thus tend to be more like extended outlines, and it’s on the first revision pass—my favorite stage—where the story takes its real form.”

In their “real form,” Liu’s stories have appeared Analog, Apex, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Nature, Strange Horizons, and more. His stories have been nominated for and won the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award. Below, Liu and I talk about Liu Cixin, translating Chinese literature, wuxia, Jin Yong, and his novel-in-progress.

How’s your translation of Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Trilogy coming along?

I’m only responsible for the first volume, The Three-Body Problem, and a first draft of the translation is done. There will be lots more edits—some probably done in consultation with the publisher. In translation, the passage of time between the first draft and revisions is critical to ensure quality. It’s not unlike writing original fiction: until sufficient time has passed, it’s impossible for me to see the text on the page in an objective manner.

Were there any frustrations or pleasant surprises in the translating process? Ever wonder what you’d gotten yourself into or was it mostly a joy?

Since I’m not a physicist, a lot of the technical terms related to the construction of particle accelerators and theoretical physics were unfamiliar to me, and I needed to consult several scientists to get the lingo feel right to readers in America who do have such knowledge (I was lucky that many of scientists I approached were science fiction fans).

Also, as is common with some other Chinese works I’ve translated, the densely allusive nature of Chinese historical and literary references in the book made me wonder if too much of the original was being lost in translation. Parts of the story take place during the Cultural Revolution, and some of the philosophical passages require familiarity with Classical Chinese history: these scenes were complicated and layered. A lot of Chinese readers expressed to me the same worry when they heard about my translation project: they were sure that American readers who were not familiar with or interested in Chinese history would not “get it.”

I tend to be an optimist when it comes to the ability for people to understand each other across cultural gaps, and I didn’t want to just “give up.” After thinking through the minimum background information that had to be provided to give the reader enough context, I ended up adding a few explanatory footnotes (even though I was told that some American readers hate footnotes). I just figured that since I enjoy footnotes in reading translated fiction, I might as well try to please a reader like me. (That seems to be the only writing strategy that has ever worked for me.)

Liu also employs some literary techniques that American genre readers may find odd or off putting. For example, among American genre fiction writers, it’s common to hear the mantra of “one scene, one point-of-view.” Liu does not follow this “rule” and often switches point-of-view within a scene to achieve the effect he wants. If you follow the “rules” rigidly, you’d say Liu engages in “head hopping,” which is supposed to be confusing for readers.

I suppose the “safe” thing for me to do would have been to rewrite Liu’s text to follow this contemporary American genre convention, but it felt wrong. It felt like a violation of the integrity of the text. Moreover, since I hate that “one scene, one point-of-view” convention and never follow it in my own work in any event, I really felt uncomfortable imposing it on someone else’s text.

In the end, I decided to just handle everything in a way that I felt respected the integrity of the text and the original author’s vision. My choices would perhaps require the Anglophone reader to come and meet me part of the way—read some footnotes and get used to some unfamiliar literary conventions (instead of dismissing them outright)—but isn’t that part of the joy of reading a translation? A good translation, I’ve always felt, should not feel like something that could have been written in English in the first place. It should have a hint of strangeness, of a vision and mode of thinking not entirely like the Anglophone reader’s own home culture.

How do you anticipate English-speaking readers will respond to the book?

I think Liu’s story is appealing in multiple ways. It’s a story of grand imagination in the tradition of hard scifi masters like Arthur C. Clarke, and it engages with big ideas, with the problems facing all of humanity. At the same time, it tells this big story using details that are rooted in China’s ancient and recent history, through images and references that may be unfamiliar to some Western readers but are very emotionally powerful and evocative. Finally, it’s just a fun and exciting adventure story, and we can all use more adventure.

I can’t guess how the English edition will be received: I’ve always been bad at anticipating reader reaction, even for my own work. I hope readers like it as much as I do.

In what ways have wuxia novels influenced you and your fiction?

The modern wuxia novels, especially those by the great master Jin Yong, hold an important place in the history of modern Chinese identity. For a long time, during the most turbulent years of the Cold War, they were practically the only cultural products that united the people who would self-identify as “Chinese” in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the overseas Chinese communities. Their continuing appeal in Chinese communities cannot be underestimated—some of the most popular online games in China today are still based on Jin Yong’s wuxia characters.

Growing up as a child in China in the 1980s, I adored these historical fantasies because they portrayed, in an easy, accessible way, what it meant to be “Chinese”: an organic synthesis of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism; a history founded on ethnic and regional diversity; a celebration of virtuous rebellion against tyranny as well as individual sacrifice for the preservation of people and country against foreign domination; an acceptance of withdrawal as an act of protest against an unjust regime; a respect for beauty in nature as well as in art. This is the kind of “Chineseness” that I try to convey in my own fantasies set in historical China.

(Incidentally, some have speculated that the “Chineseness” of Jin’s works is also what makes them so difficult to translate into another language.)

The novels gave me a sense of pride in China’s traditions and a deep, abiding appreciation of her history—qualities absent from much of the other contemporary Chinese literature I could access at the time, still emerging from a landscape scorched and traumatized by the Cultural Revolution. Much of my work revolves around the theme of the meaning of history, and I credit these novels for starting me down this path.

Indeed, much of my love of traditional Chinese poetry came not from studying it in school, but from the way such poems were unobtrusively and organically incorporated into the speech of wuxia heroes and used to limn a scene more lyrically than any mere prose. I think it’s fair to say that the wuxia novels made me interested in studying Classical Chinese. (And there is no reason to limit it to “men”). When I strive to imitate that effect in my own work these days, I’m paying homage to the great master Jin Yong himself.

Most Westerners are familiar with wuxia only through film, and these are but pale echoes of the real thing. Far from escapist fantasies about men and women who could fly or walk on walls—though I did adore these scenes as a child—the novels were deeply political. Jin Yong, who wrote in Hong Kong, had his novels banned both in Taiwan and China because they were perceived as making barbed criticisms about the policies of the regimes in both places and their leaders. I think the tendency for some of my work to verge into political satire and allegory can be traced back to these novels as well—I learned early on that imaginary, fantastical literature has a political dimension, perhaps its most important dimension.

I do not generally have heroes, but I would unabashedly call Jin Yong my hero.

Have you ever taken a crack at translating Jin Yong?

Nope. I’m certain it’s beyond my skill.

I read somewhere that you built the world of your novel-in-progress with your wife. Can you talk a little bit about that world, about building it, and about working with your wife?

Lisa and I built the world together, and then I wrote my novel in it. It’s an archipelago in a secondary world, where there are gods, magical creatures, and lots of technology based on traditional Chinese mechanical engineering techniques: kongming lanterns, battle kites, jiguan machines, etc. (“silkpunk,” if you will). Lisa and I came up with the gods and mythology together, and it was a lot of fun to develop an elaborate system like that from scratch.

The novel’s plot is loosely based around the historical legends around the founding of the Han Dynasty, and some of the cultural elements are based on East Asian traditions. This is not a “magical China” story though—the people in this world are not monochrome, nor are their beliefs. I also don’t use any Chinese words in it. It’s meant to be taken on its own terms, an epic fantasy with a non-European setting.

In what ways did your wife’s perspective as a photographer influence the process or change your perspective on the process?

My wife has undertaken some very ambitious photography projects that take years to finish, and it’s been instructive to see how she succeeds (or does not succeed) at maintaining excitement for a creative project that takes a long time to complete. I’ve found keeping momentum to be the hardest part of writing a novel. Every creative project has these stages where the work ceases to be “fun” and you have to push through, but it’s much easier to do this for short stories than a novel, and I at least knew to anticipate these parts based on her experience.

Beyond the obvious thing of length, how is working on a novel different than working on short stories?

It’s much harder keeping everything in your head. I find that I have to take a lot of time and effort to swap the novel into my head before I can work on it. Since we have two young children, it’s been very challenging to find the necessary stretch of time to devote to it without being interrupted. I keep on telling myself that it’s almost done, only to find that there’s so much more to do. But I love the story so much that even though it’s taken such a long time, I haven’t lost interest.

I love this story. I’ll get it done.

Both of us have been e-mailing around our children’s schedules. Makes me wonder . . . how are parenting and writing similar and dissimilar? Do they feed each other?

I’ve never thought of them as analogous activities! Being a parent has taught me to be more efficient and manage my time better though, and I think that has helped me to be more productive in the limited time I do get for writing.

Thanks for doing this interview.

Thanks for chatting with me. It’s been a real pleasure.

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.

Another Word:

I am an Endangered Species

Alethea Kontis

Sometimes, I read reviews people have written of my work. Sometimes I don’t. It’s no big deal. I do like to make comments on people’s blogs thanking them for their time—they do appreciate it, and I’m prepared to take the bad with the good. I recently found a perverse pleasure in responding to people who auto-Tweet their reviews (good and bad) from Goodreads. I giggle at the mental image of them freaking out (good and bad) because THE AUTHOR IS WATCHING.

My favorites are the three-star reviews, those bastions of subjectivity! Based on the reader’s experience, three stars can mean that they couldn’t put it down, or that they dropped it in the tub. One of the best wondered, “Was the author tripping on drugs?” But my favorite to date asked, “Three days to fall in love with a frog? How realistic is that?”

The question references my fairytale novel mash-up that opens with a retelling of “The Frog Prince” by the Brothers Grimm: A fifteen-year-old introvert writer wanders into a glen and finds a frog who’s actually interested in her work. We find out in the course of the novel that there were magical forces at work that not only orchestrated their meeting but also facilitated their affection but let’s put that aside . . . what fascinates me most about the comment is its willingness to suspend disbelief for the fairy tale world problem but not the actual life experience.

Has our concept of “reality” come so far that we’ve begun to question real life? Or worse, have young people really become so jaded that no one believes in love at first sight anymore?

Consider the science, both chemical and psychological.

- Limerence is defined as an involuntary state of obsessive-compulsive longing for emotional dependence, and is a result of biochemical processes in the brain.

- A “look of love” must last 8.2 seconds, and no less. Love at first glance is the very science behind Speed Dating.

- Attraction happens within the first three minutes of conversation.

- Infatuation—the thing often born from raging hormones and imagined, unrealistic expectations—is a less mature form of limerence, but does not always mean it’s not love.

This love you speak of. It is a thing. People have it. We can PROVE it.

I fall in love with people all the time. All. The. Time. I mean, yeah, I was once a boy-crazy preteen who had pictures of actors all over her walls and made up all sorts of grand futures for myself and the Boy-of-My-Dreams-At-the-Moment, but I’m talking real love in real life. It doesn’t have to be the romantic kind.

Mary Robinette Kowal locked her keys in the car while we were introducing ourselves, and I’ve loved her ever since. Casey Cothran and I watched “Poltergeist II” at the same church lock-in. Edmund Schubert and I sat on a bench at a convention and ate granola bars. Catie Murphy and I happened to be taking the same shuttle bus. I was in the front row when John Scalzi crashed my friend’s reading. John Ringo and I shared cheesecake at a publisher dinner. Sammie Bitner bumped me in a busy food court and cried, “Oh, my god, I love you!” I yelled back, “Oh my god, I love you too!” We’ve been great friends ever since.

All of these people are friends so close I consider them family. They inspire me. They increase my endorphins and raise my serotonin levels. I love them all—real love—but each instance definitely started with infatuation—silly, fifteen-year-old-girl-type infatuation.

So . . . what does it take to make a society disbelieve the idea of infatuation?

I blame two things: Fear and loss of hope.

This world we live in is scary. Even scarier than it used to be. Terrorists are real and soldiers go to Afghanistan and angry people with guns shoot up food courts and movie theatres and elementary schools. There are people honestly preparing for the zombie apocalypse. Love, too, is a scary thing. When you open yourself up to the possibility of love, you also open yourself up to a possibility of pain. Once that person gets inside your head they know how to hurt you worse than anyone else. Is it a stretch to imagine that a child who grows up afraid of being hurt physically would similarly be afraid of being hurt emotionally?

And then there’s hopelessness. In the eighties, popular culture was filled with books and stories of how one man/woman/child could Make a Difference and Save the World! We now live on a planet in the throes of global warming with seven billion other people, and the pop culture icons that save the world only do so with inhuman abilities and catastrophic damage of public property. Legions of apathetic teenagers would much rather sit around and play Call of Duty. Make a difference? But that takes WORK.

So does love.

Fascinating, isn’t it, that this random three-star review could open my eyes to the dystopia in which I already appear to be living—a world that might consciously be evolving away from infatuation and love at first sight. I must face the very real possibility that I, and optimists like me, have become a dying breed. Perhaps I should be more careful when proposing silly ideas like cerebral infatuation leading to a healthy relationship and a happily ever after.

Happily ever after! That’s right! I said that!

But I’m probably just tripping on drugs.

About the Author

New York Times bestselling author Alethea Kontis is a princess, a goddess, a force of nature, and a mess. She’s known for screwing up the alphabet, scolding vampire hunters, turning garden gnomes into mad scientists, and making sense out of fairy tales.

Alethea is the co-author of Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark-Hunter Companion, and penned the AlphaOops series of picture books. Her short fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in a myriad of anthologies and magazines. She has done multiple collaborations with Eisner winning artist J.K. Lee, including The Wonderland Alphabet and Diary of a Mad Scientist Garden Gnome. Her debut YA fairy tale novel, Enchanted, won the Gelett Burgess Children’s Book Award in 2012.

Born in Burlington, Vermont, Alethea now lives in Northern Virginia with her Fairy Godfamily. She makes the best baklava you’ve ever tasted and sleeps with a teddy bear named Charlie.

Editor’s Desk:

Post-Apocalyptic Publishing

Neil Clarke

In anticipation of our seventh anniversary issue next month, I’ve been trying to compile my thoughts on what we’ve done and where we’ll be going. It’s been a fairly chaotic time for magazines and publishing in general. I suppose that’s one of the reasons I’ve enjoyed it as much as I have. In the grand scheme of things, Clarkesworld is still a child, but digitally speaking we’re older than most.

My mind wanders sometimes when I think of these things. It can be dangerous when your imagination runs wild and casts digital publishers in a post-apocalyptic series as a rag-tag group of kids adapting to a new world in which no one thinks they can survive . . .

Episode 0: A New World—Pilot, Unreleased

Only available as a bonus feature on the Director’s Cut DVD. This episode was considered too harsh by executives due to its gritty portrayal of the high mortality rate amongst the children in the early years. Some footage from this episode was later retooled for use in flashbacks throughout the series.

Episode 1: The Elders

Originally scheduled as episode two, “The Elders” was moved because network executives felt that this would make a more accessible entry point in the absence of the pilot. The story centered on the children’s discovery of a bunker in the ruins of a city. Upon exploration, they are captured by “elders” and introduced to a shadowy corporate-type figurehead that was supposed to become the big baddy of the series arc. Several minutes are spent on his Paper Empire monologue. This speech provided many fan favorite quotes, including “Bow down, you pixel-stained technopeasant wretches!” and “Webscabs! Each and every one of you!” With the help of a few sympathetic elders that had been waiting for someone to show them the way, the gang escapes, but only after a lengthy chase scene.

Episode 2: Exposure

Since this episode was originally scheduled to be before “Elders of Publishing,” none of the characters introduced in that episode are featured in this one. Instead, the gang crosses paths with a Love Cult that keeps its followers in check by addicting them to a blue and glowy drug called “Exposure.” The gang spends most of the episode trying to corner various members and convince them that there is more to life than exposure. Originally, this episode was to feature a cameo by Harlan Ellison as the owner of a rehab clinic, but his deprogramming scenes were considered controversial and inevitably cut. Fans of the show have developed complex conspiracy theories about this still lost footage.

Episode 3: To Serve for an Eternity

The first episode shown in intended order, “To Serve for an Eternity” features the kids coming across one of the Elder camps and discovering the evils of contractual slavery. Network executives uncomfortable with the portrayal of the conditions insisted on edits that would eventually lead the director to resign. What results is a mish-mash of corporate propaganda and pontificating on the rights of others, but no real resolution. Universally disliked by fans.

Episode 4: Utopia

Mercifully, “Utopia” was the last episode of the series to be filmed. By this point in the series, most of the writing staff had resigned over professional differences caused by network micromanaging. The inclusion of a performance of “Pixels of Sunshine” by failed boy band Digitally Speaking, was the direct result of a five-minute air time shortage and network nepotism. The band’s vacant lip-synching had the unanticipated effect of making their portrayal of the Shangri-La society a bit creepy and uncomfortable. As the show’s original Director said, “Like a gift from the gods, the show’s executives screwed up so badly that the fans finally got to see what we had originally intended for this series.”

As you can see, I’m having some focus issues today.

Where was I? Oh yes. Let’s just leave that for next month, when we can celebrate Clarkesworld’s seventh anniversary, reminisce about where we’ve been, and speculate on where we’re going.

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, owner of Wyrm Publishing and a 2013 Hugo Nominee for Best Editor (short form). He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.