Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 105

Table of Contents

Somewhere I Have Never Traveled (Third Sound Remix)

by E. Catherine Tobler

Asymptotic

by Andy Dudak

This Wanderer, in the Dark of the Year

by Kris Millering

Forestspirit, Forestspirit

by Bogi Takács

The Hole in the Hole

by Terry Bisson

Riding the White Bull

by Caitlín R. Kiernan

The Day-Glo Dystopia of Poly Styrene: Punk Prophet and Science Fiction Priestess

by Jason Heller

The Paradox of the Telescope: A Conversation with Robert Charles Wilson

by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

Another Word: The Vaguely Picaresque Adventures of a New Writer

by John Chu

Editor's Desk: Once Again Down the Rabbit Hole

by Neil Clarke

Spring Day is Coming

Art by Liu Junwei

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2015

www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

Somewhere I Have Never Traveled

(Third Sound Remix)

E. Catherine Tobler

In the still of the night, there is the voice.

Am I awake?

It is not a voice as I know voices; it doesn’t speak in words, but in vibrations, audio frequencies penetrating the space which enfolds it (the siren, the woman trapped). It is the sound of a remembered heartbeat, muffled and moving through fluid, muscle, bone. There, it finds a new home, vibrates within this confine, and wakes me.

I am awake.

The station’s darkness is always warm, always faintly redolent with rubber, charcoal, ammonia. The air is clean, antiseptic despite the rust that streaks the station’s innermost walls, and tonight carries the sound—the voice that is not a voice. It reminds me of whale song, a distant rumble moving through the station as though the station were water; but the station is not water, nor is it submerged beneath any ocean. I unstrap myself from the sleep pocket and float to the nook’s window.

Jupiter, swollen. So orange against the black of space, so large as to almost occupy the entire window. Space is only a slim crescent along the planet’s brightening rim. I have worked on Galileo Station harvesting helium for twelve years, and the view never grows old; Jupiter never grows old with its ceaseless storms, new designs constantly wrought within its cloud layers. The red spot spun itself out in our sixth year, the storm succumbing to another that is the colors of Earth’s seas: teal and turquoise, indigo and lapis. Sometimes, when the sunlight angles across, the storm shines like a great opal, cracked with orange lightning.

But the voice, the sound. With my palms pressed flat to the window, I imagine I can feel the sound (the voice) rolling through the fused silica and borosilicate glass. The voice spills from the planet, from deep within its clouds, pushing itself out of roiling gasses, tunneling through thirty-one miles of cloud, through the station’s skeleton and into my own. If I close my eyes (and I do), the sound rattles my teeth, my tongue, and when it has gone (it always goes), I am left with my cheek pressed to the cold window, as if I meant to go out with it—as if it meant to take me. The voice (the sound) drains away, counterclockwise into Jupiter’s rage.

Come back, I want to say.

Am I awake?

There is no exact surface, three thousand miles straight down. In Jupiter’s orbit, hovering above its faint halo rings, station and planet have made one revolution around the distant sun; Saturn has sixteen more years for a full lap, so it seems we are running even with helium pods deployed and deploying. They plunge through the Jovian clouds to find the helium streaking the Jovian skies as rain, to gather and retrieve this precious gas for return to Earth.

The dance is silent. I used to think the harvesters looked like balloons being drawn along strings and everyone laughed because how clever, helium and balloons and aren’t you so old-fashioned. The pods rise along their guy lines, to vanish into the station’s belly and I rather think now that it’s not balloons at all, but the silent consumption by a leviathan, of a thing we should have never harvested. The siphoning of one world’s natural resources into another’s, another who depleted itself and will do so again.

A silent dance, but the station’s rumble still moves through me as pods rise along their guy lines, into Galileo’s belly, and I push myself into motion, shaking the voice from my skin as I slide into my coveralls, into my spatulae gloves that allow fast travel along the station’s walls, much like a gecko skimming glass. I work my way into the spinning levels of Galileo where gravity wraps me up and pulls me to the floor once more. The walls arc overhead here, vast and high, accommodating the harvesters after the debris of Jupiter, of space, has been sluiced from their ovoid hulls.

From the nearest pod, the voice thrums.

The pod doesn’t look unusual in any way. Its metallic hide shows the scars of space without a hint as to its precious cargo beyond the readouts of its panel; everything glows green, helium secure and ready for transfer. I picture it, sealed within yet still trying to escape. Subject to the station gravity when before it was Jupiter’s own mass stripping it from the clouds. Helium that doesn’t quite know what to do with itself after it finds its own level. Rippling waves, a tremor pushing from a liquid center, causing the contained helium to creep up the walls, seeking escape.

The voice again, and I move toward the pod, ungainly in my return to limited gravity. My gloves would allow me to ascend the pod, to crack open the nose cone and dive inside, to better hear what calls me. Like the whale song it calls to mind, I have to wonder how differently it would sound if I were submerged within the liquid helium. At just above absolute zero, the helium would freeze me; my skin would go white, cold, numb, and my hearing would no doubt be compromised, taken. And yet, the idea of allowing it to surround me, entomb me, is intoxicating. Clemens always said it’s not the booze that gets you drunk out here—mostly because there is no goddamn booze, because they always find and strip the goddamn stills—but it’s the ideas that inebriate us. It’s the mere notion that we’re six hundred million kilometers from Earth and still gloriously alive. It’s the—

“Vasquez?”

I’m half way up the pod when I hear my name, my gloved hands cradling the arced container the way I might a lover, a bottle of whiskey, a thing meant to get me drunk. I stare at the glowing green diagnostic panel and force myself to breathe. I become aware of the weight of my body, of the tension that runs in a line from neck to spine.

“Johns.”

I look over my shoulder. He’s so small down there, his coveralls a white blot against the darker metal floor. A dozen fresh pods slide into their berths behind him, great airships hissing and cascading with breath as they return to atmosphere. Johns tips his bearded face up, eyes on me. His tablet is lashed to his wrist, balanced in his hand, fingers poised to record the details of the day’s docks.

“That harvester have a problem?”

The panel still glows green at me, soft and steady and true. No problems at all, the helium perfectly content and consistent inside. Filled to the fill line. Waiting to be flushed and sent back out. The voice rises to fill the nose cone, rattling the scarred metal. It whispers my name and tries to pry its fingers along the unbreakable seal. I comfort myself with the idea that if the helium can’t get out, the voice can’t get out. Won’t get out. (The siren? A woman trapped?) Can Johns hear it? (Her. It’s her.)

“I thought it—” I glance over my shoulder and down. He waits and behind him more harvesters return to Galileo. “No, no problem.”

“Get down here and check these new returns, we haven’t got all day.”

But we do have all day—ten Jovian hours to harvest, cull, and strip from this world what our world yet needs. I carefully drop back down the side of the pod and the voice pleads for me to stay, to let it out. I want to ask Johns if he hears that, if he can feel it in his bones, but Johns is gone and it’s only the pods that hiss and await inspection, before I will drop them back into the atmosphere. Free fall into metal rain.

The biggest planets sound like thunder. Hammers beating anvils. When you listen to the radio emissions of Jupiter, of Saturn, one gets the expected. But when isolated, the rings are something far more delicate, dulcimers in the summer wind I remember from my childhood. It wasn’t always the depths of space, the hiss of gas-laden harvesters rising from planetary atmospheres; it was once tall and golden wheat fields bending in July’s hot breath.

Beneath the thunder of Jupiter, the voice.

It speaks like an ocean tossed by the thunder, moving like a thousand gallons of salted water over and through a naked body. My naked body. I haven’t been naked in months—years?—not even when Clemens joins me in the sleep pocket. That union isn’t sex so much as it’s the press of another body against your own. The knowledge of another’s weight in weightlessness. It’s waking in the middle of the Jovian night and knowing you aren’t alone.

But tonight, a hand rests against my bare thigh. It isn’t feminine or masculine this hand; it is simple warmth and weight, and the awareness I am not alone. But my thigh is not bare, so this hand, this weight, is beneath my coveralls; beneath the thin layer of thermals I always wear. My sleeping mind cannot untangle how this is so. My sleeping mind allows it, fashions the hand into Clemens who sounds like thunder sometimes, too, but Clemens is not here.

I lean into the hand and the voice fills my mind to overflowing. The tang of salt is sharp on the back of my tongue, as if I have swallowed an entire ocean, and when I open my eyes, it is not station darkness that greets me. It is not even Jupiter engorged beyond the window, for I am inside the clouds; I am not viewing the clouds from the station high above, but instead from below. I plunge through their ochre layers, past the point they go blue, past the point they go black. Lightning cracks, illuminating the space-hung opal, and there are only ever clouds. I see nothing else until the helium rain begins to fall.

Everywhere the helium rain splatters me, I burn. In truth, I freeze—but my skin sizzles with an illusion of heat. My senses overwhelmed, I don’t know which to believe. A droplet on my forehead, sliding down my nose, and over my lips. I don’t dare breathe, but still suck in a breath. I suck in the rain and my tongue turns to ice. I want to say no, but my tongue freezes against the roof of my mouth. My tongue sounds like airplanes—the sound of the bluest planets in the stars, a shriek against the sky visible only by the condensation it leaves behind. I quake awake, alone and breathless, floating free of the sleep pocket as the distant sun begins to spark through Jupiter’s clouds. My tongue goes silent.

Only in the last three months have I heard this voice, this sound I cannot pinpoint. It does not matter if I am awake or asleep, it comes. Before, it was quiet, as quiet as a station filled with a hundred other people might be. I passed every night perfectly still and quiet, and rose each Jovian morning as if I’d never slept so well, not even on Earth while harnessed in gravity. Now, I wake not knowing exactly where I am, some larger part of me still cloud-cradled and falling.

Galileo Station hums and I gecko my way to the bay with its ever-rising helium pods. I think if I focus on the pods, on the in and out of the entire operation, the voice will quiet. But as I move among the pods, the voice beckons. I cannot immediately tell which pod contains it; the pods, like a forest around me, all whispering with the notion of the coming storm. Thunder in the distance, lightning cracking unseen below. Balloons, they should have been like balloons these pods, but they are trees, and then shadows, and then monsters once confined to the pages of a book. Each one has me catching my breath and Kane and Dillon laugh at me.

Dillon tells me the bay is no monster-filled forest, but rather a cathedral in the stars, for can I not see the way the light of the distant sun pierces the far end of the room, as if thrown through a rose window. It challenges your faith to occupy this space, Dillon says, and I breathe, for it is so. When the bay is empty of all but the pods, I sing, my voice soaring as high as it might amid their vast heights. My song reaches for the rust that streams in tears down the highest walls, recalls my grandmother in her own church, though I’ve only ever heard such stories, never stood in that space and vibrated with the sound of her.

Another day, another hunt through the pods until I’ve found which pod contains the voice. It’s small today, the voice, small and whimpering. But when I find it, it sounds like the rush and whisper of Neptune, a wind-torn sigh across water. Making sure none can see, I ascend the pod. Past the diagnostic panel that tells me all is well, all is right, I climb to the nose cone and inhale. Gunpowder and hot metal, and beneath this scent, sugar. I am reminded of my grandmother’s churros, hot and crisp and sweet. I bend my nose to the pod, tip my cheek, and lick the metal. It should be cold, I should stick, but I glide.

The motion of the helium inside rocks through me. I envision it flooding up the side of the pod, toward and under my tongue pressing against the other side. It wants to fill this new cavity, my mouth, until it pools in my belly and tries to creep up the sides of even that container. The helium ripples, laughter barely contained, and I—

“Vasquez!”

The sharp sound of my name jolts me from the thought of this liquid laughter coiling in my belly and I stare down into Johns’s stormy eyes.

“Am I awake?”

“Get down. Right now.”

I descend slow, the way I imagine the pods themselves do on their long lines. I picture myself as a pod, full of things that wish they were elsewhere and will soon be, but this is not enough to calm the trembling in my body by the time I reach the floor. How easy to propel myself away, to use my gloves and move with the speed of a lizard through the pod forest, into the sleeping pocket that is the nearest thing I might call home. I do not flee.

Commander Call’s office is not what anyone would imagine. She prefers a distinct lack of gravity, so there is no desk, there are no chairs. Her predecessor occupied a space in the wheels of the station, but not Call. She likes to float and I wonder if maybe she has heard the voice, if maybe she would understand when I tell her why I licked the goddamn helium harvester, but the longer she drones on, I know that not even she would understand or take the time to try.

There is a voice, I want to say, and this voice gets inside me. It’s like . . . have you ever listened to space, I mean really listened, Call, because it’s like that. Space has a sound, and a scent, and a weight, despite its lack of gravity and this voice— You can listen to the stars, Call, the way they vibrate, and this sound, emerges unexpected. A steady line and then a hitch, the vibration of something previously unheard. A long call across a very cold and dark ocean and you’ve been in the dark so long, so fucking long, you move toward it because it’s sunlight, and warmth and the weight of someone else against you when you’ve been weightless so very long.

Call tells me about regulations. About the orderly fashion of Galileo Station, as if I am newly arrived, as if I haven’t been here twelve years. But maybe it’s those years, Call says; maybe the years have worn me down to nothing, and I need to go see the doctors first thing tomorrow. I need to let them poke and prod and they are the ones who will know, she says. They will know what is to be done.

“It’s not like they will send you home,” Clemens says as we burrow in the sleep pocket. He sounds like wind tonight, not thunder, and his arms come around me from behind. Our legs tangle.

It’s not like I did anything wrong, I want to say, but I stay quiet and allow myself to drift in his embrace. I close my eyes and will myself to sleep, but sleep never really comes.

The clouds haul me down. This time, I find I am sealed within a helium pod, its walls beaded with moisture that is not water, but neither does it burn me the way liquid helium would. The pod is the exact the length of my body and I stand, hands pressed to the forward curve, watching Jupiter swallow us. I cannot see the line we travel, perhaps it is not there; I can see only the endless clouds of this giant world. Jupiter’s thunder rattles the pod, rattles my teeth, and it is like biting down on soft metal as I wait for it to stop. It does not stop.

We fall forever, me in the pod. Outside, helium pours down, stripping neon from the clouds as it goes. The pod runs with luminous metal rain, the air never quite dark or bright as we slice through endless cloud layers. When the weight is enough—

oh god it can’t, it can’t, but it will

—the pod unfurls as designed.

Like a metal flower, the pod opens itself to the helium rain and, unobstructed, the helium pours in. I shriek and the sound flies up into the storm, carried three times as fast as it would through oxygen alone. It is the sound of sucking balloons, of terror, of help me, help me. Inch by horrifying inch, the helium rain floods the pod, and I think I should freeze—I should be long dead—but I do not freeze and am not dead.

Am I awake? I try to feel the warmth of arms around me, I try to hear Clemens breathing, but there is only my scream. I scream until my throat is raw, until my airplane-tongue is again frozen to the roof of my mouth. I consider leaping out, about geckoing up the line that umbilicals me to Galileo, but I cannot move and do not have my gloves. I lift my hands, umbrella against rain, but it does not cease.

In the lighting-wracked clouds, a sound (a voice). It comes slowly and from a great distance. I try to turn toward it, but it is all around and growing closer the deeper I descend. Am I awake? I push the question aside and stop trying to find Clemens in the helium rain. I breathe and force myself to calm. I breathe and force myself not to creep out of the container that holds me, but my body flutters in panicked waves.

The voice (the sound) deepens. It is the lowing of some great beast I have not seen and cannot name; it is the sound of cleaving ice into bottomless ocean dark. Even as I want it to continue, I want it over and done. I try to speak, but my mouth is frozen and I can only gape at the thing that emerges from Jupiter’s deepest, unseen storms.

The shape that solidifies in the clouds before me is not a mermaid. It is not a white whale, nor any other creature of Earth’s seas. It is neither masculine nor feminine, but only a weighted presence before me. The face, if it can be called that, is not beautiful, but astonishing; eyes of endless storm, a mouth that is an entire ocean. I long for this being to swallow me, so that I might know its depths, but it only stares, as curious of me as I am of it.

Am I awake?

Jupiter’s clouds coalesce before me, showing me a familiar shape—nearby sister Saturn, sunlight gilding her rings into a halo. After fifteen years spent in black winter, Titan pulls itself from Saturn’s cloak, aglow in organonitrogen haze. The giant moon stretches, a slivered orange horseshoe tonguing out a mouthful of darkness. Distant sunlight fingers through its clouds and glints off the hydrocarbon puddle of Punga Mare before the clouds close once more.

But within the clouded landscape emerging from winter’s dark, there shows a scar not unlike those upon the harvesters. A black ruin fragments Titan’s golden clouds, a mold pressed into wet clay. The clouds do not swallow this deformity, but move with care around its outer boundary, as if the scar is a physical thing possessing an edge not to be crossed.

“Vas.”

Sickbay surrounds me, white and uncomfortably sterile, the walls close and without windows. Even though I cannot see Jupiter, I feel it pressing upon us, a watchful eye. I am strapped into an observation bed, Clemens looking down at me. Dillon sits nearby, Johns pacing the hall. Clemens could not wake me, he says as his hand enfolds my own. I do not move within that slight touch, thoughts anchored upon the thing I saw in Titan’s clouds.

“You need to look,” I say. “You need to see.”

This is what I say; this is not what anyone hears. My voice is ragged from screaming and I make a feeble squeak. Clemens hands me a tablet and with shaky fingers, I scrawl the same words. I tell him about the clouds, the sound, about being in the pod and seeing— The ship. It was a ship on Titan, emerging. Life that doesn’t quite know what to do with itself after it finds its own level. Rippling waves, a tremor pushing from a liquid center, causing the contained life to creep up the walls, seeking escape.

Clemens reads the tablet and swipes a gentle hand across my short, bristled hair. His laugh is just as short, strangled, and I’m not sure if he can’t believe or believes so much that a long-last admission is terrifying. Clemens sees me back to my nook that night, and I hang uneasily at the window, watching Jupiter turn (listening for the voice), wondering at the scars that mark my hands, pale pink slashes criscrossing brown skin—as if my hands were once lifted to shield my face from helium rain.

A dark shape moving in and out of the clouds as if— As if it were alive.

Awake.

Awake after winter’s dark.

I do not sleep. I do not tether myself into the pocket, but float before Jupiter, waiting. And in time, the voice comes, bundles me into a descending pod, and waits in return, until I am close enough. I fall forever, for always, helium rain that should kill me instead now a comfort. I know the coldness against my skin. My hands grow new scars from its trespass, but I feel with each one that something inside me is emerging. Pushing itself out after a long winter dark. Creeping up the sides of this imperfectly sealed container.

The pod vibrates with the sound, the voice, and unfurls itself into the rain. The being in the clouds pushes itself closer, so close I can feel droplets of cloud against my marked cheeks. They are clouds of hydrogen, ammonia, and sweet water vapor. They should flood my lungs and strangle me, but—

A long call across a very cold and dark ocean and you’ve been in the dark so long.

I reach a scarred hand into the clouds and the clouds enfold me. They suckle at me as if to taste the droplets of blood welling from my wounds, to deconstruct and study them. A warm tongue, the weighted wetness surrounds me, swallows me. I float in a darkness that is not entirely dark, for spring is breaking, and there—there is the voice. It does not speak as I speak but together we create a kind of heterodyne, shifting voices into new ranges, churning them into something we can both understand.

They have slept and they are coming.

They have slept and they are waking.

No—we have slept and they are coming.

We heard you.

They heard me. My grandmother’s song.

I jolt into awareness within the bright cathedral space of Galileo’s bay, an open and empty harvester on the floor beside me. Blood and water mingle in shallow pools on the flooring, running from my scalp, my shoulders, and you’ve been in the dark so long, so fucking long, you move toward it because it’s sunlight, and warmth and the weight of someone else against you when you’ve been weightless so very long. I spread my fingers in the wet, staring.

I push myself up, but I am weak—so weak and how long was I—

Clemens is there, warm thunder, and Johns too, who has the sound of a very soft wind today, barely daring to breathe. They don’t look at me with anything resembling anger. It’s relief pure and simple that pours through them; Johns even laughs, gathers me into his arms and laughs, “Oh Christ where have you been?”

But they know, because the pod was planetside, they eventually tell me. The pod was submerged and they couldn’t recall it and I was missing. I was nowhere within Galileo Station.

And then—

“We saw one,” Clemens says.

On Ganymede, he tells me. Ganymede hanging stark and barren but for the black scar emerging from its head. If the scar possessed hands, Clemens saw it press those hands to the moon’s surface, so that something black and endless could pull itself from the water-ice womb of the cratered body. He said it moved like Titan from her saturnine shadow, but then that it was only shadows. It has to be, he whispers.

It isn’t.

Callisto Station confirms another scar upon its face, but there is no telling how long it has lain upon the star-spangled moon. The scar marks the edge of the Asgard crater as if it has always been there. And Titan? What of distant Titan? Huygens Station confirms Titan has at least one such mark. Said it was on Europa, too. Said the wet darkness was waking, pushing itself into the stars.

“Awake, not waking,” I say, and the sound (the voice) floods me—it is not airplanes or wind or any sound born of Earth; it is alien, dark and fathomless and unknowable, but still I know it, have made a language with it in the Jovian rain. It is curious. It is coming.

We have slept and they are coming. The voice in the night, the siren, the being no longer trapped. Pushing itself out after a long winter dark. Creeping up the sides of imperfectly sealed containers. A new red spot, cloud-cradled and rising.

About the Author

E. Catherine Tobler is a Sturgeon Award finalist and editor at Shimmer Magazine.

Asymptotic

Andy Dudak

The cadets stand at attention for their passing-out ceremony, a random sample of the motley gamut of branched sapiens, and Nuhane is the smallest by far—but he adds his voice to their oath with towering conviction:

“We swear to uphold the Einsteinian limit! We vow to impose relativistic lockdown when a debt is owed to the universe, to deal out justice like a blind law of physics, thereby safeguarding the integrity of the vacuum!”

Nuhane fights down the terror of open sky intrinsic to his branch of humanity. Although a spin foam hack keeps the atmosphere of this Titan-analog at bay, the shield is invisible. Stacked worlds of orange-glowing cloud present nauseating vistas. A darkling methane sea surrounds this rocky isle, this remote outpost of the Collection Bureau. Nuhane reminds himself that the oppressive distance to the horizon is not an existential threat. Still, he is of the Fey. He can’t help longing for a nice underground bunker, a womb-cave, or the intimate companionways of a space hab.

The cadets march to the far end of the parade ground. Weird, brazen music issues from pipes attached to robotic air-bladders. It’s all part of some ancient police ritual whose roots have been forgotten. Wisps of proxy tech haunt the margins of the field, proud instances of family and friends. Nuhane finds the scene rather grim. The intended effect is stark majesty, but he wants to get it over with, to join the fight he’s been training for.

He has no people among the spectators, and none to speak of otherwise.

From his childhood on a backward world, from concentration camps to this: lifetimes already, and he’s only a hundred. He knows all too well what humanity is capable of. He can’t fight for people alone, no matter how seemingly just the cause. In the Bureau he’s found the only mission left to him.

Without the fabric of the cosmos, even hatred is impossible.

He wonders suddenly if he’s remembering this moment, rather than living it. The future—if there is such a thing—comes to him like a divine revelation. It is a new past on the other side of “now,” but he is powerless to act on the knowledge. He’s locked inside this young cadet he once thought of as himself. The sensation is terrifying and glorious.

Simultaneously, this passive observer inhabits many other Nuhanes, including a middle-aged Nuhane, a lieutenant radically interfaced with a Bureau patrol cutter.

The debtor’s sign is plain to his augmented eye. The arcing spacetime fissure propagated like a magnetic field line from a gutted metal worldlet and out over the galactic plane. The nearest light-years of its length dissipate like an old contrail, undermining nearby vacuum. It is one of thousands of discernible violations. He sees them as an ominous glowing net tangled through the Milky Way, with stray threads arcing off to other galaxies and clusters. So much work to do. So much debt to collect.

If he tunes up his perception of the universal spin foam, he sees a second, thinner net woven through the first: debts collected, scars on spacetime. It sooths him to gaze upon all that the Bureau has accomplished. To him the scar tissue is a fundamental good, a rare thing in this universe. Never mind how little the tissue has done to shore up the collapsing seawall.

“Fresh enough,” says Lao Wang. “Bureau’s giving it to us.” The old baseline human sounds tired. Nuhane’s mentor and partner has locked down thirty-one violators, collecting over ten million relativistic tons of debt, a Bureau record. Soon he’ll vanish into lockdown himself, to pay off his Noble Debt. Nuhane will miss him. He wonders if this is their last mission together.

A younger Nuhane imposes his first lockdown with a sense of dark wonder. The violator ship, a converted Shinasian junk, dims and reddens inside its pocket of pseudo-acceleration, a pulsating sphere of apparently warped spacetime.

It is Lao Wang’s bust, but he let Nuhane do the honors—a taste of imposition for the green junior officer.

“Please,” one of the debtors weeps. “I don’t deserve this!” The transmission redshifts as it climbs out of the pocket. “I’m a licensed interface pilot! I was forced into this—”

“By a violator called Phlogiston,” Lao Wang supplies. “I know, and I’m afraid it makes no difference.”

The pilot is in the Mayall II globular cluster of Andromeda much sooner than he should be. His mass contributed to the vacuum deterioration in the junk’s wake, however minutely. He is therefore a debtor.

“It’s Phlogiston’s debt!” the pilot argues. That name again. Nuhane wants to ask Lao Wang what’s going on, but he’s distracted by the spectacle of lockdown. He’s seen it before, of course, but this one is different, no matter what the record will say. This one is his.

“Phlogiston’s debt,” Lao Wang says, “and yours, and the junk’s. Anything that violates, sentient or not, guilty or innocent, must be locked down. You’re an interface pilot. You know what’s at stake.”

“But the debt . . . ” he chokes.

“Approximately two million, seven hundred and forty-nine thousand, eight hundred and thirty-five point two two seven light-years.”

“So how long . . . ”

“Ten minutes ship-time,” Lao Wang says. “For your debt, lockdown is equivalent to point nine nine nine nine nine one seven c. Be thankful you won’t suffer the gravities.” He doesn’t need to add that meanwhile the resting universe will age 2.75 million years. This debtor is an interface-pilot, after all. He understands the law he has violated.

The junk continues to redshift, as though accelerating toward redemption. Soon it will be like a dim 3D snapshot printed on reality, beyond time and reproach. For 2.75 million years it will function like a head on London Bridge, a warning to those who would violate sacred law. Nuhane is proud to have finally contributed his first head. His pride waxes as the debtor’s personal clocks slow. The ship will gain millions of relativistic tons before it pays its mass-energy debt to the universe. By the time it heals the rent it tore in spacetime, all that the pilot loves will be gone, or radically transformed.

Nuhane is drunk on the power he wields. Perhaps sensing this, Lao Wang says: “Never forget that we are bound for the same fate.”

How could he forget with Lao Wang constantly reminding him? You sooner than me, old man, he wants to say. Nuhane has accrued seventy million light-years of so-called Noble Debt or VLOD (Violation in the Line of Duty), certainly a small fraction of Lao Wang’s. Nuhane is a young god, free to ignore Einstein when he sees fit, and to punish others for doing so. He worked hard to be so elite. Most Bureau officers end up with a local, sub-c jurisdiction, lying in wait for violators rather than hunting them. Their only taste of violation is the occasional use of a Bureau ansible. They are part of the vast, slow, relativistic two-thirds of humanity, trapped by distances that might as well be infinite.

Nuhane was never willing to settle for that. The last thing he wants to hear is Lao Wang urging him to humility.

“We aren’t so different from our prey,” the old man says.

Nuhane wonders if the bastard has developed violation syndrome. It’s new, the idea that too much time beyond c can lead to symptoms of senility. Some researchers go further, claiming that violation decouples consciousness from time.

Master Patrol Officer Nuhane is still high from his last “Noble” violation. He’s already looking forward to the next one. Between ecstasy and the grand future there is no room for doubt. Nuhane is immortal.

Beyond c there is no time and no speed. Bureau officers call the speed of light the “last speed.” Here in violation space, all of Nuhane’s violating selves are united. Beyond time there is exultant joy, infinite peace, and the “eldest” of Nuhane’s violation selves will find it hard to condescend back to the universe. They will leave pieces of themselves here.

The “younger” Nuhanes fear the dissolution of self that must result from perfect bliss. They flee back below c, cherishing what little exultation they’ve allowed themselves. All of the violating Nuhanes, young and old, remain in violation space for precisely the same amount of time—none—regardless of the light years skipped in the sub-c universe.

And so, coincident with their unification, the united Nuhanes split along their seams of self. They become again old and young and middle-aged, returning to the sub-c murk once and for all.

As Major Nuhane condescends from violation space, emerging near a violator yacht in the Southern Local Supervoid, he wonders how he’s going to explain this to the Bureau. They’ll study his ansible. They’ll suspect he tampered with its debt meter, but won’t be able to prove it. What they’ll be able to do is ground him with therapy sessions. Nuhane fears that more than anything.

The yacht winds up its violation ring, but Nuhane imposes lockdown before the ring completes its first test cycle.

He barely pays attention as the yacht wavers, begins to dim. His mind is still in violation space, in headlong discovery of joy. Why did he violate without permission? Was it really because of that informant at New McMurdo? The vacuum dweller had given him bad information before. Nuhane had vowed never to use her again. This time she claimed to know someone who knew Phlogiston, a violator no less, and she had coordinates for this violator’s next jump.

Nuhane didn’t hesitate. The informant was a known liar, her claim preposterous. Nuhane paid her. It was about a promise to Lao Wang, of course—not an excuse to violate.

“Officer,” a female voice says.

A video feed follows: twenty naked youths laze about in a garden setting, like an indolent pantheon of gods. Only one woman is standing, a sculpture in translucent flesh with inhuman black eyes and a cloud of silver hair. “I won’t insult your intelligence by denying our crime,” she says. Most of her companions aren’t even looking his way. Some appear to sleep.

“Big of you,” Nuhane says.

“You’re with the Bureau. You have violated. You know how it feels.”

“Yes.”

“So you know why we do it.”

They are libertines. They violated purely to experience violation space. Nuhane suspected this when the informant gave him the coordinates. The common breeds of violator—colonists, shippers, transports—have no reason to jump to an inter-filament void. Out here there is only vacuum and a novel view. The lights sprinkled across the blackness are all galaxies. In the varying density of this field, the large-scale structure of the universe is discernible.

Nuhane suffers a wave of nausea. Nowhere else is the universe’s dumb magnitude more apparent. He allows his cutter to feed him a palliative. He longs for a cave, or the alchemy of violation space. Did Lao Wang ever yearn for it like this? Nuhane remembers a time, long before the old man’s senility, when he seemed obsessed with violation, with its nature. But did he crave it? Perhaps all Bureau officers do.

“How can you blame us for wanting that transcendence?”

“I don’t deal in blame,” Nuhane says. “Think of me as a maintenance man.”

An Apollo in the background chuckles, saying, “There it is.”

The nymph at his side murmurs, “What did you expect?”

“I take it you don’t believe in the danger of spacetime fissuring,” Nuhane says.

A ripple of laughter animates the pantheon. “Do you?” the translucent goddess asks.

Nuhane hates this old debate, but he wants to feel these people out. “Set aside the overwhelming scientific consensus, if you like. Shouldn’t we proceed with caution? It’s the fabric of spacetime, after all. We need it.” This elicits more laughter, and Nuhane gets angry despite himself—angry at himself, more than these Deniers. He should be used to their kind. The age of unchecked FTL travel, the so-called Age of Innocence, left Deniers scattered across the cosmos. He has to remind himself of the Bureau’s role: not to correct delusional thinking, not even to keep up with the damage, an impossibility. But to act as a deterrent. “Laugh if you like,” he says. “Laugh all the way into lockdown.”

“Bureau fascist,” the nymph says.

“You want violation for yourselves,” Apollo says. “First rule of bureaucracy and so on. You imagine what humanity could be given by unchecked violation, and it terrifies you.”

“You hate freedom,” says another woman.

They may have tweaked themselves to believe this drivel. Judging by their composure in the face of lockdown, they are no strangers to mental rewrites—and their bodies are certainly customized. Not for the first time, Nuhane wonders what it would be like to see and think like a Denier. Driven by fear. Unable to live with the possibility, however remote, of the universe splitting along its fissures and flying apart. Choosing to believe otherwise.

Nuhane could go to a clinic, get the tweak. Then he could lose himself in violation. But the notion is fleeting. If he did that, he wouldn’t enjoy the resulting fantasy. Someone new would.

“You can still stop this lockdown,” the translucent goddess says.

They haven’t reached the point of no return, but they’re close. Nuhane allows his cutter to underclock him to match their continually slowing reference frame. “That’s right.”

“We’re rich.”

“Congratulations. I’m after someone named Phlogiston.”

Apollo and his nymph stop laughing. The rest of the pantheon subtly emerges from its contrived disinterest. This charged moment takes three months in Nuhane’s resting universe.

The goddess says: “That’s not his real name.”

Nuhane is old, a commander, and the dwarf glares murkily just light-seconds away. The ominous substar seems familiar, or perhaps significant beyond its fearsome absurdity.

“Sir?” It’s patrol officer Wen Ting, his junior partner. He can hear the concern mixed with youthful impatience in her voice. “Jump to orbit, or what?” She knows violation syndrome has him by the throat. How could she not, by now? He remembers his own premonitions as Lao Wang deteriorated.

They have followed a ragged tear in spacetime to an abandoned long-range rig that only accounts for ninety-one percent of the debt. Something else launched from the rig and likely headed for the dwarf.

Instead of giving the order Wen Ting craves, Nuhane contemplates the fissure. One of billions now. He gazes into the night and watches them in real time, no matter how far away they are, because they violate. They seem to propagate from him toward a distant haze woven through the microwave background.

“The L-T object,” Wen Ting prompts.

Nuhane returns his gaze to the dwarf, remembers they’re here to lock down someone named Willard. The cutter doses him with the latest syndrome therapy. It activates random memories and loosens his tongue: “Patrol Officer, did you know that my people were one of the first branches from baseline humanity? We were called fey because we bred ourselves small and claustrophilic for interstellar travel. And because our enterprise seemed like a death wish.”

“Fascinating, commander.”

“We were the first to colonize many worlds. We did it fair and square, no FTL. But on Lalo our civilization collapsed. When a wave of violators arrived, all that remained of us was an underground theocracy. Of course the violator civ also collapsed. They went medieval, demonized us, blamed us for crop failures, plagues, everything. Then they industrialized, declared total wars on each other. Most of our caverns were beneath a republic called Iomang, a desperate state ruled by a madman.”

“Yes sir,” Wen Ting says absently, then adds, “Something’s orbiting the dwarf.”

Nuhane feels vaguely insulted. Hoping to embarrass her in turn, he asks, “Why did you join the Church of the Indemnity?”

“Willard’s shuttle is correcting toward the orbiter,” she says, then seamlessly adds: “My people were violators. The Bureau wasn’t going to let me in. Getting the Church tweak was the only way to prove my loyalty. At least, that’s what I thought before. Now I see that this was the universe’s way of guiding me toward the Faith.”

Nuhane realizes she’s explained this before. He ends up embarrassed for himself again. Furthermore, he finds nothing to mock in her story.

With a note of confusion Wen Ting announces: “Grav harmonics from the orbiter, but not the signature of violation tech.” She waits for Nuhane’s order. Nuhane can’t seem to focus. “Jump over and intercept before he can dock?” she prods.

When she initiates without consent, Nuhane realizes this mission will be his last.

Nuhane has been to several Bureau lockdown ceremonies, but Lao Wang’s is the first to fill him with dread of the future. Captain Nuhane feels old for the first time in his life. He is on the observation deck of Achindoun, the Bureau hab that has long stood watch over the Nobly Locked Down. He’s joined by fellow officers and a smattering of Lao Wang’s proxied relations.

Lagrange point 4 of the Pluto-analog Kvichak and its moon Igiugig: here hang thousands of Bureau officers in their lockdown pods, most of them redshifted beyond casual observation. Lao Wang’s has just shed its attitude jets, having found its place among the others.

The bagpipes sound, and the lensing of his pod signifies the beginning of lockdown. Some of his loved ones allow their proxies to broadcast sobs. Nuhane wonders what that says about the authenticity of their grief. He can only stare in numb transfixion.

The old man shoulders four hundred billion two hundred and eighty-seven thousand light-years of Noble Debt—an epic career, but not the record. No one knows why people can only violate so many times before losing their faculties. Most officers don’t break five hundred billion. Nuhane, now at ten billion four hundred and ninety million, wonders how far he’ll go.

“Reductio ad absurdum,” Lao Wang PMs, “reductio ad infinitum. Redcutio ad absurdum, reductio . . . ” On he goes, repeating his nonsense mantra.

“Listen Uncle,” Nuhane says. “We both know I’m not half the officer you are. I’ll probably check out long before four hundred big ones. We could emerge from lockdown around the same time. We’d be together, two old maniacs laughing at . . . whatever humanity is by then. How does that sound?”

“ . . . ad infinitum. Remember that, boy.”

“Alright.” Nuhane is used to dealing with him like this. He’s glad the old man had the sense to PM him, and not include his relatives.

“Architectures, paradigms, we all fall down. Ashes, ashes.”

“Yes Uncle.”

“Nuhane.” His transmissions are redshifting fast now.

“I’m here, Uncle.”

“Remember that lockdown in Mayall II?”

“Mayall II . . . ”

“Andromeda.”

“Yes. I remember. The slaved pilot. We never found the perp.”

“Phlogiston. He called himself Phlogiston. There was a file on him. You didn’t rate the clearance at the time, so I couldn’t tell you. He’s important.”

Nuhane doesn’t know if this is the syndrome talking or not. “I remember wondering what you were hiding. Don’t worry, I’ll look at the file.”

“It’s gone. They even wiped it from me, somehow, whoever they are. But I know he was part of something big. I know it!”

“I believe you,” Nuhane says, not sure that he does.

“Find him. Violate off the books if you have to. Promise me.”

Nuhane is sure that his other, timeless self is here, reading his life like prose. The more he violates, the more certain he is of this.

Nuhane’s counselor is Lectern, an instance of a Turing-passable expert system, an ancient Bureau creature possessed of unfathomable secrets. Colonel Nuhane is enduring another therapy session. All he can think about is getting back into violation space, which is the sort of thing Lectern would like to know, and the last thing Nuhane cares to admit.

“We were talking about your old partner,” the system prods. “His lockdown ceremony.”

“It was a hundred years ago,” Nuhane prevaricates.

“Then let’s talk about your debriefing last week,” Lectern suggests.

“An instance of you was there. Surely you’ve reintegrated by now.”

“How did the questions make you feel?”

“Angry.”

“You violated without authorization. Shouldn’t we be concerned?”

“For the last time, my ansible went into lockdown before I could request the jump. I was chasing a lead. I made a judgment call.”

“There’s evidence that you tampered with your ansible. Its debt meter was dialed up.”

“Like I said, it must’ve been faulty!”

“Which isn’t supposed to be possible. But Bureau legend has it that Lao Wang knew how.”

“He taught me a lot of things, but never that.” Nuhane is barely able to convince himself that this charade is about keeping his promise to Lao Wang, and not about hiding his addiction. The old man wasn’t clear, but he seemed to imply that someone inside the Bureau was working with Phlogiston. Nuhane doubts that Lectern is involved, but can’t be sure.

“This lead you explained to the board . . . ”

How much longer can he juggle the lies? In addition to the board inquiries, he has a new partner to deal with. She is from the Church of the Indemnity, tweaked to take an almost feline pleasure in the hunt. She wants to inflict lockdowns. She won’t tolerate a prolonged investigation full of dead ends.

“I think it’s a fabrication,” Lectern continues. “If you’re investigating something off the books, you’d better come clean to the board. Regardless, we need to face the fact of your addiction.” Nuhane waits for the system to take a different tack. “Not today? Then how about your childhood on Lalo-honua? Are you ready to go there yet?”

Nuhane restrains his irritation. He has always avoided this topic, but for the first time it seems preferable to everything else on the docket. “The bliss of violation space,” he says, “is like confronting infinity. It’s like the most wide open space possible, without fear. For me anyway.”

“That makes sense,” Lectern says. “There have been two other Fey officers before you. They both said the same thing.”

This brings Nuhane an odd sense of comfort. He is encouraged to go deeper: “I remember the explosions that opened up the Hall of Star Ancestors. The Iomangans were clever. The sunlight disoriented us.”

“Disoriented you. Focus on your personal experiences.”

“I was too young to understand. I thought the Iomangans were monsters. That’s what our priests taught. All I knew was that our world was falling down around us. Many were killed in the collapse.”

“You saw that?”

“I saw my father buried. Annihilated in moments. Also my great-great-grandmother, and many cousins.”

“Go on.”

“Then there were these giants. I’d never seen them before. They had fire magic, in addition to swords. They killed many, including my grandmothers, before a commander showed up and ordered them to stop. The rest of us were herded to the surface. Up there we were helpless with our phobias, all but blind. I was separated from my mother. They packed us into magic boxes that moved on metal tracks. Many more of us died in those, suffocated or starved. You could say I was lucky, having been packed against one of my great aunts. She opened a vein and fed me her blood. I slowly killed her in order to survive.”

“No. That wasn’t murder.”

Nuhane ignores this laughable claim. “And then there were the camps. We children learned how to hide and steal and survive. The adults fell into torpors and died, if they weren’t killed outright. There were medical experiments, you see. And labor they knew we couldn’t sustain. And random sport killings. I know what you’re thinking, Lectern. Don’t worry. I saw these things myself. All of them and more.”

Nuhane watches the universe blue-shift around him, knowing he is old, that this is his Noble Lockdown—but sure of little else.

Pseudo acceleration. But no pseudo equivalence principle. He doesn’t feel the gravities. How could he? He’s not going anywhere, not in space anyway.

How did he get here? What was his last mission? He had another partner after Lao Wang. What was her name?

His timeless observing other cannot enlighten him. The other wonders, as always, why he knows nothing beyond this lockdown. Does Nuhane die soon? Is it some effect of terminal violation syndrome? An immanent cure? Or is something catastrophic about to happen to time itself? Perhaps scientists underestimated the deleterious effect of violation. Perhaps spacetime is about to unravel.

Whatever the reason, the timeless other knows he is soon to be no more.

Colonel Nuhane kneels with the other initiates before the torch-lit altar. Beyond is enshrined a fierce-looking idol, a Taoist god with bulging, hungry eyes. An urgent drum makes the incense-laden air pulse.

Nuhane endures the ritual like he did his Bureau passing-out. He ought to be happier to be in a nice cave like this.

“Eight hundred years ago,” declaims a red-robed man, “the emperor Kangxi consigned many Shaolin monks to fiery death. Five survivors escaped to a mountaintop temple, before which, using grass for incense, they formed a sacred brotherhood. They vowed revenge, pledging to oppose the Qing dynasty and restore the Ming.”

“Fan qing fu ming!” the initiates affirm. Oppose the Qing and restore the Ming.

“At the Red Flower Pavilion, the Five founded the Hong Society. The Hong conducted heroic but doomed uprisings. One hundred thousand Hong soldiers sacrificed themselves courageously for the Han race.” The man is a good actor. He appears stern and proud. Nuhane has no idea whether or not he’s actually Han—not that it matters. “And the Hong society continues to thrive today!”

After a sufficient dramatic pause, he adds, “Begin the ceremony!”

Senior brethren in black robes and red sashes enter the cave. One by one they’re stopped by two guards, who cross their broadswords and shout, “You are entering the Hong army fortress! Disobedience is punishable by death!” The black-robes reply with, “I am a Ming general! I build bridges and roads!” or “I cross mountains and ramparts! Don’t you recognize a brother?” And they’re allowed to pass.

The stuff about bridges and crossings is uncanny. Nuhane wonders if the ancient Ming rebels had the gift of foresight. This secret society has had nothing to do with Ming restoration since the 20th century, possibly earlier. They devolved into gangsterism, eventually becoming the most powerful hei she hui on old Terra. When the communist party collapsed, they took over China. Two hundred years later, their sole passion was traveling faster than light.

Bridges and roads indeed.

“Why are you here?” the red-robe barks at Nuhane.

“I’ve come to enlist,” he replies.

“Why?”

“To oppose the Qing and restore the Ming!”

“Prove it!”

Following the ritual to the letter, Nuhane recites a poem:

“Draw broadswords,

the Manchurians stole our land!

The hour of loyalty

and blood vengeance is at hand!”

With that the red-robe moves on, challenging other initiates. They are as varied as Nuhane’s cadet class at the Bureau. This Heaven and Earth Society has not been Chinese, let alone Han, for a very long time.

Next comes a black-robe, slapping each initiate in the back with the flat of a broadsword, then demanding: “Do you love gold or your brethren?”

The initiates each reply, “My brethren!” in their turn. Nuhane struggles not to faint after the blow nearly shatters his tiny frame.

All this for one unauthorized violation. Nuhane was indignant when the Bureau followed his therapy with undercover duty. Since then he has grown numb, having weathered violation withdrawal. Infiltrating the Heaven and Earth Society has been a kind of sleepwalk.

Sometimes he can’t help wishing that these gangsters would steal a Bureau cutter. He could claim to know how to hack the interface nest, then violate. Where to? Would it matter? He would continue to honor his promise to Lao Wang, of course. It wouldn’t be about the violation alone. He isn’t like that anymore. He hasn’t violated in three years. Not that he’s had the chance.

“The first oath!” the red-robe shouts. “Once a member of the society, I shall treat the relatives of my brethren as my own. If I don’t keep this oath, I shall be struck down by five thunderbolts!”

The initiates repeat this. Nuhane finds that he is tired of oaths. To the Bureau, to mentors and gangsters and spacetime, and most of all to himself. He remembers being free of promises in violation space.

Patrol Officer Nuhane and Lieutenant Lao Wang have followed a debtor’s spacetime fissure from the Small Magellanic Cloud to this system in the heart of the Pavo-Indus Supercluster. Lao Wang locked the violator down before it could fall into the orbit of a world originally terraformed by other violators. The verdant, uninhabited globe hangs in the void, a jewel that shouldn’t exist. The people that sparked the terraforming drift in an old, barely discernible mist of lockdown pockets at the planet’s L2 point.

The violator ship, locked down only moments ago, blushes slightly. It’s a large cargo vessel, no doubt a second wave of colonists. Their debt stands at three hundred million light-years. They will pay off four hundred and twenty thousand relativistic tons. Young Nuhane still marvels at the weight of these crimes, and the price of getting caught.

He and Lao Wang, though interfaced in separate nests, share an environ that renders their facial expressions. Lao Wang wears an odd grin. He pings the cargo vessel and says, “Excuse me. Do you know how fast you were going?”

When there is no response, he shrugs and says to Nuhane: “A joke. Old reference.” He avoids Nuhane’s bewildered gaze. “They shouldn’t have come back,” he says.

“What?” Nuhane says.

“I mean, maybe we’re not meant to return from violation space. Maybe we’re supposed to break light speed and stay beyond it, forever.” He meets Nuhane’s eyes again, summons an unconvincing chuckle. “Never mind. Guess I need some R and R. You won’t report what I just said, right?”

“No sir.”

They watch the violator fade. Nuhane contemplates the mystery of violation and lockdown. Already the cargo vessel’s spacetime fissure is beginning to heal, even back in the Small Magellanic. True action at a distance, a violation of c in its own right.

Nuhane can’t believe what he sees in the soul of the man his fellow thugs just killed. The ice ceiling scrolls by the window, and the dead man, formerly a violation savant for the Heaven and Earth Society, slides back and forth across the floor with the motion of the hab, his head encased in a smoking transmigration helmet.

Nuhane hides his excitement. He has found his ticket off this nightmarish detail. He will be violating again soon—but it’s more than that.

The helmet sends pertinent memories to Nuhane’s mirror net. His rhythms sift through the complexity of violation math, seeking names and itineraries. He needed something underway, something he could lock down, but he didn’t expect to find it. It was clear right away that the man hadn’t spoken with the Bureau. Perhaps he never intended to. The Heaven and Earth kingpin of this Europa-analog has grown paranoid in his dotage, violation syndrome having burned wormholes through his reason.

“You said he didn’t rat,” says Plutarch, a hulking gangster eight times the size of Nuhane. “So why are we still here? If he’s so interesting, grab the helmet. But let’s go.”

Nuhane does not want to decapitate the savant. The crystalline mass that was once his head is permanently merged with the helmet. Nuhane has done many things for Heaven and Earth, things far worse than decapitating a corpse, but he feels he has reached a critical mass.

He just needs another minute to confirm what he saw: a very improbable name.

Outside, the hab lights flash on particles suspended in the inky water. The media wall maps the local ice ceiling and the other habs as they converge on a stable rendezvous point to form yet another temporary city. That’s how society works here in Baroque Pearl. Nuhane tried to convince himself he liked it, at first. It was a sub-surface existence. His sordid duties for Heaven and Earth were part of the mission, just as important as locking down violators. He didn’t miss violating. So went the flimsy monologue.

He confirms the name attached to the violation-in-progress: William Valentin Willard, aka Phlogiston. He smiles.

Nuhane is eleven years old, and feels much older, when the harriers drop from the sky to liberate his camp. He clutches the chain-link fence and watches the Iomangan guards flee across the heath under a leaden sky. One by one the giants vanish as plasma rains down. Nuhane tries to feel glad, to feel anything in fact, and fails. He has learned many things in this camp. He has learned to tolerate the open sky, beneath which he has learned what humans really are. He knows that the Iomangans are descendants of violators, and that his liberators are also violators. He does not know what that means.

What he finally feels is dread. He’s going to have to leave the camp, and enter a wider world.

Three hundred and fifty billion light-years.

He often wondered how far he would go before succumbing to violation syndrome—and now he knows. Three fifty is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s not the stuff of legend, but it’s respectable. At least he knows he has the syndrome. He tells himself that’s something. Perhaps it means he’s not so far gone.

It was these last two violations that did it. He knows that on a level below the cellular.

“Shall I lock him down?” Wen Ting asks. She floats with him in the new cutter’s sensorium, wide-eyed with the thrill of the hunt. Nuhane envies her youth, her cold pure hunter’s psychopathy, though he doesn’t fully understand it. The Church of the Indemnity has wired her up good. When she locked down that last rig, she curled into a fetal position, moaning with something beyond divine communion. “Commander?” she says.

He’s forgotten why they’re here, and it terrifies him. He blinks up the dossier of their current mark: William Valentin Willard, aka Phlogiston, quantum information physicist and outspoken Bureau sympathizer. Trillions of humans call him a Bureau lapdog and want him dead. He understands that the Bureau holds the universe together, understands it in a way that Wen Ting and her brethren never will. He doesn’t need their leap of faith. He invented the machine that images the universe’s scars.

“Violating c,” he said famously, “is worse than murder.”

And yet here he is, after a serious galaxy hop. What possessed him?

His shuttle falls toward Nuhane’s cutter. Beneath them hangs the mysterious machine, alive with its puzzling gravitational waves. None of Nuhane’s scans or Wen Ting’s mystic sensing find weapons in the fine-woven ring of exotic matter. Far below it, dark storms roil over the surface of the dim red L-T dwarf. Nuhane wonders what role, if any, Willard means this substar to play in whatever he’s up to.

“Congratulations,” Willard transmits. “You’ve got me.”

With his voice comes the visual of a surprisingly youthful man: middle aged, gray-bearded but healthy and vital. For a moment Nuhane can’t reconcile this with what he knows. Willard ought to be decrepit by now, even if he’s had longevity treatments. Then Nuhane remembers that Willard has traveled relativistically. The man has lived a decade or so of the last five hundred years.

Wen Ting shows him a scan of the orbiting machine. “What is it?”

His brief grin is barely perceptible. “Ah, one of the Bureau’s pet zealots.” He understands—or understood—that the Bureau needs all the support it can get, even if that means employing delusional jihadists.

What has become of the far-seeing creature Willard used to be?

“What are you waiting for?” he says.

Wen Ting scans the orbital machine again, hoping this time the Angels of Indemnity will grant revelation. It appears conclusive that the thing is not a weapon. There are signs of a spin foam hack about it, but the configuration is wrong for violation or lockdown tech.

“Do you need me to confess?” Willard says impatiently.

Nuhane wonders if the man craves the portal to the future that lockdown represents. Perhaps he has grown weary of his small-minded contemporaries. Then why not take off at relativistic speed, like he has before?

Nuhane hesitates to impose lockdown. He may be slipping into dotage, but he senses he’s being manipulated.

Wen Ting, however, does not hesitate. She and the cutter have developed an understanding in the face of Nuhane’s decline. She doesn’t need his authorization. She imposes with relish.

“Thank you,” Willard says, as yet barely redshifted.

Nuhane feels Wen Ting’s confusion through her bio feed. Violators aren’t supposed to be thankful. They’re supposed to beg for mercy. But Willard is no masochist. Nuhane also feels the grav waves from the orbiter changing tune, and knows something fundamental is happening to local spacetime. He perceives a disturbance, much like the fractures caused by violation, blossoming between Willard’s shuttle, the orbiter, and the dwarf below. A lockdown pocket encloses the orbiter, seeming to mirror Willard’s.

Wen Ting panics. “What’s this?”

“I’m sorry to have led you so far,” Willard replies, “but I needed at least a seventy million light-year debt for this trial run.”

“Of what?”

“My machine is crude. The first of its kind. It won’t respond to anything less than a seventy mil debt.”

This transmission arrives at an unchanging radio wavelength. Willard’s redshifting has ceased. This is stunning, unprecedented, but Nuhane’s attention is drawn to the machine, now shivering and glowing under some unfathomable workload. Nuhane senses that it is channeling something—Hilbert distortion? inertia?—from Willard’s shuttle down into the murky furnace of the dwarf.

“I approached the Bureau first,” he says, “but they didn’t believe me. Or didn’t want to. They tried to kill me, you know. Maybe you won’t believe that, but it’s true. So I had to go to Heaven and Earth. It is regrettable that the savant in Baroque Pearl had to die, but I needed you to believe that lead and come after me. I should also apologize for having Lao Wang wiped. Canny, that one. He was on to me before I was ready. And it was my man in the Bureau who got you assigned to that duty in Baroque Pearl. I don’t imagine it was pleasant. All for a greater good, as you’ll see.”

Far below, a darkness blossoms between two ribbons of turbulent black cloud. One might almost take it for another storm of raining iron, but for the speed of its formation. It expands like an ink stain through the hydrogen blood-glow, devouring thousands of cubic kilometers per second. Nuhane remembers that the dwarf was already radiating in the long visible wavelengths, that lockdown of such matter would mean swift blackness. He tunes his vision and watches the still-growing lockdown pocket—the largest one ever, as far as he knows—dimming down its trapped matter through infrared and radio. The pocket soon encloses a fifth of the substar, and keeps expanding. Great storms flash and gleam along the moving perimeter, and the Jupiter-like band-flow is thrown into chaos.

“Debt transfer,” Nuhane says. The words are packed with mythic weight.

“Impossible,” Wen Ting declares.

“It’s working,” Willard says, “but something’s wrong.”

Over one third of the dwarf is now enclosed, the remainder stirred to frenzy by the process and made to radiate like the accretion disk of a black hole. The lockdown pocket behaves like a collapsed star in many ways, though it has no real event horizon. As the brighter material is swallowed, Nuhane can judge how far along the lockdown is, what fraction of c it is equivalent to. The hottest free matter radiates in the extreme ultraviolet to soft X-ray range, but attenuates after falling in. And still the pocket grows.

“My shuttle and I weigh about seven tons,” Willard says. His self-satisfaction is gone, replaced by mounting horror. “It seems we’ve discovered a new law of physics. The Law of the Transfer Fee.”

Nuhane gets there just after him, he is sure they’re wondering the same thing now: how much of a fee?

Unlike a black hole, a lockdown pocket doesn’t exert gravity, so the remaining dwarf material—plasmas of hydrogen and helium, trace metals and silicates—overcomes its own gravitation and shreds away wildly into space.

It doesn’t occur to Nuhane to get out of the way, not until he sees Willard and his machine doing so. Wen Ting reacts first, matching Willard’s escape vector, worlds of fire blooming under them. The pocket swells and consumes, but slower than before.

Wen Ting is chanting again. Occasionally she forgets a phrase or a line and has to start over. Nuhane scans her mind and sees that her Church mod is short-circuiting, overloaded with a cumbersome truth.

“You’ve got to help me,” Willard says.

The pocket finally stops expanding, content with the mass of forty-five Jupiters. The remaining one-fourth of the dwarf continues to burn and diffuse into space. The holy grail of debt transfer is possible, but hideously expensive. The transfer fee in this case was 1.2 octillion percent of the debt.

Nuhane scans Willard and confirms he is debt free. The machine seems to be powering down. Wen Ting is curled in a fetal position again, this time with excruciating pain. She shivers, sweating and whimpering with Church withdrawal.

“I’ve violated but can’t be locked down,” Willard says. “So arrest me. Take me to a hub.”

Nuhane understands. Willard’s shuttle can’t achieve relativistic speeds, let alone violate. There is no concentrated source of matter for light-years around, so he can’t get his long-range rig out of lockdown. He’s at Nuhane’s mercy.

“It wasn’t just you and your partner and that savant,” he admits. “You don’t know the half of it. Maybe I deserve to die out here, but it can’t all be for nothing.” With that, his shuttle lights up with high-power transmissions aimed at a few hundred of the nearest inhabited systems and galaxies. Nuhane takes a sample: the machine specs and documentation of what happened to the dwarf.

“What have you done?” Nuhane says.

“Freed humanity.”

“And that’s a good thing, is it? Perhaps we need a cage.” Before it’s out of his mouth, he wonders if his heritage, or the Bureau, speaks through him. Maybe it’s neither. Maybe it’s the boy who got used to a concentration camp, and hated himself for it.

He turns his attention to Wen Ting, tweaking her neurochemistry to ease the trauma of her disillusionment. He marvels at the delicacy of her Church tweak, but something so absurd could be no other way—not without undermining her basic functionality.

“Debtor,” she whispers, “make satisfaction for thy sin.”

Nuhane tries to imagine what will become of the debt transfer universe. Matter will soon be at a premium, if he knows anything about mankind. Then what? Cycles of lockdown and emergence? Relativistic dark ages followed by renaissances of violation? Perhaps the stars must wink out, one by one, to become readily accessible. What about expansion, deprived of all that gravitating matter? What about dark matter and energy? Are lockdowns that vast even possible?

The Bureau as Nuhane knows it will be obsolete, regardless. Perhaps it will be relegated to catalyzing debt transfer, facilitating the violations it once policed. That would still be holding the universe together. That would still be his mission, wouldn’t it?

Nuhane is four years old when his parents take him to the Hall of Star Ancestors for the first time. The cavern is the biggest space he’s ever seen.

But not the biggest you’ll ever see, says the man in his skull.

Nuhane gapes at the distant ceiling. It is a field of lights that his people call stars. “They’re actually colonies of bioluminescent fungus,” Father says.

“Don’t teach him blasphemies,” Mother whispers. The vast space is relatively quiet as hundreds of people walk the Great Circle and show proper awe.

His people are the Fey. Mother says they came from the stars.

Someday you’ll travel to the real stars, the man in his skull says, but Nuhane doesn’t believe him. You’ll forget about me for a long time, then remember me again. But we won’t be able to talk like this anymore.

“Why not?” Nuhane asks aloud, and Mother shushes him.

“Leave him be,” Father says.

“And let him anger the priests?” Mother hisses. “And get us sent to the sulfur farms?” She looks up at the fake stars. “Ancestors, why did you curse me with such a husband?”

Nuhane’s parents always quarrel when he talks to the man in his skull. Father says it’s a gift, a sign he’s destined for great things. It was Father who named him Nuhane, which in some ancient language means speaker with the ghosts of ancestors.

About the Author

Andy Dudak’s fiction has appeared in Analog, Apex, Daily Science Fiction, Diabolical Plots, Flash Fiction Online, Not One of Us, and many other venues. He’s been honorably mentioned by Gardner Dozois and recommended by Lois Tilton. He currently teaches translation at Beijing Language and Culture University. Chinese proficiency tests are slowly eroding his psyche.

This Wanderer, in the Dark of the Year

Kris Millering

It starts this way: I am a journalist. I interview the inhabitants of war zones. I go to Afghanistan, Iraq, the DRC. The stories are all different, but after a while they begin to blur together. The women are tired, and children with thin arms cling to them. We cannot get bread, they say. Or clean water. My husband died last night. My brothers have been taken.

You’re a disaster, Annelise says on the phone one night, voice distant and crackling over the satellite phone. I think her tone is fond. It’s difficult to tell, with the static. Come home safe.

They took us and raped us one after the other. They are monsters, monsters.

They are men, but they are monsters.

I travel with translators, or embedded into peacekeeping forces. The thump of shells exploding lulls me to sleep.

Or it starts this way: I am home, and doing the dishes. This is my job when I’m home. Scrape, wash, rinse; my hands are mechanical. Annelise leans on the doorframe. The kitchen is the size of a postage stamp, and the rest of the apartment is not much bigger. We pretend that this is the reason I do not spend much time at home. “Did you see the news?” Her accent curls around each word, turning it into rough music. We met in Durban ten years ago, when I was doing a predictable piece on the townships. Annelise was the only good thing about that trip.

I set a plate into the drainer. “About the meteor?”

“They’re not sure that’s what it is,” she says. “Weren’t you working there a while ago? The gypsy story?”

“Not gypsies. Roma. Gypsy’s a pejorative.” I wash off a couple of forks and set them in the drainer. “But yes. That’s right near where all those people were killed.”

All I can remember is how gray the sky was, and how cold it was at night. I have some beautiful pictures from that assignment, but I don’t remember taking any of them.

“Sorry.” Her tone is unrepentant. Annelise is an evolutionary biologist, and she dislikes the niceties of human behavior. We’re all too fast-moving for her.

“Maybe it’s a spaceship. Also, do you have to use every pot we own to make dinner with?” My voice is sharper than I mean.

“When someone else is washing dishes? Yes.” Again, no contrition. I used to love the way you never apologized. “I’m going to go see if they’ve gotten into the thing yet.” Her bare feet are nearly soundless on the old wood floor of the apartment that was once mine and then ours and now more hers. Over the sink is a small framed photograph: Annelise, her sister, and two cousins. The sun casts harsh shadows under the brims of their hats, but their smiles are wide and bright.

It will be weeks before anyone can get close to the object. When it cools off enough that they can send rovers to look at it, they will find that the surface is made of some sort of metal, pockmarked in ways that make little sense.

Everyone, it seems, wants it to be a spaceship. Nobody knows for certain.

That night, on our threadbare couch, a spring pokes me in the back, keeping me awake. Even with the roar of the city below and Annelise’s soft snoring from the bedroom, it’s too quiet.

No, it actually starts this way: I am kidnapped from the Budapest airport. I let my guard down. Life seems so much less urgent when nobody is shooting at you.

It’s easy. Replace the car driver who was supposed to meet me at the airport. Go towards the hotel but stop in a narrow, cobbled alley. Men with guns slide into the car; I am paralyzed with surprise for a critical moment.

Then the bag over my head, and darkness for what feels like days.

I step forward, and I am falling, falling, falling.

This is all out of order. I’m sorry.

The meteorite opened and something escaped. I was taken from Budapest and driven to a remote location. The non-Roma and the Roma here have been killing each other for centuries.

These three things are related.

My name is Audra Feher. I was born in Athens to American parents. I work for the international desk of a newspaper based in New York. It is January fourteenth, I am told. I am alive. I am unhurt.

I do not know who the people are who are holding me captive. I do know that they have an alien. I have seen it.

Whatever they are telling you, believe them.

The alien resembles nothing so much as a damp gray blanket with restlessly moving fringe, darker spots roving its felted-looking back.

My hands are cuffed behind my back. The metal has worn sores into my wrists, and my shoulders ache. The alien smells like nothing I’ve ever smelled before, a little like formaldehyde and fresh-cut apples. The man standing next to me has a machine gun. He keeps shifting where he stands.

“It will try to touch you,” the man says in heavily Hungarian-accented German. He lowers the muzzle of the gun a little; a reminder, a warning. “Hold still.”

We are in a damp, concrete-walled cell with one barred window near the ceiling. My feet are bare and ache so badly with the cold. The alien shifts, and moves. It flows like a slug flows, like an underwater creature, bag of water with cilia moving it along.

It touches the end of my toe. My big toenail, with chipped polish clinging to it still. Jungle Red, the color is called. Bright red, like arterial blood. I think about this because the alien is touching me and I need to think about something other than how my skin wants to crawl right off of my body.

It touches the top of my foot. It’s strangely warm. It tickles a little.

And then—pain. What feels like fire spreads up my leg in a sweeping rush, and I scream. My foot shoots out as I try to shake the fucking thing off of me—

It moves far more quickly than I thought possible, withdrawing with a swift and preternatural grace, the dark spots moving more quickly now. The man with the gun grabs my arm and drags me away with him.

Later, in the cell, I look at my feet. Bright red pinpricks—Jungle Red—show on purplish, bruised skin. My foot throbs.

It does not heal. The bruise and the pinpricks remain, even after the pain begins to fade.

I put things together, little by little.

Only the one guard speaks German; the rest speak Hungarian—a language that I can speak only the very basics of. The German talks to me, but only to give me orders. I ask questions and he grunts. They’ve read the books on how to survive hostage situations, too, it seems, and they know all the tricks one does to build rapport with one’s kidnappers. What’s your name? I ask. Where are you from? Why have you taken me?

If I were to describe the German in an article, I would say a burly man with dark hair and a sparse moustache, worn hat pulled low over his eyes. I would not mention the way he smells as if he has not bathed in weeks, or the stains on his pants, or the way his eyes flick over me as if I were one of the insects that colonize my cell.

“Please,” I wheedle. German is a terrible language to plead in. “How can I do what you want if I don’t know what it is?”

He turns towards me. Narrowed eyes with deep furrows in the corners, a suspicious set to his mouth, I note absently. “You will see,” he says. “Your government values you.” He grins, briefly, lopsidedly, and then will say no more.

The men wear gray camo and tan coats, and boots with cracked leather uppers. Their guns, though—their guns are well-tended. They’ve been at this a while. They grow careless eventually, and one of them walks by wearing a hat with a recognizable emblem on it.

Some of the men I interviewed for the piece on the killings of the Roma wore pins and badges with that sign on it. One of them had it tattooed on his beefy neck.

There were angry letters to the editor, after my piece came out. Angry letters, death threats in my email, the background noise of being a woman who walks into war and walks out with a story. I didn’t think much of it. I didn’t even think I would be returning to Hungary, but a mysterious space object crashed here and my editors wanted a follow-up piece.

I am here because they want a mouthpiece, or some sort of insurance against attack. The fact that they are . . . feeding me to the alien, if that is what is happening—I suspect that is just because I am a stranger, and my pain means nothing to them. I hear other screams sometimes. Men. I think they’re trying different people, to see what it likes.

After what feels like months, they drag me into a cinderblock room and have me talk to a video camera. They point guns at me. The German tells me what to say.

I don’t play games with the translation. I’m sure someone in their network speaks English and would know if I slipped a hint about where I think I’m located, the few glimpses I’ve gotten of the trees, the color of the dirt. I also don’t say, I miss you, Annelise.

Your native environment, Annelise always says. Your biome is war. The words had been fond at first, then less fond, as she realized that even though I would come back to New York and sleep beside her, I was never truly there at all.

I don’t wonder what she’s doing. I don’t think of her at all, if I can help it.

They take me to see the alien, again and again. Sometimes it touches me. Sometimes I just stand and stare at it. I don’t know how they know what it wants. If they know what it wants. It’s cryptic as a sea cucumber, as an anemone.

Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night, the smell of apples and bitter almonds choking me.

When the meteorite—spaceship—opens, something escapes. Nobody sees what, because at that point armed men of unknown affiliation have taken control of the crater that was the crash site. They have shot the guards and taken the scientists hostage. The Hungarian government was in the process of sending in the army when the pitted metal opened and smoke and something else poured out.

When the smoke clears, the armed men as well as whatever had come out are gone. They leave behind the bodies of the scientists.

Annelise comes out with me to wait for the taxi on the stoop of our building. She watches the traffic go past, spraying filthy slush onto the sidewalk. I glance at her, once, then again. She’s left her coat upstairs.

“I’m going home,” she says.

I hear how the oh in home elongates. Hohhme. The Afrikaner way of indicating distance. Something cold threads through my gut. “Are you coming back?”

“Taxi’s here.” She picks up my suitcase and heads down the steps.

There’s a moment after a bomb goes off that is always filled with a profound personal silence, no matter how noisy the aftermath. It is a silence filled with two questions: can I move? and why am I not moving yet?

So I move in that silence. I get into the taxi as the driver loads my bags into the trunk. Annelise bends over, makes a circling motion with her hand. I roll down the window.

“Do me a favor, Audra.” Her dark eyes meet mine, curls gathering beads of mist in them. “Get some help.”

Then she straightens and bangs once on the roof of the car. The driver slams his door and the taxi lurches into traffic before I come up with a response.

I crane around to stare out the back window. What do you mean? Help with what?

Annelise’s sharp-planed face holds no answers, and all too quickly recedes into the distance.

Later, after the lights on the plane are turned down for the evening, I close my eyes. After a while, I realize my cheeks are wet.

Oh.

Instead of sleeping, instead of thinking about Annelise, I draft the beginning of my piece. I give a quick précis of the region’s bitter history of violence between the Roma and non-Roma, detail the current right-wing disposition of the government, and posit that the appearance of such an immensely valuable space artifact might stir tensions up once more.

When I land in Budapest, I receive a text about the spaceship opening. I am distracted on my way out of the terminal to meet my driver, thinking about how I’m going to have to edit my opening. Not thinking about Annelise, and Durban.

It is an explanation, as much as anything is.

There are somber bootsteps outside of my cell, low voices sorrowing and angry. I heft myself up and limp to the door, look out the little window. Camouflaged figures walk past, carrying the body of one of their own. One of the men doing the carrying is the German; I recognize the slightly crooked set of his shoulders.

The dead man’s feet are bare. The pattern of bruise and livid pinpricks is the same as on my own feet.

I’m going to die here, I realize, somewhat belatedly.

One morning, I open my eyes to thin light filtering in through the window and the word adapt ringing in my mind.

I sit up, wrap the scratchy blanket around my shoulders. I study my hands. The skin on my knuckles is cracked, seeping blood. Jungle Red is a quarter-moon on my nails. Chipped away, grown out.

My nails are a secret calendar. Even if their growth has slowed from malnutrition, even if my periods have stopped, my nails keep track of the days and the months. My nails are a record of this endless, endless winter. My feet and calves are covered with pinpricked bruises.

Phantom scents tease my nose—burned meat, olives, bathroom cleaner, pine trees. Is it because I’m hungry? Anise and blood. Just hallucinations, I tell myself. I am starving, I am isolated.

I lie down again, close my eyes, lapse into a fever-chill sleep. I dream about the alien. In my dreams, it is warm, and its cilia are thin and soft as a kitten’s fur.

Adapt.

I don’t know what it means until a few days later, when I waken to find that overnight the roof of my mouth has grown a coating of cilia, shifting and seeking against my tongue. It’s revolting. I retch and retch.

When I try to scrape it off with my thumbnail, I nearly pass out from the pain.

Adapt.

I forget how to walk and fall forward, gashing open my knees on the concrete of the hall floor.

When I wake the next morning, the wounds have sealed over with a gray substance and the pain is gone. Within three days, they are healed as if they never were.

I lie awake and stare at the ceiling. I think I can feel thin filaments growing through me, invading me. Everything hurts, from my skin to my bones to the backs of my eyes. I allow myself to think of Annelise, of her smile, of the way my gut clenches when I think of her leaving.

I’m so cold. What are you doing to me?

I am back at home, with Annelise. I smell sunlight and dish soap, chemical lemon and Annelise’s own warm scent, the ghost of the soap she uses.

She hands me a towel for the dishes. “Every one of us is colonized by mitochondria. This is just a larger scale, is all.”

When she smiles, her teeth are gray-furred. I scream and wake myself up, sobbing, no, no.

Nem, nem, echoes a male voice distantly, and then a long, agonized scream.

The smell of apples fills my sinuses.

Communication.

Adapt.

“It is fine,” the German says, his voice harshly accented. “It is fine.” He lapses into Hungarian. I pick out élelmiszer and holnap. Food and tomorrow.

I am supposed to sit on the floor of this concrete room and wait for the alien to come to me. Lowering myself to the ground is difficult and I fall the last two feet when my legs lose strength. I will have another bruise on my hip, to join the collection.

The alien ripples towards me. I read eagerness in its movements, or desperation. I push myself up, put my back to the wall.

Under my skin, things move. There are cilia in the back of my throat, now, and the pinpoint of anger in my gut is flaring.

Not for the first time, I wonder if the alien has any opinions on its situation. It is not exactly a captive, nor exactly in charge. Both of us are stuck here surrounded by humans whose language we don’t understand. Do you even have language? I ask the alien silently. Is language a meaningful concept to you?

Ozone and a horrible artificial cherry smell rise in my sinuses. I choke.

I am remembering a Roma woman I interviewed, who had lost two children and her husband to the bullets of a vigilante group. I have nothing left. They have taken it all, the translator had said. How can they hate us so much that they kill our children?

The alien flows over my outstretched legs, and I shudder, my vision sparkling with pain. Up it goes, onto my lap. I rest my hand on it. Stroke it like a cat.

Adapt.

It wraps around my hand, dark spots moving restlessly. I don’t scream even though my hand and the skin of my thighs feel like they’re aflame. The cilia on the roof on my mouth stir, tickling my tongue. I find myself with my mouth hanging open.

Then I bend forward.

It reshapes itself, extends something like a limb to my lips. How strange I must seem to you, with this wet orifice surrounded by sharp bony projections. I keep my mouth open. Allow it to probe inside.

I feel the cilia in my mouth jerk in recognition, and light starbursts in my head.

Annelise smiles at me.

I stare at her dumbly. What is the thing she is doing with her—

Mouth, it is a mouth. She is smiling. She is happy, or wishes me to believe she is happy.

Woodsmoke and rotting seaweed. Understanding. This is like—

Yes. Much like.

We dream, the alien and I. Communicating. Adapting.

Together.

I wake on the dirty, cold floor. The alien is pressed against my stomach. Touching it no longer hurts. It is neither warm nor cool, but exactly the temperature of my body.

I push myself to my feet. I am weak, too weak. The alien’s scent is regretful. It was not supposed to take this long to find a suitable partner. It was nearing the end of its strength.

Why me?

Incomprehension is baby powder and rainwater. We do not entirely know how to speak to one another yet. I bend down and lift the alien. It flows up my arm to drape itself across my shoulders.

The German runs away, shouting triumphantly. I don’t need to speak Hungarian to know that he is announcing that I have done it, I have tamed the alien.

Surely the world will listen to them now.

I remember the Roma woman’s face, the bitter anger in her eyes. Men like these killed her family. Old hatreds that I have no stake in, or real understanding of. I was just there to report. Just there to observe.

War has a habit of drawing us all in, eventually. Even a journalist. Even an alien who came here entirely by accident.

The German’s left the door open. Four steps and I am out the door. Step, step, step down the hall. I am unsteady, but I do not stumble.

Thundering footfalls, boots on concrete. At the end of the hall, five men pound into view—the German and four others. One points. Says something in that beautiful language that I do not understand.

I stand with the weight of the alien on my shoulders. The cilia in the back of my throat are writhing with alarm. I choke as my throat closes, the alien drawing itself together in alarm, its body against mine less like fluid in a sack than a clenched muscle.

That is all the warning I have. The men receive none at all.

Fluid sprays from the alien, hitting the men in the face. They fall to their knees, screaming as I stagger, panicking, trying to draw breath and finding no air. I clutch my throat as they spew bright blood from their noses and mouths, then collapse, going silent.

Then the cilia in my throat release and I draw great lungfuls of air. My heart throbs painfully in my chest, and I am alive. I cannot feel grateful. The alien wraps itself around me in a mockery of an embrace.

I will never see Annelise again.

No, it starts this way: a woman walks out of a bunker and into a snowscape, trees black against a dim evening sky. She carries a thing that looks like a furry blanket with restlessly moving spots. Her feet are bare, and spattered with blood. She does not seem to feel the cold.

Or perhaps that’s where it ends.

Your native habitat is war.

We walk on, this marooned explorer and I.

About the Author

Kris Millering is a linguist by training, a tech tinkerer by trade, and a writer and photographer by avocation. Currently, she works at a large tech firm by day, manages communications for Clarion West by night, and writes in the spaces between. She lives between two mountains in the foothills of the Cascades in Washington State. Her fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Lightspeed, Devilfish Review, and The Colored Lens.

Forestspirit, Forestspirit

Bogi Takács

Apunak

I race foragers to each mushroom with relish, changing from a tree to a bush to sometimes even the early autumn fog. After a decade, it’s easy to hold each shape; I don’t know if I can call this neuroplasticity any longer, in the absence of neurons. My cells are machine, and they follow my thoughts with the obedience of automation.

I used to bleed people dry, to insinuate into small cracks both artificial and natural, to infiltrate. I used to fight. I still have my spherical vision, my hunter-smooth motion, my booming authority-voice to be used as needed.

These days I haunt the forest.

I love and despise them all, these pale and oddball people who come to the forest to play, to gather mushrooms because it is so quaint, to frolic. None of my people remain; they are scattered across less antagonistic lands, thinking back on this place.

I wanted to stay, to look at people like this boychild, venturing into the woods with the trepidation of an older breed of human. I can tell he still has his AR displays on, and his head swivels as he takes in all the different species, helpfully labelled for him on bright overlays in his mind. I am poised to duck, twist and run after him—maybe roll into the shape of a moss-covered log—but he is agonizingly slow, uncertain, out of his element.

I creep across the undergrowth as a thousand earthworms moving in unison, hiding myself underneath ferns and organic debris.

He brushes spiky straight ash-blond hair out of his eyes. I am soundless, invisible, gazing him in the face. I never hurt these strangers; I just want to be left alone to watch. The war has been over for a decade.

I am no danger, and yet he senses something. I flow into the earth, nestle myself between grains of soil and errant tree-roots.

“Forestspirit,” he whispers. “I know you are real.”

I am not real, I’m tempted to answer, I am a legend formed by my own self, a haunt following picnickers and mushroom-gatherers. I remain silent and still. I can hear him underground as his words make the topsoil tremble ever so slightly. My senses extend far and wide.

“My uncle saw you,” he says. Then, after some hesitation: “He can talk to birds. He makes dead plants grow.”

I know that garden on the edge of the forest, the succulents feasting on carefully arranged rocks, the little lake with fish tempting the stray cats. Few humans make such things anymore. Maybe it all needs the motivation of magic?

I am not magic. I am a cluster of myriads of tiny automata, my original shape a shimmering cloud of light.

I creep up from the earth, and yet I do not show myself. I haven’t spoken with anything besides the commanding voice in this body.

“Forestspirit,” the boy goes on, “I need your help.”

Speak, I make the leaves rustle. A finely grained control of my environment, it was called. Speak, child.

For a moment he seems resentful of having been called child, but I can only draw on the mythical. I cannot bark at him like a drill-sergeant.

“They want to destroy the forest,” he says, and my imagination immediately jumps to a variety of theys: the aliens, or these straight-haired and straight-backed humans (then why would the boy exclude himself?), my own people returning for revenge, or other peoples out for the same. The current inhabitants of the land gathered many enemies over millennia in this landlocked basin, with its rolling fields and thick forests. Should I have cared?

Explain, I whisper. Or should I project a sense of omniscience? I seldom wish I was magic, and yet—

Words topple out of him in gasps, his fear pouring out of him and into me. The gist: he doesn’t know why. This is what the Consentience has decided, and I do not even know who that would be. I’m truly out of touch. Am I old? I don’t think I age, and yet I worry I have become inflexible, my only pursuit this idle hunt of careless tourists.

The usual paranoia surfaces, an occupational hazard that never quite goes away, even after all those years. Is this unknown-factor Consentience looking for me? I went absent without leave, but no one really looked for me—after the humans fought off the aliens with pilfered technology, they turned on each other, and I knew I would be first in line to get thrown into a ditch. How do you throw a raincloud? The military had made me into something they thought would remain loyal, but I modified myself, shook off my trackers, and floated away.

I do not kill. And yet I don’t know what to do with this crumble of a boy on all fours in the dirt, crying desperately. Why is the forest so dear to him? I rarely see him—I think he lives far away, only coming to visit his uncle every once in a while.

By contrast, I know his uncle too well, and I realize that he is the connection: the man of green who wants to preserve life for its own sake. It is not the forest that’s so dear to the boy—it is not me—it is his uncle.

I blow a little gust to tousle the boy’s hair, and whisper vague promises in his ear. I have no idea what else I can do.

And yet as he gathers himself and walks away, his shoulders sinking in time with his steps, I follow him into the evening dusk, my shape a windcarpet of fireflies.

He sits on the bench by the small lake. Both the bench and the lake are carefully handcrafted, and I wonder: I could likewise build, I could laser-cut a hundred of these benches, would that qualify as my handiwork in a sense? I’m not sure where this sudden impulse comes from—I never even liked crafts, back in my human days.

He glances up, senses me in the pattern. “Why have you followed me here, forestspirit?” he whispers, then louder: “My name is Péter. What’s your name?”

The firebugs move along their preprogrammed trajectories, one of my subroutines taking care of it all. I don’t show a startle reaction this time, and for that I am glad.

It has been a long while since someone asked me my name. And I had names that hurt . . .

Name me, the insects buzz.

He frowns, trying to keep eye contact with the swarm. “I guess I can pick a name. Which gender?”

The bugs can’t quite chuckle. I’m a forestspirit, I have no gender, I say.

“And before?”

I have to, I need to display emotion. I make my bodies fall out of the sky, and they make small cracking noises as they hit the rough-hewn rock panels around the bench. I turn into sand and seep into the cracks.

“Don’t go away,” he cries with sudden desperation, and I feel bad—I’ve been making the wrong impression. I turn into a large pile of leaves—what else would be mimicry enough in such a tidy garden? How did he know there was a before?

“I’m sorry,” I answer. “I am here.” A leaf tumbles off the heap. “Before, I had no gender either. Give me any name that you want.”

These people had never reacted to me kindly, but this boy takes it all in easy stride. “Gabi,” he says, “That can be any gender. It’s kind of cool, huh?”

It sounds like a soap brand from the ancient past. Gabi I shall be, then. Anything to keep the memories at bay. But what else could I do?

I have to familiarize myself with this environment, and I’m reluctant to commit to a confrontation, even a defensive one. Many have moved off-planet, changed shape and form, reorganized their minds to an extent that even I find somewhat intimidating. Left behind by these posthumans, the Consentience governs, with an erratic, ad hoc determination all the more frightening for its hodgepodge nature.

I recall this from my studies: even when artificial neural networks make precise decisions, it can be hard to discern the process by which they do this, the representations they utilize, if any. The Consentience is a network, with who knows what substrate for nodes instead of neurons, and yet the end effect is the same. Péter doesn’t know their motivation because it cannot be known.

Now the Consentience wants to devour my forest, and I realize I have grown possessive, I who had sworn off earthly attachments. I feel myself rapidly changing, growing to fit the situation. Growing into my earlier self: soldier, tactician . . . I was never a strategist, but maybe there’s space to expand.

“What are you good at?” the boy says in hushed, awestruck tones, and I answer: “Infiltration.”

To change the behavioral output of a neural network, one can lesion it—in principle. But how should I know what happens after I lesion? We could hardly model the Consentience with tiny rocks and sticks. I know this because I try, now as a legion of angry wasps and obedient ants gathering close to ground, producing what I could hardly call a model based on what Péter tells me of each substation in the area. There’s even a new one built about a month ago, a little more than half a kilometer from the forest I call my own.

The Consentience must require an inordinate amount of energy to sustain, I realize, for why else would it need separate stations instead of floating on the air or silting down into the bottom of living waters? I require a lot of energy and yet I can be nigh-invisible, gossamer.

I decide.

The next morning, we investigate. Péter totters on sticklike legs, his noisiness suddenly our shared downfall. I order him back to the house and he obeys, sniffling.

I venture out of my territory, but I feel in my element. This is the hunt that enlivens me.

The closest substation is molded of pale white plastic and shaped like a well-grown specimen of fly agaric—presumably an ironic nod to children’s stories. These people no longer understand the forest. I do not let my anger rise.

Occasionally, large robotic millipedes creep in and out of holes at the base of the substation that reseal themselves instantly. I decide to trail them, but I grow bored quickly as I realize that each millipede has a rigidly defined patrol area and does not seem particularly intelligent.

Next, I fly up to the surface of the substation in the shape of a raven. The wall trembles, more organic than it revealed of itself from a distance. It sparks at me and I produce my best shock-strained caw.

In the following fifty-three minutes, I try out twenty-four animal shapes. My shapeshifting raises no alarm or consternation besides the localized electric shocks. Maybe it is time to sneak inside? I could soak a millipede with myself as a light autumn rain, evaporate from its body into a different shape once it’s safely indoors. But suddenly I chance upon another idea.

Reminded of a long gone battle, I’m curious how far the Consentience’s perception stretches. The intellect in this structure does not seem to be human, regardless of how it had originally arisen. Each mental setup gives shape to its own logic, and each has its peculiar holes and omissions. If there is no general alarm, then for the time being, I can experiment.

I grow into an oak. No taser-blip this time; sessile lifeforms must not be considered a danger. The fly agaric scans me with infrared and something I can’t quite sense, then puffs some chemical in my direction: to stunt my growth? This is probably how it keeps itself from being overgrown by the local flora.

I try a weeping willow, entirely out of place. Again only the puff. Even more daring, I shift into a sea-bean plant, my lianas curling toward the fly agaric. I move, I touch, yet I provoke no electric shock.

I could examine the edge cases of its classification heuristics. What is still an animal? What’s considered a tree?

My lianas freeze as I can feel a breakthrough inching closer to my consciousness. I focus inward.

If I can work out how it recognizes a forest, then I will know how it will proceed to destroy it. Péter said that the Consentience has already been sending out tersely-worded notifications for any remaining humans to vacate the area. Can I disguise my home in order to save it?

I remember flying through the Thundercloud Straits, my still-human face bearing the war-paint of asymmetric lines and rectangles designed to throw off alien shape-recognition algorithms. I remember breaking my bones one by one to assume a configuration at odds with alien mindsets. I wasn’t always this fluid, this protean. But I always had this uncanny disturbing spirit, a hacker’s attitude toward the constancies of life, toward the baseline of awareness.

It came in handy, in so many clashes. I might yet prevail, without having to destroy or cut off a single substation—for I have forsworn violence, I have forsworn malign thought. Yet, my body thrums with the excitement . . .

I transform my buzzing to elation. I run through permutations of shapes, I register and catalog. I fill a relational database, calculate correlations, build models. I am manifold, each convolution of me producing a different reaction. This is a low-level response: I do not seem to reach the Consentience’s threshold of awareness, if this unfathomable system indeed has one. I treat the giant mind as a black box: I’m only interested in its responses to my stimuli. I feel like a flea on a St. Bernard’s tail.

In a few hours I reach shapes edging into the meaningless, and yet the fly agaric still categorizes them into animals and plants, responds accordingly. I am a giant red stripe with yellow curlicues in the middle. I’m a perfectly spherical ball of flowers. Would it recognize a human as a distinct category? I do not dare try—that might invoke some higher-level process. I can only hope it doesn’t mark my stilted, spiky stalks or my purple-tinted scrub as a human due to some quirk. I started out from the animal and plant prototypes in the problem space, moved always just one little modification away, and I hope this search strategy will keep me secure and safe from alarms.

I only forgot about one detail: how will I disguise my forest? I could hardly hang brightly colored stripes from each tree-branch! When I realize this, I dissolve into piping-hot steamclouds, all my tension channeled into aggravation with the force of the motion itself.

The sun is setting. I should report back to my newfound teammate about my dubious progress. Something inside me would still be satisfied by a debriefing; I used to be a meticulous soldier.

I let the erratic winds drift me away from the substation, toward Péter.

He listens in wonder as I recount my actions. I share with him my database, but he doesn’t deign to look. He purses chill-cracked lips and rubs his hands together. I can sense his entire body gearing up for a revelation, but I can’t guess the shape of the revelation itself; my sensors do not have sufficient resolution. I’m not a mind-reader.

“Why don’t we try the reverse?” he asks, carefreely including me in us. I coalesce into butterflies; I haven’t been partnered with anyone for so long, and I notice with a startle that the presence of this boychild fills a void in me. I’m reminded of the time-old slogan: Together, we fight . . .

I don’t even parse what he’s saying.

He notices.

“Gabi? Are you listening?” He peers up dubiously. I settle on his head, his shoulders, his upper arms. He laughs with the tickle, then grows serious. “I was saying we could try the reverse.”

What do you mean? My wings beat in unison.

“If it can recognize strange things as . . . regular things, then maybe it can also recognize regular things as . . . strange things.” He’s working it out as he speaks, his eyes moving to and fro, gazing beyond the little pond. “We can come up with something that looks like a plant but it’s detected as something weird. I guess.”

That way the forest could look the same to us, but unrecognizable to the Consentience, I say. Great idea.

“Would it get confused? Would it get lost?” He pauses, just for a moment. “Would it leave?”

I don’t know. It’s worth a try, I offer, and if the butterflies could shrug, I would. I’ve dropped the mythic pretensions. Péter and I, we are comrades.

Yet I leave him by the pond, rushing ahead on my own again. His presence would disturb my plan. This time, I leave with a promise of return.

Even though I know what I’m looking for, the process is still difficult. I’m trying to find small changes that result in unexpected responses, but nothing turns up for a while. I start measuring reaction times, try to find inputs that make the system hesitate and hiccup, circle around those in the problem space.

Eventually I chance upon a pattern of translucent triangular bumps and a painted texture like thatch, invisible to the human-standard eye.

No puff. No shock. Only a millipede venturing out from the substation, turning toward me instead of veering away. It pokes at my trunk and then acts—like Darwin’s caterpillar—much embarrassed. I stay still and it returns to its home base after a while. Inwardly, I rejoice. I unfurl leathery wings, soar above the hills and dip into the clouds before I return to Péter.

We spend a frantic day manufacturing sticky triangular knobs, Péter programming the fabricator while I hover over his shoulder, drape myself onto furniture, creep on the ceiling. The missives of the Consentience are cryptic and its actions carry no deadline. It can turn on the forest at any moment that suits its caprice, and I tremble with the thought that the last set of my attempts might have served to hasten its actions.

My turn: I rush through the tree-trunks, gluing, painting. I stir up the undergrowth. Ants crowd around the triangles, then leave them alone again. This was the smallest disruption that we could conceive, and I’m not convinced it will work. More scenarios should have been tried . . . but a vast number of uncategorizables around the substation would certainly have raised an alarm.

Then we wait. We wait. Days pass. I teach Péter intricate strategy games with pebbles and bark. We produce collaborative sculptures of my body. I share my treasury of ages-old political jokes that somehow still resonate, despite the unfamiliar context, and Péter tells me stories about his uncle. I avoid his family and they seem to be glad that their youngest has finally taken an interest in nature.

When I sense the rumble, I’m rooted into the mud of a small brook and Péter is sploshing around in hydrophobic rubber boots, looking for small fish. I puff out into a swarm of mosquitoes, my startle response alive and well.

The millipedes are coming, hundreds upon hundreds of them, the size of foxes and dogs—each equipped with what seems to be laser cutters mass-produced in a hurry, attached to their heads.

Péter holds his breath, then exhales with a snort. The robotic swarm reaches the edge of our forest and comes to a standstill. The millipedes chirp like tiny chicks—also an ironic gesture? Everything about the Consentience is disjointed, patterns of nature mushed haphazardly together.

No decision is reached. No decision is reached. Péter turns toward me to whisper, but I shush him with a sharp tumbling-churning gesture.

The swarm withdraws. Once they are out of my hearing range, we cheer. I change into one of my more incongruous sphere-shapes and bounce off trees with enthusiasm. Péter sobs, his face smeared with snot and his eyes glowing with glee.

The battle is not over. The swarm returns the next day, then again the next, with determined precision.

It takes five days for the Consentience to give up, and by then the local humans have also noticed the curious phenomenon. Péter reads out news headlines to me, the feed sent directly to his brain. No one understands.

No one except the man of green, the steward of the land who calls the ravens to himself. It’s late afternoon; Péter is already inside when his uncle ventures out. The man of green runs his fingers on the bark, notices the translucent bumps. Tries to scrape them off, spits on them and rubs. Scratches the wiry black curls on his head. He looks different from Péter. Intermarriage?

“For your sake, I hope they are biodegradable,” he says out loud. I glance down on him with beady squirrel-eyes; he looks up into the branches and our gazepaths lock into each other. He nods with acknowledgement, and I nod back to him, as much as this physiology allows. He chuckles as I drop the acorn from my jittery hands, catches it in cupped fingers. For a moment I believe in his magic.

“I will have this, as a keepsake, if you don’t mind,” he says. “Thank you for taking good care of Péter. This he will remember, even when he ventures out to the stars.”

Has Péter been meaning to leave the planet? I’m silent. I mull over the idea and its impact on an aging man so tied to the land. Rejuvenation is still pricy, reserved for decisionmakers and chiefs of staff. Clinging to a human shape is more and more of a curiosity with each passing day. And the youngsters all leave . . .

“We remain here, the two of us.” The man points at my squirrel-self. “Shapechanger, forestspirit. You fought in the war, I gather?” He’s seen much himself. Maybe he fought too.

His words jingle in my head as he turns, walks away.

About the Author

Bogi Takács is a neutrally gendered Hungarian Jewish person who’s recently moved to the United States. Eir speculative fiction and poetry have been published in venues like Strange Horizons, Apex, Scigentasy, GigaNotoSaurus, among others. E also has a story forthcoming in Lightspeed Queers Destroy SF. You can visit Bogi’s website or find em on Twitter, where e also posts diverse story and poem recommendations five times a week.

The Hole in the Hole

Terry Bisson

Trying to find Volvo parts can be a pain, particularly if you are a cheapskate, like me. I needed the hardware that keeps the brake pads from squealing, but I kept letting it go, knowing it wouldn’t be easy to find. The brakes worked okay—good enough for Brooklyn. And I was pretty busy, anyway, being in the middle of a divorce, the most difficult I have ever handled, my own.

After the squeal developed into a steady scream (we’re talking about the brakes here, not the divorce, which was silent), I tried the two auto supply houses I usually dealt with, but had no luck. The counterman at Aberth’s just gave me a blank look. At Park Slope Foreign Auto, I heard those dread words, “dealer item.” Breaking (no pun intended) with my usual policy, I went to the Volvo dealer in Bay Ridge, and the parts man, one of those Jamaicans who seems to think being rude is the same thing as being funny, fished around in his bins and placed a pile of pins, clips, and springs on the counter.

“That’ll be twenty-eight dollars, mon,” he said, with what they used to call a shit-eating grin. When I complained (or as we lawyers like to say, objected), he pointed at the spring which was spray-painted yellow and said, “Well, you see, they’re gold, mon!” Then he spun on one heel to enjoy the laughs of his co-workers, and I left. There is a limit.

So I let the brakes squeal for another week. They got worse and worse. Ambulances were pulling over to let me by, thinking I had priority. Then I tried spraying the pads with WD-40.

Don’t ever try that.

On Friday morning I went back to Park Slope Foreign Auto and pleaded (another legal specialty) for help. Vinnie, the boss’s son, told me to try Boulevard Imports in Howard Beach, out where Queens and Brooklyn come together at the edge of Jamaica Bay. Since I didn’t have court that day, I decided to give it a try.

The brakes howled all the way. I found Boulevard Imports on Rockaway Boulevard just off the Belt Parkway. It was a dark, grungy, impressive-looking cave of a joint, with guys in coveralls lounging around drinking coffee and waiting on deliveries. I was hopeful.

The counterman, another Vinnie, listened to my tale of woe before dashing my hopes with the dread words, “dealer item.” Then the guy in line behind me, still another Vinnie (everyone wore their names over their pockets) said, “Send him to Frankie in the Hole.”

The Vinnie behind the counter shook his head, saying, “He’d never find it.”

I turned to the other Vinnie and asked, “Frankie in the Hole?”

“Frankie runs a little junkyard,” he said. “Volvos only. You know the Hole?”

“Can’t say as I do.”

“I’m not surprised. Here’s what you do. Listen carefully because it’s not so easy to find these days, and I’m only going to tell you once.”

There’s no way I could describe or even remember everything this Vinnie told me: suffice it to say that it had to do with crossing over Rockaway Boulevard, then back under the Belt Parkway, forking onto a service road, making a U-turn onto Conduit but staying in the center lane, cutting a sharp left into a dead end (that really wasn’t), and following a dirt track down a steep bank through a grove of trees and brush.

I did as I was told, and found myself in a sort of sunken neighborhood, on a wide dirt street running between decrepit houses set at odd angles on weed-grown lots. It looked like one of those leftover neighborhoods in the meadowlands of Jersey, or down South, where I did my basic training. There were no sidewalks but plenty of potholes, abandoned gardens, and vacant lots. The streets were half-covered by huge puddles. The houses were of concrete block, or tarpaper, or board and batten; no two alike or even remotely similar. There was even a house trailer, illegal in New York City (so, of course, is crime). There were no street signs, so I couldn’t tell if I was in Brooklyn or Queens, or on the dotted line between the two.

The other Vinnie (or third, if you are counting) had told me to follow my nose until I found a small junkyard, which I proceeded to do. Mine was the only car on the street. Weaving around the puddles (or cruising through them like a motorboat) gave driving an almost nautical air of adventure. There was no shortage of junk in the Hole, including a subway car someone was living in, and a crane that had lost its verticality and took up two back yards. Another back yard had a piebald pony. The few people I saw were white. A fat woman in a short dress sat on a high step talking on a portable phone. A gang of kids was gathered around a puddle killing something with sticks. In the yard behind them was a card table with a crude sign reading MOON ROCKS R US.

I liked the peaceful scene in the Hole. And driving through the puddles quieted my brakes. I saw plenty of junk cars, but they came in ones or twos, in the yards and on the street, and none of them were Volvos (no surprise).

After I passed the piebald pony twice, I realized I was going in circles. Then I noticed a chain link fence with reeds woven into it. And I had a feeling.

I stopped. The fence was just too high to look over, but I could see between the reeds. I was right. It was a junkyard that had been “ladybirded.”

The lot hidden by the fence was filled with cars, squeezed together tightly, side by side and end to end. All from Sweden. All immortal and all dead. All indestructible, and all destroyed. All Volvos.

The first thing you learn in law school is when not to look like a lawyer. I left my tie and jacket in the car, pulled on my coveralls, and followed the fence around to a gate. On the gate was a picture of a snarling dog. The picture was (it turned out) all the dog there was, but it was enough. It slowed you down; made you think.

The gate was unlocked. I opened it enough to slip through. I was in a narrow driveway, the only open space in the junkyard. The rest was packed so tightly with Volvos that there was barely room to squeeze between them. They were lined up in rows, some facing north and some south (or was it east and west?) so that it looked like a traffic jam in Hell. The gridlock of the dead.

At the end of the driveway, there was a ramshackle garage made of corrugated iron, shingleboard, plywood, and fiberglass. In and around it, too skinny to cast shade, were several ailanthus—New York’s parking-lot tree. There were no signs but none were needed. This had to be Frankie’s.

Only one living car was in the junkyard. It stood at the end of the driveway, by the garage, with its hood raised, as if it were trying to speak but had forgotten what it wanted to say. It was a 164, Volvo’s unusual straight six. The body was battered, with bondo under the taillights and doors where rust had been filled in. It had cheap imitation racing wheels and a chrome racing stripe along the bottom of the doors. Two men were leaning over, peering into the engine compartment.

I walked up and watched, unwelcomed but not (I suspected) unnoticed. An older white man in coveralls bent over the engine while a black man in a business suit looked on and kibitzed in a rough but friendly way. I noticed because this was the late 1980s and the relations between blacks and whites weren’t all that friendly in New York.

And here we were in Howard Beach. Or at least in a Hole in Howard Beach.

“If you weren’t so damn cheap, you’d get a Weber and throw these SUs away,” the old man said.

“If I wasn’t so damn cheap, you’d never see my ass,” the black man said. He had a West Indian accent.

“I find you a good car and you turn it into a piece of island junk.”

“You sell me a piece of trash and . . . ”

And so forth. But all very friendly. I stood waiting patiently until the old man raised his head and lifted his eyeglasses, wiped along the two sides of his grease-smeared nose, and then pretended to notice me for the first time.

“You Frankie?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“This is Frankie’s, though?”

“Could be.” Junkyard men like the conditional.

So do lawyers. “I was wondering if it might be possible to find some brake parts for a 145, a 1970. Station wagon.”

“What you’re looking for is an antique dealer,” the West Indian said.

The old man laughed; they both laughed. I didn’t.

“Brake hardware,” I said. “The clips and pins and stuff.”

“Hard to find,” the old man said. “That kind of stuff is very expensive these days.”

The second thing you learn in law school is when to walk away. I was almost at the end of the drive when the old man reached through the window of the 164 and blew the horn: two shorts and a long.

At the far end of the yard, by the fence, a head popped up. I thought I was seeing a cartoon, because the eyes were too large for the head, and the head was too large for the body.

“Yeah, Unc?”

“Frankie, I’m sending a lawyer fellow back there. Show him that 145 we pulled the wheels off of last week.”

“I’ll take a look,” I said. “But what makes you think I’m an attorney?”

“The tassels,” the old man said, looking down at my loafers. He stuck his head back under the hood of the 164 to let me know I was dismissed.

Frankie’s hair was almost white, and so thin it floated off the top of his head. His eyes were bright blue-green, and slightly bugged out, giving him an astonished look. He wore cowboy boots with the heels rolled over so far that he walked on their sides and left scrollwork for tracks. Like the old man, he was wearing blue gabardine pants and a lighter blue work shirt. On the back it said—

But I didn’t notice what it said. I wasn’t paying attention. I had never seen so many Volvos in one place before. There was every make and model—station wagons, sedans, fastbacks, 544s and 122s, DLs and GLs, 140s to 740s, even a 940—in every state of dissolution, destruction, decay, desolation, degradation, decrepitude, and disrepair. It was beautiful. The Volvos were jammed so close together that I had to edge sideways between them.

We made our way around the far corner of the garage, where I saw a huge jumbled pile—not a stack—of tires against the fence. It was cooler here. The ailanthus trees were waving, though I could feel no breeze.

“This what you’re looking for?” Frankie stopped by a 145 sedan—dark green, like my station wagon; it was a popular color. The wheels were gone and it sat on the ground. By each wheel well lay a hubcap, filled with water.

There was a hollow thud behind us. A tire had come over the fence, onto the pile; another followed it. “I need to get back to work,” Frankie said. “You can find what you need, right?”

He left me with the 145, called out to someone over the fence, then started pulling tires off the pile and rolling them through a low door into a shed built onto the side of the garage. The shed was only about five feet high. The door was half-covered by a plastic shower curtain hung sideways. It was slit like a hula skirt and every time a tire went through it, it went pop.

Every time Frankie rolled a tire through the door, another sailed over the fence onto the pile behind him. It seemed like the labors of Sisyphus.

Well, I had my own work. Carefully, I drained the water out of the first hubcap. There lay the precious springs and clips I sought—rusty, but usable. I worked my way around the car (a job in itself, as it was jammed so closely with the others). There was a hubcap where each wheel had been. I drained them all and collected the treasure in one hubcap. It was like panning for gold.

There was a cool breeze and a funny smell. Behind me I heard a steady pop, pop, pop. But when I finished and took the brake parts to Frankie, the pile of tires was still the same size. Frankie was on top of it, leaning on the fence, talking with an Indian man in a Goodyear shirt.

The Indian (who must have been standing on a truck on the other side of the fence) saw me and ducked. I had scared him away. I realized I was witnessing some kind of illegal dumping operation. I wondered how all the junk tires fit into the tiny shed, but I wasn’t about to ask. Probably Frankie and the old man took them out and dumped them into Jamaica Bay at night.

I showed Frankie the brake parts. “I figure they’re worth a couple of bucks,” I said.

“Show Unc,” he said. “He’ll tell you what they’re worth.”

I’ll bet, I thought. Carrying my precious hubcap of brake hardware, like a waiter with a dish, I started back toward the driveway. Behind me I heard a steady pop, pop, pop as Frankie went back to work. I must have been following a different route between the cars—because when I saw it, I knew it was for the first time.

The 1800 is Volvo’s legendary (well, sort of) sports car from the early 1960s. The first model, the P1800, was assembled in Scotland and England (unusual, to say the least, for a Swedish car). This one, the only one I had ever seen in a junkyard, still had its fins and appeared to have all its glass. It was dark blue. I edged up to it, afraid that if I startled it, it might disappear. But it was real. It was wheel-less, engineless, and rusted out in the rocker panels. But it was real. I looked inside. I tapped on the glass. I opened the door.

The interior was the wrong color—but it was real, too. It smelled musty, but it was intact. Or close enough. I arrived at the driveway, so excited that I didn’t even flinch when the old man looked into my hubcap (like a fortune teller reading entrails) and said, “Ten dollars.”

I raced home to tell Wu what I had found.

Everybody should have a friend like Wilson Wu, just to keep them guessing. Wu worked his way through high school as a pastry chef, then dropped out to form a rock band, then won a scholarship to Princeton (I think) for math (I think), then dropped out to get a job as an engineer, then made it halfway through medical school at night before becoming a lawyer, which is where I met him. He passed his bar exam on the first try. Somewhere along the line he decided he was gay, then decided he wasn’t (I don’t know what his wife thought of all this); he has been both democrat and republican, Catholic and Protestant, pro and anti gun-control. He can’t decide if he’s Chinese or American, or both. The only constant thing in his life is the Volvo. Wu has never owned another kind of car. He kept a 1984 240DL station wagon for the wife and kids. He kept the P1800, which I had helped him tow from Pennsylvania, where he had bought it at a yard sale for $500 (a whole other story), in my garage. I didn’t charge him rent. It was a red 1961 sports coupe with a B18. The engine and transmission were good (well, fair) but the interior had been gutted. Wu had found seats but hadn’t yet put them in. He was waiting for the knobs and trim and door panels, the little stuff that is hardest to find, especially for a P1800. He had been looking for two years.

Wu lived on my block in Brooklyn, which was strictly a coincidence since I knew him from Legal Aid, where we had both worked before going into private practice. I found him in his kitchen, helping his wife make a wedding cake. She’s a caterer. “What are you doing in the morning?” I asked, but I didn’t wait for him to tell me. I have never been good at surprises (which is why I had no success as a criminal lawyer). “Your long travail is over,” I said. “I found an 1800. A P1800. With an interior.”

“Handles?”

“Handles.”

“Panels?”

“Panels.”

“Knobs?” Wu had stopped stirring. I had his attention.

“I hear you got your brakes fixed,” Wu said the next day as we were on our way to Howard Beach in my car. “Or perhaps I should say, ‘I don’t hear.’”

“I found the parts yesterday and put them on this morning,” I told him. I told him the story of how I found the Hole. I told him about the junkyard of Volvos. I told him about stumbling across the dark blue P1800. By then, we were past the end of Atlantic Avenue, near Howard Beach. I turned off onto Conduit and tried to retrace my turns of the day before, but with no luck. Nothing looked familiar.

Wu started to look skeptical; or maybe I should say, he started to look even more skeptical. “Maybe it was all a dream,” he said, either taunting me or comforting himself, or both.

“I don’t see P1800s in junkyards, even in dreams,” I said. But in spite of my best efforts to find the Hole, I was going in circles. Finally, I gave up and went to Boulevard Imports. The place was almost empty. I didn’t recognize the counterman. His shirt said he was a Sal.

“Vinnie’s off,” he said. “It’s Saturday.”

“Then maybe you can help me. I’m trying to find a place called Frankie’s. In the Hole.”

People sometimes use the expression “blank look” loosely. Sal’s was the genuine article.

“A Volvo junkyard?” I said. “A pony or so?”

Blank got even blanker. Wu had come in behind me, and I didn’t have to turn around to know he was looking skeptical

“I don’t know about any Volvos, but did somebody mention a pony?” a voice said from in the back. An old man came forward. He must have been doing the books, since he was wearing a tie. “My Pop used to keep a pony in the Hole. We sold it when horseshoes got scarce during the War.”

“Jeez, Vinnie, what war was this?” Sal asked. (So I had found another Vinnie!)

“How many have there been?” the old Vinnie asked. He turned to me. “Now, listen up, kid.” (I couldn’t help smiling; usually only judges call me “kid” and only in chambers.) “I can only tell you once, and I’m not sure I’ll get it right.”

The old Vinnie’s instructions were completely different from the ones I had gotten from the Vinnie the day before. They involved a turn into an abandoned gas station on the Belt Parkway, a used car lot on Conduit, a McDonald’s with a dumpster in the back, plus other flourishes that I have forgotten.

Suffice it to say that, twenty minutes later, after bouncing down a steep bank, Wu and I found ourselves cruising the wide mud streets of the Hole, looking for Frankie’s. I could tell by Wu’s silence that he was impressed. The Hole is pretty impressive if you are not expecting it, and who’s expecting it? There was the non-vertical crane, the subway car (with smoke coming from its makeshift chimney) and the horse grazing in a lot between two shanties. I wondered if it was a descendant of the old Vinnie’s father’s pony. I couldn’t tell if it was shod or not.

The fat lady was still on the phone. The kids must have heard us coming, because they were standing in front of the card table waving hand-lettered signs: MOON ROCKS THIS WAY! and MOON ROCKS R US! When he saw them, Wu put his hand on my arm and said, “Pull over, Irv,”—his first words since we had descended into the Hole.

I pulled over and he got out. He fingered a couple of ashy-looking lumps, and handed the kids a dollar. They giggled and said they had no change.

Wu told them to keep it.

“I hope you don’t behave like that at Frankie’s,” I said, when he got back into the car.

“Like what?”

“You’re supposed to bargain, Wu. People expect it. Even kids. What do you want with phony moon rocks anyway?”

“Supporting free enterprise,” he said. “Plus, I worked on Apollo and I handled some real moon rocks once. They looked just like these.” He sniffed them. “Smelled just like these.” He tossed them out the window into the shallow water as we motored through a puddle.

As impressive as the Hole can be (first time), there is nothing more impressive than a junkyard of all Volvos. I couldn’t wait to see Wu’s face when he saw it. I wasn’t disappointed. I heard him gasp as we slipped through the gate. He looked around, then looked at me and grinned. “Astonishing,” he said. Even the inscrutable, skeptical Wu.

“Told you,” I said. (I could hardly wait till he saw the 1800!) The old man was at the end of the driveway, working on a diesel this time. Another customer, this one white, looked on and kibitzed. The old man seemed to sell entertainment as much as expertise. They were trying to get water out of the injectors.

“I understand you have an 1800,” Wu said. “They’re hard to find.”

I winced. Wu was no businessman. The old man straightened up, and looked us over. There’s nothing like a six-foot Chinaman to get your attention, and Wu is six-two.

“P1800,” the old man said. “Hard to find is hardly the word for it. I’d call it your rare luxury item. But I guess it won’t cost you too much to have a look.” He reached around the diesel’s windshield and honked the horn. Two shorts and a long.

The oversized head with the oversized eyes appeared at the far end of the yard, by the fence.

“Two lawyers coming back,” the old man called out. Then he said to me: “It’s easier to head straight back along the garage till you get to where Frankie is working. Then head to your right, and you’ll find the P1800.”

Frankie was still working on the endless pile (not a stack) of tires by the fence. Each one went through the low door of the shed with a pop.

I nodded, and Frankie nodded back. I turned right and edged between the cars toward the P1800, assuming Wu was right behind me. When I saw it, I was relieved—it had not been a dream after all! I expected an appreciative whistle (at the very least), but when I turned, I saw that I had lost Wu.

He was still back by the garage, looking through a stack (not a pile) of wheels against the wall.

“Hey, Wu!” I said, standing on the bumper of the P1800. “You can get wheels anywhere. Check out the interior on this baby!” Then, afraid I had sounded too enthusiastic, I added: “It’s rough but it might almost do.”

Wu didn’t even bother to answer me. He pulled two wheels from the stack. They weren’t exactly wheels, at least not the kind you mount tires on. They were more like wire mesh tires, with metal chevrons where the tread should have been.

Wu set them upright, side by side. He slapped one and gray dust flew. He slapped the other. “Where’d you get these?” he asked.

Frankie stopped working and lit a cigarette. “Off a dune buggy,” he said.

By this time, I had joined them. “A Volvo dune buggy?”

“Not a Volvo,” Frankie said. “An electric job. Can’t sell you the wheels separately. They’re a set.”

“What about the dune buggy?” Wu asked. “Can I have a look at it?”

Frankie’s eyes narrowed. “It’s on the property. Hey, are you some kind of environment man or something?”

“The very opposite,” said Wu. “I’m a lawyer. I just happen to dig dune buggies. Can I have a look at it? Good ones are hard to find.”

I winced.

“I’ll have to ask Unc,” Frankie said.

“Wu,” I said, as soon as Frankie had left to find his uncle, “there’s something you need to know about junkyard men. If something is hard to find, you don’t have to tell them. And what’s this dune buggy business, anyway? I thought you wanted interior trim for your P1800.”

“Forget the P1800, Irv,” Wu said. “It’s yours. I’m giving it to you.”

“You’re what?”

Wu slapped the wire mesh wheel again and sniffed the cloud of dust. “Do you realize what this is, Irv?”

“Some sort of wire wheel. So what?”

“I worked at Boeing in 1970,” Wu said. “I helped build this baby, Irv. It’s off the LRV.”

“The LR what?”

Before Wu could answer, Frankie was back. “Well, you can look at it,” Frankie said. “But you got to hold your breath. It’s in the cave and there’s no air in there.”

“The cave?” I said. They both ignored me.

“You can see it from the door, but I’m not going back in there,” said Frankie. “Unc won’t let me. Have you got a jacket? It’s cold.”

“I’ll be okay,” Wu said.

“Suit yourself.” Frankie tossed Wu a pair of plastic welding goggles. “Wear these. And remember, hold your breath.”

It was clear at this point where the cave was. Frankie was pointing toward the low door into the shed, where he rolled the tires. Wu put on the goggles and ducked his head; as he went through the doorway he made that same weird pop the tires made.

I stood there with Frankie in the sunlight, holding the two wire mesh wheels, feeling like a fool.

There was another pop and Wu backed out through the shower curtain. When he turned around, he looked like he had seen a ghost. I don’t know how else to describe it. Plus, he was shivering like crazy.

“Told you it was cold!” said Frankie. “And it’s weird. There’s no air in there, for one thing. If you want the dune buggy, you’ll have to get it out of there yourself.”

Wu gradually stopped shivering. As he did, a huge grin spread across his face. “It’s weird, all right,” he said. “Let me show my partner. Loan me some extra goggles.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I said.

“Irv, come on! Put these goggles on.”

“No way!” I said. But I put them on. You always did what Wu said, sooner or later; he was that kind of guy.

“Don’t hold your breath in. Let it all out, and then hold it. Come on. Follow me.”

I breathed out and ducked down just in time; Wu grabbed my hand and pulled me through the shed door behind him. If I made a pop I didn’t hear it. We were standing in the door of a cave—but looking out, not in. The inside was another outside!

It was like the beach, all gray sand (or dust) but with no water. I could see stars but it wasn’t dark. The dust was greenish gray, like a courthouse hallway (a color familiar to lawyers).

My ears were killing me. And it was cold!

We were at the top of a long, smooth slope, like a dune, which was littered with tires. At the bottom was a silver dune buggy with no front wheels, sitting nose down in the gray dust.

Wu pointed at it. He was grinning like a maniac. I had seen enough. Pulling my hand free, I stepped back through the shower curtain and gasped for air. This time I heard a pop as I went through.

The warm air felt great. My ears gradually quit ringing. Frankie was sitting on his tire pile, smoking a cigarette. “Where’s your buddy? He can’t stay in there.”

Just then, Wu backed out through the curtain with a loud pop. “I’ll take it,” he said, as soon as he had filled his lungs with air. “I’ll take it!”

I winced. Twice.

“I’ll have to ask Unc,” said Frankie.

“Wu,” I said, as soon as Frankie had left to find his uncle, “let me tell you something about junkyard men. You can’t say ‘I’ll take it, I’ll take it’ around them. You have to say, ‘Maybe it might do, or . . . ’”

“Irving!” Wu cut me off. His eyes were wild. (He hardly ever called me Irving.) He took both my hands in his, as if we were bride and groom, and began to walk me in a circle. His fingers were freezing. “Irving, do you know, do you realize, where we just were?”

“Some sort of cave? Haven’t we played this game before?”

“The Moon! Irving, that was the surface of the Moon you just saw!”

“I admit it was weird,” I said. “But the Moon is a million miles away. And it’s up in the . . . ”

“Quarter of a million,” Wu said. “But I’ll explain later.”

Frankie was back, with his uncle. “That dune buggy’s one of a kind,” the old man said. “I couldn’t take less than five hundred for it.”

Wu said, “I’ll take it!”

I winced.

“But you’ve got to get it out of the cave yourself,” the old man said. “I don’t want Frankie going in there anymore. That’s why I told the kids, no more rocks.”

“No problem,” Wu said. “Are you open tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” said the old man.

“What about Monday?”

I followed Wu through the packed-together Volvos to the front gate. We were on the street before I realized he hadn’t even bothered to look at the 1800. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to those two,” I said. I was a little pissed off. More than a little.

“There’s no doubt about it,” Wu said.

“Damn right there’s no doubt about it!” I started my 145 and headed up the street, looking for an exit from the Hole. Any exit. “Five hundred dollars for a junk dune buggy?”

“No doubt about it at all. That was either the Hadley Apennines, or Descartes, or Taurus Littrow,” Wu said. “I guess I could tell by looking at the serial numbers on the LRV.”

“I never heard of a Hadley or a Descartes,” I said, “but I know Ford never made a dune buggy.” I found a dirt road that led up through a clump of trees. Through the branches I could see the full Moon, pale in the afternoon sky. “And there’s the Moon, right there in the sky, where it’s supposed to be.”

“There’s apparently more than one way to get to the Moon, Irving. Which they are using as a dump for old tires. We saw it with our own eyes!”

The dirt road gave out in a vacant lot on Conduit. I crossed a sidewalk, bounced down a curb, and edged into the traffic. Now that I was headed back toward Brooklyn, I could pay attention. “Wu,” I said. “Just because you worked for NAPA—”

“NASA, Irv. And I didn’t work for them, I worked for Boeing.”

“Whatever. Science is not my thing. But I know for a fact that the Moon is in the sky. We were in a hole in the ground, although it was weird, I admit.”

“A hole with stars?” Wu said. “With no air? Get logical, Irv.” He found an envelope in my glove compartment and began scrawling on it with a pencil. “No, I suspected it when I saw those tires. They are from the Lunar Roving Vehicle, better known as the LRV or the lunar rover. Only three were built and all three were left on the Moon. Apollo 15, 16, and 17.1971.1972. Surely you remember.”

“Sure,” I said. The third thing you learn in law school is never to admit you don’t remember something. “So how did this loonie rover get to Brooklyn?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Wu said. “I suspect we’re dealing with one of the rarest occurrences in the universe. A neotopological metaeuclidean adjacency.”

“A non-logical metaphysical what?”

Wu handed me the envelope. It was covered with numbers:

“That explains the whole thing,” Wu said. “A neotopological metaeuclidean adjacency. It’s quite rare. In fact, I think this may be the only one.”

“You’re sure about this?”

“I used to be a physicist.”

“I thought it was an engineer.”

“Before that. Look at the figures, Irv! Numbers don’t lie. That equation shows how space-time can be folded so that two parts are adjacent that are also, at the same time, separated by millions of miles. Or a quarter of a million, anyway.”

“So we’re talking about a sort of back door to the Moon?”

“Exactly.”

On Sundays I had visitation rights to the big-screen TV. I watched golf and stock-car racing all afternoon with my wife, switching back and forth during commercials. We got along a lot better now that we weren’t speaking. Especially when she was holding the remote. On Monday morning, Wu arrived at the door at nine o’clock sharp, wearing coveralls and carrying a shopping bag and a toolbox.

“How do you know I don’t have court today?” I asked.

“Because I know you have only one case at present, your divorce, in which you are representing both parties in order to save money. Hi, Diane.”

“Hi, Wu.” (She was speaking to him.)

We took my 145. Wu was silent all the way out to the Eastern Parkway, doing figures on a cocktail napkin from a Bay Ridge nightclub. “Go out last night?” I asked. After a whole day with Diane, I was dying to have somebody to talk to.

“Something was bothering me all night,” he said. “Since the surface of the Moon is a vacuum, how come all the air on Earth doesn’t rush through the shed door, along with the tires?”

“I give up,” I said.

We were at a stoplight. “There it is,” he said. He handed me the napkin, on which was scrawled:

“There what is?”

“The answer to my question. As those figures demonstrate, Irv, we’re not just dealing with a neotopological metaeuclidean adjacency. We’re dealing with an incongruent neotopological metaeuclidean adjacency. The two areas are still separated by a quarter of a million miles, even though that distance has been folded to the width of a centimeter. It’s all there in black and white. See?”

“I guess,” I said. The fourth thing you learn in law school is to never admit you don’t understand something.

“The air doesn’t rush through, because it can’t. It can kind of seep through, though, creating a slight microclimate in the immediate vicinity of the adjacency. Which is probably why we don’t die immediately of decompression. A tire can roll through, if you give it a shove, but air is too, too . . . ”

“Too wispy to shove,” I said.

“Exactly.”

I looked for the turn off Conduit, but nothing was familiar. I tried a few streets, but none of them led us into the Hole. “Not again!” Wu complained.

“Again!” I answered.

I went back to Boulevard. Vinnie was behind the counter today, and he remembered me (with a little prodding).

“You’re not the only one having trouble finding the Hole,” he said. “It’s been hard to find lately.”

“What do you mean, ‘lately’?” Wu asked from the doorway.

“Just this last year. Every month or so it gets hard to find. I think it has to do with the Concorde. I read somewhere that the noise affects the tide, and the Hole isn’t that far from Jamaica Bay, you know.”

“Can you draw us a map?” I asked.

“I never took drawing,” Vinnie said, “so listen up close.”

Vinnie’s instructions had to do with an abandoned railroad track, a wrong-way turn onto a one-way street, a dog-leg that cut across a health club parking lot, and several other ins and outs. While I was negotiating all this, Wu was scrawling on the back of a carwash flyer he had taken from Vinnie’s counter.

“The tide,” he muttered. “I should have known!”

I didn’t ask him what he meant; I figured (I knew!) he would tell me. But before he had a chance, we were bouncing down a dirt track through some scruffy trees, and onto the now-familiar dirt streets of the Hole. “Want some more moon rocks?” I asked when we passed the kids and their stand.

“I’ll pick up my own today, Irv!”

I pulled up by the gate and we let ourselves in. Wu carried the shopping bag; he gave me the toolbox.

The old man was working on an ancient 122, the Volvo that looks like a ‘48 Ford from the back. (It was always one of my favorites.) “It’s electric,” he said when Wu and I walked up.

“The 122?” I asked.

“The dune buggy,” the old man said. “Electric is the big thing now. All the cars in California are going to be electric next year. It’s the law.”

“No, it’s not,” I said. “So what, anyway?”

“That makes that dune buggy worth a lot of money.”

“No, it doesn’t. Besides, you already agreed on a price.”

“That’s right. Five hundred,” Wu said. He pulled five bills from his pocket and unfolded them.

“I said I couldn’t take less than five hundred,” the old man said. “I never said I couldn’t take more.”

Before Wu could answer, I pulled him behind the 122. “Remember the second thing we learned in law school!” I said. “When to walk away. We can come back next week—if you still want that thing.”

Wu shook his head. “It won’t be here next week. I realized something when Vinnie told us that the Hole was getting hard to find. The adjacency is warping the neighborhood as well as the cislunar space-time continuum. And since it’s lunar, it has a monthly cycle. Look at this.”

He handed me the car wash flyer, on the back of which was scrawled:

“See?” said Wu. “We’re not just dealing with an incongruent neotopological metaeuclidean adjacency. We’re dealing with a periodic incongruent neotopological metaeuclidean adjacency.”

“Which means . . . ”

“The adjacency comes and goes. With the Moon.”

“Sort of like PMS.”

“Exactly. I haven’t got the figures adjusted for daylight savings time yet, but the Moon is on the wane, and I’m pretty sure that after today, Frankie will be out of the illegal dumping business for a month, at least.”

“Perfect. So we come back next month.”

“Irv, I don’t want to take the chance. Not with a million dollars at stake.”

“Not with a what?” He had my attention.

“That LRV cost two million new, and only three of them were made. Once we get it out, all we have to do is contact NASA. Or Boeing. Or the Air & Space Museum at the Smithsonian. But we’ve got to strike while the iron is hot. Give me a couple of hundred bucks and I’ll give you a fourth interest.”

“A half.”

“A third. Plus the P1800.”

“You already gave me the P1800.”

“Yeah, but I was only kidding. Now I’m serious.”

“Deal,” I said. But instead of giving Wu two hundred, I plucked the five hundred-dollar bills out of his hand. “But you stick to the numbers. I do all the talking.”

We got it for six hundred. Non-refundable. “What does that mean?” Wu asked.

“It means you boys own the dune buggy—whether you get it out of the cave or not,” said the old man, counting his money.

“Fair enough,” said Wu. It didn’t seem fair to me at all, but I kept my mouth shut. I couldn’t imagine a scenario in which we would get our money back from the old man, anyway.

He went back to work on the engine of the 122, and Wu and I headed for the far end of the yard. We found Frankie rolling tires through the shed door: pop, pop, pop. The pile by the fence was as big as ever. He waved and kept on working.

Wu set down the shopping bag and pulled out two of those spandex bicycling outfits. He handed one to me, and started taking off his shoes.

I’ll spare you the ensuing interchange—what I said, what he said, objections, arguments, etc. Suffice it to say that, ten minutes later, I was wearing black and purple tights under my coveralls, and so was Wu. Supposedly, they were to keep our skin from blistering in the vacuum. Wu was hard to resist when he had his mind made up.

I wondered what Frankie thought of it all. He just kept rolling tires through the doorway, one by one.

There were more surprises in the bag. Wu pulled out rubber gloves and wool mittens, a brown bottle with Chinese writing on it, a roll of clear plastic vegetable bags from the supermarket, a box of cotton balls, a roll of duct tape, and a rope.

Frankie didn’t say anything until Wu got to the rope. Then he stopped working, sat down on the pile of tires, lit a cigarette, and said: “Won’t work.”

Wu begged his pardon.

“I’ll show you,” Frankie said. He tied one end of the rope to a tire and tossed it through the low door into the shed. There was the usual pop and then a fierce crackling noise.

Smoke blew out the door. Wu and I both jumped back.

Frankie pulled the rope back, charred on one end. There was no tire “I learned the hard way,” he said, “when I tried to pull the dune buggy through myself, before I took the wheels off.”

“Of course!” Wu said. “What a fool I’ve been. I should have known!”

“Should have known what?” Frankie and I both asked at once.

Wu tore a corner off the shopping bag and started scrawling numbers on it with a pencil stub. “Should have known this!” he said, and he handed it to Frankie.

Frankie looked at it, shrugged, and handed it to me:

“So?” I said.

“So, there it is!” Wu said. “As those figures clearly indicate, you can pass through a noncongruent adjacency, but you can’t connect its two aspects. It’s only logical. Imagine the differential energy stored when a quarter of a million miles of space-time is folded to less than a millimeter.”

“Burns right through a rope,” Frankie said.

“Exactly.”

“How about a chain?” I suggested.

“Melts a chain,” said Frankie. “Never tried a cable, though.”

“No substance known to man could withstand that awesome energy differential,” Wu said. “Not even cable. That’s why the tires make that pop. I’ll bet you have to roll them hard or they bounce back, right?”

“Whatever you say,” said Frankie, putting out his cigarette. He was losing interest.

“Guess that means we leave it there,” I said. I had mixed feelings. I hated to lose a third of a million dollars, but I didn’t like the looks of that charred rope. Or the smell. I was even willing to kiss my hundred bucks goodbye.

“Leave it there? No way. We’ll drive it out,” Wu said. “Frankie, do you have some twelve-volt batteries you can loan me? Three, to be exact.”

“Unc’s got some,” said Frankie. “I suspect he’ll want to sell them, though. Unc’s not much of a loaner.”

Why was I not surprised?

Half an hour later we had three twelve-volt batteries in a supermarket shopping cart. The old man had wanted another hundred dollars, but since I was now a partner I did the bargaining, and we got them for twenty bucks apiece, charged and ready to go, with the cart thrown in. Plus three sets of jumper cables, on loan.

Wu rolled the two wire mesh wheels through the shed door. Each went pop and was gone. He put the toolbox into the supermarket cart with the batteries and the jumper cables. He pulled on the rubber gloves, and pulled the wool mittens over them. I did the same.

“Ready, Irv?” Wu said. (I would have said no, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. So I didn’t say anything.) “We won’t be able to talk on the Moon, so here’s the plan. First, we push the cart through. Don’t let it get stuck in the doorway where it connects the two aspects of the adjacency, or it’ll start to heat up. Might even explode. Blow up both worlds. Who knows? Once we’re through, you head down the hill with the cart. I’ll bring the two wheels. When we get to the LRV, you pick up the front end and—”

“Don’t we have a jack?”

“I’m expecting very low gravity. Besides, the LRV is lighter than a golf cart. Only 460 pounds, and that’s here on Earth. You hold it up while I mount the wheels—I have the tools laid out in the tray of the toolbox. Then you hand me the batteries, they go in front, and I’ll connect them with the jumper cables, in series. Then we climb in and—”

“Aren’t you forgetting something, Wu?” I said. “We won’t be able to hold our breath long enough to do all that.”

“Ah so!” Wu grinned and held up the brown bottle with Chinese writing on it. “No problem! I have here the ancient Chinese herbal treatment known as (he said some Chinese words), or ‘Pond Explorer’. Han dynasty sages used it to lie underwater and meditate for hours. I ordered this from Hong Kong, where it is called (more Chinese words), or ‘Mud Turtle Master’ and used by thieves; but no matter, it’s the same stuff. Hand me those cotton balls.”

The bottle was closed with a cork. Wu uncorked it and poured thick brown fluid on a cotton ball; it hissed and steamed.

“Jesus,” I said.

“Pond Explorer not only provides the blood with oxygen, it suppresses the breathing reflex. As a matter of fact, you can’t breathe while it’s under your tongue. Which means you can’t talk. It also contracts the capillaries and slows the heartbeat. It also scours the nitrogen out of the blood so you don’t get the bends.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I was into organic chemistry for several years,” Wu said. “Did my master’s thesis on ancient Oriental herbals. Never finished it, though.”

“Before you studied math?”

“After math, before law. Open up.”

As he prepared to put the cotton ball under my tongue, he said, “Pond Explorer switches your cortex to an ancient respiratory pattern predating the oxygenation of the Earth’s atmosphere. Pretty old stuff, Irv! It will feel perfectly natural, though. Breathe out and empty your lungs. There! When we come out, spit it out immediately so you can breathe and talk. It’s that simple.”

The Pond Explorer tasted bitter. I felt oxygen (or something) flooding my tongue and my cheeks. My mouth tingled. Once I got used to it, it wasn’t so bad; as a matter of fact, it felt great. Except for the taste, which didn’t go away.

Wu put his cotton ball under his tongue, smiled, and corked the bottle. Then, while I watched in alarm, he tore two plastic bags off the roll.

I saw what was coming. I backed away, shaking my head—

I’ll spare you the ensuing interchange. Suffice it to say that, minutes later, we both had plastic bags over our heads, taped around our necks with duct tape. Once I got over my initial panic, it wasn’t so bad. As always, Wu seemed to know what he was doing. And as always, it was no use resisting his plans.

If you’re wondering what Frankie was making of all this, so was I. He had stopped working again. While my bag was being taped on, I saw him sitting on the pile of tires, watching us with those blue-green eyes; looking a little bored, as if he saw such goings-on every day.

It was time. Wu grabbed the front of the supermarket cart and I grabbed the handle. Wu spun his finger and pointed toward the shed door with its tattered shower curtain waving slightly in the ripples of the space-time interface. We were off!

I waved goodbye to Frankie. He lifted one finger in farewell as we ran through.

From the Earth to the Moon—in one long step for mankind (and in particular, Wilson Wu). I heard a crackling, even through the plastic bag, and the supermarket cart shuddered and shook like a lawnmower with a bent blade. Then we were on the other side, and there was only a huge cold empty silence.

Overhead, a million stars. At our feet, gray dust. The door we had come through was a dimly lighted hole under a low cliff behind us. We were looking down a gray slope strewn with tires. The flat area at the bottom of the slope was littered with empty bottles, wrappers, air tanks, a big tripod, and of course, the dune buggy—or LRV—nose down in the dust. There were tracks all around it. Beyond were low hills, gray except for an occasional black stone. Everything seemed close; there was no far away. Except for the tires, the junk, and the tracks around the dune buggy, the landscape was featureless, smooth. Unmarked. Untouched. Lifeless.

The whole scene was half-lit, like dirty snow under a full moon in winter, only brighter. And more green.

Wu was grinning like a mad man. His plastic bag had expanded so that it looked like a space helmet; I realized mine probably looked the same. This made me feel better.

Wu pointed up behind us. I turned, and there was the Earth—hanging in the sky like a blue-green, oversized moon, just like the cover of The Whole Earth Catalog. I hadn’t actually doubted Wu, but I hadn’t actually believed him either, until then. The fifth thing you learn in law school is to be comfortable in that “twilight zone” between belief and doubt.

Now I believed it. We were on the Moon, looking back at the Earth. And it was cold! The gloves did no good at all, even with the wool over the rubber. But there was no time to worry about it. Wu had already picked up the wire mesh wheels and started down the slope, sort of hopping with one under each arm, trying to miss the scattered tires I followed, dragging the grocery cart behind me. I had expected it to bog down in the dust, but it didn’t. The only problem was, the low gravity made it hard for me to keep my footing. I had to wedge my toes under the junk tires and pull it a few feet at a time.

The dune buggy, or LRV, as Wu liked to call it, was about the size of a jeep without a hood (or even an engine). It had two seats side by side, like lawn chairs with plastic webbing, facing a square console the size of a portable TV. Between the seats was a gearshift. There was no steering wheel. An umbrella-shaped antenna attached to the front end made the whole thing look like a contraption out of E.T. or Mary Poppins.

I picked up the front end, and Wu started putting on the left wheel, fitting it under the round fiberglass fender. Even though the LRV was light, the sudden exertion reminded me that I wasn’t breathing, and I felt an instant of panic. I closed my eyes and sucked my tongue until it went away. The bitter taste of the Pond Explorer was reassuring.

When I opened my eyes, it looked like a fog was rolling in: it was my plastic bag, fogging up. I could barely see Wu, already finishing the left wheel. I wondered if he had ever worked on an Indy pit crew. (I found out later that he had.)

Wu crossed to the right wheel. The fog was getting thicker. I tried wiping it off with one hand, but of course, it was on the inside. Wu gave the thumbs up, and I set the front end down. I pointed at my plastic bag, and he nodded. His was fogged up, too. He tossed his wrench into the toolbox, and the plastic tray shattered like glass (silently, of course). Must have been the cold. My fingers and toes were killing me.

Wu started hopping up the slope, and I followed. I couldn’t see the Earth overhead, or the Moon below; everything was a blur. I wondered how we would find our way out (or in?), back through the shed door. I needn’t have worried. Wu took my hand and led me through, and this time I heard the pop. Blinking in the light, we tore the bags off our heads.

Wu spit out his cotton, and I did the same. My first breath felt strange. And wonderful. I had never realized breathing was so much fun.

There was a high-pitched cheer. Several of the neighborhood kids had joined Frankie on the pile of tires

“Descartes,” Wu said.

“We left it down there,” I said.

“No, I mean our location. It’s in the lunar highlands, near the equator. Apollo 16. Young, Duke, and Mattingly. 1972. I recognize the battery cover on the LRV. The return was a little hairy, though. Ours, I mean, not theirs. I had to follow the tires the last few yards. We’ll spray some WD-40 on the inside of the plastic bags before we go back in.”

“Stuff’s good for everything,” Frankie said.

“Almost,” I said.

It was noon, and I was starving, but there was no question of breaking for lunch. Wu was afraid the batteries would freeze; though they were heavy duty, they were made for Earth, not the Moon. With new Pond Explorer and new plastic bags properly treated with WD-40, we went back in. I had also taped plastic bags over my shoes. My toes were still stinging from the cold.

As we went down the slope toward the LRV site, we tossed a few of the tires aside to clear a road. With any luck, we would be coming up soon.

We left the original NASA batteries in place and set the new (well, used, but charged) batteries on top of them, between the front fenders. While Wu hooked them up with the jumper cables, I looked around for what I hoped was the last time. There was no view, just low hills all around, the one in front of us strewn with tires like burned donuts. The shed door (or adjacency, as Wu liked to call it) was a dimly lighted cave under a low cliff at the top of the slope. It wasn’t a long hill, but it was steep—about twelve degrees.

I wondered if the umbrella-antenna would make it through the door. As if he had read my mind, Wu was already unbolting it when I turned back around. He tossed it aside with the rest of the junk, sat down, and patted the seat beside him.

I climbed in or rather “on,” since there was no “in” to the LRV. Wu sat, of course, on the left. It occurred to me that if the English had been first on the Moon, he would have been on the right. There was no steering wheel or foot pedals either—but that didn’t bother Wu. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing. He hit a few switches on the console, and dials lighted up for “roll,” “heading,” “power,” etc. With a mad grin towards me, and a thumbs up towards the top of the slope (or the Earth hanging above it), he pushed the T-handle between us forward.

The LRV lurched. It groaned—I could “hear” it through my seat and my tailbone—and began to roll slowly forward. I could tell the batteries were weak.

If the LRV had lights, we didn’t need them. The Earth, hanging over the adjacency like a gigantic pole star, gave plenty of light. The handle I had thought was a gearshift was actually a joystick, like on a video game. Pushing it to one side, Wu turned the LRV sharply to the right—all four wheels turned—and started up the slope.

It was slow going. You might think the Earth would have looked friendly, but it didn’t. It looked cold and cruel; it seemed to be mocking us. The batteries, which had started out weak, were getting weaker. Wu’s smile was gone already. The path we had cleared through the tires was useless; the LRV would never make it straight up the slope.

I climbed down and began clearing an angled switchback. If pulling things on the Moon is hard, throwing them is almost fun. I hopped from tire to tire, slinging them down the hill, while Wu drove behind me.

The problem was, even on a switchback the corners are steep. The LRV was still twenty yards from the top when the batteries gave out entirely. I didn’t hear it, of course; but when I looked back after clearing the last stretch, I saw it was stopped. Wu was banging on the joystick with both hands. His plastic bag was swollen, and I was afraid it would burst. I had never seen Wu lose it before. It alarmed me. I ran (or rather, hopped) back to help out.

I started unhooking the jumper cables. Wu stopped banging on the joystick and helped. The supermarket cart had been left at the bottom, but the batteries were light enough in the lunar gravity. I picked up one under each arm and started up the hill. I didn’t bother to look back, because I knew Wu would be following with the other one.

We burst through the adjacency—the shed door—together; we tore the plastic bags off our heads and spit out the cotton balls. Warm air flooded my lungs. It felt wonderful. But my toes and fingers were on fire.

“Damn and Hell!” Wu said. I had never heard him curse before. “We almost made it!”

“We can still make it,” I said. “We only lack a few feet. Let’s put these babies on the charger and get some pizza.”

“Good idea,” Wu said. He was calming down. “I have a tendency to lose it when I’m hungry. But look, Irv. Our problems are worse than we thought.”

I groaned. Two of the batteries had split along the sides when we had set them down. All three were empty; the acid had boiled away in the vacuum of the Moon. It was a wonder they had worked at all.

“Meanwhile, are your toes hurting?” Wu asked.

“My toes are killing me,” I said.

The sixth thing you learn in law school is that cash solves all (or almost all) problems. I had one last hundred-dollar bill hidden in my wallet for emergencies—and if this didn’t qualify, what did? We gave the old man ninety for three more batteries, and put them on fast charge. Then we sent our change (ten bucks) with one of the kids on a bike, for four slices of pizza and two cans of diet soda.

Then we sat down under an ailanthus and took off our shoes. I was pleased to see that my toes weren’t black. They warmed fairly quickly in the sun. It was my shoes that were cold. The tassel on one of my loafers was broken; the other one snapped when I touched it.

“I’m going to have to bypass some of the electrics on the LRV if we’re going to make it up the hill,” said Wu. He grabbed a piece of newspaper that was blowing by and began to trace a diagram. “According to my calculations, those batteries will put out 33.9 percent power for sixteen minutes if we drop out the nav. system. Or maybe shunt past the rear steering motors. Look at this—”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I said. “Here’s our pizza.”

My socks were warm. I taped two plastic bags over my feet this time, while Wu poured the Pond Explorer over the cotton balls. It steamed when it went on, and a cheer went up from the kids on the pile of tires. There were ten or twelve of them now. Frankie was charging them a quarter apiece. Wu paused before putting the cotton ball under his tongue.

“Kids,” he said, “don’t try this at home!”

They all hooted. Wu taped the plastic bag over my head, then over his. We waved—we were neighborhood heroes!—and picked up the “new” batteries, which were now charged; and ducked side by side back through the adjacency to the junk-strewn lunar slope where our work still waited to be finished. We were the first interplanetary automotive salvage team!

Wu was carrying two batteries this time, and I was carrying one. We didn’t stop to admire the scenery. I was already sick of the Moon. Wu hooked up the batteries while I got into the passenger seat. He got in beside me and hit a few switches, fewer this time. The “heading” lights on the console didn’t come on. Half the steering and drive enable switches remained unlighted.

Then Wu put my left hand on the joystick, and jumped down and grabbed the back of the LRV, indicating that he was going to push. I was going to drive.

I pushed the joystick forward and the LRV groaned into action, a little livelier than last time. The steering was slow; only the front wheels turned. I was hopeful, though. The LRV groaned through the last curve without slowing down.

I headed up the last straightaway, feeling the batteries weaken with every yard, every foot, every inch. It was as if the weight that had been subtracted from everything else on the Moon had been added to the LRV and was dragging it down. The lights on the console were flickering.

We were only ten yards from the adjacency. It was a dim slot under the cliff; I knew it was bright on the other side (a midsummer afternoon!), but apparently the same interface that kept the air from leaking through also dimmed the light.

It looked barely wide enough. But low. I was glad the LRV didn’t have a windshield. I would have to duck to make it through.

Fifteen feet from the opening. Ten. Eight. The LRV stopped. I jammed the joystick forward and it moved another foot. I reached back over the seat and jiggled the jumper cables. The LRV groaned forward another six inches—then died. I looked at the slot under the cliff just ahead, and at the Earth overhead, both equally far away.

I wiggled the joystick. Nothing. I started to get down to help push, but Wu stopped me. He had one more trick. He unhooked the batteries and reversed their order. It shouldn’t have made any difference but as I have often noticed, electrical matters are not logical, like law: things that shouldn’t work, often do.

Sometimes, anyway. I jammed the joystick all the way forward again.

The LRV groaned forward again, and groaned on. I pointed it into the slot and ducked. I saw a shimmering light, and I felt the machine shudder. The front of the LRV poked through the shower curtain into the sunlight, and I followed, the sudden heat making my plastic bag swell.

The batteries groaned their last. I jumped down and began to pull on the front bumper. Through the plastic bag I could hear the kids screaming; or were they cheering? There was a loud crackling sound from behind the shower curtain. The LRV was only halfway through, and the front end was jumping up and down.

I tore the bag off my head and spit out the cotton, then took a deep breath and yelled, “Wu!”

I heard a hiss and a crackling; I could feel the ground shake under my feet. The pile of tires was slowly collapsing behind me; kids were slipping and sliding, trying to get away. I could hear glass breaking somewhere. I yelled, “Wu!”

The front of the LRV suddenly pulled free, throwing me (not to put too fine a point on it) flat on my ass.

The ground stopped shaking. The kids cheered.

Only the front of the LRV had come through. It was burned in half right behind the seat; cut through as if by a sloppy welder. The sour smell of electrical smoke was in the air. I took a deep breath and ducked toward the curtain, after Wu. But there was no curtain there, and no shed—only a pile of loose boards.

“Wu!” I yelled. But there he was, lying on the ground among the boards. He sat up and tore the bag off his head. He spit out his cotton and took a deep breath—and looked around and groaned.

The kids were all standing and cheering. (Kids love destruction.) Even Frankie looked pleased. But the old man wasn’t; he came around the corner of the garage, looking fierce. “What the Hell’s going on here?” he asked. “What happened to my shed?”

“Good question,” said Wu. He stood up and started tossing aside the boards that had been the shed. The shower curtain was under them, melted into a stiff plastic rag. Under it was a pile of ash and cinders—and that was all. No cave, no hole; no rear end of the LRV. No moon.

“The cave gets bigger and smaller every month,” said Frankie. “But it never did that, not since it first showed up.”

“When was that?” asked Wu.

“About six months ago.”

“What about my jumper cables?” said the old man.

We paid him for the jumper cables with the change from the pizza, and then called a wrecker to tow our half-LRV back to Park Slope. While we were waiting for the wrecker, I pulled Wu aside. “I hope we didn’t put them out of business,” I said. I’m no bleeding heart liberal, but I was concerned.

“No, no,” he said. “The adjacency was about to drop into a lower neotopological orbit. We just helped it along a little. It’s hard to figure without an almanac, but according to the tide table for June (which I’m glad now I bothered to memorize) the adjacency won’t be here next month. Or the month after. It was just here for six months, like Frankie said. It was a temporary thing, cyclical as well as periodic.”

“Sort of like the Ice Ages.”

“Exactly. It always occurs somewhere in this hemisphere, but usually not in such a convenient location. It could be at the bottom of Lake Huron. Or in mid-air over the Great Plains, as one of those unexplained air bumps.”

“What about the other side of it?” I asked. “Is it always a landing site? Or was that just a coincidence?”

“Good question!” Wu picked up one of the paper plates left over from the pizza and started scrawling on it with a pencil stub. “If I take the mean lunar latitude of all six Apollo sites, and divide by the coefficient of . . . ”

“It was just curiosity,” I said. “Here’s the wrecker.”

We got the half-LRV towed for half-price (I did the negotiating), but we never did make our million dollars. Boeing was in Chapter Eleven; NASA was under a procurement freeze; the Air & Space Museum wasn’t interested in anything that rolled.

“Maybe I should take it on the road,” Wu told me after several weeks of trying. “I could be a shopping-center attraction: ‘Half a Chinaman exhibits half a Lunar Roving Vehicle. Kids and adults half price.’”

Wu’s humor masked bitter disappointment. But he kept trying. The JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) wouldn’t accept his calls. General Motors wouldn’t return them. Finally, the Huntsville Parks Department, which was considering putting together an Apollo Memorial, agreed to send their Assistant Administrator for Adult Recreation to have a look.

She arrived on the day my divorce became final. Wu and I met her in the garage, where I had been living while Diane and I were waiting to sell the house. Her eyes were big and blue-green, like Frankie’s. She measured the LRV and shook her head. “It’s like a dollar bill,” she said.

“How’s that?” Wu asked. He looked depressed. Or maybe skeptical. It was getting hard to tell the difference.

“If you have over half, it’s worth a whole dollar. If you have less than half, it’s worth nothing. You have slightly less than half of the LRV here, which means that it is worthless. What’ll you take for that old P1800, though? Isn’t that the one that was assembled in England?”

Which is how I met Candy. But that’s another story.

We closed on the house two days later. Since the garage went with it, I helped Wu move the half-LRV to his back yard, where it sits to this day. It was lighter than any motorcycle. We moved the P1800 (which had plates) onto the street, and on Saturday morning, I went to get the interior for it. Just as Wu had predicted, the Hole was easy to find now that it was no longer linked with the adjacency. I didn’t even have to stop at Boulevard Imports. I just turned off Conduit onto a likely looking street, and there it was.

The old man would hardly speak to me, but Frankie was understanding. “Your partner came out and gave me this,” he said. He showed me a yellow legal pad, on which was scrawled:

“He told me this explains it all, I guess.”

Frankie had stacked the boards of the shed against the garage. There was a cindery bare spot where the shed door had been; the cinders had that sour moon smell. “I was sick and tired of the tire disposal business, anyway,” Frankie confided in a whisper.

The old man came around the corner of the garage. “What happened to your buddy?” he asked.

“He’s going to school on Saturday mornings,” I said. Wu was studying to be a meteorologist. I was never sure if that was weather or shooting stars. Anyway, he had quit the law.

“Good riddance,” said the old man.

The old man charged me sixty-five dollars for the interior panels, knobs, handles, and trim. I had no choice but to pay up. I had the money, since I had sold Diane my half of the furniture. I was ready to start my new life. I didn’t want to own anything that wouldn’t fit into the tiny, heart-shaped trunk of the P1800.

That night, Wu helped me put in the seats, then the panels, knobs, and handles. We finished at midnight and it didn’t look bad, even though I knew the colors would look weird in the daylight—blue and white in a red car. Wu was grinning that mad grin again; it was the first time I had seen it since the Moon. He pointed over the rooftops to the east (towards Howard Beach, as a matter of fact). The Moon was rising. I was glad to see it looking so—far away.

Wu’s wife brought us some leftover wedding cake. I gave him the keys to the 145 and he gave me the keys to the P1800. “Guess we’re about even,” I said. I put out my hand, but Wu slapped it aside and gave me a hug instead, lifting me off the ground. Everybody should have a friend like Wilson Wu.

I followed the full Moon all the way to Alabama.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 1994.

About the Author

Terry Bisson is the author of a number of critically-acclaimed novels such as Fire on the Mountain, Wyrldmaker, Talking Man, Voyage to the Red Planet, Pirates of the Universe, The Pickup Artist, and, in a posthumous collaboration with Walter M. Miller, Jr., a sequel to Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz called Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman. In 1991, his famous story “Bears Discover Fire” won the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and the Asimov’s Reader’s Award, the only story ever to sweep them all. In 2000, he won a Nebula Award for his story “macs.” His short work has been assembled in the collections Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories and In the Upper Room and Other Likely Stories. His most recent novel is Any Day Now, an alternate history of 1968 He lives in California.

Riding the White Bull

Caitlín R. Kiernan

“You’ve been drinking again, Mr. Paine,” Sarah said, and I suppose I must have stopped whatever it was I was doing, probably staring at those damned pics again, the ones of the mess the cops had turned up that morning in a nasty little dump on Columbus—or maybe chewing at my fingernails, or thinking about sex. Whatever. Something or another that suddenly didn’t matter anymore because she wasn’t asking me a question. Sarah rarely had time for questions. She just wasn’t that sort of a girl anymore. She spoke with a directness and authority that would never match her pretty artificial face, and that dissonance, that absolute betrayal of expectation, always made people sit up and listen. If I’d been looking at the photos—I honestly can’t remember—I probably laid them down again and looked at her, instead.

“There are worse things,” I replied, which I suppose I thought was some sort of excuse or defense or something, but she only scowled at me and shook her head.

“Not for you there aren’t,” she whispered, speaking so low that I almost couldn’t make out the words over the faint hum of her metabolic servos and the rumble of traffic down on the street. She blinked and turned away, staring out my hotel window at the dark gray sky hanging low above the Hudson. The snow had finally stopped falling and the clouds had an angry, interrupted intensity to them. Jesus. I can remember the fucking clouds, can even assign them human emotions, but I can’t remember what I was doing when Sarah told me I was drinking again. The bits we save, the bits we throw away. Go figure.

“The Agency doesn’t need drunks on its payroll, Mr. Paine. The streets of New York are full of drunks and junkies. They’re cheaper than rat shit. The Agency needs men with clear minds.”

Sarah had a way of enunciating words so that I knew they were capitalized. And she always capitalized Agency. Always. Maybe it was a glitch in one of her language programs, or, then again, maybe she just made me paranoid. Sarah and the booze and the fucking Agency and, while I’m on the subject, February in Manhattan. By that point, I think I’d have given up a couple of fingers and a toe to be on the next flight back to LA.

“We hired you because Fennimore said you were sober. We checked your records with the Department of—”

“Why are you here, Sarah? What do you want? I have work to do,” and I jabbed a thumb at the cluttered desk on the other side of my unmade bed. “Work for you and the Agency.”

“Work you can’t do drunk.”

“Yeah, so why don’t you fire my worthless, intoxicated ass and put me on the next jump back to Los Angeles? After this morning, I honestly couldn’t give a shit.”

“You understood, when you took this job, Mr. Paine, that there might be exceptional circumstances.”

She was still staring out the window towards the sludgy, ice-jammed river and Jersey, an almost expectant expression on her face, the sullen winter light reflecting dull and iridescent off her unaging dermafab skin.

“We were quite explicit on that point.”

“Of course you were,” I mumbled, half to myself, even less than half to the cyborg who still bothered to call herself Sarah, and then I stepped around the foot of the bed and sat down on a swivel-topped aluminum stool in front of the desk. I made a show of shuffling papers about, hoping that she’d take the hint and leave. I needed a drink and time alone, time to think about what the hell I was going to do next. After the things I’d seen and heard, the things in the photographs I’d taken, the things they wouldn’t let me photograph, I was beginning to understand why the Agency had decided not to call an alert on this one, why they were keeping the CDC and BioCon and the WHO in the dark. Why they’d called in a scrubber, instead.

“It’ll snow again before morning,” Sarah said, not turning away from the window.

“If you can call that crap out there snow,” I replied, impatiently. “It’s not even white. It smells like . . . fuck, I don’t know what it smells like, but it doesn’t smell like snow.”

“You have to learn to let go of the past, Mr. Paine. It’s no good to you here. No good at all.”

“Is that Agency policy?” I asked, and Sarah frowned.

“No, that’s not what I meant. That’s not what I meant at all.” She sighed then, and I wondered if it was just habit or if she still needed to breathe, still needed oxygen to drive the patchwork alchemy of her biomechs. I also wondered if she still had sex and, if so, with what. Sarah and I had gone a few rounds, way back in the day, back when she was still one-hundred percent flesh and blood, water and bone and cartilage. Back when she was still scrubbing freelance, before the Agency gave her a contract and shipped her off to the great frozen dung heap of Manhattan. Back then, if anyone had asked, I’d have said it was her life, her decisions to make, and a girl like Sarah sure as fuck didn’t need someone like me getting in her way.

“I was trying to say—here, now—we have to live in the present. That’s all we have.”

“Forget it,” I told her, glancing up too quickly from the bloody, garish images flickering across the screen of my old Sony-Akamatsu laptop. “Thanks for the ride, though.”

“No problem,” Sarah whispered. “It’s what I do,” and she finally turned away from the window, the frost on the Plexiglas, the wide interrupted sky.

“If I need anything, I’ll give you or Templeton a ring,” I said and Sarah pretended to smile, nodded her head, and walked across the tiny room to the door. She opened it, but paused there, one foot across the threshold, neither in nor out, the heavy, cold air and flat fluorescent lighting from the hallway leaking in around her, swaddling her like a second-rate halo.

“Try to stay sober,” she said. “Please. Mr. Paine. This one . . . it’s going to be a squeeze.” And her green-brown eyes shimmered faintly, those amazing eight-mill-a-pair spheres of fiber-optic filament and scratch-resistant acrylic, tinted mercury suspension-platinum lenses and the very best circuitry German optimetrics had figured out how to cram into a 6.5 cc socket. I imagined, then or only later on—that’s something else I can’t remember—that the shimmer stood for something Sarah was too afraid to say aloud, or something the Agency’s behavioral inhibitors wouldn’t allow her to say, something in her psyche that had been stamped Code Black, Restricted Access.

“Please,” she said again.

“Sure. For old time’s sake,” I replied.

“Whatever it takes, Mr. Paine,” and she left, pulling the door softly closed behind her, abandoning me to my dingy room and the dingier afternoon light leaking in through the single soot-streaked window. I listened to her footsteps on the tile, growing fainter as she approached the elevator at the other end of the hall, and when I was sure she wasn’t coming back, I reached for the half-empty bottle of scotch tucked into the shadows beneath the edge of the bed.

Back then, I still dreamed about Europa every fucking night. Years later, after I’d finally been retired by the Agency and was only Dietrich Paine again, pensioned civilian has-been rotting away day by day by day in East LA or NoHo or San Diego—I moved around a lot for a drunk—a friend of a friend’s croaker hooked me up with some black-market head tweaker. And he slipped a tiny silver chip into the base of my skull, right next to my metencephalon, and the bad dreams stopped, just like that. No more night flights, no more cold sweats, no more screaming until the neighbors called the cops.

But that winter in Manhattan, I was still a long, long decade away from the tweaker and his magic silver chip, and whenever the insomnia failed me and I dozed off for ten or fifteen or twenty minutes, I was falling again, tumbling silently through the darkness out beyond Ganymede, falling towards that Great Red Spot, that eternal crimson hurricane, my perfect, vortical Hell of phosphorus-stained clouds. Always praying to whatever dark Jovian gods might be watching my descent that this time I’d sail clear of the moons and the anti-cyclone’s eye would swallow me at last, dragging me down, burning me, crushing me in that vast abyss of gas and lightning and infinite pressure.

But I never made it. Not one single goddamn time.

“Do you believe in sin?” Sarah would ask me, when she was still just Sarah, before the implants and augmentations, and I would lie there in her arms, thinking that I was content, and stare up at the ceiling of our apartment and laugh at her.

“I’m serious, Deet.”

“You’re always serious. You’ve got serious down to an exact science.”

“I think you’re trying to avoid the question.”

“Yeah, well, it’s a pretty silly fucking question.”

“Answer it anyway. Do you believe in sin?”

There’s no way to know how fast I’m moving as I plummet towards the hungry, welcoming storm, and then Europa snags me. Maybe next time, I think. Maybe next time.

“It’s only a question,” Sarah would say. “Stop trying to make it anything more than that.”

“Most of us get what’s coming to us, sooner or later.”

“That’s not the same thing. That’s not what I asked you.”

And the phone would ring, or I’d slip my hand between her unshaven legs, or one of our beepers would go off, and the moment would melt away, releasing me from her scrutiny.

It never happened exactly that way, of course, but who’s keeping score?

In my dreams, Europa grows larger and larger, sprouting from the darkness exactly like it did in the fucking orientation vids every scrubber had to sit through in those days if he or she wanted a license. Snippets of video from this or that probe borrowed for my own memories. Endless fractured sheets of ice the color of rust and sandstone, rising up so fast, so fast, and I’m only a very small speck of meat and white EMU suit streaking north and east across the ebony skies above Mael Dúin, the Echion Linea, Cilix, the southeastern terminus of the Rhadamanthys Linea. I’m only a shooting star hurtling along above that terrible varicose landscape, and I can’t remember how to close my eyes.

“Man, I was right fucking there when they opened the thing,” Ronnie says again and takes another drag off her cigarette. Her hand trembles and ash falls to the Formica tabletop. “I’d asked to go to Turkey, right, to cover the goddamn war, but I pulled the IcePIC assignment instead. I was waiting in the pressroom with everyone else, watching the feed from the quarantine unit when the sirens started.”

“The Agency denies you were present,” I reply as calmly as I can, and she smiles that nervous, brittle smile she always had, laughs one of her dry, humorless laughs, and gray smoke leaks from her nostrils.

“Hell, I know that, Deet. The fuckers keep rewriting history so it always comes out the way they want it to, but I was there, man. I saw it, before they shut down the cameras. I saw all that shit that ‘never happened’,” and she draws quotation marks in the air with her index fingers.

That was the last time I talked to Ronnie, the last time I visited her out at La Casa Psychiatric, two or three weeks before she hung herself with an electrical cord. I went to the funeral, of course. The Agency sent a couple of black-suited spooks with carefully-worded condolences for her family, and I ducked out before the eulogy was finished.

And here, a few kilometers past the intersection of Tectamus Linea and Harmonia Linea, I see the familiar scatter of black dots laid out helter-skelter on the crosscut plains. “Ice-water volcanism,” Sarah whispers inside my helmet; I know damn well she isn’t there, hasn’t been anywhere near me for years and years, and I’m alone and only dreaming her voice to break the deafening weight of silence. I count the convection cells like rosary beads, like I was ever Catholic, like someone who might have once believed in sin. I’m still too far up to see any evidence of the lander, so I don’t know which hole is The Hole, Insertion Point 2071A, the open sore that Emmanuel Weatherby-Jones alternately referred to as “the plague gate” and “the mouth of Sakpata” in his book on the Houston incident and its implications for theoretical and applied astrobiology. I had to look that up, because he never explained who or what Sakpata was. I found it in an old book on voodoo and Afro-Caribbean religions. Sakpata is a god of disease.

I’m too far up to guess which hole is Sakpata’s mouth and I don’t try.

I don’t want to know.

A different sort of god is patiently waiting for me on the horizon.

“They started screaming,” Ronnie says. “Man, I’ll never forget that sound, no matter how many pills these assholes feed me. We all sat there, too fucking stunned to move, and this skinny little guy from CNN—”

“Last time he was from Newsweek,” I say, interrupting her, and she shakes her head and takes another drag, coughs and rubs at her bloodshot eyes.

“You think it makes any goddamned difference?”

“No,” I reply dishonestly, and she stares at me for a while without saying anything else.

“When’s the last time you got a decent night’s sleep?” she asks me, finally, and I might laugh, or I might shrug, and “Yeah,” she says. “That’s what I thought.”

She starts rattling on about the hydrobot, then, the towering black smokers, thermal vents, chemosynthesis, those first grainy snatches of video, but I’m not listening. I’m too busy zipping helplessly along above buckled Europan plains and vast stretches of blocky, shattered chaos material; a frozen world caught in the shadow of Big Daddy Jupiter, frozen for ages beyond counting, but a long fucking way from dead, and I would wake up screaming or crying or, if I was lucky, too scared to make any sound at all.

“They’re ready for you now, Mr. Paine,” the cop said, plain old NYPD street blue, and I wondered what the fuck he was doing here, why the Agency was taking chances like that. Probably the same poor bastard who’d found the spooch, I figured. Templeton had told me that someone in the building had complained about the smell and, so, the super buzzed the cops, so this was most likely the guy who answered the call. He might have a partner around somewhere. I nodded at him, and he glanced nervously back over his shoulder at the open door to the apartment, the translucent polyurethane iso-seal curtain with its vertical black zipper running right down the middle, all the air hoses snaking in and out of the place, keeping the pressure inside lower than the pressure outside. I doubted he would still be breathing when the sweeper crews were finished with the scene.

“You see this sort of shit very often?” he asked, and it didn’t take a particularly sensitive son of a bitch to hear the fear in his voice, the fear and confusion and whatever comes after panic. I didn’t respond. I was busy checking the batteries in one of my cameras and, besides, I had the usual orders from Templeton to keep my mouth shut around civvies. And knowing the guy was probably already good as dead, that he’d signed his death warrant just by showing up for work that morning, didn’t make me particularly eager to chat.

“Well, I don’t mind telling you, I’ve never seen shit like that thing in there,” he said and coughed. “I mean, you see some absolutely fucked-up shit in this city, and I even did my four years in the army—hell, I was in fucking Damascus after the bomb, but holy Christ Almighty.”

“You were in Damascus?” I asked, but didn’t look up from my equipment, too busy double-checking the settings on the portable genetigraph clipped to my belt to make eye contact.

“Oh yeah, I was there. I got to help clean up the mess when the fires burned out.”

“Then that’s something we have in common,” I told him and flipped my vidcam’s on switch and the gray LED screen showed me five zeros. I was patched into the portable lab down on the street, a black Chevy van with Maryland plates and a yellow ping-pong ball stuck on the antenna. I knew Sarah would be in the van, waiting for my feed, jacked in, riding the amps, hearing everything I heard, seeing everything I saw through her perfectly calibrated eyes.

“You were in Syria?” the cop asked me, glad to have something to talk about besides what he’d seen in the apartment.

“No, I clean up other people’s messes.”

“Oh,” he said, sounding disappointed. “I see.”

“Had a good friend in the war, though. But he was stationed in Cyprus, and then the Taurus Mountains.”

“You ever talk with him? You know, about the war?”

“Nope. He didn’t make it back,” I said, finally looking up, and I winked at the cop and stepped quickly past him to the tech waiting for me at the door. I could see she was sweating inside her hazmat hood, even though it was freezing in the hallway. Scrubbers don’t get hazmat suits. It interferes with the contact, so we settle for a couple of hours in decon afterwards, antibiotics, antitox, purgatives, and hope we don’t come up red somewhere down the line.

“This is bad, ain’t it?” the cop asked. “I mean, this is something real bad,” and I didn’t turn around, just shrugged my shoulders as the tech unzipped the plastic curtain for me.

“Is that how it looked to you?” I replied. I could feel the gentle rush of air into the apartment as the slit opened in front of me.

“Jesus, man, all I want’s a straight fucking answer,” he said. “I think I deserve that much. Don’t you?” and since I honestly couldn’t say one way or the other, since I didn’t even care, I ignored him and stepped through the curtain into this latest excuse for Hell.

There’s still an exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, on the fourth floor with the old Hall of Vertebrate Origins and all the dinosaur bones. The Agency didn’t shut it down after the first outbreaks, the glory spooches that took out a whole block in Philadelphia and a trailer park somewhere in West Virginia, but it’s not as popular as you might think. A dark, dusty alcove crowded with scale models and dioramas, video monitors running clips from the IcePIC’s hydrobot, endless black and white loops of gray seafloors more than half a billion kilometers from earth. When the exhibit first opened, there were a few specimens on loan from NASA, but those were all removed a long time ago. I never saw them for myself, but an acquaintance on staff at the museum, a geologist, assures me they were there. A blue-black bit of volcanic rock sealed artfully in a Lucite pyramid, and two formalin-filled specimen canisters, one containing a pink worm-like organism no more than a few centimeters in length, the other preserving one of the ugly little slugs that the mission scientists dubbed “star minnows.”

“Star leeches” would have been more accurate.

On Tuesday afternoon, the day after I’d worked the scene on Columbus, hung over and hoping to avoid another visit from Sarah, I took the B-Line from my hotel to the museum and spent a couple of hours sitting on a bench in that neglected alcove, watching the video clips play over and over again for no one but me. Three monitors running simultaneously—a NASA documentary on the exploration of Europa, beginning with Pioneer 10 in 1973, a flyover of the moon’s northern hemisphere recorded shortly before the IcePIC orbiter deployed its probes, and a snippet of film shot beneath the ice. That’s the one I’d come to see. I chewed aspirin and watched as the hydrobot’s unblinking eyes peered through veils of silt and megaplankton, into the interminable darkness of an alien ocean, the determined glare of the bot’s lights never seeming to reach more than a few feet into the gloom. Near the end of the loop, you get to see one of the thermal vents, fringed with towering sulfide chimneys spewing superheated, methane- and hydrogen-rich water into the frigid Europan ocean. In places, the sides of the chimneys were completely obscured by a writhing, swaying carpet of creatures. Something like an eel slipped unexpectedly past the camera lens. A few seconds later, the seafloor was replaced by a brief stream of credits and then the NASA logo before the clip started itself over again.

I tried hard to imagine how amazing these six minutes of video must have seemed, once upon a time, how people must have stood in lines just to see it, back before the shit hit the fan and everyone everywhere stopped wanting to talk about IcePIC and its fucking star minnows. Before the government axed most of NASA’s exobiology program, scrapped all future missions to Europa, and cancelled plans to explore Titan. Back before ET became a four-letter word. But no matter how hard I tried, all I could think about was that thing on the bed, the crap growing from the walls of the apartment and dripping from the goddamn ceiling.

In the museum, above the monitor, there was a long quote from H. G. Wells printed in red-brown ink on a clear Lexan plaque, and I read it several times, wishing that I had a cigarette—“We look back through countless millions of years and see the great will to live struggling out of the intertidal slime, struggling from shape to shape and from power to power, crawling and then walking confidently upon the land, struggling generation after generation to master the air, creeping down into the darkness of the deep; we see it turn upon itself in rage and hunger and reshape itself anew, we watch it draw nearer and more akin to us, expanding, elaborating itself, pursuing its relentless inconceivable purpose, until at last it reaches us and its being beats through our brains and arteries.”

I’ve never cared very much for irony. It usually leaves a sick, empty feeling in my gut. I wondered why no one had taken the plaque down.

By the time I got back to my room it was almost dark, even though I’d splurged and taken a taxi. After the video, the thought of being trapped in the crowded, stinking subway, hurtling along through the city’s bowels, through those tunnels where the sun never reaches, gave me a righteous fucking case of the heebie-jeebies and, what the hell, the Agency was picking up the tab. All those aspirin had left my stomach aching and sour, and hadn’t done much of anything about the hangover, but there was an unopened pint waiting for me beneath the edge of the bed.

I was almost asleep when Sarah called.

Here’s a better quote. I’ve been carrying it around with me for the last few years, in my head and on a scrap of paper. It showed up in my email one day, sent by some anonymous someone or another from an account that turned out to be bogus. Scrubbers get a lot of anonymous email. Tips, rumors, bullshit, hearsay, wicked little traps set by the Agency, confessions, nightmares, curses, you name it and it comes rolling our way, and after a while you don’t even bother to wonder who sent the shit. But this one, this one kept me awake a few nights:

“But what would a deep-sea fish learn even if a steel plate of a wrecked vessel above him should drop and bump him on the nose?

Our submergence in a sea of conventionality of almost impenetrable density.

Sometimes I’m a savage who has found something on the beach of his island. Sometimes I’m a deep-sea fish with a sore nose.

The greatest of mysteries:

Why don’t they ever come here, or send here, openly?

Of course, there’s nothing to that mystery if we don’t take so seriously the notion—that we must be interesting. It’s probably for moral reasons that they stay away—but even so, there must be some degraded ones among them.”

It’s that last bit that always sinks its teeth (or claws or whatever the fuck have you) into me and hangs on. Charles Hoyt Fort. The Book of the Damned. First published in 1919, a century and a half before IcePIC, and it occurs to me now that I shouldn’t be any less disturbed by prescience than I am by irony. But there you go. Sometimes I’m a savage. Sometimes I’m a deep-sea fish. And my life is become the sum of countless degradations.

“You’re not going down there alone,” Sarah said, telling, not asking, because, like I already noted, Sarah stopped being the kind of girl who asks questions when she signed on with the Agency for life plus whatever else they could milk her biomeched cadaver for. I didn’t reply immediately, lay there a minute or three, rubbing my eyes, waiting for the headache to start in on me again, listening to the faint, insistent crackle from the phone. Manhattan’s landlines were shit and roses that February, had been that way for years, ever since some Puerto Ricans in Brooklyn had popped a homemade micro-EMP rig to celebrate the Fourth of July. I wondered why Sarah hadn’t called me on my thumbline while I looked about for the scotch. Turned out I was lying on the empty bottle, and I rolled over, wishing I’d never been born. I held the phone cradled between my left shoulder and my cheek and stared at the darkness outside the window of my hotel room.

“Do you even know what time it is?” I asked her.

“Templeton said you were talking about going out to Roosevelt. He said you might have gone already.”

“I didn’t say dick to Templeton about Roosevelt,” I said, which was the truth—I hadn’t—but also entirely beside the point. It was John Templeton’s prerogative to stay a few steps ahead of his employees, especially when those employees were scrubbers, especially freebie scrubbers on the juice. I tossed the empty bottle at a cockroach on the wall across the room. The bottle didn’t break, but squashed the roach and left a satisfying dent in the drywall.

“You know Agency protocol for dealing with terrorists.”

“They went and stuck something in your head so you don’t have to sleep anymore, is that it?”

“You can’t go to the island alone,” she said. “I’m sending a couple of plain-clothes men over. They’ll be at your hotel by six a.m., at the latest.”

“Yeah, and I’ll be fucking asleep at six,” I mumbled, more interested in watching the roaches that had emerged to feed on the remains of the one I’d nailed than arguing with her.

“We can’t risk losing you, Mr. Paine. It’s too late to call in someone else if anything happens. You know that as well as I do.”

“Do I?”

“You’re a drunk, not an idiot.”

“Look, Sarah, if I start scutzing around out there with two of Temp’s goons in tow, I’ll be lucky if I find a fucking stitch, much less get it to talk to me.”

“They’re all animals,” Sarah said, meaning the stitches and meatdolls and genetic changelings that had claimed Roosevelt Island a decade or so back. There was more than a hint of loathing in her voice. “It makes me sick, just thinking about them.”

“Did you ever stop to consider they probably feel the same way about you?”

“No,” Sarah said coldly, firmly, one-hundred percent shitsure of herself. “I never have.”

“If those fuckers knock on my door at six o’clock, I swear to god, Sarah, I’ll shoot them.”

“I’ll tell them to wait for you in the lobby.”

“That’s real damn thoughtful of you.”

There was another static-littered moment of silence then, and I closed my eyes tight. The headache was back and had brought along a few friends for the party. My thoughts were starting to bleed together, and I wondered if I’d vomit before or after Sarah finally let me off the phone. I wondered if cyborgs vomited. I wondered exactly what all those agents in the black Chevy van had seen on their consoles and face screens when I’d walked over and touched a corner of the bed in the apartment on Columbus Avenue.

“I’m going to hang up now, Sarah. I’m going back to sleep.”

“You’re sober.”

“As a judge,” I whispered and glanced back at the window, trying to think about anything at all except throwing up. There were bright lights moving across the sky above the river, red and green and white, turning clockwise; one of the big military copters, an old Phoenix 6-98 or one of the newer Japanese whirlybirds, making its circuit around the Rotten Apple.

“You’re still a lousy liar,” she said.

“I’ll have to try harder.”

“Don’t fuck this up, Mr. Paine. You’re a valued asset. The Agency would like to see you remain that way.”

“I’m going back to sleep,” I said again, disregarding the not-so-subtle threat tucked between her words; it wasn’t anything I didn’t already know. “And I meant what I said about shooting those assholes. Don’t think I didn’t. Anyone knocks on this door before eight sharp, and that’s all she wrote.”

“They’ll be waiting in the lobby when you’re ready.”

“Goodnight, Sarah.”

“Goodnight, Mr. Paine,” she replied, and a second or two later there was only the ragged dial tone howling in my ear. The lights outside the window were gone, the copter probably all the way to Harlem by now. I almost made it to the toilet before I was sick.

If I didn’t keep getting the feeling that there’s someone standing behind me, someone looking over my shoulder as I write this, I’d say more about the dreams. The dreams are always there, tugging at me, insistent, selfish, wanting to be spilled out into the wide, wide world where everyone and his brother can get a good long gander at them. They’re not content anymore with the space inside my skull. My skull is a prison for dreams, an enclosed and infinite prison space where the arrows on the number line point towards each other, infinitely converging but never, ever, ever meeting and so infinite all the same. But I do keep getting that feeling, and there’s still the matter of the thing in the apartment.

The thing on the bed.

The thing that the cop who’d been in Damascus after the Israelis’ forty-megaton fireworks show died for.

My thirteenth and final contact.

After I was finished with the makeshift airlock at the door, one of Templeton’s field medics, safe and snug inside a blue hazmat suit, led me through the brightly-lit apartment. I held one hand cupped over my nose and mouth, but the thick clouds of neon yellow disinfectant seeped easily between my fingers, gagging me. My eyes burned and watered, making it even more difficult to see. I’ve always thought that shit smelled like licorice, but it seems to smell like different things to different people. Sarah used to say it reminded her of burning tires. I used to know a guy who said it smelled like carnations.

“It’s in the bedroom,” the medic said, his voice flat and tinny through the suit’s audio. “It doesn’t seem to have spread to any of the other rooms. How was the jump from Los Angeles, sir?”

I didn’t answer him, too ripped on adrenaline for small talk and pleasantries, and he didn’t really seem to care, my silence just another part of the routine. I took shallow breaths and followed the medic through the yellow fog, which was growing much thicker as we approached ground zero. The disinfectant was originally manufactured by Dow for domestic bioterrorism clean-up, but the Agency’s clever boys and girls had added a pinch of this, a dash of that, and it always seemed to do the job. We passed a kitchenette, beer cans and dirty dishes and an open box of corn flakes sitting on the counter, then turned left into a short hallway leading past a bathroom too small for a rat to take a piss in, past a framed photograph of a lighthouse on a rocky shore (the bits we remember, the bits we forget), to the bedroom. Templeton was there, of course, decked out in his orange hazmat threads, one hand resting confidently on the butt of the big Beretta Pulse 38A on his hip, and he pointed at me and then pointed at the bed.

Sometimes I’m a deep-sea fish.

Sometimes I’m a savage.

“We’re still running MRS and backtrace on these two,” Templeton said, pointing at the bed again, “but I’m pretty sure the crit’s a local.” His gray eyes peered warily out at me, the lights inside his hood shining bright so I had no trouble at all seeing his face through the haze.

“I figure one of them picked it up from an untagged mobile, probably the woman there, and it’s been hitching dormant for the last few weeks. We’re guessing the trigger was viral. She might have caught a cold. Corona’s always a good catalyst.”

I took a deep breath and coughed. Then I gagged again and stared up at the ceiling for a moment.

“Come on, Deet. I need you frosty on this one. You’re not drunk, are you? Fennimore said—”

“I’m not drunk,” I replied, and I wasn’t, not yet. I hadn’t had a drink in almost six months, but, hey, the good news was, the drought was almost over.

“That’s great,” Templeton said. “That’s real damn great. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.”

I looked back at the bed.

“So, when you gonna tell me what’s so goddamn special about this one?” I asked. “The way Sarah sounded, I figured you’d already lost a whole building.”

“What’s so goddamn special about them, Deet, is that they’re still conscious, both of them. Initial EEGs are coming up pretty solid. Clean alpha, beta, and delta. The theta’s are weakening, but the brain guys say the waves are still synchronous enough to call coherent.”

Temp kept talking, but I tuned him out and forced myself to take a long, hard look at the bed.

Sometimes I’m a deep-sea fish.

The woman’s left eye was still intact, open very wide and wet with tears, her blue iris bright as Christmas Day, and I realized she was watching me.

“It’s pure,” Templeton said, leaning closer to the bed, “more than ninety-percent proximal to the Lælaps strain. Beats the fuck outta me why their brains aren’t soup by now.”

“I’m going to need a needle,” I muttered, speaking automatically, some part of me still there to walk the walk and talk the talk, some part of me getting ready to take the plunge, because the only way out of this hole was straight ahead. A very small, insensate part of me not lost in that pleading blue eye. “Twelve and a half max, okay, and not that fife-and-drum Australian shit you gave me in Boston. I don’t want to feel anything in there but the critter, you understand?”

“Sure,” Templeton said, smiling like a ferret.

“I mean it. Whatever’s going through their heads right now, I don’t want to hear it, Temp. Not so much as a peep, not even a fucking whisper.”

“Hey, you’re calling the shots, Deet.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “Don’t suck my dick, just get me the needle.”

He motioned to a medic, and in a few more minutes the drugs were singing me towards that spiraling ebony pipeline, the Scrubber’s Road, Persephone’s Staircase, the Big Drop, the White Bull, whatever you want to call it, it’s all the same to me. I was beginning to sweat and trying to make it through the procedure checklist one last time. Templeton patted me on the back, the way he always did when I was standing there on the brink. I said a silent prayer to anything that might be listening that one day it’d be his carcass rotting away at the center of the Agency’s invisible clockwork circus. And then I kneeled down at the edge of the bed and got to work.

Sarah sent the goons over, just like she’d said she would, but I ducked out the back and, luckily, she hadn’t seen fit to have any of Temp’s people watching all the hotel’s exits. Maybe she couldn’t pull that many warm bodies off the main gig down on Columbus. Maybe Temp had bigger things on his mind. I caught a cash-and-ride taxi that took me all the way to the ruins along York Avenue. The Vietnamese driver hadn’t wanted to get any closer to the Queensboro Bridge than Third, but I slipped him five hundred and he found a little more courage somewhere. He dropped me at the corner of Second and East Sixty-First Street, crossed himself twice, and drove away, bouncing recklessly over the trash and disintegrating blacktop. I watched him go, feeling more alone than I’d expected. Overhead, the Manhattan sky was the color of buttermilk and mud, and I wished briefly, pointlessly, that I’d brought a gun. The 9mm Samson-L4 Enforcer I’d bought in a Hollywood pawnshop almost four years before was back at the hotel, hidden in a locked compartment of my suitcase. But I knew it’d be a whole lot worse to be picked up crossing the barricades without a pass if I were carrying an unregistered weapon, one more big red blinking excuse for the MPs to play a few rounds of Punch and Judy with my face while they waited for my papers and my story about the Agency to check out.

I started walking north, the gray-blue snow crunching loudly beneath my boots, the collar of my coat turned up against the wind whistling raw between the empty, burned-out buildings. I’d heard security was running slack around the Sixty-Third Street entrance. I might get lucky. It had happened before.

“Yes, but what exactly did you think you’d find on the island?” Buddhadev Krishnamurthy asked when he interviewed me for his second book on technoshamanism and the Roosevelt parahumanists, the one that won him a Pulitzer.

“Missing pieces, maybe,” I replied. “I was just following my nose. The Miyake girl turned up during the contact.”

“But going to the island alone, wasn’t that rather above and beyond? I mean, if you hated Templeton and the Agency so much, why stick your neck out like that?”

“Old habits,” I said, sipping at my tequila and trying hard to remember how long it had taken me to find a way past the guards and up onto the bridge. “Old habits and bad dreams,” I added, and then, “But I never said I was doing it for the Agency.” I knew I was telling him more than I’d intended. Not that it mattered. None of my interview made it past the censors and into print.

I kept to the center lanes, except for a couple of times when rusted and fire-blackened tangles of wrecked automobiles and police riot-rollers forced me to the edges of the bridge. The West Channel glimmered dark and iridescent beneath the late February clouds, a million shifting colors dancing lazily across the oily surface of the river. The wind shrieked through the cantilever spans, like angry sirens announcing my trespass to anyone who would listen. I kept waiting for the sound of helicopter rotors or a foot patrol on its way back from Queens, for some sharpshooter’s bullet to drop me dead in my tracks. Maybe it was wishful thinking.

Halfway across I found the access stairs leading down to the island, right where my contact in Street and Sanitation had said they would be. I checked my watch. It was five minutes until noon.

“Will you tell me about the dreams, Mr. Paine?” Krishnamurthy asked, after he’d ordered me another beer and another shot of tequila. His voice was like silk and cream, the sort of voice that seduced, that tricked you into lowering your defenses just long enough for him to get a good peek at all the nasty nooks and crannies. “I hear lots of scrubbers had trouble with nightmares back then, before the new neural-drag sieves were available. The suicide rate’s dropped almost fifty percent since they became standard issue. Did you know that, Mr. Paine?”

“No,” I told him. “Guess I missed the memo. I’m kind of outside the flow these days.”

“You’re a lucky man,” he said. “You should count your blessings. At least you made it out in one piece. At least you made it out sane.”

I think I told him to fuck off then. I know I didn’t tell him about the dreams.

“What do you see down there, Deet? The sensors are getting a little hinky on me,” Sarah said and, in the dreams, back when, in the day, before the tweaker’s silver chip, I took another clumsy step towards the edge of the chasm created by hot water welling up from the deep-sea vents along the Great Charon Ridge. A white plume of salty steam rose high into the thin Europan atmosphere, blotting out the western horizon, boiling off into the indifferent blackness of space. I knew I didn’t want to look over the edge again. I’d been there enough times already, and it was always the same, and I reminded myself that no one had ever walked on Europa, no one human, and it was only a dream. Shit. Listen to me. Only a dream. Now, there’s a contradiction to live by.

“Am I coming through?” Sarah asked. “Can you hear me?”

I didn’t answer her. My mouth was too dry to speak, bone dry from fear and doubt and the desiccated air circulating through the helmet of my EMU suit.

“I need you to acknowledge, Deet. Can you hear me?”

The mouth of Sakpata, the plague gate, yawning toothless and insatiable before me, almost nine kilometers from one side to the other, more than five miles from the edge of the hole down to the water. I was standing near the center of the vast field of cryovolcanic lenticulae first photographed by the Galileo probe in 1998, on its fifteenth trip around Jupiter. Convection currents had pushed the crust into gigantic pressure domes that finally cracked and collapsed under their own weight, exposing the ocean below. I took another step, almost slipping on the ice, and wondered how far I was from the spot where IcePIC had made landfall.

“Deet, do you copy?”

“Do you believe in sin, Deet?”

Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken—

The ice was all between.

Sarah sets her coffee cup down and watches me from the other side of our apartment on Cahuenga. Her eyes are still her eyes, full of impatience and secrets. She reaches for a cigarette, and I wish this part weren’t a dream, that I could go back to here and start again. This sunny LA morning, Sarah wearing nothing but her bra and panties, and me still curled up in the warm spot she left in the sheets. Go back and change the words. Change every goddamn day that’s come between now and then.

“They want my decision by tomorrow morning,” she says and lights her cigarette. The smoke hangs like a caul about her face.

“Tell them you need more time,” I reply. “Tell them you have to think about it.”

“This is the fucking Agency,” she says and shakes her head. “You don’t ask them for more time. You don’t ask them shit.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say, Sarah.”

“It’s everything I’ve always wanted,” she says and flicks ash into an empty soft drink can.

Are those her ribs through which the Sun

Did peer, as through a grate?

I took another step nearer the chasm and wished that this would end and I would wake up. If I could wake up, I wouldn’t have to see. If I could wake up, there’d be a bottle of scotch or bourbon or tequila waiting for me, a drink of something to take the edge off the dryness in my mouth. The sun was rising behind me, a distant, pale thing lost among the stars, and the commlink buzzed and crackled in my ears.

“If it’s what you want, take it,” I say, the same thing I always say, the same words I can never take back. “I’m not going to stand in your way.” I could tell it was the last thing that Sarah wanted to hear. The End. The curtain falls and everyone takes a bow. The next day, Wednesday, I’ll drive her to LAX-1, and she’ll take the 4:15 jump to D.C.

We are more alone than ever.

Ronnie used her own blood to write those six words on the wall of her room at La Casa, the night she killed herself.

My boots left no trace whatsoever on the slick, blue-white ice. A few more steps and I was finally standing at the edge, walking cautiously onto the wide shelf formed by an angular chaos block jutting a few meters out over the pit. The constant steam had long since worn the edges of the block smooth. Eventually, this block would melt free, undercut by ages of heat and water vapor, and pitch into the churning abyss far below. I took a deep breath of the dry, stale air inside my helmet and peered into the throat of Sakpata.

“Tell me, what the hell did we expect to find out there, Deet?” Ronnie asked me. “What did we think it would be? Little gray men with the answers to all the mysteries of the universe, free for the asking? A few benign extremophiles clinging stubbornly to the bottom of an otherwise lifeless sea? I can’t remember anymore. I try, but I can’t. I lie awake at night trying to remember.”

“I don’t think it much matters,” I told her, and she started crying again.

“It was waiting for us, Deet,” she sobbed. “It was waiting for us all along, a million fucking years alone out there in the dark. It knew we’d come, sooner or later.”

Sarah was standing on the ice behind me, naked, the wind tearing at her plastic skin.

“Why do you keep coming here?” she asked. “What do you think you’ll find?”

“Why do you keep following me?”

“You turned off your comms. I wasn’t getting a signal. You didn’t leave me much choice.”

I turned to face her, turning my back on the hole, but the wind had already pulled her apart and scattered the pieces across the plain.

We are more alone than ever.

And then I’m in the pipe, slipping along the Scrubber’s Road, no friction, no resistance, rushing by high above the frozen moon, waiting for that blinding, twinkling moment of perfect agony when my mind brushes up against that other mind. That instant when it tries to hide, tries to withdraw, and I dig in and hang on and drag it screaming into the light. I hear the whir of unseen machineries as the techs on the outside try to keep up with me, with it.

I stand alone at the edge of Sakpata’s mouth, where no man has ever stood, at the foot of the bed on Columbus, in the airport lobby saying goodbye to Sarah. I have all my cameras, my instruments, because I’ll need all that later on, when the spin is over and I’m drunk and there’s nothing left but the footwork.

When I have nothing left to do but track down the carrier and put a bullet or two in his or her or its head.

Cut the cord. Tie off the loose ends.

“Do you believe in sin, Deet?”

Instead of the cross, the Albatross . . .

“It’s only a question. Stop trying to make it anything more than that.”

“Do you copy?” Sarah asks again. “Global can’t get a fix on you.” I take another step closer to the hole, and it slips a few feet farther away from me. The sky is steam and stars and infinite night.

I followed East Road north to Main Street, walking as quickly as the snow and black ice and wrecks littering the way would allow. I passed through decaying canyons of brick and steel, broken windows and gray concrete, the tattered ruins of the mess left after the Feds gave Roosevelt Island up for lost, built their high barricades and washed their righteous hands of the place. I kept my eyes on the road at my feet, but I could feel them watching me, following me, asking each other if this one was trouble or just some fool out looking for his funeral. I might have been either. I still wasn’t sure myself. There were tracks in the snow and frozen mud, here and there, some of them more human than others.

Near the wild place that had once been Blackwell Park, I heard something call out across the island. It was a lonely, frightened sound, and I walked a little faster.

I wondered if Sarah would try to send an extraction team in after me, if she was in deep sharn with Templeton and the boys for letting me scoot. I wondered if maybe Temp was already counting me among the dead and kicking himself for not putting me under surveillance, trying to figure out how the hell he was going to lay it all out for the bastards in Washington. It took me the better part of an hour to reach the northern tip of the island and the charred and crumbling corpse of Coler-Goldwater Hospital. The ragtag militia of genetic anarchists who had converged on Manhattan in the autumn of ’69, taking orders from a schizo ex-movie star who called herself Circe Nineteen, had claimed the old hospital as their headquarters. When the army decided to start shelling, Coler had taken the worst of the mortars. Circe Nineteen had been killed by a sniper, but there’d been plenty of freaks on hand to fill her shoes, so to speak.

Beneath the sleeting February sky, the hospital looked as dead as the day after Armageddon. I tried not to think about the spooch, all the things I’d seen and heard the day before, the things I’d felt, the desperate stream of threats and promises and prayers the crit had spewed at me when I’d finally come to the end of the shimmering aether pipeline and we’d started the dance.

Inside, the hospital stunk like a zoo, a dying, forgotten zoo, but at least I was out of the wind. My face and hands had gone numb. How would the Agency feel about a scrubber without his fingers? Would they toss me on the scrap heap, or would they just give me a shiny new set, made in Osaka, better than the originals? Maybe work a little of the biomech magic they’d worked on Sarah? I followed a long ground-floor hallway past doors and doorways without doors, pitch dark rooms and chiaroscuro rooms ruled by the disorienting interplay of shadow and light, until I came to a row of elevators. All the doors had been jammed more or less open at some point, exposing shafts filled with dust and gears and rusted cables. I stood there a while, as my fingers and lips began to tingle, the slow pins-and-needles thaw, and listened to the building whispering around me.

“They’re all animals,” Sarah had sneered the day before. But they weren’t, of course, no more than she was truly a machine. I knew Sarah was bright enough to see the truth, even before they’d squeezed all that hardware into her skull. Even if she could never admit it to herself or anyone else. The cyborgs and H+ brigade were merely opposing poles in the same rebellion against the flesh—black pawn, white pawn—north and south on the same twisted post-evolutionary road. Not that it made much difference to me. It still doesn’t. But standing there, my breath fogging and the feeling slowly returning to my hands, her arrogance was pissing me off more than usual. Near as I could tell, the biggest difference between Sarah and whatever was waiting for me in the bombed-out hospital that afternoon—maybe the only difference that actually mattered—was that the men and women in power had found a use for her kind, while the stitches and changelings had never been anything to them but a nuisance. It might have gone a different way. It might yet.

There was a stairwell near the elevators, and I climbed it to the third floor. I hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight with me, so I stayed close to the wall, feeling my way through the gloom, stumbling more than once when my feet encountered chunks of rubble that had fallen from somewhere overhead.

On the third floor, the child was waiting for me.

“What do you want here?” he barked and blinked at me with the golden eyes of a predatory bird. He was naked, his skin hidden beneath a coat of fine yellow-brown fur.

“Who are you?” I asked him.

“The manticore said you were coming. She saw you on the bridge. What do you want?”

“I’m looking for a girl named Jet.”

The child laughed, a strange, hitching laugh and rolled his eyes. He leaned forward, staring at me intently, expectantly, and the vertical pupils of those big golden eyes dilated slightly.

“Ain’t no girls here, Mister,” he chuckled. “Not anymore. You skizzled or what?”

“Is there anyone here named Jet? I’ve come a long way to talk to her.”

“You got a gun, maybe?” he asked. “You got a knife?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t. I just want to talk.”

“You come out to Stitchtown without a gun or a knife? Then you must have some bangers, Mister. You must have whennymegs big as my fist,” and he held up one clenched fist so I could see exactly what he meant. “Or you don’t want to live so much longer, maybe.”

“Maybe,” I replied.

“Meat’s scarce this time of year,” the boy chuckled and then licked his thin ebony lips.

Down at the other end of the hallway, something growled softly, and the boy glanced over his shoulder, then back up at me. He was smiling, a hard smile that was neither cruel nor kind, revealing the sharp tips of his long canines and incisors. He looked disappointed.

“All in good time,” he said and took my hand. “All in good time,” and I let him lead me towards the eager shadows crouched at the other end of the hallway.

Near the end of his book, Emmanuel Weatherby-Jones writes, “The calamities following, and following from, the return of the IcePIC probe may stand as mankind’s gravest defeat. For long millennia, we had asked ourselves if we were alone in the cosmos. Indeed, that question has surely formed much of the fundamental matter of the world’s religions. But when finally answered, once and for all, we were forced to accept that there had been greater comfort in our former, vanished ignorance.”

We are more alone than ever. Ronnie got that part right.

When I’d backed out of the contact and the techs had a solid lockdown on the critter’s signal, when the containment waves were pinging crystal mad off the putrescent walls of the bedroom on Columbus and one of the medics had administered a stimulant to clear my head and bring me the rest of the way home, I sat down on the floor and cried.

Nothing unusual about that. I’ve cried almost every single time. At least I didn’t puke.

“Good job,” Templeton said and rested a heavy gloved hand on my shoulder.

“Fuck you. I could hear them. I could hear both of them, you asshole.”

“We did what we could, Deet. I couldn’t have you so tanked on morphine you’d end up flat lining.”

“Oh my god. Oh Jesus god,” I sobbed like an old woman, gasping, my heart racing itself round smaller and smaller circles, fried to a crisp on the big syringe full of synthetadrine the medic had pumped into my left arm. “Kill it, Temp. You kill it right this fucking instant.”

“We have to stick to protocol,” he said calmly, staring down at the writhing mass of bone and meat and protoplasm on the bed. A blood-red tendril slithered from the place where the man’s mouth had been and began burrowing urgently into the sagging mattress. “Just as soon as we have you debriefed and we’re sure stasis is holding, then we’ll terminate life signs.”

“Fuck it,” I said and reached for his Beretta, tearing the pistol from the velcro straps of the holster with enough force that Temp almost fell over on top of me. I shoved him aside and aimed at the thing on the bed.

“Deet, don’t you even fucking think about pulling that trigger!”

“You can go straight to Hell,” I whispered, to Templeton, to the whole goddamn Agency, to the spooch and that single hurting blue eye still watching me. I squeezed the trigger, emptying the whole clip into what little was left of the man and woman’s swollen skulls, hoping it would be enough.

Then someone grabbed for the gun, and I let them take it from me.

“You stupid motherfucker,” Temp growled. “You goddamn, stupid bastard. As soon as this job is finished, you are out. Do you fucking understand me, Deet? You are history!”

“Yeah,” I replied and sat back down on the floor. In the silence left after the roar of the gun, the containment waves pinged, and my ears rang, and the yellow fog settled over me like a shroud.

At least, that’s the way I like to pretend it all went down. Late at night, when I can’t sleep, when the pills and booze aren’t enough, I like to imagine there was one moment in my wasted, chicken-shit life when I did what I should have done.

Whatever really happened, I’m sure someone’s already written it down somewhere. I don’t have to do it again.

In the cluttered little room at the end of the third-floor hallway, the woman with a cat’s face and nervous, twitching ears sat near a hole that had been a window before the mortars. There was no light but the dim winter sun. The boy sat at her feet and never took his eyes off me. The woman—if she had a name, I never learned it—only looked at me once, when I first entered the room. The fire in her eyes made short work of whatever resolve I had left, and I was glad when she turned back to the hole in the wall and stared north across the river towards the Astoria refineries.

She told me the girl had left a week earlier. She didn’t have any idea where Jet Miyake might have gone.

“She brings food and medicine, sometimes,” the woman said, confirming what I’d already suspected. Back then, there were a lot of people willing to risk prison or death to get supplies to Roosevelt Island. Maybe there still are. I couldn’t say.

“I’m sorry to hear about her parents,” she said.

“It was quick,” I lied. “They didn’t suffer.”

“You smell like death, Mr. Paine,” the woman said, flaring her nostrils slightly. The boy at her feet laughed and hugged himself, rocking from side to side. “I think it follows you. I believe you herald death.”

“Yeah, I think the same thing myself sometimes,” I replied.

“You hunt the aliens?” she purred.

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

“There’s a certain irony, don’t you think? Our world was dying. We poisoned our world and then went looking for life somewhere else. Do you think we found what we were looking for, Mr. Paine?”

“No,” I told her. “I don’t think we ever will.”

“Go back to the city, Mr. Paine. Go now. You won’t be safe after sunset. Some of us are starving. Some of our children are starving.”

I thanked her and left the room. The boy followed me as far as the stairs, then he stopped and sat chuckling to himself, his laughter echoing through the stairwell, as I moved slowly, step by blind step, through the uncertain darkness. I retraced my path to the street, following Main to East, past the wild places, through the canyons, and didn’t look back until I was standing on the bridge again.

I found Jet Miyake in Chinatown two days later, hiding out in the basement of the Buddhist Society of Wonderful Enlightenment on Madison Street. The Agency had files on a priest there, demonstrating a history of pro-stitch sentiment. Jet Miyake ran, because they always run if they can, and I chased her, down Mechanics Alley, across Henry, and finally caught up with her in a fish market on East Broadway, beneath the old Manhattan Bridge. She tried to lose me in the maze of kiosks, the glistening mounds of octopus and squid, eel and tuna and cod laid out on mountains of crushed ice. She headed for a back door and almost made it, but slipped on the wet concrete floor and went sprawling ass over tits into a big display of dried soba and canned chicken broth. I don’t actually remember all those details, just the girl and the stink of fish, the clatter of the cans on the cement, the angry, frightened shouts from the merchants and customers. But the details, the octopus and soba noodles, I don’t know. I think I’m trying to forget this isn’t fiction, that it happened, that I’m not making it up as I go along.

Sometimes.

Sometimes I’m a savage.

I held the muzzle of my pistol to her right temple while I ran the scan. She gritted her teeth and stared silently up at me. The machine read her dirty as the gray New York snow, though I didn’t need the blinking red light on the genetigraph to tell me that. She was hurting, the way only long-term carriers can hurt. I could see it in her eyes, in the sweat streaming down her face, in the faintly bluish tinge of her lips. She’d probably been contaminated for months. I knew it’d be a miracle if she’d infected no one but her parents. I showed her the display screen on the genetigraph and told her what it meant, and I told her what I had to do next.

“You can’t stop it, you know,” she said, smiling a bitter, sickly smile. “No matter how many people you kill, it’s too late. It’s been too late from the start.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, whether I actually was or not, and squeezed the trigger. The 9mm boomed like thunder in a bottle, and suddenly she wasn’t my problem anymore. Suddenly she was just another carcass for the sweepers.

I have become an unreliable narrator. Maybe I’ve been an unreliable narrator all along. Just like I’ve been a coward and a hypocrite all along. The things we would rather remember, the things we choose to forget. As the old saying goes, it’s only a movie.

I didn’t kill Jet Miyake.

“You can’t stop it, you know,” she said. That part’s the truth. “No matter how many people you kill, it’s too late. It’s been too late from the start.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“We brought it here. We invited it in, and it likes what it sees. It means to stay.” She did smile, but it was a satisfied, secret smile. I stepped back and lowered the muzzle of the gun. The bore had left a slight circular impression on her skin.

“Please step aside, Mr. Paine,” Sarah said, and when I turned around she was standing just a few feet behind me, pointing a ridiculously small carbon-black Glock at the girl. Sarah fired twice and waited until the body stopped convulsing, then put a third bullet in Jet Miyake’s head, just to be sure. Sarah had always been thorough.

“Templeton thought you might get cold feet,” she said and stepped past me, kneeling to inspect the body. “You know this means that you’ll probably be suspended.”

“She was right, wasn’t she?” I muttered. “Sooner or later, we’re going to lose this thing,” and for a moment I considered putting a few rounds into Sarah’s skull, pulling the trigger and spraying brains and blood and silicon across the floor of the fish market. It might have been a mercy killing. But I suppose I didn’t love her quite as much as I’d always thought. Besides, the Agency would have probably just picked up the pieces and stuck her back together again.

“One day at a time, Mr. Paine,” she said. “That’s the only way to stay sane. One day at a time.”

“No past, no future.”

“If that’s the way you want to look at it.”

She stood up and held out a hand. I popped the clip from my pistol and gave her the gun and the ammo. I removed the genetigraph from my belt, and she took that, too.

“We’ll send someone to the hotel for the rest of your equipment. Please have everything in order. You have your ticket back to Los Angeles.”

“Yes,” I said. “I have my ticket back to Los Angeles.”

“You lasted a lot longer than I thought you would,” she said.

And I left her there, standing over the girl’s body, calling in the kill, ordering the sweeper crew. The next day I flew back to LA and found a bar where I was reasonably sure no one would recognize me. I started with tequila, moved on to scotch, and woke up two days later, facedown in the sand at Malibu, sick as a dog. The sun was setting, brewing a firestorm on the horizon, and I watched the stars come out above the sea. A meteor streaked across the sky and was gone. It only took me a moment to find Jupiter, Lord of the Heavens, Gatherer of Clouds, hardly more than a bright pin-prick near the moon.

Originally published in Argosy Magazine, January-February 2004.

About the Author

Caitlín R. Kiernan is a two-time recipient of both the World Fantasy and Bram Stoker awards, and the New York Times has declared her “one of our essential writers of dark fiction.” Her recent novels include The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, and, to date, her short stories have been collected in twelve volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder, A is for Alien, The Ammonite Violin & Others, and the World Fantasy Award winning The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories. Currently she’s editing her thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth collections–Beneath an Oil Dark Sea: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume 2) and Cambrian Tales (Subterranean Press) and Houses Under the Sea: Mythos Tales (Centipede Press). She has recently concluded Alabaster, her award-winning, three-volume graphic novel for Dark Horse Comics. She will soon begin work on her next novel, Interstate Love Song, based on “Interstate Love Long (Murder Ballad No. 8).” She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

The Day-Glo Dystopia of Poly Styrene:

Punk Prophet and Science Fiction Priestess

Jason Heller

Her cheeks round and her teeth gleaming with braces, Poly Styrene sits in front of a television set, staring raptly at the flickering screen. At the age of twenty-one, she easily looks five years younger. If they didn’t already know, no one guess that this is one of the most exciting young rock stars in England.

The year is 1979, and Styrene’s band, X-Ray Spex, has been launched into the limelight thanks to their 1978 debut album, Germfree Adolescents. Technically speaking, it’s punk rock. But it also incorporates saxophone, synthesizers, and Styrene’s buoyant yelp, a voice that’s both bubbly and piercing.

Styrene is being filmed for an episode of BBC’s August Arena documentary series, an hour-long program titled, aptly enough, Who Is Poly Styrene? As she’s being captured for TV, she’s also gazing at a TV, forming a strange recursion. She’s watching a show about John Maynard Smith, the eminent geneticist and author of the canonical scientific text The Theory of Evolution.

In this documentary-within-a-documentary, Smith explains how genetic engineering—the deliberate manipulation of the human genome in order to effect a desired result in newborns—may come to play a large part in the evolution of the human species in the coming centuries. Styrene’s eyes are wide, but she’s not buying it. In response to the prospect of human beings being engineered in the womb to grow up more qualified to work certain jobs, she says, “In the wrong hands and used the wrong way, [genetic engineering] is terrible. I mean, I find that quite frightening that actually we won’t have much control.” She’s mixing the skepticism of a punk priestess with the dystopian clarity of a science fiction prophet.

Punk exploded in 1977 thanks to the release of The Sex Pistol’s Never Mind the Bollocks, and although proto-punk and post-punk would both draw heavily from science fiction, punk itself couldn’t have been less concerned with science fiction. Science Fiction was still associated with the florid extravagance of progressive rock, whose grandiosity punk rock aimed to deflate. Fantasy, naturally, was completely off the table; no punk band would have been caught dead singing about unicorns, dragons, or wizards, although many punk bands worshipped T. Rex’s Marc Bolan, who unabashedly celebrated all three of those fantasy tropes in his music.

The early British punk band Alternative TV had a song in 1977 called “How Much Longer,” in which the preeminent fantasy author Michael Moorcock is explicitly lumped in with the hippie scene: “How much longer will joss sticks rule / They grow their hair long and stringy and wear Jesus boots / Afghan coats, yeah, making peace signs, man / Talk about Moorcock, Floyd down the Reading Festival?” Punk was all about gritty social realism and pugnacious confrontation; escapism of any kind was deemed the enemy.

That said, X-Ray Spex weren’t the only punk band of the ’70s explosion that tapped into the nervier side of science fiction. A handful of punk bands referenced SF here and there; Scotland’s peppy, outrageously-costumed The Rezillos steeped themselves in b-movie schlock, naming songs “Destination Venus” and “Flying Saucer Attack.” The Clash namechecked the villainous cyborgs the Daleks in their 1977 song “Remote Control.” The Adicts took on the eerie, boiler-suit-and-bowler-hat look of the droogs from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, adapted from Anthony Burgess’ 1962 dystopian book. In fact, A Clockwork Orange’s lurid look at youth-gang brutality in the near future held sway on many punks, including the Misfits. The New Jersey band formed in 1977, and leader Glenn Danzig turned their morbid yet catchy songs into miniature tributes to many science fiction and horror films and tropes, from “I Turned Into a Martian” to “Astro Zombies.”

It’s a great irony that, within a decade of punk’s big bang in 1977, a new subgenre of science fiction—cyberpunk—would co-opt the term as a suffix, one that would eventually and enthusiastically be used in an ever increasing array of science fiction and fantasy subgenres, from steampunk to clockpunk to dieselpunk to mythpunk. Punk may not have had more than a grudging rapport with science fiction and fantasy at first, but the genres haven’t held any grudges.

Styrene was born Marianne Joan Elliott-Said in 1957, the daughter of a Scottish-Irish mother and a Somali father. After a period of teenage rebellion in the mid-’70s—including a stint as a hippie, not to mention a failed record as a reggae singer, titled “Silly Billy,” that was released in 1976 under the name Mari Elliott—Styrene renamed herself when she became baptized by punk.

She was nineteen when she assumed her new persona. Her band X-Ray Spex was inspired by the shocking phenomenon of The Sex Pistols, whose lewd, sneering, blasphemous mouthpiece Johnny “Rotten” Lydon had become Britain’s public enemy number one. For all its infamy, though, punk broke down doors. Hordes of kids who had previously never thought themselves motivated or talented enough to start a band picked up guitars, drums, and microphones. And as crude as punk proudly was, they began expressing themselves.

X-Ray Spex were part of that wave, but they were a different kind of punk band. Instead of spiking her hair, Styrene kept it curly. Instead of dressing in leather, safety pins, bondage pants, and other garb meant to evoke an image of nihilistic sadomasochism, Styrene wrapped herself in vivid pastels and kitschy clothes from secondhand shops. Her pop-art style carried over to the name of the band, which was taken from the Cold War-era toy called X-Ray Specs—allegedly able to imbue the wearer with the ability to see through skin and clothes—which was advertised primarily in comic books.

It’s telling that X-Ray Spex dubbed themselves after a cheap, frivolous, clearly fraudulent bauble. Styrene, after all, took the name of a plastic as her pseudonym. On Germfree Adolescents, the song “Art-I-Ficial” addresses that plastic nature, the slick and hermetic falseness that had come to envelope consumer society. In it Styrene sings, “My existence is elusive / The kind that is supported / By mechanical resources,” as if she’s enslaved in a state of blissful yet horrific cybernetic stasis.

Her feeling wasn’t an isolated one. In the ’60s and ’70s, technophobia had established itself one of the staple themes of science fiction, after the generally optimistic Golden Age of Science Fiction had given way to the more cynical and complex New Wave. Dystopia gripped the popular imagination, and technology was crucial to the praxis of oppression. From The Twilight Zone episode “A Thing About Machines”—in which everyday appliances turn against their unappreciative owner—to Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s classic science fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, which prophesizes a post-apocalyptic future that shuns science.

Rather than recoil from technology, however, Styrene embraces it with postmodern irony. That gleeful capitulation to mass-marketed inhumanity makes it all the more chilling when she claims, “I wanna be Instamatic / I wanna be a frozen pea / I wanna be dehydrated / In a consumer society,” in the in X-Ray Spex song “Art-I-Ficial.” The phrase “frozen pea” very nearly rhymes with “Soylent Green”; in fact, the people-derived foodstuff from Harry Harrison’s novel Make Room! Make Room! could easily be substituted into the song without significantly changing its meaning.

Consumerism in its most rampant form is another SF theme that dominates Germfree Adolescents. Amid its serrated guitars, squawking saxophone, and barbed pop hooks, the album weaves an ironic, sophisticated subtext that mocks its own commercial aspirations while undeniably embodying, if not emblemizing, them. It envisions an insidiously euphoric future in which a gleaming sheen of artifice and homogeneity cocoons society like so much shrink wrap. And whether we like it or not, Styrene posits, that future is now. As she told John Savage in his book England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond:

My thing was more like consumerism, plastic artificial living. [ . . . ] There was so much junk then. The idea was to send it all up. Screaming about it, saying: “Look, this is what you have done to me, turned me into a piece of Styrofoam, I am your product. And this is what you created: Do you like her?”

The record-buying public in England did indeed like her, shrill deconstruction and all. Styrene, for a brief time, became a bona fide pop star in England, thanks to infectious punk anthems like “The Day the World Turned Day-Glo,” a propulsive song with hallucinatory couplets such as “X-rays were penetrating through the latex breeze / Synthetic fiber, see-through leaves fell from nylon trees,” which might have come straight out of one of J. G. Ballard’s dreamlike catastrophe novels, but especially 1966’s The Crystal World. That exultation in pure plastic-ness set the tone for the new wave music of the ’80s to follow, which glibly skimmed the surface of Styrene’s image and sound without touching the substance underneath.

“I wanted to write something using all kinds of plastic words and artificial things, make kind of a fantasy style around it,” Styrene said of “The Day the World Turned Day-Glo,” adding, “It means something too. In an indirect way it’s about the modern world, and maybe you could say it’s futuristic.” Styrene never spoke openly about any possible science fiction influences on her antiseptic yet kaleidoscopic view of art and society, but it had many precedents in SF. The relation between consumerism and conformity is at the core of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 milestone Brave New World, a novel whose ideas have since trickled down and permeated the cultural bedrock.

These ideas also pop up in the works of Golden Age science fiction authors Frederick Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, both separately and as collaborators. In the 1950s, Pohl and Kornbluth each published short stories—“The Midas Plague” and “The Marching Morons,” respectively—that projected the growing trend of consumerist obsession into a nightmarish tomorrow, and the two co-wrote the like-minded novels The Space Merchants and Search the Sky. Satirical and scathing, these stories served as cautionary tales against the herd mentality that Pohl and Kornbluth saw American society eagerly adopt, all too soon after the defeat of Fascism in Europe in World War II. Capitalist society purported to exalt the individual, but given near infinite choice, people chose to be the same anyway. They even identified themselves by packages, brands, and consumer choices as much as anything that’s unique and intrinsic to themselves. It’s the same unsettling paradox that Styrene oozes, from her name to her music.

Styrene’s sly sense of humor dovetails with another work of science fiction, one that was rising at the same time as X-Ray Spex. In 1978, Douglas Adams’ radio show The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy debuted on the BBC, followed a year later by his novelization. The clever, madcap tale of a hapless human named Arthur Dent who stumbles toward the secrets of the cosmos after witnessing the destruction of Earth (to make way for an intergalactic bypass), The Hitchhiker’s Guide captured the minds of a generation and became an instant phenomenon—and while Adams wasn’t a punk by any stretch of the imagination, his iconoclastic attitude and sharp wit couldn’t have been more in tune with Styrene’s.

As befits X-Ray Spex’s worship of superficiality, the only blatant reference to science fiction in Styrene’s lyrics pertain to the most popular SF television show of the time. “Bionic Man is jumping / Through the television set / He’s about to materialize / And guess who’s coming next,” she sings in  “Genetic Engineering,” referencing the titular hero of The Bionic Man as played by Lee Majors.

Granted, Majors’ character isn’t genetically engineered; he’s a cyborg, half man and half machine. If anything, though, that cheerful disregard for factual rigor only makes Styrene’s slapdash, secondhand repurposing of science fiction seem that much more fitting. Tragically, Styrene’s knack for blurring the boundaries between science fact and science fiction took on a  devastating dimension when, in 1979, her then-undiagnosed mental illness contributed to a startling vision she saw while on tour with X-Ray Spex. In England’s Dreaming, she remembers:

All of a sudden I looked out of the hotel window. And I saw this sort of energy. It was bright, bright, luminous pink, and it had a disc shape. It was faster than the speed of light. I was inside a window, but the radiation effect hit my body. I was suffering afterwards, and my body kept going hot and cold.

X-Ray Spex fell apart soon after Styrene’s breakdown. From there, her forays into music were sporadic; she issued three solo albums over the decades, including 1980’s restrained yet sublime Translucence, which vibrates on some blissed-out plane of cosmic mysticism—that is, as much as a synth-heavy new-wave album could do that. X-Ray Spex regrouped for a comeback album in 1994, Conscious Consumer, but practically all of the SF-centric elements of Germfree Adolescents were stripped away in favor of more on-the-nose social statements. Styrene still delivered them playfully, even if her unique alchemy of surreal SF and biting commentary had been diluted.

Styrene’s final solo album, Generation Indigo, came out in April of 2011. She died of cancer the week of its release at the age of fifty-three. Even at the end, her voice retained an elastic youthfulness, as if she’d been hermetically preserved in exactly the manner she once sang about in X-Ray Spex. Listening back to Germfree Adolescents, Styrene comes across as a citizen of some troubling, deceptively utopian future, one who has excavated the remnants of late-20th-century culture. Now, through the language of song, she’s attempting to make sense of our fossils. She’s not, however, an archaeologist. She simply found our civilization buried under her playground.

About the Author

Jason Heller is a former nonfiction editor of Clarkesworld; as part of the magazine’s 2012 editorial team, he received a Hugo Award. He is also the author of the alt-history novel Taft 2012 (Quirk Books) and a Senior Writer for The Onion’s pop-culture site, The A.V. Club. His short fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine, Sybil’s Garage, Farrago’s Wainscot, and others, and his SFF-related reviews and essays have been published in Weird Tales, Entertainment Weekly NPR.org, Tor.com, and Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Time Traveler’s Almanac (Tor Books). He lives in Denver with this wife Angie.

The Paradox of the Telescope:

A Conversation with Robert Charles Wilson

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

I discovered Robert Charles Wilson’s work in February of 2009, with the slender and elegant novel Bios. Though I was in the middle of reading three or four other books at the time, once I started it I couldn’t stop. Compelling characters, interesting politics, an unnerving but wholly plausible science fictional set-up, and nothing extraneous—I finished it that same night. After Bios, I picked up more of his novels, but then I started focusing heavily on reading short stories and thought to myself, “It’s probably going to be a while before I get back to Wilson.”

Wrong.

Later that same year, in the dealer’s room at WorldCon in Montréal, I chanced on a signed, first edition hardcover of his collection of stories The Perseids and Other Stories. I couldn’t pass it up. And I’m glad I didn’t. “Divided by Infinity” is just one of several stories that linger in the mind long after reading, and it reinforced my sense of having discovered a major science fiction writer. None of Wilson’s subsequent releases, which I now eagerly anticipate, have made me doubt that belief.

Robert Charles Wilson’s first novel, A Hidden Place, was published in 1986. Since then he has written seventeen novels, including the Hugo Award-winning Spin, and the aforementioned collection of short stories, The Perseids and Other Stories. Other awards include the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel The Chronoliths, the Philip K. Dick Award for the novel Mysterium, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for his short story “The Cartesian Theater.” His work in translation has received the Seiun Award, the Kurd Lasswitz Prize, and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire. He lives just outside Toronto with his wife, proofreader, and music journalist Sharry Wilson. His most recent novel is The Affinities.

Your work—particularly Spin (2005) and its two sequels, Axis (2007) and Vortex (2011)—powerfully conveys what Robert Silverberg once described as the “smallness of Us and the immensity of It.” Would you say science fiction is particularly well-suited to exploring this theme?

I can’t think of a genre better suited to exploring it. But there’s more here than just the truism that we’re insignificant creatures dwarfed by a vast, uncaring cosmos. There’s the startling fact that we know this about ourselves. I think of it as the paradox of the telescope: What amazing and unprecedented creatures we are, that we can build a telescope and discover what small and insignificant creatures we are. And that’s not just a facile irony—I think it’s an invitation to awe rather than despair.

You’ve been called an heir to Theodore Sturgeon and Ray Bradbury, while also being compared to Olaf Stapledon and Greg Egan. Is combining intimacy and pathos with more cosmic, reality-bending perspectives a conscious decision on your part, or does it simply emerge from the kinds of stories you choose to tell?

I’m not sure that’s a real dichotomy. The cosmos is only meaningful to the degree that it’s experienced by sentient beings, after all. And fiction as an art form is a finely-tuned device for generating a sense of intimacy and pathos in readers—a novel that doesn’t do that, at least to some degree, is fundamentally broken.

The way narrative can capture and evoke the shared experience of our lives—the scratch of snow against an icy window, a conversation at a garden party, the touch of a hand in a darkened room—is a big part of why I read and why I write. And what’s wonderful about science fiction is that it lets us treat the cosmic and the ordinary as a figure-and-ground reversal, a sort of literary Nekker cube.

Your science fiction novels are remarkably varied. In what ways do you keep your curiosity and creativity primed, to sustain what Paul Di Filippo has called your “deliberate heterogeneity”?

I think it’s just my own scattershot curiosity, in combination with a genre that lets me get away with indulging it. And while I don’t think of what I do as “genre-bending,” some of my novels are in a kind of dialogue with genres other than science fiction, which might make them seem more heterogeneous than they really are. Julian Comstock borrows its voice and structure from 19th-century American moralistic and adventure fiction, for instance, and Burning Paradise has a few nods to contemporary thrillers and horror novels.

Given the range of your science fiction works, have you ever considered writing a novel outside the genres of the fantastic altogether? How about non-fiction?

I’ve thought about it, and I don’t rule it out, but there’s very little of what I want to do that doesn’t fit within science fiction, to be honest. As for non-fiction—I watched my wife Sharry Wilson go through the long process of writing her book Young Neil (ECW Press, 2014, about the early years of singer/songwriter Neil Young), and I don’t think I have what it takes to do that kind of sustained, detailed research.

Readers have noted a tone of melancholy in works like Memory Wire (1988), Darwinia (1998), The Chronoliths (2001), Blind Lake (2003) and the more recent Burning Paradise (2013). Gary Wolfe, discussing your short stories, commented on their “heartbreaking sense of loss.” Has this been inspired by specific personal losses, or does it result from a more abstract existential worldview—or both?

I guess I’ve experienced as much personal loss as the average North American of my age and background, but if there’s a sense of melancholy in my work I don’t think that’s the sole explanation. Nor am I sure about “a more abstract existential worldview,” but maybe that’s closer to the truth. We’re the first species on Earth to have evolved the kind of sentience that forces us to acknowledge (or deny) our mortality, both as individuals and as a species. I don’t know if that’s “heartbreaking,” but it’s certainly poignant. You can’t talk about time and change without giving at least a little thought to human ephemerality. “Man is in love, and loves what vanishes.”

The Affinities, just out, is your 17th novel; The Perseids and Other Stories (2000) is your only short story collection to date. Your bibliography suggests a shift away from short stories during the last decade or so. Can you talk a little about that?

A temporary shift, maybe. I tend to write short stories in batches, and you’re right, it’s been a few years since the last round. I think of myself as a novelist first, and I read more novels than short fiction, so maybe that’s natural. But short fiction still interests me. Some of the writers I most enjoy reading do their best work at shorter lengths—Steven Millhauser, Ray Bradbury, Ted Chiang. It wouldn’t take much more than an interesting idea to lure me back into short fiction.

I’m currently reading Millhauser’s collection Voices in the Night, and it strikes me how fragile these wonderful stories are, like delicate life-forms that can exist only in the ecosystem of short fiction. Millhauser seems to generate such ideas effortlessly. I don’t. Short stories are labor-intensive for me. But some ideas only work at shorter lengths, and yeah, I’ve stored up a few such ideas. We’ll see.

The first part of The Affinities deals with Adam Fisk finding a new family for himself in the Tau Affinity. The name Tau made me think of the five castes—Alphas through Epsilons—in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Do you see The Affinities as tracing its lineage to this type of social science fiction, or do its roots lie elsewhere?

I wasn’t thinking of Brave New World when I wrote The Affinities, though I’m flattered by the comparison. And this may be a petty distinction, but The Affinities isn’t social science fiction in the sense of “fiction based on the social sciences.” The Affinities imagines a kind of social technology derived from new discoveries in cognitive science. In other words, the imaginary technology is social but the speculative science undergirding it is cognitive and neurological.

The Affinities, of course, aren’t castes. No one’s obliged to join one, and you can leave at any time. In many ways, they’re the opposite of an authoritarian model of organization. They aren’t easy to govern from the outside, and they quickly evolve out from under the nominal control of their parent corporation. What makes them powerful is what they offer—an idealized family, an idealized politics, meaningful social support systems—and the open-ended way they evolve and compete.

In a way, the idea owes more to stories like H.G. Wells’ “The Door in the Wall” than to dystopias like Huxley’s Brave New World. The Wells story is a fable about a man who discovers a mysterious green door that admits him to a paradisiacal world in which all his longings are fulfilled—but if you leave, you may never find that door again. The Affinities begins with the narrator Adam Fisk hesitating at a door that seems to make a similar promise. Adam’s door-in-the-wall is a suite of neurological tests, and the paradise behind it is perfectly real. But it’s not the only paradise, and not everyone who knocks on the door can get in. That’s the moral and political dilemma at the heart of the book.

If there was a perfect Affinity for you, what would it be like?

The Tau tranche house, at least as Adam encounters it in the first part of the book, feels like a place I could happily live. And the most positive reactions I’ve heard are from readers who feel the same way. But it’s part of the premise that not everyone will find Tau particularly alluring. “Your mileage may vary” is built into the nature of the concept.

One of The Affinities’ central concerns is how human culture and individuals might be transformed, for better or worse, by the application of science to human dynamics. How do you get along with social media in the here-and-now?

Indifferently and idiosyncratically. I enjoy interacting with readers on Facebook, for instance, but I can’t work up any real enthusiasm for Twitter. But that’s just me. I don’t have any weighty Cory-Doctorow-like insights to offer, and of course The Affinities isn’t about social media, though a couple of reviews have drawn the connection.

In a recent interview you mentioned that “cognitive science is opening big new doors for imaginative fiction to step through.” Who are some of your favorite pioneers—writers or scientists—of this frontier?

Terrence W. Deacon is a professor of evolutionary anthropology at UC Berkeley who wrote a book called Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. He invented the word “teleodynamics,” which I borrowed for The Affinities, mainly because it sounds so wonderfully science-fictional. Deacon’s book sketches out how we might begin to understand life and consciousness at the level of complex thermodynamics. It’s immensely interesting stuff, almost a blueprint for the next century’s work on abiogenesis and the evolution of consciousness. (One of Deacon’s graduate students just emailed me to say Deacon “thinks it is rather cool that teleodynamics got a mention in a science fiction book.”) Another book I keep going back to is Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.

Both books are large, long, and technical, so I don’t necessarily recommend them to the casually curious. And I’m not a scientist or a philosopher, so I can’t evaluate them on that level. But they led me down some interesting speculative roads, and that’s already showing up in my fiction—in The Affinities in particular, and in a book I haven’t yet started to write, tentatively called The Cure.

John Clute, in his review of Burning Paradise, posits that one of the novel’s main themes is “that we were not designed to survive our evolutionary success . . . having escaped our niche, we have nothing but ourselves to eat.” How do you feel about this interpretation, and how does this idea strike you in real life?

A little bleak. It’s true, I think, that our technological success is taking us out of our comfort zone as a species. We haven’t evolved a lot of tools for dealing with slow, large-scale problems like global warming, and we have a bad habit of clinging to social and economic institutions even when they’ve outlived their usefulness or demonstrated toxic side effects.

In Burning Paradise an alien symbiotic entity has helped us address some of those problems, without our knowledge and for purposes that aren’t entirely altruistic. But the irony is that the aliens aren’t conscious, sentient beings. They’re essentially machinelike, and all they can do to achieve their ends is manipulate human nature as they find it. In other words, they haven’t made us do anything we couldn’t have done on our own. The paradise that burns is as much our creation as it is theirs.

You’ve been hard at work finishing a new time-travel novel called The Last Year. How does time travel in this novel differ or relate to its depiction in A Bridge of Years (1991) and The Chronoliths? What was the inspiration for The Last Year? Any tentative idea of its release date?

A Bridge of Years and The Chronoliths were both fairly conventional time-travel stories, with the conventional concerns about how altering the past might alter the future. I didn’t want to write that kind of story again. The Last Year imagines a vast array of “pasts,” each one a distinct alternate universe. Nothing you can do in such a universe affects anything back home. If this were Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder,” you could shoot dinosaurs and trample Paleolithic butterflies to your heart’s content.

So we have a situation in which corporate interests are free. Treat the past as an exploitable commodity—say, by opening a luxury resort hotel in 1870s America, catering to wealthy tourists from the future but also to locals rich enough to pay for the opportunity to gawk at motion pictures and dioramas of The Word to Come. Cultural conflict is inevitable, of course, and it means such a project is unsustainable—either the locals are going to be fatally offended and bring the whole thing down, or this version of “the past” will change so dramatically that it loses the virtue of authenticity. But a few years is long enough to extract a significant profit, and who cares if it doesn’t last longer than that? There’s always another 1875. It’s a renewable resource.

Part of the fun of the book is the uncensored dialogue between two Gilded Ages, each deeply suspicious of the other. The “last year,” of course, is the year when it all breaks down.

I should be handing in the book next month, but there’s no publication date yet.

About the Author

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro is the co-author, with Robert Silverberg, of When the Blue Shift Comes, which received a starred review from Library Journal. Alvaro’s short fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Analog, Nature, Galaxy’s Edge, Apex and other venues, and Alvaro was nominated for the 2013 Rhysling Award. Alvaro’s reviews, critical essays and interviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Strange Horizons, SF Signal, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Foundation, and other markets. Alvaro currently edits the blog for Locus.

Another Word:

The Vaguely Picaresque Adventures of a New Writer

John Chu

In 2012, a contingent of Chinese fans go to ChiCon 7. I think I may have chatted with all of them. The Three Body Problem, Liu Cixin’s hard SF trilogy comes up again and again. (Yes, the actual name of the trilogy is Remembrance of Earth’s Past but no one I talk to ever calls it that.) When I get home, I order it and start reading the first book. Like you do.

A few months later, Ken Liu makes a sly reference to it on Facebook and I’m all “Hey! Are you reading that book, too?” It’s not announced yet but Ken’s not just reading it, he’s translating it into English. It turns out that he’s looking for a beta reader who’s both a science fiction writer and someone who’s read the book and would I be interested. Well, of course.

Now, in this case, what beta reading means is not just reading then commenting on the translation. It’s cross-checking the translation against the original. In other words, translate the original then compare that translation with both Ken’s translation and the original text a few sentences at a time. What I end up doing is very much translation with occasional training wheels. For example, I take a pass on some of the wordplay and marvel at Ken’s invention instead. However, I also recreate some of Ken’s research. For example, to translate this book you need to know what songs the US military played to smoke Noriega out of the Apostolic Nunciature of the Holy See in Panama City. (By the way, no, there does not exist a John Chu translation of The Three Body Problem.)

At LonCon 3 in 2014, I will be on a translation panel. When I talk about this work, the translator to my left will look appalled at me and then ask why anyone would ever do this to himself. After all, it amounts to writing a translation that no one will ever read. I will counter that I learned a lot in the process. Cross-checking Ken’s work means questioning and understanding his every decision. For me, that experience was invaluable. Beta reading Ken’s work has been a master class in translation and I feel privileged for the opportunity. Of course, it’s also difficult and time-consuming. You only do this because you really want to.

[Digression: As a side-effect, this makes me absurdly well-qualified to talk about Ken’s translation of The Three Body Problem. I think it’s terrific. It is highly readable and, faithful, but not too faithful. As Umberto Eco says, tradurre è tradire. A reasonable translation of that sentence may give short shrift to the music that makes that sentence so quotable (“To translate is to betray”) or present the meaning in way that’s far too obscure (“To translate is to traduce”). Time and time again, Ken steers deftly around the pitfalls. His translation gives you the sense of having read Liu Cixin even though you haven’t read his actual words. That’s really impressive. He does a similarly skillful job with the third book in the trilogy, Death’s End, which is also, in my opinion, the best book in the trilogy.]

At LonestarCon 3 in 2013, I catch up with Meizi Wang, whom I don’t get to see nearly enough. She translates for a living, primarily from English and French into Chinese. While we’re waiting for a reading to start, we’re chatting about her translation work, her recent vacation to Taiwan and just stuff. Tang Fei joins the conversation. Tang and I actually met a little earlier that day but we haven’t been introduced yet, so Meizi introduces me to her, mentioning how I’d beta-read Ken’s translation. As it turns out, Tang is looking for a translator and would I be interested? Well, of course.

And that is how I got my first translation gig. As far as I can tell, I get it mostly because I was curious about everyone else and what they were doing.

Now, of course, this account skips some things.

I haven’t talked about the years I spent getting my Chinese to the point where reading a Liu Cixin novel for pleasure isn’t out of the question. As many, many people have pointed out, what the saying “Learning Chinese is a five-year lesson in humility” means is that after five years, your Chinese will still be awful but you will have learned humility. Now, as a heritage speaker, I have it easier than some. My grammar has always been relatively decent, for example. On the other hand, I’m still expanding my vocabulary.

I haven’t talked about translating blog posts for friends. Once, a friend of mine goes to the Bookworm Festival in Beijing. One of her interviews is written up as a blog post in Chinese and I translate it for her. Doing that raises some interesting questions about the nature of translation. The interview is actually conducted in their mutual second language, English. Rendering the interview back into English takes it back to its original language, but probably not their actual words. That blog post also quotes, in Chinese, a metaphor from one of her own blog posts, which is are in English. The back-translation of the quote is actually a slightly different metaphor than her own. Which better conveys the Chinese blog post, a back-translation of the quote or the actual quote itself.

Unexpected doors open. When I can walk through them without falling and slamming my face on the sill, it’s because my time doing what interested me has, as a side-effect, prepared me.

How “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” gets published is a mini-saga in and of itself. One of the reasons I send it out again and again is because it keeps getting these really encouraging rejections. This includes one rewrite request that doesn’t convert and the most effusive rejection I have ever gotten. It comes from Ann VanderMeer. At this point, she’s still at Weird Tales. Ann sees the story, in part, because I’m running out of markets and desperate and, in part, because she’s an amazing editor and I just want her to read it. Ann loves the story, rightly points out that it’s not a weird tale, and suggests some other venues. She also says, among other wonderful things, that if she were at the right venue, she’d snap it up.

Fast forward some months and Ann VanderMeer is announced as one of Tor.com’s new associate editors. The story is between slush piles and, of course, I haven’t forgotten about the most effusive rejection ever. I immediately wonder whether she has and whether Tor.com is the right venue. Bizarrely, I also wonder whether it’s ok for me to query and I lament that if only there were some pros nearby I could ask for advice. Keep in mind that when Tor.com makes this announcement, I am Chicon7. I can only plead temporary insanity. (To their credit, the pros I ask are all very kind to the newbie as they reassure me.)

What I don’t know at the time is that, meanwhile, Ann is wondering whether that John Chu story is still available.

And so, I am saved from myself. “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” ends up being either the first or second story she take for Tor.com. That is how I make my by third SFWA qualifying sale . . . which then goes on to win the Hugo for Best Short Story in 2014.

Talk about unexpected doors opening.

Of course, what I’ve skipped past are years of hard work improving my prose and, learning how to tell a story. What I haven’t talked about are the years of doing what interested me just for its own sake, which has turned out to be helpful.

When Ann takes “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” for Tor.com, she also gives me some advice. Good work is the fount from which good things flow. I think, ultimately, all anyone can do is get better at doing the things they love doing. Everything else, it either happens or doesn’t.

Or maybe, everything else, it both happens and doesn’t. There is a Buddhist notion of “Where does the story end?” The same story can be, for example, sad or happy depending on where we choose to stop telling it. Stories go on forever. How we classify them is an arbitrary effect of presentation. So, with Ann’s advice in mind, I’ll stop this story here.

About the Author

John Chu is a microprocessor architect by day, a writer, translator, and podcast narrator by night. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming at Boston Review, Uncanny, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Apex Magazine and Tor.com. His story “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” won the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Short Story.

Editor’s Desk:

Once Again Down the Rabbit Hole

Neil Clarke

There isn’t a month that goes by where someone doesn’t complain about how publishing is stacked against them. Last month, I stumbled across a Facebook discussion about a few men who felt oppressed by the existence of an all-female anthology. Usually, that’s enough for me to just scroll on by, but before doing so, I noticed a comment by Ellen Datlow:

The only difference between all female and all male anthos is that the former are created deliberately and the latter are created out of negligence.

That’s probably the most accurate and level-headed comment I’ve ever seen in one of these discussions. Smart statements can get you thinking and this one did.

In the past, we’ve run articles and editorials that have looked at slush pile and publication statistics for short stories. For the most part, things tend to fall around seventy percent male and thirty percent female. Subconsciously, I’ve always figured those percentages could safely fluctuate by plus or minus ten without drawing much negative attention to a market. The further you go beyond that range . . . someone eventually gets offended for right or wrong reasons.

So why is it that my own magazine regularly drifts well outside those expectations? Several times our annual breakdown has been nearly seventy percent female. What’s up with that? It certainly wasn’t deliberate. Is it an indication of a grand conspiracy? Do we have something to fix? Down the rabbit hole I went.

Before I go further, I’d like to acknowledge two things:

I’ve been speaking about gender in a strictly binary sense. I know that some people would like to see this broken out to include more genderfluid options, but the dataset for that group is small enough (frequently much less than three percent in our samples) that I’m uncomfortable using it to make any meaningful observations.

Also, every time I start a discussion like this, I feel the obligation to remind people that editors select what they think are the best stories for their publication. This is a purely qualitative assessment. Looking at the slush pile quantitatively can let you know if you have to start actively soliciting stories from an under-represented group, but it shouldn’t be used to determine what your final ratios should be. If seventy percent of the stories come from one group, it doesn’t necessarily mean that seventy percent of the best stories will also come from that group. Talent (as perceived by the editor) tips the scales.

To date, I haven’t been able to come up with a satisfactory explanation as to why our final selections have tilted the way they have. The best I could state was that it appeared that female authors had a better handle on what we were likely to publish. Maybe the best male authors were busy sending their stories elsewhere. Maybe the best female authors were sending us their stories first. Maybe it is created out of negligence.

I recently took some criticism from another editor for refusing to define what makes a Clarkesworld story. I’ve called it a moving target, something that makes me think, and even a pleasant surprise, but I’ve never seen the point in trying to nail it down. Since I’m the qualitative filter that appears to be skewing the system, it occurs to me that they may be right. That could have value.

I’ve been avidly reading short stories for over thirty-five years. I can’t even begin to estimate the number of works that encompasses. The same old thing bores me. I reject a lot of good stories simply because they are too familiar and I don’t mean that they are plagiarizing or even very similar to other stories. It’s just that they follow the same formula. It’s a trip to the old neighborhood: pleasant and predictable. That’s not what I want. What I want is to be taken somewhere new or somewhere old in a new way.

So, after some time, I came to the conclusion that my own history is to blame. I’ve lived through a time where the overwhelming majority of short stories were written by white men and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. It does mean, however, that those are my anti-influences. Those are the people you have to beat. Those are the people you have to be different than.

So, my grand theory of why I’ve published more women than men is that we probably don’t share the same influences. That same theory may be true for younger or foreign authors as well. I’m looking for science fiction and fantasy that takes me somewhere new. These groups might just have an advantage in that department.

While that’s a rational theory, I had absolutely no data to back it up, so off to the internet I went. I started a short survey, expecting to attract maybe one or two hundred participants. At the end of three days, it was almost nine hundred and fifty.

The survey asked short story authors the following questions:

- Age (Under 18, 18-21, 22-29, 30-39, 40-49, 50-59, 60-69, 70-79, Over 80)

- Gender (Open ended text)

- Whether or not they had been published by Clarkesworld

- Whether or not they had been traditionally published (publisher model)

- Whether or not they had self-published

- What country they were from

- And up to five of the authors or editors that influenced their writing

Authors are terrible spellers. It took three days to get the data into a state that I could use for analysis. Fortunately, there were only a few entries that needed to be tossed because they were either too vague or accidental double submissions.

So who are the most influential people in short fiction?

The list changes only slightly if you remove the unpublished authors,

but when you break that group down by gender, it indicates that men lean more towards the traditional/classics and women have more diverse influences. There’s only a forty percent overlap (King, Le Guin, Gaiman, Bradbury) between the two groups and women are less likely to have been influenced by those authors than their male counterparts.

Let’s take a look at the responses from Clarkesworld authors.

Of the overall list, we’ve published original works by two of the authors cited as influences (Valente and VanderMeer). One, Valente, is someone we’ve published almost every year. It makes some sense that we’d attract authors they’ve influenced and interestingly, all of them in this group are women. Sixty-two percent of the women’s list, eighteen percent of the men’s list, and thirty-six percent of the overall list of influencers are female.

Next, I pulled apart the data by age and gender.

As you can see from the age distribution chart above, our authors skew a bit younger than the majority of those participating in the survey. That blip in the 70-79 and Under 18 ranges has more to do with the sample size and should probably be ignored.

Common sense says to me that the younger authors are going to have a different set of influencers than the older ones, but what wasn’t clear to me before digging into the data was that gender magnifies that break from the past. Take Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke for example. You won’t find any of them on the top ten lists for women under fifty, but one or more is on every top ten list for the men across all ages. In the Clarkesworld lists, only Asimov makes an appearance in the men’s list. Even King’s influence is barely present in the Clarkesworld lists and overall, his impact is barely felt on the top ten for all women under forty. In their place, Gaiman, Valente, Pratchett, and Butler rank high.

Breaking the published group into foreign and American authors resulted in the following:

I expected more variation from these lists, but I suspect that the sample size from outside the UK/Canada/Australia block was insufficient to overcome their influence. I’d love to do another survey with non-English speaking writers sometime. It might be interesting to see how influential English language works are outside our bubble.

So far, I’ve dropped a lot of data on you, and trust me, there is a lot more. I’ve pulled and prodded at this data trying to assess whether or not my past is influencing what I publish here. With rare exception, I’ve read books or stories by everyone mentioned in these lists. Some had greater impact on me that others. Clarke, Heinlein, Asimov, Le Guin, and others of that age made up a good percentage of my reading up into high school when I discovered Omni. In college, I started reading more Ellison and Dick, reading Asimov’s and Fantasy & Science Fiction, and crashing into cyberpunk with Gibson and Cadigan. It went on from there, but as I go through the lists in my head, I can see that it’s all been a progression, always moving forward.

It appears as though I do have a considerable bias. It’s not towards a specific gender, race, creed, or nationality. It’s towards those that have a more varied background than I. If you write the perfect Heinlein story, good for you, but I’ve been there before and quite often. Enjoyed the trip, but it doesn’t belong here. The data seems to indicate that without previously defining what a Clarkesworld story is, I’ve kept true to a goal to take us down a different (to me) road.

Now, this revelation may depress a number of people who are trying to get published in Clarkesworld, but if anything, it should encourage you to break out of your comfort zone. Clarkesworld is a safe place for that and it will be that way as long as I’m around to influence it.

With Clarkesworld, I don’t want to look back. It’s not a slight against the people who influenced me. It’s in honor of them. They made me this way. Look to the future. Discover new things. Escape. Enjoy.

About the Author

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

Cover Art:

Spring Day is Coming

Liu Junwei

About the Artist

Liu Junwei, aka Shayudan, is a professional artist living in Beijing China. Inspired by fantasy art and literature from an early age, Liu’s work has gone on to appear in Science Fiction World, books, and card games. He is the winner of the Xingyun (Nebula) Award from Global Chinese Science Fiction for Best Art (2013) and Galaxy Award for Best Cover Art (2014).