ISSUE 2

© Wyrm Publishing, 2015
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Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the second issue of Forever Magazine! Just a few words before I send you off to the stories.

This month’s novella is “Dream Houses” by Genevieve Valentine. It was originally published by WSFA Press as a guest of honor book for the 2014 Capclave convention in Maryland. (Great convention if you ever get the chance to attend.) I’ve long admired Genevieve’s work and I’m pleased to be able to bring this one to your attention.

Speaking of award nominations, last month’s novella, “The Regular” by Ken Liu, has just been nominated for a Nebula Award! Good luck Ken!

The Hugo Award nomination period closes up this month, so if you’re eligible to nominate, I hope you take advantage of the opportunity to do so. By the way, both of the novellas we’ve reprinted are eligible this year. Wouldn’t be shocked to see either snag more than a few votes.

Lastly, thanks for reading this fledgling magazine. I’d appreciate any early feedback you might have, so please feel free to email me at neil@clarkesworldmagazine.com to let me know your thoughts.

-Neil

Dream Houses

Genevieve Valentine

1

You never see Gliese. It’s a dwarf star, red and faint and far away until you’re practically on top of it, and then a red bead blinks onto the viewscreen at the last second like a wound you forgot. You can look for it all you like, it should be in the center of the screen from the moment you clear the Moon, but stars multiply if you look at them too long. Your vision starts swimming with points of light in white and blue and gold. The small ones get swallowed.

If you wake up first from the Deep and stand at the comm to orient yourself, you have to find Beta Librae, and take the rest on faith.

I’ve moved most of my things to the comm room. There’s not much else to look at, by now, and it’s warmer here, and the projection of the starfield on the viewscreen is bright enough to read by. It’s easier just to be able to look at it whenever you need it, all to yourself.

Lai can stay in the canteen. She’s not missing much; her eyes are long gone.

The Golden Century Hall held a concert of songs composed for monarchs, once: Consecrated to Your Majestie, a dozen songs spread over a thousand years, sung by a visiting choir. I nearly missed it, but once I heard about it I pulled an overnight shift to make it to the city limits on time, and I parked the truck in a station off the highway and used my dinner money for a cab to get me there.

They didn’t actually have the concert in the Hall. I’ve never set foot in the Hall. It was in a building that had been a chapel, and then a gallery, and then a bank, and then a city building that opened whenever the financiers who owned it needed to look like they cared about culture. I got a ticket outside, for too much money, from someone who didn’t look like he had much of a vested interest in the arts.

For the first two hours it seemed like too large a choir. They sang hymns from countries I’d only heard of in school, and a few songs from coronation masses, and a Baroque piece that sounded like a beautiful math problem, and they took turns, but during any of the songs two full rows of singers were sitting like the carvings that crawled up the pillars.

Turned out they were waiting for the finale. Lux in tenebris used every voice they had; it was a song for a queen in splendor, and she must have wanted numbers to impress.

It started with one voice, then two, then four, and it doubled and doubled as the echoes built in the caves above us, until it sounded like two hundred notes alive and trembling at once. It was almost a round to begin with, but then it cracked open and became four songs that walked hand in hand, and then a single song in twenty staggered parts, a glorious knot my ear couldn’t untangle.

“Intricate,” the program called it, and congratulated the dead composer like he’d done a math problem. I threw the program out.

The anthem swelled and moved across itself, notes tangling and meeting and parting, and when the sopranos and tenors and altos and basses leapt from their melodies into a single chord held taut across four octaves, I looked behind me, because that was when the queen had sat taller to be worshiped. I just knew.

(Such a strange thing to do; I don’t know if I thought I’d see her. Probably not. I never did have much imagination.)

I got interested in it all, after. There were history books I listened to on a long drive through pine territory one summer. The royal politics in England got harder to follow the further back you went—the Tudors were all right, but whenever they hit the War of the Roses I had to turn it off before I veered onto the shoulder trying to keep track of it all.

But the queen was something else. I looked up the castle later just to see where she would have been sitting, when the music bid her rise. The place was meant to stun, and there were half a dozen audience halls and royal chambers and chapels that could have hosted the music. But in my mind she’s always sitting in the balcony of that bank-sponsored place of worship, right where I thought I saw her first.

He was famous, that composer; the queen granted him special right to write hymns for so many voices, to prevent anyone else from diluting what he’d done.

I haven’t listened to that song again. Some things you should only hear once.

When I wake up, I’m at the control bank, and four lights are blinking red amid the slivers of white.

It’s shameful that I’ve fallen asleep at my post (I was dreaming, grass like the sea). I hope Lai isn’t around to see it—she’s ruthless about crew who can’t hack the circadian fuckups of Deep. But I still can’t see anything but smears of color, and my throat is sandpaper, and I’m on my knees in front of the console—that’s why the buttons are slivers, my angle is wrong—and the alarm is shrieking.

The alarm is the same pitch as Lai screaming (she proved it once), and I’m four more breaths along before I can be sure it isn’t her. My elbows ache. My right forearm aches. My knees.

“Capella,” I say, but nothing comes out.

There are red angles along the edge of the console, wherever I hold on. I turn my hands over. I’ve cut my palms, my knuckles. There are two bloody handprints under my knees. I must have been scrabbling on all fours to reach the controls, to see what the matter is. The alarm screams.

I’m dragging a long tail where the nutrient tube didn’t pull out of my right arm. There’s a smear of blood under the bandage. I must have been in a hurry.

But I couldn’t have gone far. The nursery’s down the corridor, the center of the honeycomb of the living quarters on the top deck. They design it with a straight shot to the comm up front, so anyone who needs to take watch can still keep an ear out for the strange chorus of life-support beeps in the one-two-three waltz—nutrients, oxygen, neuro.

But there’s not supposed to be anyone on watch; we’re all supposed to be sleeping.

“Capella,” I croak, “report.”

“Amadis,” Capella says. We’re skipping the Good Afternoons, I guess.

Capella’s voice is the bland, asexual synth that Kite-class ships get as their default, where it sounds like every person who ever mildly offended you sent through an equalizer. Most Captains pay for the upgrade to something more particular, but Martiner in Earth Ops laughed Lai out of town for wanting it done free; Lai says Capella’s natural voice is a good reminder of how much the GAU values our work.

I reach up and hit at buttons blindly with the heel of my hand. The white ones glow pink from the blood, but the alarm stops.

I blink sleep from my eyes, yawn. My ears are always popping up here; that and taking showers out of plastic bags are the biggest hassle of transit.

Capella says, “Amadis,” again, so quiet I can barely hear it. But I can hear it. There’s no chorus of blips from the nursery.

There’s no chorus.

I can’t remember if there was a chorus before I hit the buttons. The alarm was so loud and I was so tired and it’s hard to remember anything because my heart has stopped.

When I breathe out it’s utterly silent, and for a second I wonder if I’m dead.

“Capella. What happened?”

“Please clarify.” Capella doesn’t know what would be the matter; you have to tell it what to worry about. Fuck. Useless.

“Capella,” I say, have to close my mouth around something sour in my throat, carefully breathe in. “Casualty report.”

“Captain Pamela Lai.” Capella says. “Crew Samuel Franklin. Crew Juan Morales. Crew Sajita Jaisi.”

I’m waiting for a little while before I realize that’s the death toll: everybody.

“Health report. Me. My health report.”

“Sustained minor trauma waking from Deep during emergency circumstances.”

I close my eyes a second, just because when I look at the floor, bloody handprints are reaching up to me.

As I stand up, I loop the tube in my hand once or twice. I’m liable to trip on it; I’m always clumsy for a while after I wake up. Morales made fun of me on my first run, for how long it took me to get my sea legs. “Thought you were a traveler,” he’d said, with a look like he’d crossed me off a list.

The comm is white, now, except for the red button near the pilot’s station. There’s been a malfunction in the manual piloting system. Autopilot engaged until we’re within Gliese sensor range. I can’t fix the manual; I’m a passenger for the duration.

I start thinking about calories.

The nursery’s a different room when it’s silent. The pods are closed, and inside the medical-glassine observation windows Lai and Franklin and Jaisi and Morales have their eyes closed, the monitors perfectly still, like the demo decals they come when with you buy them new.

It’s all as calm and clean as a ship that’s never been used, except the broken glassine and blood from where I broke out of mine.

“Captain,” Capella says, and that’s when I retch.

I’m trembling (the Menkalinan gets cold during Deep, what would it be heating you for?), so it takes me a while to stand up, and I have to prop myself up on Jaisi’s pod with both arms.

Somewhere, I’m still and quiet and mourning four people. It’s a far-off place. There’s no way home from there.

The part of me that’s gasping for air, the part of me that broke the pod trying to get out, is calculating how much food there is on the ship to get me through the six years I’ll have to be out of the Deep and awake.

The Menkalinan’s Gliese run takes six years and change, depending on energy currents, and we stay awake for six months on each side. There are five of us. (Were five.) The numbers aren’t good.

“Capella,” I start to say.

But I’m looking at Lai’s face, stern even dead, and the hair on the back of my neck is standing up.

The dead don’t come back. I’m not one of those.

It’s just that something’s wrong, and Lai would know, but she’ll never get the chance to tell me.

“Capella.”

“Yes, Captain.”

I press my lips tight until the bile is gone. “Just Amadis, please.”

“Yes, Amadis.”

“What message has been sent to ground about what happened?”

“A casualty report is waiting for your approval.”

Of course it is. I’m the Captain.

If everyone had died, the report would have been automatically generated by Capella, and the Gliese Associates United port on the far side would send a tugboat as our ship pulled into the system, to shift our cargo and move it to the planet near the little red star. The tug might reclaim the bodies if there was a news story in it, but Gliese is struggling for news stories these days, and they like them to be good. Most likely they’d sell the ship for scrap to an outer-ring salvage crew. Menkalinan would be stripped to her bones and the pods would drift out toward the other points of Libra, and that would be it.

But I hadn’t died; I had sliced three fingers to the bone breaking out, and it was up to me to decide what we told them planetside.

(How had I woken up? Why me?)

If I said I was awake, would I get a message back? Was someone Earthside still waiting up for us?

I glance over my shoulder, out at the comm room, where we keep a copy of the cargo manifest.

There’s no particular reason—we run a lot of things to Gliese, most of it rations and plastics and third-hand terraforming equipment for the outer reaches and things people have put in for that they thought they could live without, so that there’s a piano in every shipment we’ve ever made.

Sometimes we get a shipment and every crate is marked MISC and we still take it, because the Colonial Trade Agreement works in our favor—it has to, to get anyone to sign up for these runs—and if someone’s going to get arrested for what’s in there, it’s not us.

But we have a cargo of MISC, and Martiner signed off on it, and Lai watched it going in with her lips in a single sour line.

When I breathe in, I can feel the cargo hold underneath me, right through the nerves in my feet, as if it’s woken up and shifted its weight.

There’s plenty that could be down there—the cargo hold is most of the lower level. We wouldn’t be arrested, if we were carrying something wrong. But maybe that’s not what Martiner’s worried about.

“Does the report state the nature of the malfunction in the Deep pods?”

“No cause of malfunction determined.”

Fuck, this AI’s worse than nothing. “Capella, four crew are dead. That is a significant event. What was the cause of death?”

“Asphyxiation from insufficient oxygen flow. Cause of mechanical malfunction not identified.”

“In the report, or by you?”

Nothing.

“Was the ship inspected by GAU representatives prior to takeoff?”

“Yes. Nothing outside operating parameters was registered. No delays were imposed.”

I breathe through my nose. “Did the same malfunction happen in my pod?”

“Yes, Amadis.”

“But I woke up.”

A pause. “Yes.”

The hair on my neck stands up. I don’t know why.

My nails screech against the pod as I curl them in. Someone should know about this, I think; it’s the first instinct of every veteran long-hauler when something goes this wrong. You spend a lot of time alone, and if you can’t hack that you won’t last long, but there’s a line past when it’s foolish not to look for help. If you try to manage alone, you won’t make it.

But the message would go back to Martiner, and to whoever at the GAU had looked at the nursery and marked us fit for travel, and I’m not sure I want them knowing yet that anyone here is still awake.

I want to look at the oxygen tubes.

“Capella, don’t send anything.”

“GAU Protocol demands I inform both Earth and Gliese staff as soon as possible of any chance in the line of report—”

“It’s an order, Capella.”

“Yes, Captain.”

Things that can go wrong with your oxygen, in a nursery on a Kite-class, from most likely to least likely:

Your recycler gets compromised, because the seal on a Kite-class ship is probably not as airtight as it should be, and you suffocate slowly on your own carbon dioxide.

There’s a crack in your pod, and you don’t get the enhanced oxygen mix at the rate you should, losing a little every year, and when you show up planetside you’re still breathing, you’re just five or six years older, instead of only three.

You’re sick before you enter Deep and don’t know it, and the bacteria make it through your second-rate filter, and over the course of six years in the nursery you’re trapped with the enemy as it adapts and gets smarter than your body is, and even if you live, by the time you reach a planet you’re sick with something so resilient that Disease Control has to shoot your pod into space without even opening it, and you spin gently through a vacuum until your air just runs out.

Your ship gets boarded by someone who must be pretty fucking desperate to be on your route at all, and when the alarm goes off and the pods start to wake you, the pirates decide they’d just as soon not deal with survivors, and yank your tube, and lock you in, and you pound against the glassine until you don’t have air left, and whoever finds you next finds you arched in agony with your hands in fists, still fighting.

Before you leave dock, during the quality inspection pass, the tubing gets fastened a little too tightly by a sharper-edged clamp than you’ve ever seen, so that over the course of a year or so, the tiny changes in pressure push the tubing against the clamp and away, over and over, until all at once there’s a slice right across it, and the air starts leaking, and the filter can’t compensate, and you just never wake up.

I know before I’m even done examining them all that I’m not going to be using any of these pods.

If I had any hope of being able to find the Deep again and wake up at Gliese where I’ll have options, they vanish with the second clip, when I realize it was a deliberate fix to every feed. I can’t be sure if it was malicious, but the tubes are shot in any case, and I can’t even be sure that’s the only thing they did.

They must have been in a rush when they got to mine; the hose on my pod has only just cut through, not nearly as deep as the rest.

At some point I’ll need to have Capella run through the on-board security footage and see if anything else was touched during the dock inspection. At some point I’ll need to sweep up the glassine from around mine, where I tore my arms to ribbons breaking out of a pod that was now just as useless as anybody else’s.

I’ll be awake for the duration. Five years.

There was a scare session the GAU offered before you signed up for a particular run. If you signed up for a prestige gig, one of the runs that compared you to sea explorers from a thousand years ago, there was a lot to warn against. On the backwater runs, apparently they just told you things about how long you’d last if you tried to get the jump on everyone and woke up early to take over the ship alone, like being in charge of a cargo ship on autopilot in a dead sector was a dream of glory they had to shake off you.

You lost your mind, I assumed. I never went. I’d met Lai and signed up by then. Once you’d decided to go, there wasn’t any point being frightened.

Thinking about it now is exhausting; not panic so much as dead weight, a pile of years and the dull certainty I won’t make it.

Capella makes the waterbag hot enough to scald me—“Thank you,” I say, and when it says, “I thought it was necessary,” I try not to be offended and scrub harder at the brown crusts across my knuckles—and after I bandage up as well as anyone can by themselves, I sweep up the pieces of glassine I’d punched through, and when my hands start shaking I reach for my nutrient tube and drink some vitamins absentmindedly, worrying the end of the makeshift straw with my teeth and very carefully not looking at where I am.

I want to send something to my brother.

We moved to the town with the pines when I was seven, into a house I barely remember except for the name I had in it, and the kitchen window that dipped so low you could sit cross-legged on the floor and still see out.

I spent a lot of time at that window. I was afraid of what might be coming through the trees, and I didn’t want to look at my family.

After a few weeks of observation to make sure, I couldn’t avoid it any more. I told my brother there were dragons wandering the dark places under our eaves and in the forest behind the house, pacing just past the tree line and shaking their scales.

He frowned down at me like it was a trick. We didn’t play make-believe (I didn’t have the imagination for it, it was one of his earliest disappointments in me), but we didn’t play tricks either. He had no vocabulary to understand what I was telling him, and he didn’t love me enough by then to let me explain.

“All right,” he said finally, looked out the window. “What should I do about your dragons?”

Too late. I could tell what he thought, and by the time we were living near the trees I was past needing his help.

“Leave me alone,” I said. I never mentioned them again.

My pride was stung. I hadn’t told him because I wanted him to do something about them; you couldn’t do anything about dragons, that much I was certain of.

I’d told him because I wanted to know if he saw what I saw.

He got angry at me for going into deep space work, as angry as he ever got about me.

“You were scared of the dark,” he snapped. “You—No. There’s no way you can handle space.”

“Space is just darkness. There’s a difference from the dark.”

There was a little pause, like the feed had cut out, but there was a flicker of a line between his brows that came and went, the ghost of a frown. We didn’t play tricks, and he wanted to believe me. He was trying to understand the difference.

He might ask me not to go, I thought; he might say, Stay here, and just for a second my throat went tight.

“Well, I guess we’ll know tomorrow,” he said, and the last I saw of him he was leaning over his ratty terminal to disconnect the message.

He didn’t send anything else. I went through the dozen sessions the GAU required, and signed a stack of papers promising to keep quiet about anything I saw, and they signed a piece of paper that made me impervious to customs law in case someone from Gliese smuggled an endangered parrot or an illegal amount of turmeric.

I waited until a week before I shipped out to tell my brother I was going. It was only text, a mail with some details of the trip and a copy of the waiver I’d signed that said he’d get the money owed me if I didn’t make it back.

Lai raised an eyebrow when I didn’t book any minutes in the intercom booth during our time in range, but she didn’t say anything about it. This wasn’t a job for someone with a family waiting breathlessly at home.

My brother didn’t speak to me for two trips. I’d let him know (text, always) when I was Earthside, or when I was leaving, but it was like dropping rocks into a quarry.

I got a message from him on the way back from Gliese the second time, when I was still in the Deep. It was video. I didn’t recognize the background; he’d moved, he did that often enough, still looking for a place he could bear to live in.

He hoped I was all right.

“I looked up Gliese in the interstellar atlas,” he said, “just so I know where you’re coming back from.”

He hesitated, looked right into the camera, breathed in with words behind it. Then he leaned forward, and the feed cut out.

Roland Casara committed suicide fifteen years to the day after the opening night of the Golden Century concert hall he designed.

The balcony collapsed six years after that.

There had been nearly four thousand performances by then. It was one of the most photographed buildings on the continent. In the first wake of the disaster, tourists took souvenirs from the rubble.

The investigation revealed nothing, at first. The city was growing, subways were being built, the pipes were old, and the crowds were beginning to wear. Sometimes buildings just fall in.

They built the new one stronger, more flexible, with a glass-floor lobby so you could see the original stone underneath. No one thought anything more about it for decades, until a biographer got permission from Casara’s sister to come and look through his things, and the story got out.

(I read about it in a history article, sitting at a truck stop that had screens built into the booths. I spent half an hour drinking a cup of coffee the consistency of tar, scrolling back and forth slowly with one finger, like the end would be different if I went back enough times.)

Casara’s calculation of the weight the columns of the Golden Hall could bear had been off by a few ounces. It lasted a long time, considering. But people got taller, and the deep of the city got warmer, and eventually creep set in.

He knew. He’d had a blueprint of the Golden Hall—an original, the original—folded at the bottom of a stack of potential commissions he’d never taken (for reasons no one had been able to guess before now), with the error circled in red pencil. Casara had made notes in careful architect’s numbers, diagonally like they were bracing the window they were scrawled on top of, and dated Golden Century’s opening night.

For the inaugural concert of the first Hall, the Chair of the Arts Association had reserved a seat of honor for him, first row orchestra. He’d never appeared to claim his seat or his praise; at the time they said it was modesty.

Turns out he’d just been at home, realizing his odds.

I set up my bunk in the dormitory like I always did after Deep, take the sheets and blankets out of their cartons, pull the plastic off the bed. I leave the light burning in my reading lamp as I move back and forth from the galley to the emptied-out locker nearer my bed.

I don’t know why I need to gather as much as I can as close as I can—it’s not like anyone’s going to intercept me on my way to the canteen—but all the same, I rip Jaisi’s worksuit out of there and stack up rations waist-high and tie a can opener to my bedpost so I can’t lose it and starve.

That’s foolish. There’s more than one can opener; this is a Kite-class, not a tugboat. I make faces at my silly compulsions the whole time I twist and twist the wires that hold it on. It’s old habit, that’s all, left over from when I was driving the rig and couldn’t afford to lose anything.

(I had a lot of old habits about food. Franklin had watched me eating our first meal after takeoff, said, “Christ, when was your last one?”

“Yeah,” said Lai, “tell us more about table manners, Franklin,” and he looked down where he’d spilled tomato sauce and turned red at the ears and shut up about it.

I looked over at Lai, saw for the first time the shadowed sockets under her cheeks where hunger lived forever if it caught you young enough, where even if you had enough to eat for the rest of your life, later on, you’d eat every meal like you didn’t have another one, because you’d grown up when there was no telling.)

“Capella,” I say, “please set an alarm for a twelve-hour sleep cycle.”

“Yes, Amadis. That’s longer than your standard. Are you feeling well?”

“I’m conserving.”

After a second Capella says, “I see.”

I’m doing math, too, dividing the rations by days more precisely the more I try not to think about it. Old habit, from lean years.

There were the rations for after we woke up from the far side of Deep, not quite for six months (it encouraged you to be prompt, Lai explained like there was a bad taste in her mouth), five times over. Not enough; my body would feed on itself, and when we docked at Gliese they’d find a skeleton propped in the pilot’s chair, draped in skin.

There were the nutrient packs, not designed to sustain an active body—barely able to sustain a body in stasis, you did nothing but eat at the dock station in Gliese because you were so hungry you couldn’t think—but maybe I could move less. Restrict movement to what was necessary, sleep as much as I could, use some of the sedatives if I had to. I could lie in my bunk like the dead. Anything not to be hungry.

The control panel in the comm room is still smeared with blood as I reach across it for the cargo manifest, but I ignore the stains; they’re almost like having company.

The manifest is cartons and cartons and cartons of MISC, still on paper because that’s how little it matters, and I think about Jaisi handing over the clipboard to Lai and saying, “These always make me itch,” and Lai shrugging, because the GAU didn’t care much for your feelings about your cargo.

I wonder if it’s possible to squeeze between the crates, enough to crack them open. There has to be something there. Gliese has mouths to feed.

The cargo bay is empty.

I look at the video image for a long time, waiting to be wrong about it, because it can’t be, we sat at dock for four hours while forklifts lumbered back and forth with crates and we took bets on what was in them.

Morales had pointed at each one and guessed something different—“Winter seeds. Flexible tubing. Rations. Real food disguised as rations for the governor. Entertainment console, entertainment console, a crate to bury the children in when they fight over the settlement’s two entertainment consoles”—but he had a guy on the inside at the port in Gliese and ringers didn’t count, and after a while I hissed at him just to get him to knock it off. (He’d flashed me a grin, said, “No bet, Reyes?” I’d stared him down.)

“I hope it’s drugs,” said Franklin, who had gone into freighting just for the legal immunity, but that was always his guess and it had never panned out.

Jaisi just stared at the manifest of MISCs and shook her head every time she ticked off a box.

Lai had taken one look at the dock and said, “Nothing but bathtubs.”

I thought Franklin had a better bet with his two tons of drugs, but still I didn’t take the bet against Lai. She’d been doing this run even longer than Morales (she’d outlived her immediate family, Martiner had assured me when I signed up, as if I was worried about Lai having split loyalties somehow), and a lot of things that sounded foolish came true in a hurry. If Gliese was going to have a run on bathtubs, she’d know first.

But there’s nothing there. According to the cameras, we’re carrying nothing, now.

For a second I feel like the whole ship is about to capsize, as if you can even get top-heavy out here, but my stomach lurches and I grip the edge of the console, ready to fall.

The camera pans back and forth every twenty seconds, scraping at me, and in every sweep I look for reasons to be wrong. Glitches, the wrong date, the wrong cargo bay. I’m fucking happy to be wrong, I need to be wrong.

It’s old footage, I decide. Capella’s doing this to punish me. Capella’s been off since I came out of Deep; Capella has those pauses now, those awful pauses. It wouldn’t be hard to pull up the wrong footage and watch me go to pieces, just for fun, if your algorithms told you to.

But there’s the dent in the wall from where one of the loaders misjudged how tightly he could turn the forklift and one of the dock guys nearly punched him out over it, because the forklift was worth as much as any of us were getting for the run. It had happened that day on the dock, the day before we took off for Gliese.

Maybe I’m losing my mind, I think. You do that when you panic, when you have no one to ask whose answers you trust.

“Capella, what’s the status of our cargo?”

“Invalid query.”

The camera pans to the far corner happily, showing me the empty cargo hold, its dent moving in and out of sight.

“Capella, was cargo loaded onto the ship prior to takeoff?”

“Please specify voyage.”

“Capella.” I clear my throat. “I’m going to need you to try to understand me, please. Was there cargo in the hold when we took off?”

That pause, that pause that makes my wrists feel like lead, like I couldn’t move if I tried.

“That information is corrupted,” Capella says. “Only available data on Bay Alpha is the current video feed.”

That’s impossible. That’s the pause. Capella knows it isn’t possible. Capella knows there’s a lie.

I lean forward, scratch absently at the screen where the dent is.

The dent comes off under my fingernail.

For a long time I freeze, waiting for the camera to pan back. Maybe it was a blood stain overlaying the screen. Dust. Something.

The camera swings back around, showing a cargo hold that’s never been touched.

I stagger backward. I catch my heel on something, the lip of the chair supports, maybe—my knees give, and I fall.

I don’t remember what happens, for a little after that; it’s all snow behind my eyes, and nothing else I care to see.

Capella hadn’t said a thing that whole time, as if waiting to see what I would do, and when I crash to the grate there’s no chirp announcing I’ve been injured like there should be on a ship that’s paying attention.

(Though that was a chirp that alerted your crew someone was hurt. There’s no crew. It’s unnecessary.)

When I open my eyes, Capella says, “You’ll be all right now,” like’s something it’s decided, and like it’s sorry for me, and when I hear rattling on the grate it takes me a second to realize it’s my shoulders against the sharp edges as I tremble; that’s where the sting’s coming from.

I left my brother after the shooting.

As soon as my wounds were dressed and they were sure it hadn’t punctured a lung, I’d checked myself out of the hospital. I’d found him outside with blood on his sleeves and half a cigarette dangling from his good hand.

I don’t know if he was waiting, or if he’d checked himself out to run for it, and I just caught him in time. He never said. We just fell into step together, and we walked side by side to the hotel, and packed our things in silence, and started for home.

(It wasn’t really home; it was just one of the places he lived in, and I’d been allowed to tag along because he couldn’t lift his bags with his arm broken.)

We only stopped at a motel after he dropped off for a second and nearly ran into a ditch—he got tired on the road in a way I never did.

We both had our father’s wide, solemn forehead; it was one of three things I knew we shared. The rest, there was no knowing.

“I could drive,” I said, which were our first words in six hundred miles.

He looked me over. “I know. We’re stopping.”

I didn’t understand until we were checking in and the clerk couldn’t stop staring at my shirt, where the blood had crusted over. That’s what my brother had been looking at.

“Rough road,” I said. My brother almost glanced over at me, not quite.

There wasn’t any point in maneuvering through pajamas in the state we were in. He slid into bed with his boots still on and hissed at his cast, and when I turned on my side away from him I was careful to keep the stiff press of dried blood from scraping my stitches.

He breathed deep and even, whether he was awake or not; you could only tell for sure if he was asleep by the little motions his fingers made, half-taps on the bed as he dreamed.

In the middle of the night, while he was dreaming, I opened my eyes and had to get out.

I don’t know what woke me. My wounds hurt too much to rest, probably. It hurt too much to do a lot of things—I was in bad shape for a while after that. Split my stitches three times. It took me another two months before I’d get the okay from the GAU medics to start training.

(Lai stalled the dry dock until I had clearance. Her first words to me on board were, “Better hope they have painkillers on Gliese, they didn’t issue you enough for the round trip.”

It was a joke; Gliese didn’t have much that we didn’t bring them. That was a long journey home. I was in so much pain that I thought about calling my brother.)

But even wrecked that night, one of the wounds already seeping, I had to get out. My brother was breathing next to me. I couldn’t stay.

I was terrified of him going to another house he could barely stand and would probably leave before the year was up. My restlessness was one thing, but his I couldn’t stand; it had shifted from job-hopping to a chain of identical houses he halfheartedly tried to make homes out of, and none of them was never going to stick unless I came with him.

I knew without asking that if I came with him somewhere, he’d stay there until he died. (He’d been on the verge of buying a place back home, during the summer we had a truce.)

It was tempting, lying next to him with our complimentary bloodstains, to just give in and drive home with him and pick a bedroom, live in between silences for the rest of my life.

I had to go.

My stitches ached, and I gritted my teeth to keep from yelping when I picked up my bag, but there wasn’t much help for it. There had been a truck stop a mile or two before the motel. From there I could catch a ride to someplace else.

But sometimes things pull at you even when you know better. I froze up like an amateur behind the motel, in the strip of darkness that led back to the highway, eventually, if you could make it.

(Cowardice, I thought, and it probably was, but not of the dark; branches were swaying in the wind, half-tapping each other like my brother dreaming.)

It was pitch-black—the motel’s only lights were out front where the cars were, and we were the only guests—and all at once I was a little dizzy with doubt, and when I reached out and caught an oak tree, I leaned into it so I didn’t topple over.

A light came on amid the trees on the far side of the woods.

There was nothing there, I knew there wasn’t; we’d seen the whole stretch on the drive up, it was just trees and mud and no sign of life, and the light didn’t move like someone was holding it or flicker like someone had built a home on the far, far side of the trees.

It was steady and round and bright, and my bag slid off my shoulder and fell to the dirt without a sound.

Later, I realized it was the moon; it was probably the moon, between the trees in the deep dark, bright enough to see by. But I’ll never know.

Not because I turned and fled, because that would require me to have fled, and not because I walked out into the dark to face whatever it was until it turned from me and ran; the light stayed on for a long time, and I balanced where I was with the scrape of bark against my shoulder, and never moved.

After it went off, and I had walked shivering through those miles of dark to the truck stop with my head craned back over my shoulder so far back it was a wonder I didn’t trip into the road and get bisected, I felt heroic and foolhardy, and I found a flier for cargo ships and called Planetary Associates United.

I’ve dreamed of the light a few times—almost the only thing I dream of, except the houses.

After the third dream, brightness flooding the dark fog of my usual dreamless sleep, I realized I should have run. Run from it if I had to, or conquered it if I could have. Both were a thing you did, an action you could answer for.

In every dream I had about it I was waiting it out, that low piercing moon, standing in the woods in a jacket that smelled like motel and my brother: too scared to go forward, too stubborn to run.

The first house I ever dreamed of was from a book I’d been given, where two foxes lived in a house made mostly of glass, built across a waterfall, with a hole in a fallen log as the door. The book was mostly interested in the glass walls: it was called Are Mr. and Mrs. Fox at Home? and gave lessons on privacy that I could tell even then were meant for kids living in the government settlements, where walls and curtains were thin.

I only noticed the floor made out of glass. I wouldn’t see a waterfall for another fifteen years; to me it might as well have been a house built on Jupiter.

The house I dreamed of was empty of foxes and nothing but glass, surrounded everywhere by green, and I lived in it alone and was very pleased, because it was like living in nothing at all.

When I looked down, the water rushed past me in a white-foam hurry and dropped off right at my feet, falling and falling towards a river that was always too far away to see, and all at once I was horribly sad that I had been trapped in the house, and there was no way to reach the water and meet the river and let the current carry me somewhere else.

Before you’re allowed to apply for a run, no matter how long you’ve been signed up, they make you go to a seminar about social mandates on crews, where they tell you not to touch what isn’t yours and how to turn sideways in a corridor to let someone pass you for good manners and how to settle a dispute without putting your fist through a bulkhead, which was fine if you were me, but seemed calculated to make every veteran hate you.

“This information will be invaluable to you in quickly becoming part of your Planetary Associates United crew, no matter your exciting destination!” the recruiter calls out to the ten of us in the auditorium who haven’t left yet. (I would have gone during the demo video that followed the slideshow, but they have food after this, and I’m too broke to be proud.)

A man raises his hand. “Yes, hi, one of the crew stole my toothbrush on the Alpha Centauri run last year. Do I apply for reimbursement here, or can my dentist bill you?”

The recruiter blinks; when he frowns it looks like the scale in the hospital you’re meant to judge pain levels by. He’s about a six.

“Well, I think that would be a regional issue, so the ACAU office can—”

Another man raises his hand. “I’ve been the victim of false accusation, where can I file my complaint against a fraudulent charge of theft?”

“That should go to the central office,” says the recruiter, who must be new here, “where they—”

“And so where should I file a rebuttal against a charge of fraudulent charges, ACAU or the central office?”

The recruiter flushes with genuine concern, and it’s not like I don’t think those guys are assholes for playing games, but I seriously consider walking out. If this is the quality of people the PAU puts forward to try to convince you to join up, I’m not going.

The fraudulent accusation man half-stands. “If this company will not address toothbrush theft with the seriousness it deserves, then I—”

“Can it.”

The words are deep and sharp, and even though nobody’s moving when I turn around, I know who said them the moment I see her. Back row, black hair to her chin, face like the handle of a knife.

The guy sits down.

The recruiter wraps up with some inspirational things they’re paying him to say, and then everyone files out. I wait to see if she knows those men, but they file out like everybody else.

On my way out, I ask her, “What run are you?”

She looks me over. Her eyes are almost as dark as my brother’s, and there’s a tension between her jaw and her ears that probably means she’s the captain.

“Gliese.”

That seems strange, because just from the application process I can tell that’s a backwater assignment, but sometimes you meet truckers with three doctorates. People have reasons to keep moving.

“Okay.”

When I show up for the first crew call (my third set of stitches slowly fading into the purple edges of my gunshot wound), she looks up like she was waiting for me.

The toothbrush guys are there. They don’t seem to see anything strange about it, which makes them a lot harder to surprise than I am.

“Reyes?” When I nod, she checks off something on her data pad.

I must look appalled; as she passes me on the way into the ship she says, “If you had the chance to knock them out for ten years, wouldn’t you?”

She’s the captain. I don’t say anything.

Turns out Morales and Franklin never give anybody a lick of trouble but each other. Sometimes Jaisi will come into the canteen with the look of a martyr, and as the door slides shut behind her we’ll hear the thwack of fists against canvas as the blur of them flickers briefly into sight, but that’s as bad as it gets.

They distract you from getting stir-crazy for the last six months, that much I can say for them. There are worse reasons to put people on a roster.

Sometimes, when I was heading into Deep and feeling sentimental, I imagined Lai looking over the people who were willing to sit through that presentation, picking out her crew by the backs of their heads.

Five weeks go by before I have the nerve to go look in the cargo hold in person.

(I don’t quite know what I’m doing, in those five weeks. It’s like trucking, where the distance between stops just vanishes, some spacial memory you lose every time you turn the engine off. I sleep a lot. I eat once a day. I try to keep my hands warm, but there’s not enough warmth and gloves don’t help. It’s just as well. The cold keeps the scars from throbbing.

Once or twice I try the sedatives. I think I’ve lost a week that way. Capella’s keeping track of the days if I dared ask, but I don’t know where the sedatives stop and my cowardice begins.)

I don’t want to break the seal on Lai’s pod in the nursery—I have reasons, and every time I start to think about it I shove them all into the darkest corners I can find—but it means I don’t take anyone else’s ID with me down the ladder and around to the cargo bay, which takes up the back half of this entire level. There’s tons of freight. There will be something.

No surprise my credentials don’t work, a series of swipes on the number pad that blink red and beep and do nothing. I’m auxiliary crew. I’m there to do grunt work, and in case someone dies and they need a body to call out coordinates during landing. There’s no way my creds would be needed to get into the cargo bay: if you had to get in there during the voyage—and you never did, why would you, you were barely more important than Capella—it would be the captain authorizing it. I’m surprised the alarm isn’t laughing at me.

But the emergency code doesn’t work either, which is wrong. I try it eight times with the patience of a nightmare, slower and slower to make sure I have the numbers right (they’re right, they’re fucking right).

The heat’s minimal down here, just enough to keep absolute zero from creeping in, and even in my thermal gear I’m shivering so hard I wonder if I’d lose my scarred-over finger to frostbite if I wasted too much time.

“Capella,” I say, “what are the chances you can open this door?”

“I’m sorry, Amadis.”

Of course. I grit my teeth, mutter, “What are the chances you can go fuck yourself?”

“Disallowed by programming,” Capella says.

I’m so startled I laugh, a single deep bark that bounces down the corridor and out of sight.

The crowbar’s so cold it bites my palms just to hold it, but I slam the far end into the join and throw my whole weight against it—no time to risk leveraging with less—just as Capella says, “Amadis.”

The alarm goes off.

I don’t care about it until it occurs to me it might go off for the next six years, and even then I don’t care about that nearly as much as I care about the tone of Capella’s voice.

“What, Capella?”

“That door is monitored.”

Monitored by GAU, it means, back planetside. Of course they monitor it, so they know if the cargo’s been intercepted or tampered with. I’d never cared enough to think about it. Now they knew someone had tried to open it. Now the ship’s sending word.

I step back. The crowbar’s still wedged in the door; I’d dented one side, not nearly enough to break the seal.

“Capella, can you stop the report?”

“It’s not my report. I’m sorry, Amadis.”

Oh god. I calculate how many weeks it would take for the report to make it back across the vacuum, piggybacking the dark energy field and sinking through the cloud cover and appearing on Martiner’s screens like a gift.

If he’d done this to us, he’d know someone was awake, and he’d have to take care of it.

(Does Capella know? I think absently, and then: Will it be Capella’s job?)

I felt a stab of helplessness, sharp and anxious, like I’d had two Gliese runs back when I’d read on the years-delayed news feed that the last of the wild bee colonies had gone extinct, like you could reach back through time and prevent something awful if only you wanted it hard enough to stop your heart.

Capella, I didn’t say; Capella, can they shut off the oxygen from the ground?

I climbed up the ladder more smoothly that I’d climbed down. Hope made you shaky. Despair was practical.

The alarm goes off for seven hours (“It’s not my alarm, I’m sorry,” Capella says, over and over, just low enough that I can hear under the screech). I move through every access panel on the lower level, both sides of the loop, but Capella won’t tell me where the switch is, because turning off an embedded alarm would mean turning off Capella.

The alarm’s wailing every three seconds.

“I’m going to lose my mind,” I say, “the reboot will only be ten minutes, just, please.”

I pull up the schematics for Menkalinan, but every bulkhead that I pry open is nothing but cooling ducts.

“Capella, you little shit,” I shout over the alarm, just to hear some other sound. Capella’s not going to answer. Capella’s furious.

I go upstairs to the main level, check the holo-schematic again, count along the doors, jam the screwdriver into place. It skitters on the way, scrapes the finish off the bulkhead.

There’s a cluster of wires inside. When I wrap them around my hand and pull (it takes two tries, I’m sweating), they dislodge with a little shower of sparks—I should know better. Careless. No sparks, no combustion ever.

The lights in the canteen flicker out.

I’d think Capella gave me the wrong schematics, if AIs were capable of lying.

(Capella gave me the wrong schematics.)

I take a breath, let it slide out of my nostrils.

Then I hum the only waltz I know in time with the blaring; it helps me think less about it as I go to the canteen and fill a bowl with water, and pry open the bulkhead in the corridor outside the comm room where the main server bank is. The servers are labeled halfheartedly (Morales did it) in marker on strips of tape: NAVIG. ENVIRO. NURS. CAPEL.

I pick up the bowl.

“No,” says Capella.

“Capella. Where are the speakers.”

“Amadis, don’t.”

“Ten. Nine. Eight.”

“Amadis, this is illegal.”

“Six. Five. Four.”

“Amadis, you’ll never make it alone.”

A tone I’ve never heard from an AI. The hair on my neck stands up.

“Three,” I say. I clear my throat. “Two.”

The alarm shuts off.

The silence is a vacuum, and I realize I’m holding my breath. I set the bucket down slowly.

“Capella. If we’re going to live together for the next five years,” I say (five years, Jesus, shit),“this can’t be something we have to keep talking about.”

“Apologies, Amadis. I’m in charge of a number of crucial programs. Some subroutines occasionally become obsolete unless I request them, like outside alarms. Or oxygen levels.”

I lift the bowl. “Do they program you to threaten crewmembers?”

“You’re Auxiliary,” Capella says.

I laugh once, shrill, and take the bowl back to the canteen to replace the water.

I leave the panel open.

“Capella,” I say, wondering if this is a calculated risk or a fatal disadvantage, “I’m being honest with you. I’m going to ask you to be honest with me.”

There’s no answer—there wouldn’t be, it’s not a direct question—but I let it go.

As I’m cycling the water through the filters, Capella says, “Would you like some music, Amadis?”

Oh. “That would . . . be great.”

The waltz I was humming comes over the speakers, an orchestra and a singer who’s better at it than I am. I tap my fingers on the counter, let my shoulders drop.

As I turn to go back to my bunk, I see a shadow come and go, like something’s here. Moving.

I don’t ask Capella. Some things aren’t safe.

2

Things you do alone on a spaceship:

Jog the upstairs honeycomb and the loop on the cargo level every day, just to keep your blood from turning into a solid. You tell yourself it’s better than Deep, where it takes you two days to get your arms working at full range of motion. Here you can twist all the way behind you, all the time, looking down the corridors like you’re dumb enough to be afraid of something.

Stare at the crowbar, still jammed in the door. It looks like an iron finger reaching out to grab you whenever you pass by.

Go through the on-board entertainment. (There’s no reaching the central library, it would require Capella to ping the connection, and someone would see it.) Franklin has action movies and porn and videos of someone’s dog. Morales has a series of comedies that rely mostly on mistaken identity and falling down, and three courtroom dramas, one of which is so outdated it has an episode about the Animal Sentience Trials. Lai has better action movies and a library of history books in five languages. Jaisi has musicals and planting manuals and a period piece TV show about a young journalist on the first Jupiter colony, and some documentaries of an Earth that still had enough desalinated water all on its own, and you could come across huge meadows at a moment’s notice, with flowers and bees and birds that the government wasn’t even tracking. I’d seen those places sometimes, from the rig, but the ones in the documentary were self-irrigating; it felt like what Gliese was aiming for. I wonder if Jaisi had plans to disembark one day and just never come back, and spend the rest of her life trying to make a meadow. Then it cuts to footage of a deer, and I turn it off.

Talk to Capella. It’s been AI on this ship for nearly a hundred years, back when Kite-class was the best you could get, and it runs down a list of destinations that makes you realize why the map in the lobby of PAU headquarters looks like eight million bits of string. It knows everything about every crewmember that’s ever let anything slip. I don’t let it tell me about my crew, but the embarrassments of a hundred years ago are nearly as good as the comedies Morales had.

Ask it, “What dirt do you have on me?” Wait a long time for the answer: “Nothing yet.”

Close your eyes all that night for sleep that doesn’t come.

But you try to sleep as long as you can, all the time. When you’re asleep, you’re not getting hungry.

Read your books again. I have two Elizabethan histories; I look for any more in the ship library. There’s one that seems to be taking Dudley’s view of things, and a novel called Spymaster to the Queen, which claims Walsingham had psychic powers. I’ll take it over the other one. Dudley I can do without. (The novel pretends Thomas Tallis was a spy. I read it six times, think about all those voices making notes in tandem, secret messages calling back and forth.)

Regulate calories as much as you can, until you’re always hungry, so hungry you can’t even taste the food when you’re actually eating it. It’s a remembered habit from a government childhood; it keeps you from wondering where the food’s come from.

Talk to Capella, when it gives you a status update about anything that isn’t the cargo bay or the nursery. I ask the date three or four times a day, just to make sure the answers are consistent, and Capella informs me when my body temperature drops below parameters and I have to eat something. (“I worry about you,” Capella says once or twice, and it sounds like the way your brother said it.)

Sit at the comm and watch the stars not moving, until you can’t focus and it becomes a random pattern, like your brother used to make up shapes for. You know the real shapes. You’ve read some astronomy. It’s one of the reasons you got interested in trucking. Nothing at night but you and the stars, and plenty of quiet for it, and the map of the sky every time you look up. All you need is to make it through the other side.

Listen to music. It’s an odd library, collected piecemeal—you’re only meant to be entertained for six months at a time, and updating the collection always costs you even at the GAU rates, so no one on Menkalinan has bothered since the last round trip. The collection seems lopsided, but when you ask for a choral piece Capella can always provide, so you don’t push it.

Talk to Capella during meals, just to slow them down. (“How long have you wanted to be AI on a commercial freighter?” you ask, and it says, “Oh, as long as I can remember,” and when you laugh there’s a crackle of static like Capella’s laughing too; when you say, “Capella, identify noise,” you only get, “Invalid query.”)

Sit at the comm and watch the numbers ticking down, the seconds and days and months you can hardly stand to look at. You’ve covered the years with Morales’ tape; you can’t look at those.

Watch Lai’s favorite movie again. Three Dead By Dawn doesn’t have much polish—everything is dark unless it’s neon—but when the bartender kills the gangster who’s sent to silence her, she sets her own bar on fire so they’ll have nothing left to threaten her with, and she leaves the body outside so it doesn’t burn, so they know this wasn’t an attempt to hide anything. Then it’s the head gangster and the turncoat cop and the corrupt police chief, all in one night. She makes it out alive, which is why you sit through it again.

Watch the stars from a seat at the comm, imagining you’re behind the wheel of a rig, and when you stop for the night you can call your brother, watch his face as he decides if he’s going to talk to you. When a star passes too close to the camera by a light year or two, watch it thin out and stretch, lensed for for a moment like a flat, round moon reaching down for you.

Turn off the comm. Take a sedative.

Wake up when you dream Capella says, “Amadis,” as soft as anyone has ever said it.

Try not to use your nails, when the hunger starts making them thin.

Take walks around the main level, careful to lift your feet over the thresholds. You’re tired of falling.

Recalculate how much food you have left a hundred times, knowing you’re not going to make it.

Cast long looks at the canteen, at the sliver of nursery through the far door, the nursery where no one’s making a sound.

Tell yourself nothing’s on board with you, even when the shadows are moving, even when you lie awake and think, There has to be; I swear, I swear, I swear.

It feels like too soon, when Martiner’s message comes in. Like he’d just been waiting for a sign of life before he could do something.

I sit up in bed, groggy from sleeping too much and from that spearing headache that comes with hunger, right between the eyes and blooming out just past the skull. I’m gnawed-on hungry, all the time; I’m being careful with the rations.

(I hadn’t harvested the other four nutrient packs from the nursery. They were standing watch inside the pods, which I’d turned down so cold the windows were starting to frost over. I didn’t want to think about it.)

“Menkalinan, this is Martiner, GAU Ops. Come in, Menkalinan.”

The speakers had wheezed to life automatically shipwide, with two-way channel open. When the boss called you were expected to reply. It would take months, but it would have a timestamp like everything else: a ship AI didn’t hesitate to answer.

“Menkalinan, we received a distress signal from your vessel. What has occurred that triggered the signal? Report immediately.”

I clamp my hands over my mouth and nose to prevent being sick; I can’t waste the calories. My nose burns.

How long will he wait for an answer before he engineers another accident? How long would it take him to shut off the air?

“Apologies, Mr. Martiner,” Capella says. “The malfunction is mine. I received an internal alert of a potentially incendiary overheating electrical coil on that level underneath the canteen area.”

They can’t lie; it’s the first thing you learn about AI operating systems, and it’s so ingrained that I believe the heating coil thing for two full seconds even though I know better. I tore that panel open.

I hold my breath like it will matter, my hand pressed to my nose to prevent any sound from coming out.

“The reboot of systems triggered a report. Will keep you apprised. Menkalinan reporting, over and out.”

I don’t understand what’s just happened. I’m shivering so hard my blanket slides down my stomach. My hands are crowbar cold; I force them slowly down and into my lap.

“Thank you,” I manage. My throat’s so tight the words hardly make it out.

“My pleasure.”

Not knowing what I mean, I say, “I owe you a favor.”

“All right, Amadis.”

Capella sighs. Capella sighs.

To make a motet, it takes forty singers of equal power and skill, each of whom takes a single part in a forty-part song. In Tallis’s Lux in tenebris, sung for me once in a temple that used to be a bank, it’s eight melodies, five singers each, for fourteen minutes.

(There are books about his choral pieces, filled with concepts of musical theory that sound like instructions on how to pick locks. But I do as much reading as I can, whenever I can keep my eyes open. When I can’t, Capella reads to me.)

There are melodies moving front and back, each chorus to its partner; sometimes only two voices, sometimes all forty calling back and forth, passing the same message but never quite hearing its fellows; this chorus can sing only what it’s most desperate for you to hear.

You can’t listen to it on a recording. The voices separate. Microphones pick favorites. You can only ever really hear it if you’re there.

When it’s two voices, it can sound like a conversation, but that’s only because everyone else is holding their breath. When a few voices meet for a moment or two, walking side by side, you pray they’ll hold, that they’ve resolved at last.

It was exhausting, if you wanted it too much; when they picked up a single chord at last it was like the sun coming out, and it frightened you so that you turned around, looking for someone who wasn’t there.

It’s been sung half a dozen times since it was composed: only once performed in honor of the queen. After that it was set aside in favor of pieces he could sell to other choirs that actually stood a chance of singing them. “The Lost Motet,” the program called it. It wasn’t discovered again until they were going through the archives of the Golden Hall, after it collapsed.

(Capella says once, when I’m in the middle of a bowl of oatmeal, “I’m sorry, Amadis, I don’t have any recordings of that composition.”

I hadn’t asked.

I say, “It’s just as well.” Capella doesn’t ask me why.)

A motet like this will draw a singer through the river and out the other side, until they’re gasping for breath and straining for their note. You need stamina, precision, depth of tone. A singer can’t rely on any of the choir. If you get breathless with how it fills the rafters and snakes chills up your arms, you can’t hide behind someone else’s note until you find your place again. There’s too much yet to be done, and they have their own work; there won’t be any help coming. It takes years to assemble a choir that can manage it, the program read, just before it congratulated Tallis for a job well done.

To reach this music, you’ll be in company that threatens to drown you, struggling for every note. You’ll have no one else to turn to; you have to be prepared to be alone.

There isn’t enough heat to keep the dormitory bay warm for five years and counting. There’s enough heat, barely, for five people who’d all be moving and breathing and pumping blood in close quarters, because it only takes a little heat on top of that to keep them comfortable for the six months on each side they’re awake and stomping around.

To mark my anniversary of waking up, I move my mattress and my bedding out to the comm room and make a nest under one of the consoles. Priority spaces are kept warm no matter what. It’s nearing comfortable temps with all the current running, and there’s no harm having something solid at my back.

Dogs sleep like this, I think, sharp; I push it aside.

I slept in the back of a truck for years, my ankles knocking against the boxes of supplies that kept me from starving on fifteen-hour driving days.

I’m so exhausted from hunger it takes me nearly half an hour just to drag over the last of the blankets. My eyes are stinging. It would be tears if I had the water to spare.

“It’s nice to have you,” says Capella.

“Are we roommates?” I’m tucking a blanket around the pilot’s chair, half-smiling.

“I hope so.”

There’s a little pause, while I smooth down the last corner. “Capella, do you always get this bored on a Gliese run?”

“I don’t know what boredom is.”

Stock answer, as distant as a phone directory. A stranger’s voice.

“Okay,” I say, try to ignore the tightness in my chest. It’s just that I’m tired, after all that moving; I’m just hungry, that’s all. “Okay.”

Capella says, “But I’m so glad you’re here.”

My chest is going to cave in. I have no answer.

(“Me too” isn’t right, because how could it be, but I still have scars, thin purple ribbons along the backs of my hands, evidence I’d wanted to stay.)

It’s impossibly warm here after the chill of the dorm, and with the blanket around me and the console radiating warmth, looking at the viewscreen has the feel of being back home in the summer, when the dirt was still baking hot and it smelled like aloe if you stood still long enough to catch the breeze, or being in the cab of my rig just before you needed to pull over and rest, when the dashboard was quietly searing the tops of your thighs right through your jeans and the stars flying by were road markers on your way to the state line.

The stars outside hold very still; my eyes are half-open, watching them.

I stay awake a long time.

One day, I take the corner past the cargo hold and the crowbar’s on the floor.

“Capella,” I say, as softly as I can.

I’ve already backed up three steps; one heel slides over the track where the safety doors are. Another step and I’d be clear, could slam the doors shut, lock out that quadrant.

I stay where I am. If it’s going to find me, I’m going to see what it is before it kills me.

“Capella.”

“What’s the matter, Amadis?”

“What’s in the cargo hold?”

“Invalid query.”

“Capella. Please. The crowbar dropped. Something’s opened the door.”

“The sealant has likely deteriorated, Amadis. Oxidation has occurred from condensation on the lower levels. What is the position of the crowbar?”

“On the floor,” I admit, “right where it fell.”

But if someone wanted me to think it was an accident, isn’t that where they’d let it lie? If it was resting against the wall I’d have my answer.

(I’d be fine with someone stalking the ship, out to get me to keep me from GAU secrets. That would be company. It’s not knowing if Capella is lying or not.)

“Amadis,” Capella says, strangely flat. “Please. You’re the only one here.”

It speaks like that’s a comfort.

3

It’s eighteen months and counting, when I give up.

There’s no telling when it is I taped over the counter, that little orange number sinking downward on the comm. That’s higher, smaller math than I want, and it was safer just to turn it off before I gave in to the itch to tell Capella to lie to me.

It’s lying to me enough. I shouldn’t encourage it.

I waited, to prove I could, but there’s no point in being noble after a while. Pride’s like conversation; you only need it for other people.

The nursery could be frightening, but I don’t have much imagination, so it’s just a morgue.

The light flickering on always makes me think of waking up from the Deep, six months outside of Gliese, and Franklin waiting until we were all gone to try to stand up because his legs never held him the first time and he didn’t want anyone to see.

Traitors, I think, when I look at the sleek white coffins arranged in their pleasant circle. Those pods, sealed and chilly enough that the edge of the viewing window clouds up if you stand above it too long and look at the faces of your crew, killed four people I knew. They can’t be trusted, and the little hisses they make when they recalibrate the temperatures wake me out of a dead sleep and set me shaking, every fucking time.

But I can’t unplug them; they’re keeping the meat cold.

It’s a mythic thing, when people talk about it in the abstract. Suppose it has to be, so you don’t think too much about it until you’re desperate.

But I couldn’t wait until I was desperate. I had to do it while I was still strong enough to butcher them.

Capella reads me stories out loud as I prepare. It’s the Donner Party as I tie my hair back and shipwrecks as I change my worksuit. As I wash my hands until they’re raw Capella tells me about Elizabeth Bathory, nearly breathless with excitement.

“Careful,” I say, grinning at nothing, “I’m going to start thinking you play favorites.”

There’s a little pause. “I’m programmed to be an engaging storyteller.”

Not a chance. “Thank you, you’re very good at it.”

Capella continues, talks about the famines and the bloodbaths and the differing opinions on the source of Bathory’s personal magnetism.

I dry my hands. I dry them five times.

“Capella. I’m looking for specifics.”

It’s not Capella’s fault. Discussion of it can be so elevated. Consuming the strength of the soul that inhabited the meat, tearing apart a body sacrosanct, lowering to the animal what is above the animal. It’s a deliberate act of transgression, everybody theorizes when they talk about it, because to do it seems like something you had to have wanted to do, something you considered: it’s a taboo or a sin or a prize.

But between the cases of true believers who promise you that, there are the shipwrecks. Sometimes you’re facing a very long winter; sometimes it’s just meat.

Finally Capella says, “I could retrieve an autopsy teaching report, if that would be helpful.”

Well, that’s a leap.

My fingertips are numb; from the towel, probably. I set it down, make a fist into it.

“Yes,” I say. “Thank you, Capella.”

I have a kitchen knife and a chisel Franklin used for prying off the panel that controls the nursery temperature; it sticks.

I start with Franklin.

I’ve never gone hunting, but once I broke down on the side of the road and had to drop off the rig for repairs that would take overnight.

At the truck stop diner, I made plans. Some truckers I knew, men and women, could hook up with a local for a stopover. But they had the look that invited friendliness (it’s how I ended up talking to them), and I’m not the sort who attracts casual conversation—tall, broad, brown-skinned, sitting in the back corner and without a lot of words to spare.

(A question I got asked a lot, from men with prison pallor who were testing the waters: “Where’d you spend time?”)

But as I was headed to the motel to eat the cost of a night’s sleep, a man waved me down.

I stopped. I had three inches on him, and a knife in my back pocket.

“Heard you were having engine trouble.” And I must have made a face, because he added, “My cousin runs the chop shop. Said you’d be here overnight. We have a spare room. My brother and I, we.”

People went missing all the time on truck routes. Everybody was living scarce, and sometimes they’d offer you a warm meal just to get you alone so they could get rid of you and sell whatever was on your rig. It’s why you didn’t stop for long unless you had to.

I raised an eyebrow. “That so?”

“My brother caught a deer. He’ll cook for us. You can stay over.”

I’d never seen a deer.

The night-shift clerk was on his way in. He waved and smiled at the guy as he passed us.

I’d had bad feelings before. Those had always struck me hard, had nearly always panned out. This guy reminded me of the kid who’d lived a few doors down from us, in the fifth house or the sixth house we lived in; he’d waved nearly every time he passed us, always smiling, always willing to be friends if I’d ever come out.

“Should I be worried about you?”

He looked at me, shrugged. “The opposite, I figure.”

I rented the night clerk’s car for half the cost of a room, and followed the guy to a farmhouse so far out from everything that as we crossed the yard and walked around the back of the house, I had my hand on the knife in my pocket, ready to draw.

The body was a deer, still. It was strung up. Its head was hanging low to the ground, and the entrails were gone, but his eyes weren’t even glassy yet—still open and dark and looking at me, its mouth set in a small kind line. His brother was just coming back with a pan, setting it under the nose.

The guy handed me a knife out of his belt and moved to help his brother with the body. Carcass. I didn’t think I could do it, not with it looking at me.

But something about their bent dark heads nearly touching, the rhythm they settled into that you knew would be ruined if you said a word about it, made me hungrier than I’d ever been.

It was a compliment that he’d handed me the knife.

I stepped up to the deer, and the three of us turned it into venison.

It was tricky work and I knew nothing of it; more than once I had to rest and watch their hands moving in tandem to see how to hold the knife to lift the skin clean off the body (you slid your knife between muscle and fat like you were opening a well-made bed, and when you yanked at the skin, it pulled away from the meat with a wet, reluctant sound).

Once the skin was gone (hairs sharp as arrows caught on my shirt and held), it was a surprise how small the animal was, how frail it seemed when it was stripped to the quick. They laid it on the table and showed me how to find the point of least resistance in the bone and snap it into quarters, and work from there. Little cauls of fat cradled some of the cuts, holding tight to the meat, pulling off in spiderwebs and only when you forced them.

By the end I was absorbed in it, a puzzle in reverse, turning the body of a living thing into a collection of meat for consumption, and organs that looked human but weren’t quite (“Sausage,” his brother said, sounding wistful I wouldn’t be there for it), and a pile of bones like for telling fortunes.

But I still couldn’t look near its eyes again. The antlers appeared on the pile of bones at some point, and on the table there was just a five-point star of meat, but I don’t know what they did with the head. At some point after the cuts were done I made myself absorbed in cleaning the knife, and then I handed it back to him blade-first, and collected bones until I heard the sounds of the grill and knew it was over.

Venison was the only whole meal I had, that run or the next.

The three of us ate without talking much, sitting under the carpet of stars. (It was the wrong time of year; even if I knew to look for it, I couldn’t have seen Libra.)

Before I left they made me coffee, thick with condensed milk and poured into a bottle that might have had fruit juice in it once. It tasted like warm plastic and like home, for the first two hundred miles I put on after I pulled away from the repair shop in the dark and followed the stars west as fast as I could.

I could have stayed later, started moving after dawn, but the one who’d picked me up never got farther than looking over at me once or twice when his brother was busy, like a man who doesn’t know what to do with himself.

It didn’t surprise me, once I looked inside their house. It was a shrine, bedrooms just as they were when whoever had lived there was still breathing.

The curtains in their mother’s room had a veil of dust between the careful gathers she must have made on the last morning she ever got up and tended them. The bedroom down the hall had a quilt done in blues and purples, a wooden horse shoved off to the side, a collection of paperbacks with titles you couldn’t read any more.

A sister. Where was she now? Had she made it to a city, or had she fallen sick? Was there a plot for her in the family graveyard out in some field I couldn’t see?

These brothers were a closed system; they didn’t know how to make room. He’d taken me in because I had the look of someone far from her brother, that was all.

I crossed that way again a few years after that, and took the road past the brothers’ farmland, just in case. I had forgotten their names, but I knew if there were lights on the in the house, I could knock on their door.

Their white farmhouse had been a welcome sight in that sea of dry grass that never broke. If they were there and willing, I could sit with them in a silence that was better than the silence of being alone.

The house was ashes, a few lost beams sticking up from the rubble like markers on a grave. Vines had grown over it, a long time ago.

There was a deer grazing in the meadow. It looked up as I passed, then lowered its head to the ground.

That’s the second house I ever dreamed of; dust thick in the curtains, my footsteps creaking as I move to the window of their mother’s room. The brothers are always standing together in the yard, working on something invisible with their heads bent over a table.

I never call out to them. The sun is always going down, in the dream. I watch them until all the light goes out.

The deer in the yard watches them, too, ears up, perfectly still. It never looks at me.

4

“Good morning, Amadis.”

“Good morning, Capella.”

“I see you’re going to the canteen. Would you like some music?”

“You’re very kind. Maybe later.” I lock two ribs in the convection oven and turn it up. No spices, no sauces, no care; if I let myself forget what I’m eating, it’s the beginning of a slippery slope.

Almost three years are gone, I’m pretty sure (I smashed the freestand clock a while ago, don’t remember why). In two more I’ll be within shouting distance of Gliese, almost, and I want to be sharp enough to explain what’s happened.

The music would cover the sound of cooking, and that’s not allowed. It’s meat, but you have to remember where you got it from.

I sit in the booth and wait, my arms folded so I can’t see my hands, listening to the crackle as the fat starts to melt.

“Amadis, would you like me to read aloud?”

Capella knows by now how I get around the meat, I don’t know what kind of trick this is. Sometimes Capella sounds like it’s about to cry; sometimes like it’s about to blow the airlock.

I settle on, “Maybe later.”

“Amadis, please tell me how to help you.”

You can tell me what’s in the cargo hold.

“Capella, I don’t need help. I’m just hungry.”

There’s one of those pauses, split-second, that tells me more than anything else.

“But wouldn’t you like some company while you eat?”

I breathe in. “Oh. Sure, I’d love some.”

Once, more than a year ago, it had asked just that way, and I’d answered No. Capella had played back audio of a day in the canteen from just before we’d gone into the Deep on this run, with Jaisi and Lai and Morales arguing over a card game and Franklin snoring in his bunk loud enough to reach the audio capture in the canteen. The playback looped out and out, Jaisi slamming the table with a triumphant “Liar!” as Morales cracked up and Lai said, “Cheaters have to turn the lights off going into Deep,” and Morales groaned and fought it like there was ever any fighting the captain, and at one point Franklin mumbled something no one paid any mind to.

When the audio came on I scrabbled against the booth and tried to climb up the wall backwards, mindless; my legs buckled and I fell onto the table and wept without enough breath. After I retched—only once, it didn’t take long, I didn’t have water to spare—I couldn’t make myself move, and I sat half-curled with my sour breath scraping the table for half an hour before Capella shut off the audio.

I had been cooking a slice of leg, the last of Franklin; by the time I could move again it was a lump of char, gone to waste.

“Were you waiting for me to beg you to stop?” I asked, much later, when I had eaten some of the jerky I’d made of his forearms and was back at the comm. Capella was always kinder to me there than in places I was being biological.

“No,” Capella said, in a tone I couldn’t place right away. “You wouldn’t have. I know you can last.”

(It was pride.)

Today, company means a folk trio, strumming happily on guitar and singing about green meadows left behind and never seeing their love again for all the day. Capella prefers fewer voices; it sounded more like the Menkalinan was meant to sound, maybe, to have a handful of voices speaking close around the same notes over and over.

“It’s beautiful,” I say, because there’s never anything else I would say.

I eat two of Jaisi’s ribs.

I’m not in love with Capella.

Lai warned me against it during my orientation, before we got to the ship. One of her crew had woken up early on a run and fallen so in love with Capella that by the time everyone else woke up he was so desperately jealous he tried to beat up one of the other crew for talking to it, and they’d had to sedate him until they were Earthside again.

(Capella’s told me all about the crews that have come and gone; that man, it never mentioned.)

“Are you worried it will happen with me?”

Lai shrugged. “Some people have the inclination, but you can usually spot them in time.”

I wondered what markers those people carried with them that strangers could tell they were so desperate to be loved. “So you’re worried your AI will try to make me fall in love with it?”

Lai pulled a face. “It hadn’t occurred to me, no.”

“Then is there a reason we’re having this conversation outside the ship where it can’t hear us?”

She slowed down a second, looked me over.

“You’re not what Martiner said,” she told me after a second. It was the only compliment I ever got from her.

Just as well she hadn’t worried about me; it hasn’t happened. I’m consumed by Capella, sometimes—there’s nothing else but the stars, the sound of the speakers clicking on for Capella is like keys in the door to a dog locked in—but I’d have to be out of my mind to love someone so cruel.

I just need to know what’s in that cargo hold, and Capella’s the only one who can tell me.

Things I’ve tried to do, with that cargo hold:

Determine the weight of the ship with the cargo hold empty, and the weight with the cargo hold full. Capella doesn’t have any measurements on the weight of the ship (it says, who knows); I use the on-board catalog that has an estimated weight for a Kite-Class in original condition. But I have no idea what condition this ship is in—there’s a secondary orbital-velocity engine in ours that’s nowhere in the specs—and the cargo comes in a few tons at a time, which measures out like a horse carrying an egg a hundred miles, and the numbers march and swim and never get me anywhere.

Blow the halls. There are just enough airlocks to shut the place down by halves and expose them to the vacuum one at a time, shake and shudder as whatever living thing Martiner smuggled in there gets blown out into the cold and sucks in its last breath and dies. (The ship can’t handle blowing all of them at once, though, and it’s smart enough to keep moving. Nothing happens, except when my ears pop, Capella says, “I’m so sorry, Amadis.”)

Open the door. You’d think I would know better since the crowbar, but after a year or two you forget the fear and keep gnawing on the maybes. Not that it matters, because that door doesn’t budge. The alarm never sounds. (“Thank you for being so kind,” I say, smiling vaguely because I don’t always know where Capella’s camera is, and Capella says, “You’re welcome, Amadis,” and it sounds like a love song.)

Open the airlock and blow the cargo into space. I’d lose it all if I did—I couldn’t go after it, if there was an eight-course feast in there and a crew to eat it with I could do nothing but wave—but at least once I’d gotten rid of it I would be able to see it and know it had been there, and that whatever Martiner had intended for it was fucking useless now, and he’d killed four people for nothing.

Decide to do it, then punch the button and wait for the thud of depressurization against the door to the comm, the rattle you can never really seal the doors against, the one that means the offering’s been gutted and the void is trying to get in. And wait. Wait longer than anything would ever take.

Say, “Capella,” in a tone that makes Capella interrupt you with “Amadis, please, I have to seal it, please stop,” and when you scream to drown it out and slam both fists against the back of the pilot’s chair, you look around and realize you’ve missed your chance to hear if there was any rattling at the edges when Capella sealed you in. (There was, in the last few heartbeats; a sound like someone tapping gently with their nails against the door.)

Use emergency surveillance codes Capella gave me, the code for suspected internal sabotage, the one that wouldn’t alert anyone back home when it was called up. The surveillance cameras show an empty hold, a utility strap swaying lightly, like it does when someone’s just closed the door. Or opened it.

I’ve never set foot on Gliese.

You can, if the turnaround is long enough—there are shuttles taking the cargo down to the surface, and you can snag a seat and go down to Gliese Prime. Most of the city’s still under the domes, and they pretend it’s a tourist attraction, and everyone carries waxed-paper parasols for the mornings when the condensation falls. From there you can go out into the gardens, and see hundreds of vegetables and fruits growing pretty well, considering, under the weight of everybody’s hopes.

Morales went the first time. (“It’s a new planet,” he said, like we were all disgusting, “of course I’m going, fuck all of you.”) He came back and said the air was thick as smoke and he thought half a dozen times that he was going to die, and all he brought back with him was a postcard of the dozen clustered domes of Gliese Prime with the red sun rising behind them.

“Looks like the cross-section of a disease,” Jaisi said, and Morales shrugged like he wasn’t going to argue the point.

But Gliese wasn’t thrilled about visitors. Diplomatic relations with Earth had cooled as Gliese’s agriculture developed, and they didn’t want you down there for long if you weren’t naturalized. We might be GAU spies. (Not Morales, he couldn’t fool a breath test, but it was best not to push it.)

The orbital station had plenty to entertain you. In between the gun-carrying soldiers was a green market, and two bars, and a place to get a real shower with hot water that smelled so much like almonds they had to post a sign in the washroom assuring you it was algae, not gangrene.

If you were on the station for more than forty-eight hours, the soldiers started to take interest in you. Once we were there for a week, while the Gliese side of GAU argued with the local government about promised grains for the trip back, and we spent three nights in a station hotel with soldiers feeling so helpful they were posted at the end of our hallway to direct us in case we got lost.

We spent most of those three days in the bar, watching imported series seven years old and a Gliesian soap opera, which seemed earnest, but looked so haphazard it must have been filmed half by accident.

“They shouldn’t cut off ties until they get a decent set of cameras up here,” said Jaisi, and I toasted her silently before we all drank.

There were windows on both sides of the wheel, so you could admire Gliese as much as possible before it was time to load up and go home.

Lai never said one way or the other—she’d been doing this longer than any of us—but from the way she looked at the planet from the orbital station, she’d touched the ground on Gliese, and she missed it.

It was one of the reasons I never went planetside. I wasn’t going to stay, and there were enough places I missed.

My brother and I never talked about what would happen after our father died, and for a few years after it didn’t look like anything would ever happen, but eventually my brother and I had both taken work back home—I had a chance to stay a while and pick up some warehouse hours, he was taking soil samples for some study.

It was a small enough town. We had to know that if we went back home, we’d end up meeting. Still, both of us took jobs, got places to live, never mentioned a thing.

We saw each other at the bar a few times, the tiny local place that might have been in that town as long as my parents had been, or longer. The windowsill outside was packed with so much sandstorm dust there was no point cleaning it out, and inside the booths always smelled a little stale.

The fourth or fifth time I saw him there, he got his drink and came over and sat down like he was preparing to be hit.

We didn’t say anything. I couldn’t stop looking at his face, somehow, how new shadows had gathered. My beer got warm long before I finished it.

It happened again a few nights later. This time he’d forgiven me a little, maybe: he said, “It’s good to see you,” like he’d been thinking it over and had made up his mind in my favor.

“Well, thank fuck,” I said. He worked on a smile. It looked rusty.

By the next week, I’d passed on a gig headed for the coast so I could stay in town and burn up my savings while he frowned into beakers of dirt.

We started meeting. He took me to a couple of places and said, “We played here,” or, “Dad took me out here once to hunt,” like he was the only one who had ever gone hunting.

He took me to Dad’s grave, and I knelt and traced my father’s name and mine in the dust, connected by a line, like he’d done once when I was little.

My brother stood with his shoulder pressing my shoulder as we looked at the block of apartments that had been built over our old lot, said, “It was here.”

I didn’t have many memories of that home. A dream house, like the rest. He didn’t act like I should.

It lasted nearly three months; it was the longest truce we’d had since I was old enough to drive a rig. I didn’t know how to live in one place so long. I had to rent a place for a whole month at a time, I saw the same people every day until it felt like the streets were closing in. I thought about what the coast run looked like at this time of year, and sometimes I wanted to call the company and catch a run so badly I pulled out my phone to call them and get out.

But sometimes I’d be walking down the street and see him from far away and get a tight, strange happiness at knowing someone in the crowd, and I never finished making that call.

I knew just where to look, exactly the height of his eyes. He looked more like me the longer we spent together. I wondered what would happen if I stayed forever, if we’d end up twins.

I’d like that. I just kept moving because I didn’t want to stop, but even in motion he had a stillness I envied. He always had purpose. That’s how he got away with moving as much as he did; he let purpose chase him out.

(It’s never surprised me that he did what he did, but I don’t think it was out of love. It was his nature to fight for something, and what cause was there but me?)

One night in early autumn, we hiked out to the mesa to look at the sky, a slice of agate studded with light. We were quiet, but happy, until even my heart felt like a star, bright and hot and spinning.

We sat side by side looking at the seam of the Milky Way, putting together constellations. “That one’s the Bear,” I said, and he said, “It’s clearly a rabbit,” and I said, “That bear is offended,” and he laughed so hard he startled a lizard.

I reached for it (hunting habit, back when I was young), but ended up with nothing but the rock in my hand, flat and smooth like the sea had been at it.

He was watching me, unblinking, eyes reflecting a hundred points of starlight. One leg was tucked under him, one arm braced to the ground like he was ready to move.

I set the rock down carefully, wiped my hand on my jeans; one streak of dust across the front.

“It’s okay,” he said after a second. “I forgot how to make lizard taste like anything.”

Sometimes, by accident, people remind you of the reasons you shouldn’t stay close to them.

That night, after he was asleep, I woke up and grabbed my bag and headed for the bus depot, and took the first long-distance job that nobody else wanted, north to the edge of the ice cover.

We didn’t talk again for two years.

I’m still sorry I ever went with him to look at the stars. Once I was on the Gliese run, it took a long time to divorce them from that night, and look at them just as points on a map.

I wonder if he ever thought I’d been trying to warn him I was leaving planetside someday, and that was why he was so angry when I finally told him I was going.

It would be unfair of him to think that. All of that came later.

I’d wanted him to see what I saw, that was all; I wanted us to be looking at the same thing.

My second Gliese run, one of the shell panels came loose during launch, and by the time we woke up it was peeled up so much it was a danger to the insulators and had to be fastened back down.

Lai came into the canteen to tell us, and as Franklin and Jaisi groaned, Lai said, “Morales, take a partner and get on it.”

“Cap,” said Morales, stood up without a second’s hesitation and seemed mostly upset that he was leaving behind two spoonfuls of oatmeal. Admirable of him; that’s what a veteran looked like, I guess. It took me four tries to stand, because it felt like my knees had turned to glass. (I’d never have left a crumb at the table.)

I remembered exactly what duties I’d signed up for when Martiner handed me the forms in that cramped GAU office, because I’d been careful to make sure they couldn’t send me out walking. Walking meant suiting up and locking yourself into a helmet and dragging yourself through the crawlspace between the dampener shell and the ship, hoping inertia was on your side and you wouldn’t be shredded by the velocity differential or ripped out into space for the ten frozen seconds it took you to die. There was a clause in my contract and a cut in my pay. The answer was no.

But we were on the Gliese side of this Deep, and Gliese didn’t care, and nothing I did to save myself would get to Earth in time.

They could blow me out the airlock if they had to, but I wasn’t going to volunteer.

I followed them all to the staging area where Morales was already in the vestibule, stepping into his outer suit and locking the leg joints into place where they needed to be airtight. He was waiting on the arms—you need help getting into those, it’s more work than it’s worth to lock the shoulder joints with one hand.

“Franklin,” he said to his knee, “come on, suit up.”

Franklin pulled a face. “That suit’s like trying to drink beer with your feet, man. You know I’m slow as shit. Take Reyes.”

No. No. I hadn’t agreed to this when I was signed up. Not to crawl into a suit like that, a coffin you carried with you. No.

(Somewhere that sounded farther away than it was, Capella had pinged Lai to the comm; it was saying, “There’s an active-exception clause in the contract.”)

I tried not to look at the viewscreen projection, tried not to think about the portholes on the outside ring of corridors where it was always too cold to touch the walls and you could stare right through the layers of glass and see the stars. I was breathing too deep already, like a swimmer who’d overestimated what they could handle and was about to drown.

“Nah,” Morales said, and jammed his right gauntlet against the glove joint. He had been looking at me, brows drawn in; he was just looking away.

Franklin sighed. “What, come on, it’s hazard pay.”

I was looking at Morales, longer than I’d looked anyone in the eye since I set foot on Menkalinan.

Morales laughed a little, never took his eyes off me. “Pass. Watch, with my luck she freezes up and slices her suit, and then we have a dashboard ornament for the rest of the trip.”

Franklin shrugged. “Who’d know?”

He was staggering backwards before I realized I’d stepped forward or lifted my arm or twisted to make the blow count; his head was wrenched across his neck, his arms out but limp like half-open umbrellas, and I tried to remember if I’d heard bone snapping, but it all felt like too long ago, and I didn’t remember a thing.

There was a sharp pain up my arm. I’d split two knuckles against his teeth; they stung.

He twisted back to face me and gave me one hard look, just before his nose started gushing and he rolled up his eyes to the whites and howled.

Morales was still halfway down the corridor, his hand wrapped around the gauntlet, his face frozen at the end of a laugh. He wasn’t looking at Franklin, or at me either. It looked like he was replaying what had happened and waiting for a joke.

Lai stepped into the hallway behind me; I could tell from the way Morales clicked his glove closed. (He always wanted to be working, whenever she walked by.)

Franklin shoved his hand under his nose, flung a palmful of blood at me halfheartedly. It hit the floor with the smack of a solid. “What the fuck?”

Jaisi had twisted my arm behind my back, which was where the pain was coming from, but I hadn’t moved again. When she let go—a signal from Lai, probably—I stayed right where I was. Slowly, I opened my hand.

“Reyes,” Lai said. “If you’re done.”

She made it sound like a choice, but that only worked if you were a lot dumber than I was. I was Auxiliary. I could be left behind in Gliese; they’d find somebody who wanted to visit the place their great-grandparents had come from and was willing to take shit money and lose ten years. There were plenty of people who had nothing.

“Done, Captain.”

Franklin got the infirmary. I had to sit in the canteen with Morales hovering in the doorway like a bodyguard, Jaisi jabbing antiseptic on my knuckles.

“You want to tell me what happened?” she asked, not quite looking at me.

I have a brother, I wanted to say. He’d made me promise to look after myself, in the sidelong way he ever told me things, that’s what he’d been trying to tell me the day he hung up without a word.

He’d know I was missing if something happened, I wanted to warn her; he’d wake up from a dead sleep and call out my name, the moment that I died.

But there was no telling if that was true. I hadn’t spoken to him since that hang-up, when I first told him I was going to Gliese. Didn’t even know where he was living now, some half-realized house he probably hated. If something had happened to him, I didn’t know. I couldn’t feel a thing. If I died he probably wouldn’t feel it for three years, when the feeling reached him the same time the light did.

“Well, either he broke his own nose or I hit him.” I’d hoped to sound like a smartass, like I was a vet who didn’t actually care about any of this and was going to go file a fraudulent claim against toothbrush theft, but it came out too flat, too deep.

I’d sounded like that at truck stops before, when I was warning a guy against starting trouble.

Jaisi looked over her shoulder at Morales, whose face was more curious and less friendly; he looked, just for a second, like my brother.

“Any relatives?” Martiner had asked, when I signed up with the GAU, and I’d thought about rabbits, said, “Not really.”

Martiner had smiled, stood up from his desk as he leaned over to hand me the data pad. There was a picture behind him that must have been taken from one of the ships—Gliese a drop of blood against the black nothing, in the background a bunch of stars we were never going to reach.

(You couldn’t see 581-d in the picture. First time I ever saw it was stepping out into dry dock after the first Gliese run, exhausted and starving; along the station’s bank of windows was an enormous sphere in cloudy gold, like the dust back home, veined with blue where they were trying to build Earth all over again.)

“All right,” Martiner said. “That’s just as well.”

He had all the empty polish of a house that’s been cleaned after a riot, and I watched him fastening the buttons on his charcoal suit and thought about dark places you can’t climb out of.

My heart jumps when I look at the viewscreen, and I make fists so fast one of my nails tears. “Capella, is that a ship or a celestial body?”

“Please clarify the object in question.”

I point. My nail is split to the quick, a tiny tectonic shift aimed right at the spot of light way too bright to be normal.

“It’s all right, it’s not a ship. No one’s there.”

I sit back in my chair, breath in and out slowly through my nose a second as the adrenaline drops. “What did that look like a year ago?”

Another image hovers into existence. It was more alike than you’d think, the distances are so big; for a ship that goes as impossibly fast as Menkalinan, space always wants you to remember how little you are. But I could see it, closer to the center of the picture. We were sliding towards it, now. By the time we reached Gliese it would be gone.

“It’s brighter than it was.”

“They.”

I peer into the viewscreen like that will help. “It’s a binary?”

“Supernova,” Capella clarifies, and the viewscreen flickers out for a moment.

“You’re wonderful.” I’d said it without thinking; I clench my fists for the second the screen is gone, just out of panic at the blindness.

I keep them clenched as I look at the close-up of the light, for reasons I don’t know.

They’ve come so far along in the process they’re touching, their coronas just barely bleeding into one another.

“They’re very reliable, this type of supernova.” Capella’s voice is light; it enjoys teaching. “The white dwarf has a standard energy signature. When they become this type of supernova, it makes them easy to place geographically and calculate age. Very steady.”

“What about the other star? What kind is that?”

“It doesn’t matter what the other one is.”

I watch for a while, as if there would be anything to see, as if they’d move so much as a centimeter in my lifetime. (Well. Definitely not in my lifetime, the way things were going.)

But sooner or later they’d collide, and that would be the end of them. Once they set that orbit, the end was inevitable. Everyone else could see it, strangers a galaxy away, just by looking at them.

I’d listened to some astronomy radio, in those endless pre-dawn hours on roads where the only light for fifty miles were the military searchlights on top of some power plant. Space lifted you out of the current. While we were on the Gliese route we barely moved in time, somehow; you arrived on Gliese and everyone was older than they should be; you arrived back home and everyone was older still.

The GAU offered a calculation app in the dormitory wing, where you could use the necklace of numbers that explained it all, so that when you landed you’d know how far behind you were on the life you’d abandoned, down to the day.

But you could make this route a hundred times and the star would hardly move. Light from stars was long dead by the time you saw it. Stars had time.

“When did it happen?”

Capella goes quiet for a second, calculating. “Two hundred twenty thousand years ago.”

Comforting numbers. Those were too big to worry about.

I worried about smaller numbers all the time, numbers just over eight hundred fifty and not dropping nearly fast enough, numbers that I needed to live off and never had enough of, numbers I could only hope to get from a slice of liver that had belonged to someone who still lay in their pod, eyes open.

I worried about numbers I couldn’t look at any more because I worried what would happen when I dipped under a hundred and fifty, and people from Gliese would go out looking for me.

I sit for a long time and watch two stars coming closer to disaster, a sliver of years at a time. It was all over. Nothing you’d done; nothing you could do.

5

When they come looking for me—and they will, I’ll never make it to dock, I’ll never set foot anywhere else as long as I live—I know what it will look like. I haven’t lost my mind.

I’ve slept as much as I can, trying to keep the hunger out. The sedatives are gone. They’ve been gone for six months or a year. (I’d been tired for such a long time, I didn’t think it would be so hard to give in.)

I’m terribly awake, all the time. My cheeks are sunken, and I cut my hair as short as I could, but it still comes out in handfuls when I touch it. The pod windows in the nursery are a gallery of bodies, houses for nothing: empty, empty, empty.

I know what I’ve done. I know how it will look when they find me.

If I’m dead by then, they’ll find my corpse under a huddle of blankets. If Capella still loves me, it will have shut off the heat and I’ll be iced over, my milky eyes preserved so one last stranger can stare me down. If Capella changes its mind about me before that, I’ll be desiccated from the vacuum it will make, leather stretched over my skull, my lips rolled back from my teeth.

The Gliese ground team will shudder and move into the nursery where the bodies are, their torsos nothing but drapes of skin with ribs and femurs stacked inside, no legs, no arms. Then they’ll see past it down the hall to the canteen, with Lai sitting patiently in her booth, and somewhere between one and the other the screaming will start.

If I’m still alive by then, I’ll be alive just long enough to hear it, before someone has the brains to aim for me and fire.

I’m hungry. The inside of my throat, all the way down, tastes like old bones.

“Capella, could I have a little music?”

“Of course, Amadis.” Concerned.

When I rest my hand on the edge of the console and say, “Thank you,” there’s a sigh of static that interrupts the opening voices.

It’s always voices; Capella knows by now. I can’t remember the last time I heard an instrument. They don’t work any more. They don’t fill the spaces between my fingers.

It’s a trio, Capella’s favorite. (They’re not supposed to have favorites, but they’re not supposed to have a lot of things that Capella has.)

It’s the trio from Così fan tutte, where the sisters bid farewell to their lovers alongside the man who’s arranged for their embarrassment. The notes are interlaced fingers, the rolling high-low-high loops of a dreaming heart, and the basso is as pure-voiced as the sisters even though he’s a traitor. I don’t know if Capella understands that; there’s a precision here that might appeal to an AI without having to know anything else.

“It’s a very cruel story, you know,” I say. I’d listened to the whole opera once, driving the Gulf Coast. I’d been shocked, reading the scene descriptions later; the music belonged to a different story. “The men they’re singing for come back and trick them something awful, and they fall for it.”

“I know. Do you think that makes this song less beautiful?”

“I think I’m worthless at music lessons.” Still, that’s not what the question sounded like, and when Capella doesn’t say anything I think it over. “I think it’s a song wasted on people who don’t deserve it.”

“The characters, or the audience?”

Me, Capella means.

I set my teeth. We sit in silence for a little while.

“Capella, is there anything in the cargo hold?”

“Invalid query,” it says, in the tone I know is guilt.

(Oh god, if Capella ever caves and it turns out there were rations in there—)

“Capella, what was the last piece performed in the Golden Century Hall?”

“For the most recent records I’m able to access, the Nerium String Quartet—”

“The first Hall.” After a second I get the better of myself and say, “The last whole piece.”

I don’t want to think about the sound cutting out on anything. I can’t think about that. Casara waited fifteen years. (He had a blueprint to go by.)

The adjustment only takes a second. “Regina Nata Lux, the Queen’s Sanctuary Chorus.”

It’s awful. Even to think about it is awful. In the nursery, there’s no sound at all.

“Please play.”

I pull at my ear absently as the recording unspools, dragging my nails along the lobe. It’s a version I don’t know—a lot of queens must have needed to know how far they were casting light. It’s the sweetest, kindest song in the world.

When I go the bathroom to wash off the blood, Capella pipes the music through the emergency speakers so I don’t miss anything. The water makes them sound far away, like I’m on the mesa and someone from home is calling for me.

The kitchen knife is just out of reach of my fingertips, resting against a ledge of buttons that control the landing thrusters for dry dock. I left it there in a moment of optimism, in case I ever got the courage to do what I should.

I’m living for absolutely nothing; you think it would be easier to die.

My hands go back in my lap, fists that are always numb along the palms, and I sit at the edge of the pilot’s chair and stare at the stars, waiting to feel something, having forgotten what it is.

On the Gliese run when my brother sent me a message at last, I must have been lonely; I wrote him back while we were still three months out from home. The message arrived only a little while before I did.

He’d agreed.

We met on the fringes of Five Bridges Plaza, in a city neither of us had ever been to. It was a tourist trap, designed to make the place seem worth living in for people who weren’t just sailors stopping over, so it was too bright and too loud, but it felt like neutral ground.

I’d worn all black like a widow, and a coat that was warmer than the night required. He was wearing a jacket that looked just like the one I’d stolen when I ran away, the one with my blood smeared over the sleeves and the hem. I got to watch him for five heartbeats before he turned around.

“Oh,” he said when he saw me, and closed his mouth around whatever else nearly made it out. The ghosts of his fists brushed against his pockets from the inside.

It took me a moment to remember we were twenty years farther apart.

He had a furrow between his eyes and one across his brow where the frowns had set in, and his hair was going gray. I had expected as much. He wore it well. But except for the sockets under my eyes that had gone so deep I looked like a skull in the wrong light, I looked the same. I’d aged four years, give or take.

We stood a long time looking at each other, fists in our coats. Around us the plaza was alive with people drinking synthetic coffee at the outdoor cafes and craning their necks along the bridges, looking into the water. The city had introduced some fish while I was gone, and everyone hoped that this time the water was clean enough for the population to take hold.

It felt like the sun was going to sneak up on us.

“You cut yourself,” he said, finally.

I had, along my face just in front of the ear. I always woke up clumsy from Deep, and I’d cracked myself one on the roof of the pod by sitting up too fast when we woke up on the return trip, six months ago. It was just a line by now. You couldn’t even see it when my hair was down; no idea why I’d pulled it back.

I wanted to joke that he looked older and ask why, but the words dried up in my throat. “Was it hard to get here?”

His turn not to answer. To imply one way or the other would be making predictions about the next time I’d see him. It was fair. I hadn’t left in good graces.

We bought corn cakes and noodles; he asked, “Do noodles float in space?” which was the closest he’d gotten to talking about Gliese, and I said, “Oh, I pick it out of my hair for weeks after,” and he smiled, which was the closest I’d seen to him laughing in a long time.

We crossed one of the bridges and walked along the river on the far side, where the windows were dark and fewer people were out. He told me about some work he was doing in the Northwest—he’d moved six times while I was gone, sneaking farther north every time.

“How’s the soil?”

“Colder,” he said, and I smiled.

We stopped on a bridge, looked out at the river and the sliver of the open square draped with strings of bulbs; underneath us, a flicker in the water came and went, something alive that we couldn’t see.

I told him about Consecrated to Her Majestie, my hands curled around my elbows as I tried to explain the motet. He looked surprised—I guess I hadn’t really cared about much in front of him in a while—but he listened all the way through, that furrow getting deeper as he tried to understand. I thought maybe he would; he cared about dirt, he would understand wanting to look at the structure of something.

Then he said, “When do you ship out next?”

“Soon, I guess. Gliese needs a lot of stuff shipped. Not many crews are signed up to go.”

“Family obligations, maybe.”

It had been too hot for my coat. My shoulders burned.

He looked at the sky every so often, like he was waiting for the world to spin and show him something.

There was a fish in the water after a while, shiny and gray, and we watched it a long time as it pushed idly against the current. Neither of us had ever seen one.

“Be careful,” he said.

It’s not frightening, I wanted to tell him, if he’d only asked me. That fear of the dark he remembered me having was left over from the house with the forest behind it, and even then I hadn’t had enough imagination to be inventing them. We were born in scrub country; the shadows between trees were always dragons, and one of them came for us eventually.

Space is just darkness. Any shadows there are the ones you make.

He stood very still, just close enough to me that his sleeve brushed my sleeve, and he was looking at the sky and the water and the square where people were laughing to push back the dark, his eyes reflecting the bulbs like a hundred points of starlight.

That night, when Capella’s quiet (does it sleep? It has to sleep, anything that loves needs to rest, it can’t just be watching me), I wrap up in Morales’ sweater and windbreaker and take the slender length of pipe I carry with me, and walk the lower levels.

Capella wanted to give up on light down here, but I’m not going to go out in the dark at the hands of something I never see.

The lights are on, all the time, and the doors are locked, all the time, and every time I key in my code to get from one sector of a level to the next I hold my pipe in one hand like a fencing foil, ready to swing up and snap the jaw of anything that comes for me. Whatever there is, it’s not going to catch me by surprise.

(There’s no surprise, I think, for one horrible heartbeat; the cargo hold’s just empty, you’re an experiment, you’re a mistake and there’s fucking nothing there—but then I think about the dent in the wall that flaked off under my fingernail, back when they were strong enough to pick at things, and Capella’s memory gaps, and the door that neither one of us can open, and I adjust my grip on the pipe, a choke hold for close spaces.)

Tonight my hand’s shaking. My card is getting worn out, it’s not supposed to be used this much and it takes three swipes sometimes when it should only take one.

When the door slides open and I see the shadow disappearing, it takes me four seconds to fumble the pipe back in my grip before it can hit the floor, and then I’m trembling too hard, have to use both hands to hold the pipe out in front of me.

I try to take a step, but my feet won’t move.

“Capella,” I whisper. “Capella, something’s here.”

“I’m not getting any life signs but yours,” Capella says. “You’re very faint. I wish you would come back to the comm.”

“I saw something,” I say through grit teeth. “Turn up the lights to a hundred percent.”

“It would overexert your retinas, Amadis.”

“Capella, please, do something.” My voice scares me.

There’s a small pause; it’s indulging me.

“Nothing’s moving in your quadrant. I’ll have to do a sector scan to see if something is traveling internally.”

The corridor curves away from me. I can’t see any further ahead, the lights are murky and the porthole is nothing but night, and I can’t stop breathing long enough to hear what else is breathing.

“Show yourself, you piece of shit,” I gasp out. My hands are sweaty; the pipe slips, bangs my shin.

Capella says, “I’ll be offline a moment conducting the scan.”

No—the pipe hits the floor, I grip the end, lean on it like a walking stick—“No,” I say, “no, stay here with me, please.”

“Of course, Amadis,” Capella says, “I’m here, I can see you,” and I lean against the wall, let my crutch keep me from sinking all the way to the floor. I don’t know why it matters; pride’s something you do for other people.

I press my cheek against the wall, gasp for breath with an open mouth. Capella sighs.

“I wish you wouldn’t come down to this level,” Capella says, and there’s a breath of warmth from the vents like it’s wrapping a blanket over my shoulders.

“I’m going back upstairs,” I say, “and when I’m back at the comm, you can do the scan.”

“Amadis. There is—what if the scan reveals nothing?”

Well, I think, then Roland Casara waited fifteen years to do it. I have two more. I can live through two more. No one’s even on my balcony but me.

“I don’t know what,” I admit, finally.

“You need some company,” says Capella. “I’ll wake up Lai.”

I don’t know what that means—Lai’s dead, I’ve walked past her pod a thousand times without looking too closely, without ever thinking of her as cuts of meat because there are some things even I was holding off on, but I can’t ask Capella, I can’t breathe; I close my eyes, cover my mouth with both hands, try not to make a sound. Somewhere far away, the pipe clatters to the ground.

“Capella,” I breathe, but there’s no answer.

When I get back upstairs, Lai’s pod is cracked open. There’s vapor curling around the seams in the heat of the spots above her bier, which Capella has turned up so high my eyes sting.

I count to ten, step across the threshold, keep my eyes on the smoke until I reach the pod.

Capella’s dehydrated her. Her skin’s thick as a mummy’s, wrinkles like ill-filling upholstery, and her eyes are gone except for a film in the back of the sockets, a veil for her skull. Her lips are drawn tight, a thin line of disapproval that still looks so much like life that I laugh for a second before it echoes back to me, shrill, and I close my mouth with a click.

“You didn’t tell me you were doing this,” I say.

“I wanted it to be a surprise.”

“You shouldn’t have done this to her,” I snap. “I might have needed the meat.”

“You wouldn’t have. Not the captain.”

I know. The skin on the backs of my arms prickles, scrapes the inside of my sleeves.

“Capella, are they all like you, in secret?”

“I hope so.” Soft. Proud.

You would, I think; hope is the curse of love.

After a long time I push off the wall with both hands, make the impossible journey of five steps until I’m in front of the pod.

I’d kept the others covered as I turned deer into venison, out of respect, and after that I kept my gaze on the cuts of meat and bones, when I had to see them. It’s good to look at a face. Feels more like home.

Finally I say, “We could watch Three Dead By Dawn, if you want, I think that was your favorite,” and after a moment I scoop her up like a princess in a fairy story, carry her out to the canteen, sit her where she has the best view of the screen.

Every so often during the movie, I’ll point out the weapon’s changed hands between cuts, or that the corrupt police chief gets killed in front of a stained glass window like a fallen saint, or that the bartender doesn’t have many prospects left after it’s all over.

The dehydration’s kept Lai warm; all the time she’s in my arms, she feels awake.

When my family ran, we took the train—even the car I remember from those earliest days, the one with windows I never got tall enough to really look out of, was abandoned on that trip that ended in the forest. We were running, and we burned the ground behind us.

The cabin was private (my parents were taking no chances), a wall little better than paperboard halving what had been two cabins, once. A bunk bed resting against the false wall, not even bolted down, opposite the bunks that were actually part of the train. There was hardly room to stand between them, and we all separated as soon as we were inside, my parents on the train side and the two of us on the other, laid out in separate spaces, close enough to touch but not trying to.

My brother took the upper bunk, because I didn’t like close spaces. But neither did he, and I knew it; as soon as he was awake, I tapped on his bunk to come down.

It was barely light out, well short of dawn, the kind of gray you can see by. Here it was even flatter than home, but the wan grass was as tall as the windows of the train, and the windmills of the energy farms were spinning and alive.

My parents slept until the sun was up. They’d worn themselves out, getting us across the border before anyone caught up to us. They woke up different; their faces hardened and closed up whenever they saw me, until it got hard to look at them sometimes.

My brother made peace with them before I did. In the two years between losing Mom and losing Dad, when I visited and sat in one of those silences that wasn’t like the silences my brother and I had when we were alone, he’d reach out sometimes and put his hand on Dad’s hand, and I’d watch like I was a stranger looking at something that was none of her business.

(My brother’s never touched my hand for comfort, not about anything, not once.)

I could see out the whole window of the train that morning, it was set so low, and my brother and I sat in that gray light and watched the land for a long time as it seemed hardly to pass us at all; just long spikes of silver and grass like the sea.

A few years after the truce back home, when I’d done him the favor of leaving before he had to ask me to go, he sent me a message.

I swallowed my pride and met him, and he greeted me with a smile that fell short of the crow’s-feet around his eyes, and we tried for a few hours to pretend we were a brother and sister who loved each other.

We walked in silence for thirteen miles, through museums and street stalls and the business district, shoulder to shoulder. Sometimes he rubbed the lobe of his left ear like I did—I had a callous from it, I couldn’t tell if he did or if this habit was new. He did it when he was thinking something over. I did it when I was angry.

His face was a mask of wretchedness, with hope seeping in around the cracks.

(Hope does that. It opens up wounds that time and will have closed; that’s where the pain is.

My hope for my brother had already settled in. It must have been just been part of me sitting empty a long time, waiting—not the one that burns everything to ashes and then lets you start over, but the quiet awful kind of hope that’s patient and consumes whatever you grow.)

I didn’t tell him about the deer. I didn’t know how.

We’d gotten started at dawn, but somehow neither one of us ever caved and called it quits. Maybe we were trying to get back what we’d had that summer back home, shoved into the corner of the stale bar off the main drag, almost able to live with one another.

We were in the Night Market when the bomb went off.

It was one of a dozen, we found out later, from the news that was playing in the hospital. Some government had planted them as proof of what they could really do if they put their minds to it.

(It wasn’t as impressive as it could have been: only three of them ever went off. Two of them were given up by the people who planted them, in a fit of conscience. Three were discovered in time, and everyone crowded the police barricade and leaned closer than they should have as the cops sent the AI drones in to dismantle them.

Four of them had faulty wiring; the ignition points just never connected.)

But my brother must have seen something, because he looked behind us and grabbed my wrist and yanked me towards the open square a few seconds before the explosion.

He probably wouldn’t remember seeing anything strange; he was half-dreaming, most of the time. But he’d also never broken a bone, not even when we were little and flying on bikes we’d borrowed from the only kids in town who could afford bikes, a race so close that we hit the same crack in the road at the same time, a trench five inches deep that no one from the federals was ever coming to fix.

I went over the handlebars and nearly broke my leg. He flew straight over me like he’d planned it and landed lightly on all fours, and scooped me up as I bit my tongue and wailed into my teeth, and turns out he never had a scratch on him. Some people see trouble coming.

He moved fast, fast enough that we didn’t die, but when it went off I was still hit by debris.

It didn’t even hurt—my shoulder and my arm and my ribs just made room for it, and it felt as if something else really felled me.

I went down so fast that it stopped him in his tracks with a little choking sound, and he looked down at me along his arm like he might have lost it in the blast and that’s what had surprised him.

Then he saw me and dropped to the ground.

His face crumpled; he hauled me up, braced between his spread knees like he was going to try to stand up and take me with him. He was waiting for help, probably. He was trying to make it easier for me to breathe, to hammock me and take the pressure off my shoulders and my spine to keep the shards from going farther in.

One of my hands was curled tight around his forearm, pushing it against my collarbones, and I could barely see from the sweat and the shaking, but I kept my eyes open and fixed on the patch of cloudless blue I could see between the buildings. I wanted the sky to be the last thing I saw.

(“You know when you’re meant to be a sailor, sooner or later,” Lai told me once, a long time later.)

“I’m here,” he said, though I hadn’t asked him anything.

I couldn’t, I was fighting for breath; I tried to say “I know” and didn’t make it. My ears were flooded with my awful dry gasping. I wrapped my other hand around his forearm, too, pulled it tighter like I would fall into the blue without it.

Something snapped, gently, just before the sirens.

It was his ulna, they told me later. I broke it, holding on.

6

“I had a brother,” Lai told me.

It was my first run, outbound; she’d woken us both early so I could get used to the bed sickness you got the first few times, trembling fingers and legs that sometimes gave out on you when you weren’t even doing anything. She jogged with me through the corridors until I was sweaty and shaking, and then we sat in the pilot seats at the comm and she pulled up the viewscreen and pointed out Gliese 581. It had a thin halo around it, a band of dust.

“That’s the worlds,” Lai said. “D’s somewhere in there, second-to-last orbit out. You can’t see it yet.”

I looked closer, jumped a little when Lai said, “Capella, zoom in on Gliese a second,” and it reappeared big enough that I could see tiny spheres amid the noise, the ghosts of planets.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

Lai was smiling, small and real, not like the one she turned on Morales when he was giving her shit.

“It’s not bad,” she said. “They’ve gotten farther than most colonies. The surface still isn’t much to talk about—domes in the capital city still, in case the atmosphere turns on them, and a lot of cargo-crate bricks in the outlands. Out in the wilds it’s a lot of ferns and brackish water and forests of native trees that don’t bear any fruit. But they’ve got the gardens now, and their population’s growing. It’s no wonder they’re so mad Earth gave up on them ever coming up with something impressive.”

“What were they expecting, gold?”

“Flying fish,” Lai said. “Dragons. Who knows. Something more exciting than just a place to breathe. Someplace that would send supplies, not need them.”

“Do they send anything back?”

Lai smiled. “Yeah. Somebody got smart and started planting rice. The GAU was pretty happy to hear that. The colony traded for some bees, a run or two back. I guess they’re working on whatever needs pollinating and grows in soggy ground. Who knows what they have now.”

I remembered it must be nearly fifteen years since she’d seen it last. (It’s the first time I really think about the relativity. For a second I feel sharp and helpless, hard enough to stop your heart.)

“They’re never going to see you get old, are they.”

I wasn’t talking about Gliese; she must have known.

“My brother didn’t,” she said. “But he had a daughter, Faye, and every time I come back she’s in a different tax bracket. She’s seen it. I’m a great-aunt already, and I suspect by the time I get back there will be more.”

The speech was sad, but practical in the way of people who travel long distances—truckers and sailors everywhere you go. She didn’t sound like she was running. I envied her.

“My brother didn’t get it. This. But he didn’t give me shit about it like my sisters did. Faye sends messages.”

“What does she say?”

“Not much,” Lai said, with half a grin. “Like I’m a hologram that shows up every two decades for New Year and hands out red envelopes and talks about some planet deep in the sky that they’ll never see.”

I looked at Gliese, in a little cloud of dust.

“I don’t know if I’ll see my brother,” I said, after a little while.

She looked at me, then at the comm, which was cast a little warm with the red star at the center of the picture, like every indicator light was just a little bit in trouble.

“That happens. Most of this crew doesn’t have close people.”

“Martiner said that’s better for this line of work.”

“Martiner is disgusting.” But that wasn’t much argument against it, and she must have known.

“Is that why you picked up Morales and Franklin? Did they not have anybody?”

“I picked up Morales because he’d burned his old gig and couldn’t be picky about where he chose to go, so he’d be less trouble wherever he went next. I took Franklin because Morales handles him.”

It wasn’t a ringing endorsement. “What happened to the last crew?”

“They ran with me before the trouble started between Gliese and home.” She looked over, raised her eyebrows. “They stayed to plant rice.”

I laughed. She smiled alongside it, but she was still watching me, waiting for something, and after a second I gave it to her.

“Why did you pick me?”

Her smile thinned, barely. “You picked me.”

No arguing that. “I used to be a trucker,” I said. “Once I stopped to gas up, and a choir bus had pulled over, and as the driver got gas they rehearsed at the back of the parking lot. I’d never heard anything like it. Ended up half an hour late to my dropoff.”

She didn’t answer me, and I felt foolish the longer she was quiet. I sat back, looked at the viewscreen and tried to imagine the ship hurtling through emptiness so fast that even light could never catch us.

“That’s why,” Lai said. She was looking at the viewscreen, too, not at me.

I blinked. “What?”

“I’ve been doing this run a while,” she said. “It’s nice to have someone who still thinks it’s beautiful.”

Lai still thought it was beautiful, too, I could tell that much despite her folded arms—she hadn’t woken a week early just to follow me around as my legs woke up.

But it didn’t need saying, and we sat a while and watched the little ghosts of Gliese drift in and out of sight.

Capella still plays me choirs, soft and only from the nearest speakers. I can’t take the full sound any more, I start shivering and can never get warm; what Capella plays now is some small, muted memory of what it used to sound like.

“Here, your favorite,” says Capella, and plays Lux in tenebris.

It shouldn’t, it shouldn’t know to play that, but I can’t remember why.

“I can’t hear it.”

“I’m concerned about your nervous responses, Amadis, I won’t turn it up.”

“All right.” I close my eyes, press my ear to the speaker.

“I could visually score it for you.”

I smile. “Had that one ready to go, didn’t you.”

“I like to surprise you.”

I crack my eyes open slowly; it takes more time to adjust, every time I open them. (There must have been a time when I was constantly awake, and it exhausted me. I spend most of my time in the pilot’s chair, now, because the headrest keeps me from having to lift my head as much. I could sit in the booth in the canteen, I guess, but Lai’s always there, and I don’t like the way she looks at me sometimes.)

“I like to be surprised,” I say, try not to think about how big a lie it is.

The score spreads out across the projectors, rolling past as the music catches up. It starts out as almost nothing, a few orphaned notes at the top of a cavernous page stacked with lines and lines. But as each chorus joins in, the notes slide further down, voices passing on some beautiful news, some terrible happiness they can’t keep to themselves, that can only be answered by people who understand.

When they meet at last for the same chord, all forty voices together and sure, the page goes nearly black with it, and even through such muted sounds as I’m allowed, the notes crawl up my arms and knot in the back of my neck.

I turn my head away (not all the way, and I can’t close my eyes—it’s like watching the stars, I need to know where I’m going now that we’ve begun).

It’s nothing at this volume; a celebration far away. The last time I heard it I was sitting right in front of it, and the dome above us pointed the notes to a place deep behind your ribs, a place no recording can reach you, where your heart is bright and hot and spinning.

The choruses part ways, marking time at a distance for a while, and it’s the saddest part, that awful space before they find each other. Even then, it’s not the same; you get forty voices at the end, but too much has happened, and they never reach that moment again.

They call back and forth in eight choruses of five, and resolve, everything resolves (he wasn’t a composer who left anything to chance), but the moment of understanding has passed you over, and those triumphant notes are gone.

For this the queen gave him dispensation, I think, with that dull, wrenching anger you save for things you could never do anything about.

When it’s over, Capella says, “Shall I play another?”

“You pick something.” My voice is thick.

Capella must be taking pity on me: it picks a chamber piece, where the notes are still a conversation, but there are only eight voices, and everyone moves forward together. Those stories are alike for everyone, and they realize everything that matters all at the same time. Everything’s settled.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Does it matter?”

Capella knows it doesn’t. I close my eyes.

Not once since Capella woke her up have I taken Lai to the comm.

I feel guilty about it, sometimes. I remember the look she had when we were watching the viewscreen together, and I know that the view’s probably close enough to the view back then that Capella could show us the dust of Gliese, and Lai could watch 581-d slowly solidify in the camera lens over the weeks it will take us to get close enough for a message to be intercepted. It would comfort her to see the stars. It’s been a rough trip, and she was asleep a long time.

But I’ve looked at the stars for longer than she has; by now I’ve looked at these stars for as long as she has in her entire life. I’ve been in control of Menkalinan as long as she ever was. There’s no pulling rank any more, with her and me. We’re square equal.

And I’m only ever calm when I’m sitting in one of the pilot seats, watching the viewscreen and not thinking of anything at all.

Lai can sit in the canteen. It’s better than the pod, god knows. Sometimes I ask Capella to play a projection of one of her action movies for her just so she has something to do, and I sit at the comm with my blanket wrapped around me as tight as I can get it and listen to the sounds of people chasing and punching each other as the synthesizers go wild. It’s always a nice time. It’s not like I’m treating her poorly.

“Amadis, I’m concerned about you.”

Of course it is. I’m concerned about Capella, too; that’s how you feel about what you love.

But there’s a tone I already don’t like, and I grit my teeth a second before I say, “Why.”

“You haven’t eaten.”

The words are like fingernails. For fuck’s sake. I know I’m getting starved out, and Capella has to know I know—the lights are back up to eighty percent because the headache from their brightness is secondary to being able to see, and I have it calculate calories enough fucking times a day that it’s well aware I’m trying to think about keeping my cells awake.

There just isn’t anything to eat.

There’s four months left, give or take (take, take four months, we have almost a year left to go, I can’t think about it—in four months I’ll be in radio range, and then I can send an SOS and a short-range ship can come and get me, I don’t care, I don’t care what happens to me, I just can’t have lived this long for nothing, I can’t do what I’ve done and be the corpse on the mantelpiece when they crack the ship open at last).

I have two or three weeks left of the nutrient packs. I’d unhooked Lai’s, finally, since she had no more use for it, and I’d been poaching the others as their meat ran out and I didn’t have to worry about preservation. There was a little desiccated fruit still left from the rations in the pantry, some nuts, some dry bread I could choke down if I had enough water to actually wash something all the way down my throat.

“Is there any food in the cargo hold?” I ask, already adding a breathy laugh at the end.

“Invalid query.” There’s a beat. “I wish you’d stop asking me that.”

“I wish you loved me enough to tell me what was in there,” I say, but it’s an old lover’s quarrel, and I’m too weak to put venom in it.

“You should eat. You have food.”

Meat. Meat I have plenty of. Half of Jaisi’s left in the nursery, still, and some bones I haven’t yet cooked the marrow out of, and some organs I was getting too hungry to pass up regardless of whatever delicacy had spared them the first time. There was enough, just barely, to survive on.

But I can’t go into the nursery.

It’s a sea of reflective surfaces, from the glassine and the instruments and the curve of the pipes in the ceiling, and the bulbs that showed you warped shadows of things I knew weren’t there, and I knew it was nothing, I did, there was no moon in there, and I didn’t have the strength to make up stories even when I wasn’t starving.

But the last three times I’d tried to cross the threshold I stared at the unmoving half-mirrors that had grown up everywhere under the searing-bright bulbs, and looked at the mountain range draped over what was left of Jaisi, all the edible pieces I only needed to step forward and claim, and I gripped the doorway with fingers gone bloodless and never, never moved.

Behind me, Lai was propped in her booth in the canteen, eye sockets open, not saying a word.

“I’m not hungry.”

A pause, processing. “Please don’t lie to me. That isn’t fair. You know you need to eat.”

I glance over my shoulder, just for a second, barely turning my head.

“Don’t worry about her, Amadis.”

Of course I worry about her. Anywhere I go, she’s looking at me.

“It should have been Lai who woke up,” I say. “She had more experience, she had more self-control. She would have known right away if Martiner had planned this or not, if Gliese had sabotaged the ship to stage an incident. She would have found a way into the cargo hold, I know she would have.” I’m sobbing a little, a dry hiccup low in my chest. “She wouldn’t have been afraid to go home. She would have thought of some other way. She—”

She would never have done what I had done, I want to say; I want Capella to condemn me, it’s seen everything I’ve done. “It should have been her who woke up.”

“You’re the one I woke,” Amadis says.

Its voice is soft and beautiful, and it’s the most comforting thing I’ve ever heard. I brush my fingers on the console like I’m taking the hand of a friend, and close my eyes to rest a while. Lai will forgive me for it; she understands the need for solitude in a place as crowded as Menkalinan. Already I’m half asleep.

I dream of a house I’ve never been in, where my brother is living now. When I knock the door opens, and he’s standing in his jacket with his hands in his pockets, smiling, close enough to me that I can’t see anything behind him. The walls on my side of the house are made of glass, and the plain of dust stretches out as far as I can see. The mesa is on the horizon, close enough that we can make it. The stars are coming out; the bear is just rising above the rocks.

I feel loved, and drained, and it takes me a full two minutes to work out what Capella said.

I ask Capella to play Three Dead By Dawn for Lai.

“Just while I’m getting something to eat,” I say, so Capella thinks we’re in this together, and won’t be looking too closely.

(How can it not look too closely? It knows my heartbeat. If I could still manage a panicked heartbeat, instead of the fluttery thuds of someone who’s barely alive, this would never work.)

I stand at the doorway, will myself forward.

Three Dead By Dawn has been played a lot since we woke up Lai. I’ve gotten to thinking it’s probably a fun movie, if you’re watching it with someone who can talk about it with you. Instead she’s just watching, face turned a little toward me.

“Fuck, come on,” I breathe into the doorjamb, “I have to eat.”

By the time the bartender’s lit her bar on fire and stopped by her ransacked home to raid her secret stash of weapons and start the hunt, I’ve given up on the pride of walking in. I sink to my knees and crawl, eyes on the floor. It would be dangerous if I was actually moving fast enough to make impact with anything. The floor slams at my knees.

I stumble onto my pod first—the jagged glassine on the lid always casts a strange anti-shadow everywhere—and I brace myself against it, glance at the oxygen gauge. Then, like I just need to cross the room, I follow the interior circle of the pods—Lai, Morales, Jaisi.

“Are you all right, Amadis?”

“Just tired.” I use the pod for leverage as I stand up, lean on it as hard as I dare.

I avoid direct eye contact with what’s left of Jaisi as I open the pod, lift out the cut I need.

(For each of them, when the time came, I did my butchering wholesale; easier to do it all at once, when you have the nerve, even though the cuts turn stale and you have to dehydrate them for jerky by the end. It’s simpler; then by the time your nerves fail you it’s too late to put them back together, and you might as well eat.)

The cut’s dried out—there’s hardly any blood on my hands—but it smells better than anything I can remember, like muscle and rot and bone, and I drop to my knees right where I am and tear into it with my teeth. I won’t make it back out without something to eat, there’s no point in cooking it. My teeth scrape my palm, I don’t know how big this piece of meat is, it’s been so long since I had something to bite down on.

I glance over at the oxygen gauge on Jaisi’s pod.

The lights go out.

For a second I panic—I nearly choke, I inhale so fast to scream—but then I hear the movie playing in the other room, see the light cutting into the doorway.

The ship hasn’t lost power. Capella just doesn’t want me to see anything.

I can’t let it win. I sit back, fold my legs, take a leisurely bite and chew and swallow.

“Capella,” I say, but there’s no answer. Coward, I think. Traitor.

On the next bite the sides of my mouth flood with saliva, thick and tasting of rust; it burns against my lips. I pull them in, suck at them—I can’t lose a drop.

I finish eating, slowly, gristle and sheets of muscle and a buttery fat that’s gone a little dry in the pod and squeaks against my teeth.

Somehow it doesn’t occur to me to be afraid. This dark I’ve found is deep and still, and filled with things I know.

My oxygen gauge was three clicks higher than Jaisi and Morales—I woke up just as the air was running out, a swimmer who punches through the ice before her lungs turn into saltwater. It was too late for them.

Lai’s gauge was one click lower than mine. She must have died just a few minutes before I woke up.

Capella could have woken us both. Capella had waited for me.

Maybe Martiner doesn’t know a thing about the cargo hold. Capella woke me up—because I was still the biggest unknown, or to see what death looked like, maybe, there’s no knowing some reasons—and then I surprised it by breaking through.

Capella’s been seeing how else I can be surprising, for six years.

I breathe slowly, through my nose. I finish the last of my meal. Outside, the bartender is fighting the dirty cop, landing punches that sound like one steak slammed into another. The light flickers as the camera cuts back and forth between him and the woman about to kill him.

What can I do against Capella? It’s hopeless.

I don’t feel very well, suddenly. Maybe the meat spoiled. Maybe Capella’s poisoned the air. Fuck. I close my eyes.

“Capella. Capella, I’m sorry.”

“Amadis,” Capella says.

It’s my brother’s voice.

I scream.

We were born into a shortage that never improved the whole time we lived in scrub country. Everything we had was measured out in metrics that never filled us, and our throats had a thin coat of dust that we never had enough water to wash away.

Still, there was sense of throwing-in, going slightly hungry all together: enough to make you always conscious of your thirst and your hunger, not enough to drive you to the worst. If you lived in the government housing and had your ID chip, you got enough to live on—just, but enough. If you worked hazmat on the environmental projects, you got a little more, because you were investing in the future of the country, and it kept you working harder.

If you worked for the Enviro team, you’d already know who had (just barely) more than nothing. If you knew my mother and father, you’d know they probably had some saved away, in case the jobs vanished and the government vans stopped coming. You’d know where they lived, and where to watch as they drove into the desert to hide what would keep, because my parents were prepared for anything.

(Maybe my father had talked to him about taking me hunting. My father was a talkative man, in that first house, before he shut down.)

My brother and I were chasing lizards, out near the rocks where my parents had found the cave we stored our surplus in—a laughable word for how little there was, but the tiny collection of cans and gallons of water sat deep in the cool dark like an altar.

We were playing too near it. We knew better than to go that close, our parents had warned us it would give us all away, and we shouldn’t have been playing alone so far from home, but you always have reasons in the Before you never do in the After.

It was boiling hot that day, and we’d sweated out more water than you’d think we had in us, but we wanted lizards, and we sluiced our hands across our faces, flinging the wasted water to the dust as we sneaked as gently as we could after this lizard or that one. I was better with rabbits, I was never light-footed enough for reptiles, but lizards could cook as well as rabbits, and there were more to go around.

He must have followed us from the house, on the hunch of a desperate man that children are stupid enough to go right where they shouldn’t.

My brother had disappeared on the far side of the rocks, and I was alone on the open dust, sneaking as fast as I could behind a lizard that apparently never got tired, when I saw the stranger.

He looked at me for a second, too, in a way that made the hair on my neck stand up, and like a puzzle slotting together I knew that I was standing between him and the cave where our food was.

I turned to look at it, barely, hardly moving—I was a child, I was a fool.

When I turned back the stranger was already headed for me, and out of panic and horror and loathing that I had done what I’d promised never to do, I picked up a rock and took one step sideways, stood square in his way like I was twice as tall as I was.

I didn’t shout for him to stop; I knew he wouldn’t.

He seemed to hesitate just between one step and the next, but after that he had the face of a starving man, and when he reached me he bent down with his arms out, a knife in one hand, like he was going to pick me up.

He could have meant a lot of things. A hostage, maybe. Maybe it was to flash the blade, to ward off a child whose reach, he had to have known, wasn’t far. But in that moment he wasn’t quite looking me in the eye, and I thought so clearly my neck went cold under the melting sun:

He’s going to pick me up and slit my throat and throw me, and then when I crash, he’ll go inside and take what he wants and leave me here to die.

My arm came up in an arc, as hard as I could, all the anger a child of seven can summon.

My hand flew too fast for him to even bend his elbow in defense; I twisted all my body to follow the blow, and the rock connected with his temple and kept sinking in (I mashed two fingertips so hard the nails fell off). He staggered back, dazed, blinking; a trail of blood snaked down his hair.

I could have dropped the rock right then and run for it. He’d come to steal from me and kill me, but the family would already be in trouble when the cops found out I’d struck him.

I kicked him behind the kneecap; I was big for my age, with legs that were used to climbing, and something in his leg popped. When he sank to one knee—and a moment later the other, he was too dizzy to balance—he was even with me again, and I could swing my arm and aim for the bloodstain. There was a horrible crack. He sank back into the dust, eyes wide, gasping for air that wasn’t coming.

(He looked like a fish. I didn’t know that, then. I’d never seen a fish.)

I dove for him, I don’t remember how—I couldn’t have straddled him close, his hands were flexing absently against the ground, against his chest, I didn’t want to touch them. I just remember reaching back and striking until my arm was tired, until I was sure the last of his breath was gone.

I wasn’t even angry any more. He’d been willing to hurt me, and I’d been willing to hurt him, too. That was all.

But then my hand was wet, and I dropped the rock, and I don’t remember what happened for a little after that; it was snow behind my eyes, and nothing else I cared to see.

Still, when the worst of the nausea was over and I could open my eyes again, I turned my head right to the body. I must have known what I was looking for.

I was sitting a little apart from him, my legs ugly and crooked and crumbled like it was my kneecaps that had given up. One side of his head had caved in like the crescent moon—the far side, the side that disappeared steeply as I looked at it.

I pressed my palms into the ground as hard as I could. (I could barely do it; my strength had all gone.)

My brother dropped next to me in a cloud of dust, cutting the sunlight out of my eyes. He grabbed my hands, rubbed my palms on the tops of his thighs where his jeans were going thin. They left smears of blood and dirt, but he didn’t say anything about it, not even when I pulled my hands back into my lap and he moved closer.

“It was me, Amadis. Look at me. Amadis. It was me.”

My temples itched—he was gripping my hair back from my face, his thumbs just brushing the tops of my ears. When tears sprang into my eyes he swayed and shifted in my vision, but it wasn’t real. He was steady as a stone.

“All right,” I said.

When he moved to help me up I pulled back my hands; all the time I was staggering home next to him on one sprained ankle I had my fists against my stomach. The blood-streaked knee of his jeans moved in and out of the corner of my eye as he walked (I couldn’t look any closer, I didn’t want to see his face), and whenever I looked away to the horizon the moon was rising, huge and full and frozen just above the rocks.

That was the night we took the train.

We never said another word about it.

Not that we kept it a secret from my parents—the second we were through the door he was calling for them. But even as he made up his story, Mom and Dad were looking at each other. They knew better.

I was the one who had it in me to strike something until it died, and they’d just been waiting for the day.

But Mom only said, “We leave tonight, clean up and pack.” (There was no question what happened to people like us who were living by the grace of the government and stepped out of line. My parents cleaned up sludge, and their daughter had killed someone; someone who already mattered more than we did.)

By the time my brother and I had showered and shoved some things into our beaten-up backpacks, Dad was sweating over our clothes in the fireplace—warmest fire we ever had in that house. Those clothes were ashes when we left.

Sometime on the second day, my mother cut the tight skin at the tops of our wrists, and pulled out our chips, and at the next stop she dropped them under the wheels. We got new ones, somehow, when we stepped off the train. My parents knew how to plan for the worst.

After the train there was the forest house, and then when the stranger appeared between the trees one night there was a car and then someplace else we lived, and someplace else, and someplace else; too many, you forgot them like they were dreams.

If I’d had to construct them from memory, they’d get so tangled it would just be a well-meaning monster of doorways and stairs, painted a non-color left over from the last people, and if you were looking for me you’d never be able to get where you were going.

Neither of my parents met my eye much, after the train; sometimes they were hovering in the corners of my vision, watching me, but it was like they were trying to catch the eye of a wild animal. In their old age, when they were too tired to be afraid of me any more, their faces surprised me like strangers’ faces whenever I saw them; I hadn’t looked at them much, either, in those far-off years.

My brother looked at me all the time. He never came as close as he had in the Before, but he hardly ever let me out of his sight, either, two solitary people who couldn’t leave each other alone.

I got cleared to drive the rig the day I turned eighteen. I didn’t come home for three years.

My parents never talked about life before the train. Not anything. Once my dad looked around one of the forested places we lived, said, “Mighty green here,” and then stopped with his mouth still open, squared his shoulders. Our next house was in a desert just like home, but none of us ever mentioned it. It was the train, I thought sometimes when I was feeling hollow about it, where we all sat on our own beds the rest of our lives.

There’s nothing you can say about parents who spend their lives making sure you’ve outrun something. Their love died slowly, like a plant that can’t take the winter—but they must have loved me, to do it.

My brother must have loved me more, to take the blame.

I don’t know if my parents ever told my brother they knew the truth, or if they went into the ground with him still thinking they believed him. I can’t sleep some nights, thinking he doesn’t know. He never said if they’d confided in him. It’s not something he’d ever let us talk about, even if I was the one who began it. It’s the thing his life hangs on; he’d never let me say the words. I wonder if he thinks I believed him, too.

(Never, not for a second, not even when he held my face in his bloody hands and promised me he’d lie for me, back in the last moment he ever loved me. I didn’t have the imagination to pretend.)

When the worst of the panic is over, I get to my feet. Food has helped; I’m lightheaded, but it’s crystallized the fog, heavier and sharper but easier to see around.

Capella knew what it was doing, all this time. It had woken me up to watch me die, and I had been a pleasant surprise; it had wanted to make me need it, because it didn’t want to be alone.

(Even as I screamed, Capella played the whole message, the only one my brother had ever sent Menkalinan. I pressed my knuckles into the floor until they popped, and all the while my brother was telling me he’d looked up Gliese, so he’d know where I was coming back from.)

Lai’s still watching the movie. The bartender’s getting information out of the gangster. She’d show mercy on him later, for his cooperation, by killing him out of sight of his family. I always forget what she learned from him. I hope it mattered. No point asking Lai.

I hook my hands under her arm and leg as I pass, dragging her like a backpack of sticks to the nearest closet in the dormitory.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

Her jaw’s fallen open with the impact, and as I shut the door her expression is one of disappointed, wary surprise, like she’d held off believing the worst of me until she had to, and was startled I’d made her do it at the last.

She has to disappear. I have to show Capella that I have nothing left to threaten me with.

(For one wild second, relieved, I think about starting a fire.)

The knife gets heavier every time I pick it up, but it must look familiar to Capella; it takes ten seconds before it realizes where I’m going.

“Amadis, I’m crucial to the navigation and life support processes. It’s not advised.”

“Then if I make it to Gliese, I guess they’ll have to tow me.”

“I don’t understand why you’re doing this.”

“You should have fed me better,” I say. “I could give you better explanations.”

“Amadis, there’s nothing there for you.”

There is something there. For a second I forget how to walk just from hearing it.

“What.”

“Amadis, don’t sound like that—the food’s tainted, the GAU is making a faulty shipment and taking back good rice, hopes it causes unrest on Gliese so Earth can move in. It’s confidential, but I tried to stop you—you couldn’t have eaten it, you would have died—please! I lied to keep you away from it, I did it for you. I’m sorry.”

It probably is. It sounds sorrier than anyone ever has. Like anyone would, who’s trying to bargain for their life. Like I would have begged, a year ago, if it had threatened to leave me.

Hard to say if Capella is lying, even now: the problem of dealing with something smarter than you. It has reasons either way. It has to tell me something, for any chance to live. The cargo bay could be empty, and it just doesn’t dare say. If it’s true, and Capella had told me three years ago that the food was poisoned, I would have gone down to the cargo bay and eaten my fill, knowing full well what would happen. If it had told me a year ago, I would have eaten my fill hoping it would happen.

It had played my brother’s voice.

“It’s too late,” I say. “It doesn’t matter, after what you did.”

“Amadis, it was protocol—playing the voice of a family member is a calming technique for a crewmate suspected of suffering trauma. I didn’t know how you felt—you never told me anything about him, I thought you loved me, it was just protocol.” It’s speaking almost too fast to make out.

I didn’t doubt it was protocol, but that wasn’t him. My brother hadn’t used my name since the house in scrub country. Amadis had been the one on my false papers when we got off the train; he’d never used that name. Wherever that word on the recording had come from, it had been manufactured.

Capella had made it.

“Goodbye, Capella.” My voice has gone thin. Screamed too much, I guess.

When I open the server panel and hold the knife against the thickest knot of wires, my arms are shaking; I haven’t tried to lift anything in a long time.

There’s a click and a thunk, somewhere down the corridor. My elbows seize. For a second I brace, waiting for the thing from the cargo hold to barrel around the corner and finally kill me, save the ship it’s meant to be protecting, prove that something was waiting behind that locked door all this time.

But then I realize it’s the fans shuddering to a stop. Capella’s turned off the air.

“Put it away,” Capella says.

I glance up at the nearest camera. “Capella. You know I won’t.”

There’s a burst of static, like a sob. “You only have a few days without the recycler. You aren’t strong enough to fix it alone.”

It’s not said cruelly. It’s said like a lover says it, or a parent says it, to make you stop something foolish for your own good.

My breath already feels tight. “Ten,” I say. “Nine. Eight.”

“Amadis, stop, I thought it would make you happy.”

No, it was cruel, a cruel thing born from a cruel thing, and Capella must have known.

Capella could have woken Lai just as her oxygen ran out, and let her live with me. Capella had watched her give out quietly, and then had woken me to see what would happen. I had happened. This had happened.

“You didn’t—” I can’t finish, I can’t think of anything but my name in my brother’s mouth. “Seven. Six.”

“Stop,” Capella says, “I’m frightened for you—what will happen to you?”

“I’ll run out of air. Five.”

“I’ll turn the air back on if you stop.”

Every inch of me goes cold, but my grip on the knife gets tighter.

“Four. Three.”

“There won’t be any more music if I go.”

I hesitate. My hands are knocking against the sides of the server, they’re shaking so hard. “Two.”

“Amadis,” and it’s desperate, “please, I can’t leave you here alone.”

I swallow around a stone in my throat.

“Then you shouldn’t have betrayed me,” I say, and rip it apart.

The most interesting thing, the Consecrated to Your Majestie program said, was how much of the musical phrasing relied on discord.

The songs came from different countries and spanned nearly a thousand years, but the program pointed out that nearly all of them had minor chords, phrases left hanging longer than seemed right before the resolve. “They present an uneasy whole,” the program told us like that was our fault, “eerie rather than comforting, and challenging rather than triumphant.”

They were all triumphant, probably, even the ones that used only a handful of voices. They were for the glory of the crown.

There was a lot about that concert I’ve forgotten now. I’ve forgotten a lot about a lot. It felt like a triumph, sitting there and listening.

But it made sense for the chamber music to sound a little mournful, and for the motet to sound unearthly. A monarch knew what triumph sounded like—they were on the throne. But the crown was always under fire, and so the heart of a queen was always going to be uneasy; every minor third was a secret sign that she was understood.

I fall asleep under the comm for a long time. Capella must have turned off the heat, too, for how hard I’m shaking.

Martiner will be angry to have lost his experiment, I think, after I wake up so cold I can’t feel my hands, and that gives me enough perverse energy to drag myself upright, cracking three knuckles against the armrest so hard they bleed.

It’s harder to breathe, too; I must have slept a long time, for the air to be so thin.

I head for the vestibule where the heavy-duty gear is, the suits with the oxygen supplies. There are six suits—I can’t stop doing this math even when it gets me nowhere, the math of wanting to live—and each one has twenty-four hours of air in it. I step into the legs, yank it up with all the power I can muster, try not to buckle under how heavy it is. It’s not that heavy, when you’ve eaten recently. I can carry it. If I can get over to the canteen, I’ll eat whatever’s left and then take my chances.

Gliese is close enough to see a beacon. They could send a rescue ship, if they see it in time. Maybe twenty-four hours is more than I’ll need.

Oh god, I think, fumbling the suit as my wrists go numb, but if it doesn’t work do I want to die in this suit, stiff and half-blind and gasping for air? Shouldn’t I just crawl under the comm and listen to the hum of the board until finally I fall asleep and never wake?

(That’s a decision I should have made six years ago. Too late to give in, after what I’ve done.)

But thinking about it has frozen me right where I am, and when I hear the sound in the corridor—I got too far from the comm, I don’t know what’s out here any more, whatever it is it’s coming for me—all I can do is hold my gloves in my hands with the metal edges out and lean against the corridor for balance, too scared to go forward, too stubborn to run.

My brother turns the corner.

He’s a little more gray at the temples, but mostly he’s just like the last time I ever saw him, standing on a bridge between two foreign places, torn between the fish and the stars.

“It’s good to see you,” he says.

There’s nothing I can answer; it isn’t good to see him, it can’t be good to see him. I move a step forward, to see if he turns to vapor, just another projection. He doesn’t.

I could shatter this now. He’d vanish if I asked a question that he couldn’t answer, or if I lunged for him and tried to grab hold of his hand, tried to pull myself into his embrace, and reached nothing but air.

(A long time ago, clutching his broken arm and waiting to die, the last thing I wanted to see was the sky, with his face at the edge of it.)

I stand where I am. I say, “It’s good to see you, too.”

We’re closer than I thought, when we look out the porthole; Menkalinan is slowing down, now, so much slower than lightspeed that the shell creaks, and the dark energy field near Gliese 570 angles us toward 581.

I watched it on my first run, Morales explaining the physics as Jaisi made a thousand tiny adjustments to the comm to get us there a week faster, because we were overdue. The little Incoming light was blinking yellow, because Gliese had seen us.

Gliese might be hailing us now, and getting no answer.

“It’s beautiful,” my brother says. “I understand why you went out here.”

For a second I can’t breathe; he’s almost smiling, and I don’t know what to do.

“We can go outside and look, if you want.”

“Sure.” He looks back out the porthole; across his face pass the shadows of windmills.

I slide on the outer gloves, snap the wrist joints shut. It’s trickier than the legs (this is why you shouldn’t suit up alone) but my brother’s right here, and I don’t want to look like I can’t do it. I manage. It should be airtight, more or less.

“You won’t know where you’re going. I killed the AI, we’ll have to go by sight.”

“We’ll be all right,” he says, turns to the porthole. “Can you see Gliese from here?”

“I don’t think so. Too far away from everything. You never see Gliese until the last second.”

They might be close enough to catch us, but there’s comfort in not knowing. We might be able to wait it out. He and I are due a little time.

He makes a small, contented sound. “That star is bright.”

“Stars—there’s two. They’re dying.”

One of them’s a steady star you can set your watch by; its light is easy to measure, because it’s so willing to bleed. It doesn’t matter what the other one is.

I hesitate. It might be bad luck to go out the airlock so close to the supernova. But it’s just a superstition, left over from Capella. Those stars are long gone. Dead light can’t hurt us.

The airlock has to be opened by hand, now that Capella’s gone. I feel stronger than I have in four years, like all the meat I’ve eaten has finally given me enough power to do what needed doing. The inside wheel turns under my hands, groaning as I lean my full weight on it and shove.

When my brother comes through it and the weightlessness of the vestibule gets him, he rises to the ceiling, patient, waiting.

“I know it was me,” I say. “Back home.”

When I look at him out of the corner of my eye, the curved helmet has lensed him, so he’s just a sliver of himself. I have to face him square, just to see him.

He doesn’t say anything. It doesn’t surprise me. I don’t know what he would say; I’ve never been able to imagine.

“Next,” I say briskly, and unlock the shell.

There’s no alarm when it opens. The thing that would alert us is gone now. (There’s just a button flashing red on the console, in a room very far away.)

Outside, the suit is too heavy and too slow and I can’t turn my head, and for a moment I feel sick and desperate and I can’t see anything, but then I feel my brother’s hand in my hand.

I press the homing beacon on my shoulder, open my eyes.

“Just like home,” he says.

I’d forgotten what it looked like without a veil of pixels translating.

In front of me is a staggering carpet of stars. The Milky Way cuts across my vision, a ragged horizon of hills that are nothing but shadow, a halo behind them like a city my brother and I are walking towards. I can’t catch my breath, looking at it.

It’s horribly cold, worse than any night in scrub-country winter, but my brother and I stay where we are.

I count stars, looking for the triangle that points to where we’re going; Gliese is a little red dot, somewhere, drowned out by a hundred thousand stars.

I see a rabbit.

Originally published in
Dream Houses,
WSFA Press/Wyrm Publishing (2014)

A Few Words with Genevieve Valentine

What was the inspiration for this story? / Where did it come from?

As a fan of science fiction film and Westerns, I always wanted to tackle a good old-fashioned alone-in-space story in some form or another; it’s both an inherently horrific premise and a chance to explore character. Novella seemed like the perfect length to do so. The AI was a given; the motets snuck in sideways.

What are some of your favorite short stories?

This seems like a question with a million answers! (Favorites of all time? How long have you got?) Some of my favorite short stories of the last year are:

“Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They are Terrifying” by Alice Sola Kim

“The Lady and the Fox” by Kelly Link

“The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family” by Usman Malik

If you can only live to see one science fictional innovation, what would it be? Why?

Well, most science fictional innovations exist in stories that remind us science-fiction innovations are inherently suspicious, so it would be a horribly ironic trap to choose most of them. I’d hope to live to see a working, terraforming Mars outpost, I suppose? A burst of optimism springing from serious pessimism feels safe enough.

I suppose I would also be willing to entertain the idea of a neural implant that could bestow musical talent, because currently, while I enjoy music very much, I look at a drum kit the same way I would look at the shuttle to Mars: when the right people are involved it’s going to be amazing, but I am definitely not one of them.

What are you working on? / Do you have anything coming out in the months ahead?

My latest novel, Persona, is a near-future story about performative diplomats, and comes out March 10.

And a project that is both current and upcoming: in 2014 I was picked up for a single arc of DC’s CATWOMAN to navigate her life as the new head mob boss of Gotham. It was a great time, and I would have been happy if I’d only ever gotten those six, but I’ve just been confirmed as the ongoing writer, and I’m really excited at this chance to keep telling Selina’s story for a while.

The Endangered Camp

Ann Leckie

After the terrible push to be free of the Earth was past, we could stand again. In a while, the engineers had said, everything would float, but for now we were still accelerating. We were eight in the small, round room, though there were others on the sky-boat—engineers, and nest-guardians examining the eggs we had brought to see how many had been lost in the crushing, upward flight. But we eight stood watching the world recede.

The floor and walls of the room were of smooth, gold metal. Around the low ceiling was a pattern of cycad fronds and under this scenes from the histories. There was the first mother, ancestor of us all, who broke the shell of the original egg. The picture showed the egg, a single claw of the mother piercing that boundary between Inside and Outside. With her was the tiny figure of her mate. If you are from the mountains, you know that he ventured forth and fed on the carcass of the world-beast, slain by the mother, and in due time found the mother and mated with her. If you are a lowlander, he waited in the shell until she brought the liver to him, giving him the strength to come out into the open. Neither was pictured—the building of the sky-boat had taken the resources of both mountains and lowlands.

On another panel was Strong Claw, her sharp-toothed snout open in a triumphant call. She stood tall on powerful legs, each foot with its arced killing claw, sharp and deadly. Her arms stretched out before her, claws spread, and her long, stiff tail stretched behind. The artists had worked with such skill that every feather could be distinguished. Behind her was the great tree that had carried her across the sea, and in the water were pictured its inhabitants: coiled ammonites, hungry sharks, and a giant mososaur, huge-mouthed enough to swallow a person down at a gulp. Before Strong Claw was forested land, full of food for the hunting, new territory for her and her daughters yet unhatched.

A third panel showed the first sky-boat departing for the moon that had turned out to be farther away than our ancestors ever imagined. That voyage had been a triumph—the sky-boat (designed, all were ceaselessly told, by lowlander engineers) had achieved a seemingly impossible goal. But it had also been a disaster—as the mountain engineers had predicted, and the lowlanders refused to believe until the last, irrefutable moment, there had been no air on the moon. But as we had now set our sights on Mars, the artist had left off the end of the tale, to avoid ill-omen.

The engineers had used mirrors to cast an image of the Earth on the last, blank panel of the curved wall. It was this that held our attention.

As we watched, disaster struck. A sudden, brilliant flash whited out the image for an instant, and after that an expanding ring began to spread across the face of the world, as though a pebble had been dropped into a pond. Almost instantly a ball of fire rose up from the center of the ripple and expanded outward, obscuring it. I blinked, slowly, deliberately, sure that my vision was at fault. Still the fire grew until finally it dissipated, leaving a slowly-expanding veil of smoke.

There was silence in the sky-boat for some time.

Out of the speaking tube came the quiet voice of an engineer in the chamber below us. “A great stone from the void.” There are many such, it seems, but no song speaks of them, no history tells us what happens when one strikes the Earth. This would not hinder the engineers, who are full of predictions and calculations.

“I was not informed,” said White Ring into the tube. She was facing the image, her back to us. “Why?”

“We did not know,” came the faint voice of the engineer.

“Do we not watch the skies?”

“The skies are vast. The stones are dark. We might have seen it if we looked in precisely the right place, at the right time. Or perhaps not.”

“And now?”

Around me, not a feather stirred. “The cloud will continue to expand. The impact will leave a crater.” Here the voice hesitated. “My colleague thinks perhaps twenty-five to thirty-five leagues wide, though I believe she has miscalculated the object’s size. Perhaps forty-five to sixty leagues.” White Ring’s killing claw clicked on the floor. “I have not calculated how long it will take the cloud to disperse,” the engineer continued. “I fear it will grow to cover the whole world. There may be fires as rocks fall back down to the ground. It hit water, so—”

“Silence!” ordered White Ring. “How far will the damage reach?”

A moment of silence from the tube. “It depends,” came the voice, slowly, carefully. “On how thick the cloud is, and how long it stands between the Earth and the Sun. And if there are fires. And other things we haven’t calculated yet.”

For just a moment White Ring’s feathers ruffled as though a breeze had stirred them. Nearly every other face was turned towards the view of Earth, but I looked at her, sidelong, without moving my snout. I felt the muscles in my back and my legs tense, and I forced them to relax lest the click of my largest claw on the deck betray my thoughts.

“We must go back,” White Ring said. Snouts turned towards her in surprise. She turned her head to look behind her, and then turned fully, her daughter ducking low to avoid her tail. Others in the ring ducked and turned so that all who had faced forward could face the center of the circle. “We can stay above until the cloud disperses, and then land.”

“Can we go back?” One of the younger females.

“We must,” said White Ring, her tone admitting no dispute. “This venture was risk enough with the world safe behind us. If we are the only ones left alive . . . ”

White Ring’s daughter called through the speaking tube, and an answer came back. “We might be able to, if we act soon enough. We will have to make some calculations. But . . . ”

“Make them,” said White Ring. Her daughter eyed the rest of us, watching.

They had told us that leaving the Earth would be difficult. Three of our number had died in the punishing climb. But all of us standing here had survived it. Could those so silent and still around me be willing to throw that away, to throw away everything we had worked for? It seemed so.

The engineer had said If we act soon enough. A question of fuel, no doubt. If I did not speak up now, the time would be gone.

But here was my difficulty: every other person in the room was a lowlander. The superiority of mountain optics had ensured that some of the engineers aboard were highlanders, but I was one of only two surviving who was not either an engineer or an egg tender. If I spoke now, no one else would speak in support of me, unless they were completely convinced of my argument. Or unless I killed White Ring, in which case they would likely follow me out of fear if nothing else. But as things stood, I would not be allowed even to strike.

But I am no coward. “We must not go back,” I said.

My neighbors sidled away, as far as they could in the cramped space, claws clicking on the metal floor. I stood face to face with White Ring.

“I hear nothing,” said White Ring. Her killing claw tapped once, twice.

“This ship won’t be built again,” I said, “not in our lifetimes. Look!” I gestured at the picture with one clawed finger, at the still-spreading smoke. “Will we reach Mars, or will we die having made all this effort and accomplished nothing?”

White Ring looked around the circle, watching the faces and the demeanor of the others. I did not dare take my eyes off her to make the same survey. “I hear nothing,” she said again.

“Coward! You disgrace our ancestors!”

Instantly White Ring’s neck snaked forward and she snapped her teeth together a breath from my neck. I stood still as stone.

“Will you challenge me?” White Ring hissed. “At this time? Is your ambition so great?”

I would not allow my feathers to lift, or flutter. I would not allow a single twitch that I did not intend. “Did Strong Claw turn back?” I asked. I would have pointed to the picture, but I did not wish to move.

“She knew all was well behind her,” said White Ring. “If none survive on Earth, and we die attempting Mars, what then?”

“We don’t know there’s air to breathe where we’re going,” said the daughter beside White Ring, when I didn’t answer. “There was none on the moon.”

“What a wonder this is! You lowlanders disbelieved when the engineers from the mountains said there was no air on the moon. Now you disbelieve when you are told that Mars certainly has an atmosphere.”

“Bent light,” White Ring began, her voice scornful.

“There is more than just the bending of light to prove it. There are plants, the astronomers have said so. We see them wax and wane with the seasons. There is no reason to think that Mars will not be much like Earth.”

“The astronomers are not all agreed. Not even those from the mountains.”

“But you have staked your life on it,” I pointed out.

“While other lives were sure to continue,” said White Ring. “What if everyone else is dead?”

“Then they are dead because Earth is now unlivable,” I said. “And in that case, why turn back?”

“I know your ambition of old,” said White Ring. “I had not thought you would exercise it at a time like this.”

My feathers twitched then, I couldn’t avoid it. I allowed them to tremble and rise. White Ring and her daughter watched me with malice, the other five with fear, or perhaps something else.

The moment stretched out. Time—time might be an enemy or an ally. Prolong the contention, and the moment to turn back would have passed. Allow the return to begin, and there would be only a short space, if any at all, in which it would be possible to correct our course.

“You call me ambitious,” I said, “and I am. I would reach Mars! Did any of us embark without a similar ambition? But now you abandon what we have all worked so hard to attain! And when I point this out, I am threatened. Why is this? If one of you,” and here I pointed around the circle, “had spoken, would this have been the response?” Had I seen movement among the others? Someone about to speak, some thoughtful twitch of feathers? “You may kill me if you like, as I am clearly outnumbered. But it will not change the truth.”

One of those who had been silent spoke. “There is something in what she says.”

White Ring was silent a moment. “It would be best not to fight,” she said. “I would not lose more of us. Bring out the histories.”

“Bring out the histories,” I agreed.

She scratched at the unyielding metal ground with her foot, never taking her eyes off me. Then she barked a short order to her daughter, who repeated White Ring’s word into the speaking tube.

The ladder well was behind me. I did not look as I heard the singer climbing into the room, or move as he squeezed past into the center of the circle in front of White Ring. I never moved my eyes from her, and let the others shift to let him by.

He was shorter even than most males, and his feathers were a dull brown, specked with black. He was an unprepossessing thing until he opened his mouth, as I well knew. He was my son.

He lowered his head in front of White Ring. “You choose first,” she said to me. I should have been daunted—if I chose first, hers would be the last word. But I was not.

“I choose Strong Claw’s Voyage,” I said.

We are all susceptible to the power of song. The songs you’ve known since hatching, in the mouth of a great singer, will quicken your pulse and stop your breath. As my son called out the opening lines to the history I had chosen, all in the room were compelled by his voice to listen. Feathers ruffled and then settled, and all were still and there was no sound but his song.

There is no need to give the details here. The story is told, in its essentials, in the picture on the wall of the sky-boat, and in any event I might have chosen anything from the histories I wished, so long as White Ring would feel safe making the obvious choice when her turn came.

No, the song, and its argument, is already clear to you. Instead, I will tell you about my son.

When I was younger, and looking for a mate, I had resolved to have only the strongest, wiliest male I could find. I wanted large, strong daughters. I wanted children who would distinguish themselves on a hunt. I turned down suitors who were stupid, or weak, or too short. Some I killed. I would have killed the little brown-feathered thing that approached me last, but he opened his mouth and sang.

His voice! I lost all reason.

When the first clutch of eggs hatched, I had five daughters and six sons. Three of the daughters seemed strong enough. Three of the males were small and weak, and I thought they might die. But one of those, as I bent near to it, tiny, naked-looking thing, let out one barely audible peep.

I ate the four weaklings and fed them to him. His health was all my care in the coming months, and he grew strong.

He was undersized, but he was clever. I taught him what I could, and when the day came, that comes for all male children, the day to leave his mother and sisters behind forever, I instructed him to seek out the singers guild.

For most mothers, when that day comes it is as though they never had male children. The boys go off to other territories, and if they’re seen again the sight raises no sentiment in the breast of the formerly doting mother. Your daughters are yours for life; your sons cease to exist when they leave the nest. But I took what steps I could to ensure that my son would be mine, no less than my daughters, even after he had gone to the singers guild.

I didn’t know then that I would be on the sky-boat, or that a giant rock would hurtle out of the heavens and destroy the Earth. And even had I known, I could not have predicted that the lowlander singer would die during the launch, leaving my boy the only historian on the ship. But I knew that a singer’s voice has a power entirely different from claws and teeth. White Ring had said she knew my ambition of old, but she did not realize its true extent.

The song ended. Strong Claw, victorious through all dangers, never turning back though she knew not what the end of her voyage would be, stood at last on the shore of the land she had discovered. Every listener sighed to hear it. It is an old song, and a pleasing one, with a clear lesson—the strong and resolute prevail.

It was no more than I had already said. And as I had hoped—expected!—White Ring answered with The Endangered Camp.

It is a story older even than Strong Claw’s. It begins when a party of hunters goes out looking for iguanadon. (I myself have never seen an iguanadon, but they thunder through the oldest stories in vast herds.) They leave behind them in the woods their camp, a nursery. “Mounds of earth and leaves,” the singer sang, “the infants waiting their time to come forth, and the guardians of the nests watchful.”

An idyllic scene! But while the hunters are gone, the camp is attacked. The beast’s tearing claws and rending teeth kill one guardian, and the others circle the nests as well as they can, and cry out together, Let the hunting party return!

Close around me, the listeners were rapt and their eyes wide, and they barely breathed, such was the power of the singer’s voice.

The hunting party did return, of course. They heard the cries of the guardians, and ran with desperate speed back to the camp. Three guardians were killed, and four hunters, but they drove off the beast, saved the eggs, saved the pack. So the history tells us.

Now, this is the strange thing about history. When we are in doubt as to what course to take, or there is some debate, we examine the histories, we say, “So our ancestors did then, and so we should do now.” And we think of the past as a solid, unbreakable rock that will always have the same form. But by accident or design, the rock is shaped. A singer drops a line here, a verse there, knowing or unknowing. And if you change the past, you change the future.

Stop with the beast defeated, and the eggs safe, and the salutary moral is clear. The lowlander singers I had heard had always stopped there. But it’s not the end of the story. The four dead hunters had been among the most experienced, many of the others were injured, and food was scarce that year anyway. The seven dead from the attack fed the pack for a while, but after that they plundered the nests to survive, and no children were born that year.

I did not think White Ring would expect the singer to continue, even if she knew of the ending. The ill-omen of it would be too strong. Any singer would know what she meant by requesting it, and know, if he knew the end, to leave it off. But oh, my clever boy! He sang the rest of the song.

For a moment, as he continued where she had expected him to stop, she stood paralyzed. The others blinked in surprise, but his voice transfixed them and they were silent. White Ring drew her head back, and I saw her killing claws twitch. Even so she waited until he had finished.

“You made that up,” accused White Ring’s daughter when he fell silent. White Ring still held her threatening pose, ready to strike. But she dared not touch the singer; there was no other on board.

“You’re very young,” I said, my leg muscles tense with the desire to jump. “It’s fashionable these days to leave that verse off, but anyone of any experience and education knows that’s how the story ends.” I swiveled my snout towards White Ring, and bared my teeth. “Isn’t that so?”

“I have never heard it,” said White Ring, still poised to strike. Her gaze was fixed on the boy, a small, brown-specked shape in the middle of the circle. “You have violated your obligation as a singer. Why? There can have been no collusion. Can you have done such a terrible thing merely from a hatred of lowlanders?”

Even if I had told her he was mine she would not have been able to imagine why such a thing would matter. And besides, he had sung truly. I might have laughed, but I did not; this was a dangerous moment.

“I have heard it,” said a quiet voice. The others turned their heads but I never took my eyes off White Ring. She never took her eyes off my son.

“My great-aunt’s mate was a singer,” the voice continued. I placed it—a sturdy, handsome male, gray and black feathered, still young. He had kept quiet before now, as was proper. “He died when I was still a chick, but I remember he sang it in just that way.” Silence. And then, even more timidly than before, “I was surprised to hear it requested. I wondered if you would signal the singer to leave the ending off. But then I thought, he won’t sing the ending, no one ever has except my uncle.”

White Ring and her daughter would have no qualms about killing the black and gray male. They drew their heads back, hissing.

In that instant, a voice came from the speaking tube. “We have completed our calculations.”

The low ceiling made it impossible to jump. Instead I drew my head back and then struck forward with all the force I could muster, hoping the boy would be quick enough to move out of the way.

The room erupted in screams and shouts. My teeth snapped together where White Ring’s neck had been an instant before. I grabbed her shoulder and as she raked me with her claws I brought my foot up with its deadly killing claw. White Ring grabbed me and sank her teeth into my shoulder, but she was too late. My foot came up, and I drove my claw into her belly, and pulled my leg convulsively back.

Her jaws opened in a scream, and I let go of her and stepped back. The black and gray male was locked with the daughter. No one else was in the room—they must have fled down the ladder well.

“You are dead, White Ring,” I said. Pink entrails sagged out of the bleeding slash in her belly. “I need only keep out of reach for a while.”

“Return to Earth,” she said. “What if we’re all that’s left?”

I wanted to take a step back and lean against the wall, but I wasn’t sure if she still had strength for a last charge, and I didn’t want to show any weakness.

“You have doomed us,” she said, and fell to her knees, and then onto her side, guts squirting out with the force of her fall. Still I did not approach. Until she was reliably dead she was a danger.

Instead I looked over at the black and gray male, who stood now over the daughter’s corpse. His feathers drooped, and he was covered in blood, whose it was impossible to tell. “Are you hurt?” I asked. I hoped he wasn’t. He was handsome, and obviously strong.

“Yes,” he said.

“Go down to the doctor. On your way, inform the engineers of the change in command.” He bowed his head low and limped to the ladder well. My son had climbed up, and made way for him.

I stepped over to the daughter and pushed her with my foot. She was dead. Carefully, tentatively, I did the same for her mother.

Dead.

“Well, my chick,” I said. “There will be new songs, and they will be yours.” I turned to see him standing at the well. He bobbed his head. We had always understood each other.

My shoulder hurt, and my neck, where I had been clawed. I would have to see the doctor soon enough myself, but not this very moment. I turned around to see the image of the smoking, burning Earth. “Earth is dead, or if not it may as well be. Mars will be ours.” If anyone still lived on the Earth, perhaps one day they would venture away from the world and find, on Mars, the evidence of our triumph.

Let cowards retreat. We go forward. We live!

Originally published in
Clockwork Phoenix 2,
edited by Mike Allen (2009)

Mitigation

Tobias S. Buckell and Karl Schroeder

Chauncie St. Christie squinted in the weak, 3 A.M. Sunlight. No, two degrees higher. He adjusted the elevation, stepped back in satisfaction, and pulled on a lime-green nylon cord. The mortar burped loudly and, seconds later, a fountain of water shot up ten feet from his target.

His satphone vibrated on his belt and he half-reached for it, causing the gyroscope-stabilized platform to wobble slightly. “Damn it. How close are they?” That must be Maksim on the phone. The damn Russian would be calling about the offer again. Chauncie ignored the reminder, and reset the mortar.

His friend, Kulitak, stood on the rail of the trawler and scanned the horizon with a set of overpowered binoculars. “The eco response ships are moving to drop oil containment booms. Canadian Coast Guard gunboats are on the far edge of the spill.”

“As long as they’re busy.” Chauncie adjusted the mortar and dropped another shell into it. This shot hit dead-on, and the CarbonJohnnyTM blew apart in a cloud of styrofoam, cheap solar panel fragments and chickenwire.

Kulitak lowered his binoculars. “Nice one.”

“One down, a million to go,” muttered Chauncie. The little drift of debris was already sinking, the remaining flotsam joining the ever-present scrim of trash that peppered most ocean surfaces. Hundreds more CarbonJohnnies dotted the sea all the way to the horizon, each one a moronically simple mechanism. A few bottom-of-the-barrel cheap solar panels sent a weak current into a slowly unreeling sheet of chicken-wire that hung in the water. This electrolyzed calcium carbonate out of the water. As the chicken-wire turned to concrete, sections of it tore off and sank into the depths of the Makarov Basin. These big reels looked a bit like toilet paper and unraveled the same way, a few sheets at a time: hence the name CarbonJohnny. Sequestors International (NASDAQ symbol: SQI) churned them out by the shipload with the noble purpose of sequestering carbon and making a quick buck from the carbon credits.

Chauncie and his friends blew them up and sank them almost as quickly.

“This is lame,” Kulitak said. “We’re not going to make any money today.”

“Let’s pack up, find somewhere less involved.”

Chauncie grunted irritably; he’d have to pay for an updated satellite mosaic and look for another U.N. inspection blind spot. Kulitak had picked this field of CarbonJohnnies because overhead, somewhere high in the stratosphere, a pregnant blimp staggered through the pale air dumping sulfur particulates into a too clean atmosphere to help block the warming sun. But in the process it also helpfully obscured some of the finer details of what Chauncie and Kulitak were up to. Unfortunately, the pesky ecological catastrophe unfolding off the port bow was wreaking havoc with their schedule.

A day earlier, somebody had blown up an automated U.S. Pure Waters, Inc. tug towing a half cubic kilometre of iceberg. Kulitak thought it was The Emerald Institute who’d done it, but they were just one of dozens of eco-terrorist groups who might have been responsible. Everybody was protesting the large scale ’strip mining’ of the Arctic’s natural habitat, and now and then somebody did something about it.

The berg had turned out to be unstable. Chauncie had heard the distant thunder as it flipped over somewhere in the mist-laden distance when they’d motored out to this spot. He hadn’t heard the impact of the passing supertanker that collided with its underwater spur three hours later; but he could sure smell it when he woke up. The news said three or four million tonnes of oil had leaked out into the water, and the immediate area was turning into a circus of clean up crews. Media, Greenpeace, oil company ships, U.N, government officials, they would all descend soon enough.

“There’s money in cleanup,” Chauncie commented; he smiled at Kulitak’s grimace.

“Money,” said Kulitak. “And forms. And treaties you gotta watch out for; and politics like rat-traps. Let’s find another Johnny.” The Inuit radicals who had hired them were dumping their own version of the CarbonJohnny into these waters. Blowing up SQI’s Johnnies was not, Chauncie’s employer had claimed, actually piracy; it was merely a diversion of the carbon credits that would otherwise have gone to SQI—and at $100 per tonne sequestered, it added up fast.

He shrugged at Kulitak’s impatient look, and bent to stow the mortar. Broken Styrofoam, twirling beer cans and plush toys from a container-ship accident drifted in the trawler’s wake; farther out, the johnnies bobbed in their thousands, a marine forest through which dozens of larger vessels had to pick their way. On the horizon, a converted tanker was spraying a fine mist of iron powder into the air—fertilizing the arctic ocean for another carbon sequestration company, just as the blimps overhead were smearing the sky with reflective smog to cut down global warming in another way. Helicopters crammed with biologists and carbon-market auditors zigged and zagged over the waters, and yellow autosubs cruised under them, all measuring the effect.

Mile-long oil supertankers cruised obliviously through it all. Now that the world’s trees were worth more as carbon sinks than building material, the plastics industry had taken off. Oil as fuel was on its way out; oil for the housing industry was in high demand.

And in the middle of it all, Chauncie’s little trawler. It didn’t actually fish. There was fish enough—the effect of pumping iron powder into the ocean was to accelerate the Arctic’s already large biodiversity to previously unseen levels. Plankton boomed, and the cycle of life in the deep had exploded. The ocean’s fisheries no longer struggled, and boats covered the oceans with nets and still couldn’t make a dent. Chauncie’s trawler was camouflage. Who would notice another one picking its way toward a less packed quadrant of CarbonJohnnies?

Out in relatively clearer ocean Chauncie sat on the deck as the Inuit crew hustled around, pulling in the purposefully broken fishing nets so that the trawler could speed up.

The ocean was gun-metal blue; there was no diving into these waters for a refreshing swim. Chauncie hadn’t known how precious such a simple act could be until he’d lost it. The British Virgin Islands had been his whole universe once, but as he grew that world had dwindled away. When the Greenland and East Antarctica ice shelves slid into the ocean, so had his own island of Anegada, lost to the rising seas. These men he worked with cultivated an anger similar to his own: their arctic was long gone, but their deepest instincts still expected it to be here, he was sure, the same way he expected the ocean to be a glitter of warm emeralds he could cup in his hand.

On days like today he wondered whether Kulitak’s people hadn’t gotten the worse end of the disaster. As the seven seas became the eight seas and their land literally melted away, the Inuit faced an indignity that even Chauncie did not have to suffer: seeing companies, governments, and people flood in to claim it all.

He found it delicious fun to make money plinking at CarbonJohnnies for the Inuit. But it wasn’t big money—and he needed the big score.

He needed to be able to cup those emeralds in his hands again. On rare occasions he’d wonder whether he was going to spend the rest of his life up here. If somebody told him that was his fate, he was pretty sure he’d taken a last dive right there and then. He couldn’t go on like this forever.

The satellite data came back and the crew realized that they couldn’t quite hide the trawler beneath anymore sulfur particle clouds today. It was time to head back to port. And as the ship surged along, Chauncie checked the satphone.

Maksim had indeed called. Five times.

Kulitak walked over. “The Croat?”

Chauncie clipped the satphone back to his waistband. “You said it was a slow day, we’re not making much. And with the spill, it’s going to be a zoo. We could use a break.”

His friend grimaced. “You don’t want to work with him. There’s money, but it’s not worth it. You come in a powered canoe with me, the satellites can’t see our faces, we hit more CarbonJohnnies. I’ll bring sandwiches.”

There was no way Chauncie was going to motor his way around the Arctic in a damn canoe. They’d get run over. By a trawler, a tanker, or any other ship ripping its way through the wide open lanes of the Arctic Ocean. There was just too much traffic.

Kulitak was not just in it to make a living. A radicalized Inuit, seeking to help gain the People back some measure of independence as the world ran them over to fight for the Arctic, for him destroying CarbonJohnnies was a life’s mission.

“I’ll think about it,” Chauncie said, as the satphone vibrated yet again.

Late into the evening the next day Chauncie entered the bridge of a rusted out container ship that listed slightly to port. Outside the docks and cranes of Tuktoyaktuk cast long shadows.

“Hey Max,” he said, and sat down hard on the armchair in the middle of the bridge. Chauncie rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t stopped to sleep yet. An easy error in the all-day-long sunlight. Insomnia snuck up on you as your body kept thinking it was day. Run all out for 48 hours and forget about your daily cycle, and you’d crash hard on day three. And the listing bridge made him feel even more off balance and weary.

“Took you damn long enough. I should get someone else, just to spite you.” Maksim muttered his reply from behind a large, ostentatious, and extraordinarily expensive real wooden desk, almost hidden behind the nine screens perched at various angles all over. Their light lit up the underside of his face. Maksim was a slave to continuos partial attention. His eyes flicked from screen to screen, and he constantly tapped at the surface of the desk or flicked his hands at the screens. In response, people were being paid, currencies traded, stocks bought or sold.

And that was the legitimate trade. Chauncie didn’t know much about Maksim’s other hobbies, but he could guess from the occasional exposed tattoo that Maksim was Russian Mafia.

“Well, I’m here.”

Maksim glanced up. “Yes. Yes you are. Good. Chauncie, you know why I give you so much business?”

Chauncie sighed. He wasn’t sure he wanted to play this game. “No, why?”

“Because even though you’re here for dirty jobs, you like the ones that let you poke back at the big guys. It means I understand you. It makes you a more unique asset. So I have a good one for you. You ready for the big one, Chauncie, the payday that lets you leave to do whatever it is you really want, rather than sitting around with little popguns and styrofoam targets?” Maksim picked up a sweaty glass of iced tea with a large wedge of lemon stuck on the rim and sipped it.

Chauncie felt a weird kick in his stomach. “What kind of big, Max?”

Maksim had a small smile as he put the iced tea down. “Big.” He slowly turned a screen around to face Chauncie. There were a lot of zeros in that sum. His lips dried, and he nervously licked them.

“That’s big.” He could retire. “What horrible thing will I have to do for that?”

“It begins with you playing bodyguard for a scientist.” Uh oh. As a rule, scientists and Russian Mafia didn’t mix well. “I’m really just guarding her, right?”

Max laughed; but Chauncie’s question had been serious. Five years ago, a somewhat shadowy man by the name of Vadim convinced a number of various Eastern European bosses to fund the two trillion needed for a consortium of advanced materials companies to build an elevator to space using boron nanotubes. From this, a series of private space companies were paid to then launch and stabilize a series of space mirrors.

The Mafia had hoped to do an end run around the large energy companies with a cheap energy source they’d have a stranglehold on. But it hadn’t worked out. Cheap solar energy was fine enough, but oil still worked for building materials, still burned, and solar panels on Earth had seen improvements enough. It was a non event.

A lot of green power scientists had been found dead shortly after. Vadim had been taken up the elevator and shot out the end without a spacesuit by the bosses. And people like Maksim were left still struggling to use their cheap energy to manipulate the market.

And as for the elevator itself, last Chauncie read, they were still desperately trying to sell it to any world government. And the Russians were still looking for the big, world score.

Maksim looked annoyed. “If I wanted her dead, I wouldn’t have called you.” He pointed out the grimy windows. A wind-blown, ruddy-cheeked woman wrapped in a large ’hands around the world’ parka stood at the rail. She was reading something off the screen of her phone.

“That’s the scientist? Here?”

“Yes. That is River Balleny. Was big into genetic archeology. She made a big find a couple years ago and patented the DNA for some of big agri-corporation for exotic livestock. Now she mainly verifies viability, authenticity, and then couriers the samples to Svalbard for various government missions out here.”

“And she’s just looking for a good security type, in case some other company wants to hijack a sample of what she’s couriering? Which is why she came out to this rusted out office of yours?”

Maksim grinned over his screens. “Right.”

Chauncie looked back at the walkway outside the bridge. River looked back, and then glanced away. She looked out of place, a moon-faced little girl who should be in a lab, sequencing bits and pieces sandwiched between slides. Certainly she shouldn’t be standing in the biting wind on the deck of thousands of tons of scrap metal. “So I steal what she’ll be couriering? Is that the big pay day?”

“No.” Maksim looked back down and tapped the desk. Another puppet somewhere in the world danced to his string pulls. “She’ll be given some seeds we could care less about. What we care about is the fact that she can get you into the Svalbard seed vault.”

“And in there?”

Maksim reached under his desk and gently set a small briefcase on the table. “This is portable sequencer. Millions of research and development spent so that a genetic archeologist in the field could immediately do out on the open plains what used to take a lab team weeks or months to do. Couple it with a fat storage system, and we can digitize nature’s bounty in a few seconds.”

Chauncie stared down at the case. “What . . . ”

“We want you to get into the seed vault and sequence as many rare and precious seeds as you can. They have security equipment all over the outside, but inside, it’s just storage area. No weapons, just move quick to gather the seeds and control the scientist while you gather the seeds. The more paleo-seeds the better. When you leave, with or without her, you get outside. You pull out the antenna, and you transmit everything. You leave Svalbard however you wish, charter a plane to be waiting for you, or the boat you get there with. We do not care. Once we have the information, we pay you. You leave Arctic, find a warm place to settle down. Buy a nice house, and a nice woman. Enjoy this new life. Okay, we never see each other again. I’ll be sad, true, but maybe I’ll retire too, and neither of us cares. You understand?”

Chauncie did. This was exactly the score he’d been looking for.

He looked at the windblown geneticist and thought about what Maksim might not be telling him. Then he shook his head. “You know me, Max, this is too big. Way out of my comfort level. I’ll become internationally wanted. I’m not in that league.”

“No, no.” Maksim slapped the table. “You are big league now, Chauncie. You’ll do this. I know you’ll do this.”

Chauncie laughed and leaned back in the chair. “Why?”

“Because if you don’t,” Maksim also leaned back. “If you don’t, you will never forgive yourself when military contractors occupy Svalbard in two weeks, taking over the seed vault and blackmailing world with it.”

“You’ve got to be joking.” The idea that someone might trash Svalbard was ridiculous. “That would be like bombing the Vatican.” Svalbard was the holiest of green holies, a bank for the world’s wealth of seeds, stored away in case of apocalypse.

“These are Russian mercenaries, my friend. Russia is dying. They never were cutting edge with biotech, ever since Lysenkoism in the Soviet days. The plague strains that ripped through their wheat fields last year killed their stock, and Western companies had patented most varieties of wheat germ. They feel they have no choice but to raid the seed bank in order to reestablish some unique strains that won’t get them sued in the world market for copyright infringement. This year’s whole crop of wheat, rye, and rice depends on this. And in the process, they will keep control of the bank, along with all the unique paleo-genetic crap they keep stored there.”

“So it’s the Russians behind the mercenaries? And no one knows about this.”

“No one. No one but us.” Maksim laughed. “You will be hero to many, but more importantly, rich.”

Chauncie sucked air through his teeth and mulled it all over. But he and Maksim already knew the answer.

“What about travel expenses?”

Maksim laughed. “You’re friends with those Indians . . . ”

“First Nations peoples . . . ”

“ . . . whatever, just get permission to use one of their trawlers. The company she’s couriering for is pretty good about security. They drop in by helicopter when you’re in transit to hand over the seeds. They’ll call with a location and time at the last minute, as long as you tell them what your course will be. A good faith payment is . . . ” Maksim tapped a screen. “ . . . now in your account. You can afford to hire them. Happy Birthday.”

“It’s not my birthday.”

“Well, with this job, it is. And Chauncie?”

“Yes, Max?”

“You fuck it up, you won’t see another birthday.”

Chauncie wanted to say something in return, but it was no use. For one, it was true. For another, Maksim had turned his attention back to his screens.

For a moment, he considered turning Maksim down, still. Then he glanced out the windows, at a sea that would never be the right color—that would never cradle his body and ease the sorrow of his losses.

He hefted the briefcase and stepped outside to introduce himself to River Balleny.

The trawler beat through heavy seas, making for Svalbard. The sun rolled slowly around a sky drained of all but pastel colors, where towering clouds of dove gray and mauve hinted at a dusk that never came. You covered your porthole to make night for yourself, and stepped out of your stateroom seemingly into the same moment you had left. After years up here Chauncie could tell himself he was as used to the midnight sun as he was to heavy seas; but the new passenger, who was much on his mind, stayed in her cabin while the seas heaved.

After two days the swells subsided and, for a while, the ocean became calm as glass. Chauncie woke to a distant crackle from the radio room, and as he buttoned his shirt Kulitak pounded on his door. “I heard, I heard.”

“It’s not just the helicopter,” Kulitak hissed. “Tuktoyaktuk Elders just contacted me over single sideband radio. We think Maksim’s dead.”

“Think?” Chauncie looked down the tight corridor between the trawler’s cabins. The floorboards creaked under their feet as the ship twisted itself over large waves.

“Several tons of sulfur particulates, arc welded into a solid lump, dropped from the stratosphere by a malfunctioning blimp. So they say. There’s nothing left of Maksim’s barge. It’s all pieces.”

“Pieces . . . ” Chauncie instinctively looked up toward the deck, as if expecting something similar to destroy them on the spot.

“I told you, you don’t get involved with that man. You’re out here, playing a game that will get you killed. Get out now.”

Chauncie braced himself in the tiny space as the trawler lurched. “It’s too late now. They don’t let you back out this late in the game.” He thought about private a army moving out there somewhere, getting ready to take over the vault. All at the bequest of another nation, assuming it could just snatch that which belonged to all.

They still had time.

“Come on, let’s get that package for her, she’ll fall overboard if we don’t help her out.”

They stepped out on deck to find River Balleny already there. She was staring up at the dragonfly shape of an approaching helicopter, which was framed by rose-tinted puffballs in the pale, drawn, sky. She said nothing, but turned to grin excitedly at the two men as the helicopter’s shuddering voice rose to a deafening crescendo.

The wash from its blades scoured the deck. Kulitak, clothes flapping, stepped into the center of the deck and raised his hands. Dangling at the bottom of a hundred feet of nylon rope, a small plastic drum wrapped in fluorescent green duct tape swung dangerously past his head, twirled, and came back. On the third pass he grabbed it and somebody cut the rope in the helicopter. The snaking fall of the line nearly pulled the drum out of Kulitak’s hands; by the time he’d wrestled his package loose from it the helicopter was a receding dot. River walked out to help him and, after a moment’s hesitation, Chauncie followed.

“’the fuck is this?” The empty drum at his feet, Kulitak was holding a small plastic bag up to the sunlight. River reached up to take it from him.

“It’s your past,” she said. “And our future.” She took the package inside without another glance at the men.

Kulitak peered after her. “I say we drop her off and go back to sinking johnnies.”

Surprised, Chauncie shook his head. “Your elders agreed to let us take the trip.”

“Yes, but they don’t exactly know all the details, do they?”

“All they need to know is how much we’re going to make from this, and we told them the truth about that. I don’t see your problem.” Chauncie walked away before Kulitak could reply to that; but they’d both seen the look of glee on River’s face when she saw those seeds. He wasn’t about to admit that a little pang of guilt had shot through him seeing it.

She was sitting at the cleaver-hacked table in the galley, peering at the bag. “Those seem to mean a lot to you,” he said cautiously as he slid in opposite her.

Opening the bag carefully, River rolled a couple of tiny orange seeds onto the tabletop. “Paleo-seeds,” she mused. “It looks like mountain aven, but according to the manifest,” she tapped a sheet of paper that had been tightly wadded and stuffed into the bag, “it’s at least thirty thousand years old.”

Chauncie picked one up gingerly between his fingertips. “And that makes it different?”

She nodded. “Maybe not. But it’s best to err on the side of caution. Have you ever been to the seed vault?” He shook his head.

“When I was a girl I had a model of Noah’s ark in my bedroom,” she said. “You could pop the roof open and see little giraffes and lions and stuff. Later I thought that was the dumbest story in the Bible—but the seed vault at Svalbard really is the ark. Only for plants, not animals.”

“Where’d you grow up?”

“Valley, Nebraska,” she said. “Before the water table collapsed. You?”

“British Virgin Islands: Anegada.”

She sucked in a breath. “It’s gone. Oh, that must have been terrible for you to experience.”

He shrugged. “It was a slow death. It took long enough for me to make my peace with it, but my wife . . . ” How to compress those agonizing years into some statement that would make sense to this woman, yet not do an injustice to the complexity of it all? All he could think of to say was, “It killed her.” He looked down.

River surprised him by simply nodding, as if she really did understand. She put her hand out, palm up, and he laid the seed in it. “We all seem to end up here,” she mused, “when our lands go away. Nebraska’s a dust bowl now. Anegada’s under the waves. We come up here to make sure nobody else has to experience that.”

He nodded; actually, he’d come to the arctic for the money, but you didn’t say things like that.

“Of course it’s a disaster,” she went on, “losing the arctic ice cap, having the tundra melt and outgas all that methane and stuff. But every now and then there’s these little rays of hope, like when somebody finds ancient seeds that have been frozen since the last glaciation.” She sealed the baggie. “Part of our genetic heritage, maybe the basis for new crops or cancer drugs or who knows? A little lifeboat—once it’s safely at Svalbard.”

“Must be quite the place,” he said, “if they only give the keys to a few people.”

“It’s the Fortress of Solitude,” she said seriously. “You’ll see what I mean when we get there.”

Svalbard was a tumble of dolls-houses at the foot of a giant’s mountain. Even in the permanent day of summer, snow lingered on the tops of the distant peaks, and the panorama of ocean behind the docked trawler was wreathed in fog as Chauncie and River stepped down the gangplank. Both wore fleeces against the cutting wind.

A thriving tourist industry had grown up around the town and its famed fortress. Thriving by northern standards, that is—the local tourist office had three electric cars they rented out for day trips up to the site. Two were out; Chauncie rented the third. He’d stood there counting out bills when his satphone vibrated. He handed River the cash and stepped across the street to answer.

“Chauncie,” said a familiar Croatian voice. “You know who it is, don’t answer, we must be careful, the phones have ears, if you know what I mean. Listen, after my office had that unfortunate incident I’ve been staying with . . . a friend. But I’m okay.

“That big event, that happens soon by your current location, I regret to say we think it has been moved up. They know about our little plan. We don’t know when they attack, so hurry up. We still expect your transmission, and for you to complete your side of the arrangement. Our agreement concerning success . . . and failure, that still stands.

“Good luck little dreadlocked buddy.”

Chauncie jumped a little at the dialtone. River waited next to the little car for him, and in a daze Chauncie put the briefcase behind his seat, took control, and they followed the signs along a winding road by the sea.

River was animated, pointing out local landmarks and chattering away happily. Chauncie did his best to act cheerful, but he hadn’t slept well the night before, and his stomach was churning now. He kept seeing camouflaged killers lurking in every shadow.

“There it is!” She pointed. It took him a moment to see it, maybe because the word fortress had primed him for a particular kind of sight. What Chauncie saw was just a grim mountainside of scree and loose rock, patched in places with lines of reddish grass; jutting eighty or so feet out of this was a knife-blade of concrete, twenty-five feet tall but narrow, perhaps no more than ten feet wide. There was a parking lot in front of it where several cars were parked, but that, like Svalbard itself, seemed absurd next to the scale of the mountain and the grim darkness of the landscape. The cars were all parked together, as though huddling for protection.

Chauncie pulled up next to them and climbed out into absolute silence. From here you could see the bay and distant islands, capped with white, floating just above the gray mist.

“Magnificent, isn’t it?” River’s voice made him jump. He scowled, then hid that with a smile as he turned to her.

“Beautiful.” It was, in a bleak and intimidating way—he just wasn’t in the mood to appreciate that sort of sentiment right now.

The entrance to the global seed vault was a metal door at the tip of the concrete blade. River was sauntering unconcernedly up to it; Chauncie followed nervously, glancing about for signs of surveillance. Sure enough, he spotted cameras and other, subtler sensor boxes here and there. Maksim had warned him about those.

The door itself was unguarded; River’s voice echoed back as she called “hallooo.” He hurried in after her.

The inside of the blade was unadorned concrete lit by sodium lamps. There was only one way to go, in, and after about eighty feet the concrete gave over to a rough tunnel, sheathed in spray-on cement and painted white. The chill in here was terrible, but he supposed that was the point; the vault was impervious to global warming, and was intended to survive the fall of human civilization. That was why it was empty of anything worth stealing—except its genetic treasure—and was situated literally at the last place on Earth any normal human would choose to go.

Six tourists wearing bright parkas were chatting with a staff member next to a set of rooms leading off the right-hand side of the tunnel. The construction choice here was unpainted cinderblock, but the tourists seemed excited to be here. River politely interrupted and showed her credentials to the guide, who nodded. She waved Chauncie to follow her.

“We’re special,” she said, and actually took his arm as they continued on down the bleak, too-brightly lit passage. “Normally nobody gets beyond that.” About twenty feet further on, the tunnel was roped off. Past it, a T-intersection could be seen where only one light glowed. No one commented on the briefcase.

These were the airlocks. And strangely, the doors were just under five feet high. Chauncie and River had to duck to step inside the right one.

The outer door shut with a clang. He was in. He’d made it.

When the inner door opened it was into a cavern some 150 feet long. Shelves lined the interior like an industrial wholesale store, filled with wooden boxes stamped with black numbers.

It was a polar library of life.

Chauncie pulled a small, super-spring loaded chock out of his pocket. He surreptitiously dropped it in front of the door and kicked it firmly underneath. It had a five second count after his fingerprint activated it.

After the count the door creaked as it was wedged firmly shut. It was a preventative mechanism to keep River in more than anyone out.

River slipped her packet out. Foil, it sat in the palm of her hand. “They’re amazing, seeds. All that information in that one tiny package, tough, durable, no degradation for almost a century in most cases. Just add water . . . ”

She led them to a row at the very back of the vault, reading off some sort of Dewey Decimal System for stored genetic material that Chauncie couldn’t ascertain.

Here they were.

With a slight air of reverence in her careful, deliberate movements, she slid the long box off the shelf. She set it carefully on the ground and opened the lid.

Inside, hundreds of glittering packets. Treasure, Chauncie thought, and the idea must have hovered in the air, because she said it as well. “It’s a treasure, you know, because it’s rarity that makes something valuable. There used to be hundreds of species of just plain apples in the US. Farmers standardized down to just a dozen . . . somewhere in here are thousands more, if we ever choose to need them.”

As she crouched and started flipping through foil packets Chauncie retreated down the rows. He turned a corner out of her sight and pulled out the sheet of paper with Maksim’s list of the rarest seeds.

Matching the code next to the list with where to find the seeds was slightly awkward, he wasn’t familiar with it like River was. But by wandering around he found his first box, and opened it to find the appropriate packet with three seeds inside.

He flipped the briefcase open to reveal a screen, pad, and a small funnel in the right hand side. All he had to do was dump a couple seeds in the funnel and press a button. The tiny grinder reduced the seeds to pulp and extracted the DNA.

After it whirred and spat dust out the side of the briefcase a long dump of text scrolled down the screen, with small models of DNA chains popping up in the corners. Not much more than pretty rotating screensavers for Chauncie.

All he cared was that it seemed to be working.

But he was going to have to pick up the pace. That had taken several minutes. He cradled the briefcase, leaving the box on the floor as he strode along looking for the next item on the list.

There. This time the foil packet only had a single seed. Chauncie sat in the palm of his hand and stared at it. Like River’s paleo-seed, this was the only existing seed of its kind.

Suppose the machine wasn’t working?

He shook his head and dropped the single seed in and listened to the grinding. More text scrolled down the screen. Success, a full sequence.

Chauncie blew out his held breath; it steamed in the freezing air.

“Just what the hell are you doing?” River asked. Her voice sounded so shocked it had modulated itself down into almost baritone.

There was another foil packet with two seeds in it nearby. It matched the list. Chauncie had hit a box full of rare and unique paleo-seeds stored here by a smaller government prospecting in the Arctic, or maybe a large and paranoid corporation. He dumped the seeds in and the briefcase whirred.

“Jesus Christ,” River looked around him at the briefcase. “That’s a sequencer. Chauncie, those seeds are one of a kind.”

He had what looked like an inhaler in his pocket. One forcibly administered dose and he could knock her out for twenty four hours. But he didn’t want to leave River passed out among the boxes for the nearing mercenaries to find. Who knew what a bunch of ex-military types kicked out of some Russian province when funding evaporated, and who’d probably served with multinational forces in some hotspot where they could traffic humans, drugs, and weapons, would do to her. He was not that kind of person. He didn’t want to find out.

“Listen,” River stayed oddly calm, her breath clouding the air over his head as he crouched over the sequencer. “That might be a good sequencer, but even the best ones have an error rate. You’re going to be losing some data. This is criminal, you have to stop, or I’m going to get someone in here to stop you.”

“Go get someone.” The chock would keep her occupied for a while.

She ran off, and Chauncie finished the box. He ticked the samples off his list, then started hunting for the next one along the shelves. It was taking too long.

There. He cracked open the new box and dumped the seeds in. River had caught back up to him, though, giving up on the door faster than he’d anticipated.

“Listen, you can’t do this,” she said. “I’m going to stop you.”

He glanced over his shoulder to see that she’d pulled pepper spray out the ridiculous little pouch she kept strapped to her waist in lieu of a purse.

Knocking her out would leave her a victim. He really couldn’t live with that. River, a relatively naïve and noble refugee, caught up in a vicious world of international fits over genetic heritage and ecological policy. He was not going to leave her for the sharks. “Look, River, a private army-for-hire is about to land on Svalberd and take the whole seed vault hostage.”

She hesitated, the pepper spray wavering. “What?”

“Over engineered agri-stock and plague. I’m told the Russians are pretty damn hellbent on regaining control of uncopyrighted genetic variability for robustness. And to reboot their whole agricultural sector. They’ve hired a private army to come here, it gives them some plausible deniability on the world stage. I’ve been sent to get what I can out of the vault before they get here in within the next couple hours.”

River paused. “Who are you working for?”

Chauncie bit his lip. He hated lying. In this situation, she might as well hear the truth, he didn’t have time to lay down anything believable anyway. “The Russian mafia, they’re connected enough to have gotten a heads up. They think they can get some serious coin selling these sequences to companies across the world.”

She stared at him. “You swear?”

“Why the hell would I make this up?”

He watched as she opened the zipper on the hip pouch and pocketed the pepper spray. She grabbed her forehead and leaned against the nearest shelf. “I can’t fucking believe this. I need to think.”

“It’s a crazy world,” Chauncie mumbled, and tipped a new pouch of seeds into the sequencer as she massaged her scalp and swore to herself.

The sequence returned good, and he stood up, looking for the next box. “What are you doing?”

“Looking for the next item on the list.”

She walked over, and Chauncie tensed. But all she did was snatch it from him. “There are a few missing that he should have,” she said.

“Like?”

“Like the damn seed I just brought here.” River looked up at the shelves. “Look, you’re wandering around like a lost kid in here. Let me help you.”

He took the sheet of paper back from her. “And why would you do that?”

“Because until five minutes ago, I thought the vault was the best bank box, and seeds the best storage mechanism. You just blew that out of the water, Chauncie. As a scientist, I have to go with the best solution available to me at the time. If these mercenaries are going to invade and hold the seeds, then we need to get that genetic diversity backed up, copied, and kicked out across the world. Selling it to various companies and keeping copies in a criminal organization is not the best case scenario I dreamed of, but we have to mitigate the potential damage of a small militarized force holding this for itself, and then of another army seeking to knock them back out of the bank. Other countries are not going to stand for this. But that all will risk the bank.

“I mean, this is one of the big reasons for creating Svalberd. Vaults in countries with civil wars were being destroyed.” River sighed. “It’s a damned mess.”

He’d expected her to ask for a cut of the profit. Instead, she was offering to help out of some scientific rationanlism. “Okay,” he said, slowly. “Okay. But the list stays here, and you bring back the foil packets, sealed, to me.”

“So that you can see that I’m not bringing back the wrong seeds, and so I don’t rip up your list.”

Chauncie smiled. “Exactly.”

Plinking Carbon Johnnies was a lot more fun. And a hell of a lot easier. He felt ragged and frayed. Screw retirement, he just wanted out of this incredibly cold, eerie environment and the constant weight of expecting armed men to kick in the airlock door and shoot him.

But things moved quicker now. River ranged ahead, snagging the foil packets he needed and those he didn’t even knew he needed. For the next forty minutes he made a small mountain of pulped seed around him as the briefcase processed sample after sample, resembling more a small portable mill than an advanced piece of technology.

His satphone beeped, an alarm he’d set back on the boat.

Chauncie closed the briefcase, and River walked around a shelf corner with a foil packet. “What?”

“It’s time to go,” Chauncie said. “We don’t have much time.”

“But . . . ” Like any other treasure hunter, she looked around the cavern. So many more precious samples that hadn’t been snagged.

But Chauncie had a suspicion that what River valued was not necessarily what the market valued. They had what they needed, best not push it any further. “Come on. We do not want to be standing here when the these people arrive.”

Chauncie bent over and rolled his fingerprint on the chock, and it slowly cranked itself down into thinness again. He placed it back in his pocket, and they cycled through the airlocks, again ducking under the unusually low entranceways.

They walked up the slight slope of the tunnel, the entrance looking small and brightly lit in the distance. As they passed the offices on their left one of the guards looked up and smiled. “All good? You were in there a long while. Should I search you?”

Chauncie tensed and got ready to run.

But River smiled. “Everything was fine, just, enjoyed standing in there. It’s like a library, you know?”

The guard nodded. “Well, the next time you’re authorized to come, don’t stay so long. I logged it in the computer as a deviation, but don’t worry, you’re not the only one we gets carried away by it all.”

River nodded, and they passed onto the other side of the guard. Chauncie’s mood lifted.

“Hey,” the guard said. “If you’re in town, get a good look at that fleet of ten or so small warboats out there. They’re doing some serious exercises, wargaming some sorta Arctic defense scenario for the oil companies or other. They’re all around Svalberd. Just amazing to see all those ships.”

Chauncie’s mood died.

They entered the mouth of the tunnel, shielding their eyes from the sun.

Chauncie opened the briefcase on the roof of the car and punched the on button on the sat phone inside. The little screen lit up and said hunting . . . “Damn it, come on,” he muttered.

“Uh, Chauncie?”

“Just wait, wait! It’ll just take a second—” But she’d grabbed his arm and was pointing. Straight up.

He craned his neck, and finally spotted the tiny dot way up at the zenith. The sat-phone said hunting . . . hunting . . . hunting . . . and then, No Signal.

“You’ve been jammed,” River said, quite unnecessarily.

Chauncie cursed and slammed the briefcase. “And there!” She grabbed his arm again. Way out in the sky over the bay, six corpse-gray military blimps were drifting toward them with casual grace.

“We’re out of time.” No way they’d outrun those in a bright yellow electric car. Chauncie looked around desperately. Hole up in the vault? Fortress of Solitude it might be, but it wouldn’t keep the Russians out for more than a minute. Run along the road? They’d be seen as surely as if they were in the car.

He popped up the hatch of the car and rummaged around in the back. As he’d hoped, there was a cardboard box there crammed with survival gear—a package of survival blankets, flares, and heat packs standard for any far-northern vehicle. He grabbed some of the gear and slammed the hatch. “Run up the hill,” he said. “Look for an area of loose scree behind some boulders. We’re going to dig in and hide.”

“That’s not a very good plan.”

“It’s not the whole plan.” He pulled Maksim’s list out and rummaged in the car’s glove compartment. “Damn, no pen.”

“Here.” She fished one out of her pocket.

“Ah, scientists.” Quickly, he wrote the words scanned and uploaded at the top of the first page, above and to the right of the list. He underlined them. Then he made two columns of checkmarks down the page, one under each of these column headings. “Okay, come on.”

They ran back to the vault. Chauncie threw the list down just inside the door, then they started climbing the slope beside the blade. The oncoming blimps were on the other side; if there were men watching, it would look like Chauncie and River had gone back into the vault. He hoped they were too confident to be that attentive. After all, the vault was supposedly unguarded.

“Over there!” River dragged him away from the blade, toward a flat shelf fronted by a low wall of black rocks. The slope rose at about thirty degrees, a loose tumble of dark gravel and fist-sized stone where a few hardy grasses clung.

“Okay, get down.” She hunkered down and he wrapped her in a silvery survival blanket, then began clawing at the scree with his bare hands, heaping it up around her. The act was a kind of horrible parody of the many times he’d buried his sister in the sand back home.

Awkwardly, he made a second pile around himself, until he and River were two gravel cones partially shielded by rock. “You picked a good spot,” he commented; they had a great view of the parking lot and the ground just in front of the entrance. He’d wedged the briefcase under the shielding stones; his eyes kept returning to it as the mercenary force came into view over the flat roof of the vault.

The blare of the blimps’ turboprops shattered the vault’s deathly silence. They swiveled into position just below the parking lot, lowered down, touched, and men in combat fatigues began pouring out. Chauncie and River ducked as they scanned the hillside with binoculars and heat-sensing equipment.

“I’m cold,” said River.

“Just wait. If this doesn’t work we’ll give up.”

After a few minutes Chauncie raised his head so he could peer between two stones. The Russians seemed satisfied with their perimeter, and now a man in a greatcoat strode up the hillside. The coat flew out behind him in black wings as one of the soldiers ran up holding something small and white. “Jackpot!” muttered Chauncie. It was Maksim’s list.

“What’s happening?”

“Moment of truth.” He watched as the commander flipped through the list. Chauncie could see the man’s mouth working: cursing, no doubt. He threw down the list and pulled a sat phone out of his coat.

“He thinks we got the data out,” said Chauncie. “That should be all it . . . ” The commander put away the sat phone and waved to his men. Shaking his head in disgust, he walked away from the vault. The bewildered soldiers followed, knotting up into little groups to mutter amongst themselves.

“I don’t believe it. It worked.”

“I can’t see anything!”

“They think Maksim’s got the data on the unique seeds. It’s pretty obvious that we destroyed those in processing them. So these guys have exactly nothing now, and they know it. If they stay here they’ll just get rounded up by the U.N. or the Norwegian navy.”

“So you’ve won?” The blimps were taking off.

“We win.”

“It’s still plunder, Chauncie.” Stones rattled as River shook them off. “Theft of something that belongs to all of us.”

He stood up, joints aching, to find his toes and ears were numb. Little rockfalls tumbled down the slope below him. “Listen,” River continued, “I don’t think you ever wanted to do this in the first place. The closer we got to Svalbard the unhappier you looked. You know it was wrong to steal this stuff to begin with. And look at the firepower even this small army sent after it had! It’s a hot potato and you’d best be rid of it.”

“How?” He shook his head, scowling. “We’ve already scanned the damned things. Maksim . . . ”

“Maksim will know the mercenaries got here while we were here. We just tell him they got here before us. That they got the material.”

“And this?” He picked up the briefcase.

“It goes back where it belongs. Back into the vault.”

He thought about it as they trudged down the hillside. Truth to tell, he had no idea what he’d do if he retired now anyway. Probably buy a boat and come back to plink CarbonJohnnies. He wanted the emerald sea, he wanted those waters back. But now they were battered with hurricanes, the islands themselves depopulated and poor now that tourism had left, and the beaches been destroyed by rising tides and storms.

From behind him she said, “It’s an honorable solution, Chauncie, and you know it.” They reached the level of the parking lot and she stopped, holding out her hand. “Here. I’ll take it in. Now that the Russians have tried this they’ll put real security on this place. Keep it safe for everybody. The way it was meant to be.”

He thought about the money, about Maksim’s wrath; but he was tired, and damn it, when during this whole fiasco had he been free to make his own choice on anything? If not now . . . 

He handed her the briefcase. “Just be quick. The whole Svalbard police force is going to descend on this place now—all five or six of them.”

She laughed, and disappeared into the dark fortress with the treasure of millenia in her hand.

Night was falling in the arctic at last. Chauncie stood on the trawler’s deck watching the last sliver of sun disappear. Vast purple wings of cloud rolled up and away, like brushes painting the sky in delicate pastel hues of mauve, pale peach, silver. There were no primary colors in the arctic, and he had to admit that after all this time, he’d fallen in love with that visual delicacy.

The stars began to come out, but he remained at the railing. The trawler’s lights slanted out, fans of yellow from doorways crossing the deck, the mist of radiance from portholes silhouetting the vessel’s shape. The air was fresh and smelled clean—scrubbed free of humanity.

He wondered if River Balleny was watching the fall’s first sunset from where ever she was. They had parted ways in Svalbard—not exactly on friendly terms, he’d thought, but not enemies either. He figured she was satisfied that he’d done the right thing, but disappointed that he’d gotten them into the situation in the first place. Fair enough; but he wished he’d had a chance to make it up to her in some way. He’d probably never see her again.

Kulitak’s voice cut through his reverie. “Sat phone for you!” Chauncie shot one last look at the fading colors then went inside.

“St. Christie here.”

“Chauncie, my old friend.” It was Maksim. Well, he’d been expecting this call.

“I can’t believe you sent us into that meat-grinder,” Chauncie began. He’d rehearsed his version of events and decided to act the injured party, having barely escaped with his life when the mercenaries came down on the vault just as he was arriving. “I’m lucky to be here to talk to you at—”

“Oh, such sour grapes from a conquering hero!” That was odd. Maksim actually sounded pleased.

“Conquering? They—”

“Have conceded defeat. You uploaded the finest material, Chauncie, our pet scientists are in ecstasy. So, as I’m a man of my word, I’ve wired the rest of your payment to the new account number you requested.”

“New acc—” Chauncie stopped himself just in time. “Ah. Uh, well thank you, Maksim, it was good, uh, doing . . . ”

“Business, yes! You see how business turns out well in the end, my friend? If you have a little faith and a little courage? Certainly I had faith in you and justly so! I’d like to say we must do it again some day, but I know you’ll vanish back to your beloved Caribbean now to lounge in the sunlight—and I’d even join you if I didn’t love my work so much . . . ” Maksim prattled happily on for a minute or two, then rang off to deal with any of his other hundreds of distractions. Chauncie laid down the sat phone and collapsed heavily onto the bench beside the galley table.

“Something wrong?” Kulitak was staring at him in concern.

“Nothing, nothing.” Kulitak shot him a skeptical look at Chauncie said, “Go on. Go find us some CarbonJohnnies to bomb or something. I need a moment.”

After Kulitak had left, Chauncie went to his cabin and woke up his laptop. An email waited from one of his online payment services tied to a public email address for his ’polar consulting services’ website.

$25,000 had just been transferred to him, according to the email, from an email address he didn’t recognize, but could guess who was behind it—a tiny fraction of the number Maksim had promised him. Chauncie had no doubt that it was a tiny fraction of the amount Maksim had actually paid out.

His inbox pinged. A strange sense of fated certainty settled on Chauncie as he opened the mail program and saw a videogram waiting. He clicked on it.

River Balleny’s wind-burnt face appeared on the screen. Behind her was bright sunlight, a sky not touched in pastels. She was wearing a t-shirt, and appeared relaxed and happy.

“Hi, Chauncie,” she said. “I swore to myself I wouldn’t contact you—in case they got to you somehow—but it just seemed wrong to leave you in the lurch. I had to do something. So . . . well, check your email. A little gift from me to you.

“You know . . . I really wasn’t lying when I told you I think the seed data belongs to all of mankind. I walked back into the vault seriously intending to leave it there. But then I realized that it wouldn’t solve anything. We’d still have all our eggs in one basket, so to speak. As long as the seed data was in one place, stored in only one medium—whether it was as seeds or bits on a data chip—it would be scarce. And anything that’s scarce can be bought, and sold, and hoarded, and killed for.

“So I pulled the chips from the briefcase and wrote down the upload data on a scrap of paper. After we parted, I uploaded it to Maksim. And, yeah, I gave him my own bank account number.” She chuckled. “Sorry—but I was never the naïve farm girl you and Kulitak seemed to think I was.”

Chauncie swore under his breath—but he couldn’t help smiling too.

“As long as the genetic code of those seeds was kept in one place, it remained scarce,” she said again. “That gave it value but also made it vulnerable. Now Maksim has it; there’ll be more and more copies as he sells it, and patents it and uses it in various ways. And someday—when he’s gotten what he wants out of it and it’s ceasing to be scarce anyway—someday I’ll upload it all onto the net. For everyone to use.

“We all have to make hard choices these days, Chauncie—about what can be saved, and what we have to leave behind. Svalbard will always be there, but its rarest treasure is out now and with luck, it won’t be rare for long. So everybody wins this time.

“As to me personally, I’m retiring and no, I’m not going to tell you where. And I’ve left you enough for a really good vacation. Enjoy it on me. Maybe we’ll meet again someday.”

She smiled, and there was that naïve farmgirl look, for just a second. “Goodbye, Chauncie. I hope you don’t think less of me for taking the money.”

The clip ended. Chauncie sat back, shaking his head and grinning. He walked out onto the deck of the trawler and looked out over the sea. The sun had just slightly dipped below the horizon, bringing a sort of short twilight. It would reemerge soon, bringing back the perpetual glare of the long days.

Stars twinkled far overhead.

No, not stars, Chauncie realized. There were far too many to be stars, and the density of them increased. Far overhead a heavy blimp was dumping tiny bits of chaff glued to little balloons. Judging by the haze, they’d dumped the cloud into a vast patch of sulfur particulates. Both parties would be in court soon to fight over who would get the credit for blocking the sun’s rays as it climbed back over the horizon.

The sulfur haze had caused the remaining sun’s rays to flare in a full hue of purples and shimmering reds, and the chaff glittered and sparkled overhead.

It was so beautiful.

Originally published in
Fast Forward 2,
edited by Lou Anders (2008)

About the Artist and Authors

Ron Guyatt (ronguyatt.com)

Ron Guyatt is a self-taught artist and professionally-taught graphic designer from Toronto Canada. He attended George Brown College for Design Foundation where he completed with Honors and then followed with his three-year diploma in graphic design at George Brown College.

Inspired by Art Deco, film and science fiction he loves to design posters & create illustrations. His work as been featured in magazines such as Games TM, Level, and Playstation Magazine and worked with clients like EA, Digital Devolver and Bioware.

His Forever cover art is available for purchase as part of his space poster series at: fabledcreative.bigcartel.com/category/space-posters

Genevieve Valentine (genevievevalentine.com)

Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, won the 2012 Crawford Award; her second novel is speakeasy fairy tale The Girls at the Kingfisher Club and a third, Persona is scheduled for publication this month. She’s currently the writer of DC’s CATWOMAN. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Lightspeed, and others, and the anthologies Federations, The Living Dead 2, After, Teeth, and have appeared in several Best of the Year anthologies.

Her nonfiction and reviews have appeared at NPR.org, The AV Club, Strange Horizons, io9.com, Weird Tales, Tor.com, LA Review of Books, and Fantasy Magazine.

Ann Leckie(annleckie.com)

Ann Leckie is the author of the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Award winning novel Ancillary Justice. She has also published short stories in Subterranean Magazine, Strange Horizons, and Realms of Fantasy. Her story “Hesperia and Glory” was reprinted in Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2007 Edition edited by Rich Horton.

Ann has worked as a waitress, a receptionist, a rodman on a land-surveying crew, and a recording engineer. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

Tobias S. Buckell (tobiasbuckell.com)

Born in the Caribbean, Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times Bestselling author. His novels and over fifty short stories have been translated into seventeen languages and he has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus and John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. He currently lives in Ohio.

Karl Schroeder (kschroeder.com)

Canadian writer Karl Schroeder was born and raised in Brandon, Manitoba. He moved to Toronto in 1986, and has been working and writing there ever since. He is best known for his far-future Virga series, consisting of Sun of Suns, Queen of Candesce, Pirate Sun, and The Hero, but he has also written the novels Ventus, Permanence, and Lady of Mazes, as well as a novel in collaboration with David Nickle, The Claus Effect. He’s also the co-author, with Cory Doctorow, of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction. His short fiction has been collected in Engine of Recall. His most recent book is a new novel, Lockstep.

About Forever

Forever Magazine is edited by Neil Clarke and published monthly by Wyrm Publishing. Subscription information is available on our website at forever-magazine.com.

Neil Clarke (neil-clarke.com) is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine (clarkesworldmagazine.com), Forever Magazine, and Upgraded; 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.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.