ISSUE 4

© Wyrm Publishing, 2015
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forever-magazine.com

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the fourth issue of Forever Magazine!

This month’s novella is “The Man With the Golden Balloon” by Robert Reed and it set in his Greatship world. If you enjoy this one, I highly recommend his Greatship collection and the Greatship novels: Marrow, The Well of Stars, and The Memory of Sky.

We also have “Cold Words” by Juliette Wade and “The Hand is Quicker—” by Elizabeth Bear. I’ve published stories by both of them at Clarkesworld and am quite pleased to be able to bring your some more of their work.

I don’t have any significant news to report this month, but I will say that Forever is off to a nice start. The reception so far has been largely positive and the feedback quite useful. As always, I welcome any thoughts or questions you might have and hope that you’ll consider telling your friends about Forever. At this early stage in the magazine, it’s important for us to build up our subscriber base and word of mouth marketing you can spare will be greatly appreciated.

As always, thanks for reading! Until next month . . .

-Neil

The Man With the Golden Balloon

Robert Reed

1

Quee Lee learned about the Vermiculate from an unlikely source—a painfully respectable gentleman who never took pleasure from adventuring or the unexpected. But their paths happened to cross during a feast given by mutual friends, and after the customary pleasantries, he gently pulled the ancient woman aside, remarking, “I have some news that might be of interest to you.”

“Well, I have interest to spare,” she said.

Then with a precise, mildly perturbed voice, he explained how one tiny portion of the Great Ship had never been adequately mapped.

“How can that be?” Quee Lee asked skeptically. “The captains’ first priority was to locate every shipboard cavern and dead-end tunnel. Even the tiniest crevice wears some unique name.”

“Oh, the captains were thorough,” the man admitted, never one to openly doubt authority. “But the Ship has the mass and volume of Uranus, with engines bigger than moons and fuel tanks that can swallow oceans whole.”

Yes, mapping the enigmatic body was a challenge. But the early captains were clever, stubborn souls. Their survey began with several million robots—small, elegantly designed machines bristling with sensors and curious limbs. Scrambling through the Ship’s interior, the robots memorized every empty volume, and whenever a passageway split in two, the robots paused, feasting on the local rock and metal while building copies of their obsessive selves. As prolific as carpenter ants or harum-scarum fleas, those early scouts soon numbered in the trillions, and ruled by simple unyielding instructions, they moved ever deeper inside the Ship, eventually scurrying down every hole, fashioning a precise three-dimensional model of the Ship’s vacant interior.

But the method had limitations. Doorless bubbles and pockets and finger-wide seams lay out of reach; more than a few long caverns were sealed beneath kilometers of iron and hyperfiber. Yet with sonic probes and neutrino knives, the Ship’s engineers made even those buried places visible. The only unmapped region was the Ship’s distant core. The Master Captain was being honest when she stood on the bridge, proclaiming that her fabulous machine had been mapped in full; and its crew and countless passengers had little reason but believe every promise that this voyage would remain routine—a blissful journey that would eventually circumnavigate the bright heart of the Milky Way.

Quee Lee explained all of this, and her companion bristled.

“I understand how the Ship was mapped,” he said. “What I’m telling you is that despite everyone’s best efforts, a few empty spaces are lurking out there.”

“And how do we know this?”

“Because the Master Captain owns a team of AI savants—brilliant machines designed to do nothing but ponder the Ship and its mysteries. One of those AIs recently made a fresh analysis of old data, and one glaring gap was discovered. One blank spot on the captains’ map and nobody understands how this could have happened.”

“And when did we learn this?”

“But we haven’t learned anything,” he countered, his voice breaking at the edges. “This is a very grave, very important business. Only the highest ranking captains know about the flaw.”

“And you,” she pointed out.

“Well, yes, I know portions of the story. But I can’t tell how or why, and please don’t ask me.”

“And why are you telling me?”

“Because it occurred to me,” he said, producing a hopeful smile. “You of all people would appreciate hearing this news.”

Give a rich secret to the blandest soul, and he will turn into a fountain of knowledge. And Quee Lee was a charming presence as well as a very desirable audience: A wealthy woman from the Old Earth and one of a handful of humans onboard the Ship who could remember that precious moment when their species turned a sensitive ear to the sky, hearing intelligent sounds raining down from the stars. In that sense, she was a remarkable and very rare creature—a lady of genuine fame inside the human community. She was also beautiful and poised, socially gifted and universally liked. Given this kind of opportunity, any healthy, insecure heterosexual male would work hard to impress Quee Lee.

“Our captains are worried,” her confidant said. “The Master Captain took the trouble of waking one of the old surveying robots and putting it down a promising hole. And do you know what happened?”

“You’re going to tell me, I hope.”

“The robot lost its way.” The man shivered, bothered by this turn of events. “The machine fumbled around in the darkness, and then with nothing to say for itself, it climbed back out of the hole again.”

“Fascinating,” she said.

“I knew you would enjoy this,” he whispered, offering a smile and quick wink. After millennia of traveling together, he had finally managed to engage the interest of this beautiful creature.

“Perri will want to hear this story,” she mentioned.

“But I wish you wouldn’t mention it,” the man said. Then a worse possibility occurred to him. “I understood your husband is traveling now. He isn’t here with us, is he?”

“Oh, but he is.” For the last several weeks, Perri had been riding a saddle strapped to the back of a squid-like alien called the Gi-Gee, enjoying wild swims in a frigid river of ammonium hydrate. But by chance, he had just now slipped into the party. Of course her husband would want to learn of this news. A thousand souls were scattered across the room, human and otherwise. Most of the celebrants were dressed in gaudy, look-at-me costumes—which was only proper, since these were among the wealthiest, most powerful individuals to be found in the galaxy. But looking past the towering egos, Quee Lee waved at the only human male dressed in plain, practical clothes.

“I don’t want this to be known,” the man said. “Not outside our little circle, please.”

The tone was the message: Perri was neither wealthy nor important, which made him unacceptable.

But Quee Lee laughed off the insult as well as the earnest pleas for silence. “Oh, I’m sure my husband’s already heard about the Vermiculate,” she said. “Perri knows the Ship as well as any captain does, and he knows everyone onboard who matters too.” Then she winked, adding sweetly, “And he knows you, of course.”

“Of course.”

Yet for some reason Perri wasn’t familiar with this rumor. He listened intently as Quee Lee related the mystery, and yes, he was familiar with the region called the Vermiculate. It was an intricate nest of dry caves, very few entrances leading to a million dead ends. But he never knew that some portion of those caverns had escaped mapping.

The other man rocked nervously side to side.

“Tell it again,” Perri demanded, tugging at the fellow’s elbow. “From the beginning, everything you know.”

But there weren’t many new details to share.

“I think I see what’s happening,” Perri said. “This is just an old rumor reborn. The first two passengers to come onboard the Great Ship started this story. Over drinks or in somebody’s bed, they convinced themselves there had to be secret places and unmapped corners. It helped heighten the sense of adventure, don’t you see? And every century or two, without fail, that same old legend puts on a new costume and takes its walk in public.”

“But this is no rumor,” the man said. “And I don’t approve of legends. What I told you is the truth, I swear it.”

“Yet you won’t name your source,” Perri pointed out.

“I cannot,” the man said. “Frankly, I wish I hadn’t said this much.”

Unlike all of the well-moneyed souls in the room, Perri wore a boyish face and a pretty, almost juvenile smile. When it served his needs, he played the role of a smart child surrounded by very foolish adults. “It scares the hell out of you, doesn’t it, sir? You hear about this puzzle, and you’re the kind of creature who won’t fall asleep unless every puzzle is solved, every question mark erased.”

“And what is wrong with that?” asked the rumor’s source.

“What’s right about it?” Perri asked.

Quee Lee had expected that response, and when it came, she laughed softly.

The gentleman bristled, looking at her. “My dear, I thought you would be interested in this matter. But if you’re going to tease me—“
“I didn’t mean that,” she began.

But the man had his excuse to turn and march away. No doubt he would avoid Quee Lee for the rest the day, and if genuinely angry, she wouldn’t see him for the next fifty years.

“I shouldn’t have laughed,” Quee Lee admitted.

“And he shouldn’t forgive you,” said Perri. “But he will.”

True enough. Fifty years of chilled silence was nothing among immortals. All but the most malicious slights were eventually pardoned, or at least discarded as memories not worth carrying any farther. “It’s too bad that the story isn’t true,” she said. “I wish there was an unmapped cave hiding out there.”

“Oh, but there is,” said Perri.

Quee Lee worked through the possibilities. “You lied to me,” she complained. “You’d already heard about the Vermiculate.”

“I didn’t, and I haven’t.”

“Then how can you say—?”

“Easily,” he interrupted. “Your friend might be a wonderful soul. He might be charitable and sweet—”

“Hardly.”

“But the man has never once shown me the barest trace of imagination. I seriously doubt that he could dream up such a tale, and I know he wouldn’t repeat some wild fable, unless it came from a reasonable, responsible source.”

“Such as?”

“One of the captains,” said Perri.

“But why would an officer take any passenger into his or her confidence?” She hesitated, and laughed. “I suppose our friend is rather wealthy.”

“Wealthier even than you,” Perri agreed.

“And if he happened to be sleeping with a captain . . . ”

“That’s my cynical guess.”

Nothing about her husband’s mind was unknown. “You already know which captain it is. Don’t you?”

“I have a robust notion,” he said.

“Tell”

“Not here.” Stroking her arm with a fond hand, he said, “My candidate has rank and connections, and she’s desperately fond of money. And if you mix those qualifications with the fact that she, like that prickly man sulking over there, doesn’t appreciate mysteries . . . ”

“Is the Vermiculate unmapped?” she asked.

“If any place is.” With long fingers, he drew elaborate shapes in the air between them. “Join all of those empty caves together and straightened them out, and you’ll have a single tunnel long enough to reach from your Earth to Neptune and partway home again. So yes, it’s easy to imagine that some AI expert could massage the old data, and one corner here and one little room there might have escaped notice and naming. And maybe after eighty thousand years of sleep, one of the original survey robots gets awakened and shoved down a hole, but because of its age, it malfunctions, which makes these events far more mysterious than they actually are.”

On her own, Quee Lee had narrowed the list of suspect captains to three, perhaps four. With a quiet, conspiratorial voice, she asked, “Who’s going to make our discreet inquires? You or me?”

“Neither of us,” Perri said.

“Then you’re not my husband,” she teased. “The man I married would want to finish the mapping himself.”

Perri shrugged and grinned. “We can make our own good guesses. Besides, if we get ourselves noticed, what began as a tiny anomaly mentioned on a pillow becomes much more: An area of potential embarrassment to the godly rulers of the Great Ship. Then our nameless captain will personally march into that empty corner, and keep me from having my little bit of fun.”

“And me too,” said Quee Lee.

“Or quite a lot of fun,” Perri added, wrapping an arm around his wife’s waist. “If you’re in the mood for a little darkness, that is.”

2

Yet nothing was simple about this simple-sounding quest. Finding holes inside the existing maps required months of detailed analysis by several experts paid well for their secrecy as well as their rare skills. Meanwhile, half a dozen of Perri’s best friends heard about his newest interest, and by turning in past favors earned slots on the expedition roster. Then Quee Lee decided to invite two lady-friends who had been pressing for centuries to join her on a “safe adventure”, which was what this would be. The Vermiculate might be imperfectly known, but there was no reason to expect danger. The dry caves were filled with the standard minimal atmosphere—nitrogen and oxygen and nothing else. There were no artificial suns or lights, and the only heat was thermal leakage from the nearby habitats and reactors. Even if the worst happened—if everyone lost their way and their supplies were exhausted—the result would be a bothersome thirst and gradual starvation. Bioceramic minds would sever all connections with their failing bodies, and when no choice was left, ten humans would sit down in the darkness and quietly turn into mummies, waiting for their absence to be noted and a rescue mission to track them down, waking them up and then teasing them endlessly.

But Perri didn’t approve of losing his way. Meticulously recording their position on the new, modestly improved map, he earned gentle ribbing and then not-so-gentle ribbing from the others. Of course the Vermiculate was far too enormous to explore, even a thousand years. But their flex-skin car took them to areas of interest, and before stepping away from each base camp, he made his team memorize the local tunnels and chambers. Everyone had to stay with at least one companion, he insisted. He begged for the others to carry several kinds of torches as well as locator tools, noisemakers and laser flares. But eighteen days of that kind of mothering caused one of Quee Lee’s friends to break every rule. She picked a random passageway and ran for parts unknown, at least to her. Carrying nothing but one small torch and a half-filled water bottle, she invested ten hours into solitary adventuring, and then discovered that she had no worthwhile ideas where she was in the universe.

Perri and Quee Lee found the explorer sitting in a dead-end chamber, shivering inside her heated clothes—shivering out of anxiety and the first hunger experienced in ages. But it was a lesson that took, and from that moment on, everyone’s wandering was done with at least the minimal precautions.

Boredom was what began defeating the explorers.

The Vermiculate’s walls were stone buttressed with low-grade hyperfiber. No human eye had ever seen these tunnels, but the novelty was minimal. Some places were beautiful in their shape and proportions, but it was an accidental beauty. The Ship’s builders might have had a purpose for each twist and turn, every sudden room and the little tubes that gave access to the next portion of the maze. But living eyes found nothing strange or interesting, and after two months of wandering, the novice adventurers were losing their interest.

One by one, the expedition shrank.

First to leave was the woman who hadn’t gotten lost. Then Perri’s friends complained about these dreary circumstances, each demanding a ride to the nearest exit point. The only ones left were identical twin brothers and that dear old friend of Quee Lee who had gotten lost and scared, and who since then, to the surprise of everyone, had discovered a genuine fondness for spelunking.

Or maybe it was the brothers who held her interest. One night, when the camp lights were dropping down to a nightly glow, Quee Lee spotted the twins slipping into her friend’s little shelter—entering her home from opposite ends, and neither appearing again until morning.

Another month of roving brought few highlights. Half a dozen tunnels showed evidence of foot-traffic over the last few thousand years. The desiccated slime trail of a Snail-As-God was a modest surprise. Inside one cave was the broken scale from a harum-scarum shin, and a few meters farther along, a liter of petrified blood left behind by a human male. And then came that momentous afternoon when they discovered a graveyard of surveying robots—ten thousand machines that had pulled themselves into neat, officious piles before dropping into an eternal diagnostic sleep.

Two days later, Perri brought his team to the bottom of a deep, deep chimney. Mathematical wizards had labeled that location as “mildly interesting”. The Vermiculate displayed patterns, sometimes predictable and occasionally repeatable, and according to sophisticated calculations, that very narrow hole should lead to a large “somewhere else”. But the unknown refused to expose itself with a glance. Two little tunnels waited at the bottom of the chimney, yet every sonic pulse and cursory examination showed that they were long and exceptionally ordinary repositories of the same-old-shit.

The five humans broke into two groups.

Perri and Quee Lee slipped into the shorter tunnel. As always, they brought tracking equipment as well as the sniffers constantly searching for organic traces left by past visitors, and they carried heated clothes and survival rations and a variety of lights to offer feeble glows or sun-blazing fires. But the most effective sensor came in pairs, and it was the bluish-yellow eyes that noticed the sudden hole in the floor.

“Stop,” said Perri.

Quee Lee paused, one gloved hand dropping, fingertips reaching to within a hair’s width of the emptiness.

“Look,” he advised.

“I see it,” she said. But she didn’t know what she saw. After days and weeks of staring at structural hyperfiber, she recognized that here was something different. The area surrounding the hole was peculiar. Holding a variable beam to the floor, she slipped through a series of settings. Hyperfiber was the strongest baryonic substance known—the bones of the Ship and the basis of every starfaring civilization—yet she had never seen light flickering against hyperfiber quite like this. It was as if the floor could feel their weight, and the photons were betraying the floor’s tiny vibrations.

“Do you know what this is?” Perri asked.

“Do you?”

“The source,” he said. “The source of our rumor.”

She shone a second light up and down the tunnel. There was no sign of disabled robots or the detritus left by mapping crews. But the captains could have cleaned up their trash, since captains liked to keep their secrets secret, particularly when it came to curious passengers.

“This hole is fresh,” Perri said. And when Quee Lee reached toward the edge, he said, “Don’t. Unless you want to cut off a finger or two.”

The floor was pure hyperfiber—a skin only a few atoms thick at its thickest. Because the stuff was so very thin, the light flickered. What they were trusting with their combined weight was close to nothing, like worn paint stretched across empty air, and the edge of the hole was keener than the most deadly sword.

“But a robot should have noticed,” she guessed. “If we can see that the floor here is different . . . ”

“Yeah, I’ve given that some thought too,” said Perri. “We’re about as deep into the Vermiculate as you can go, or so we thought. A few surveyors probably started working above us, and when they were overwhelmed, they stopped and ate the rock and replicated themselves.”

“Imperfect copies,” she said.

“Flawed but not badly, and nobody noticed.” He shrugged, enjoying the game without taking anything too seriously. “Whatever the reason, the machine that first crawled into this tunnel wasn’t paying close attention. It didn’t notice what should have been obvious, and that’s why the Ship’s map was incomplete.”

“Just like the rumor says,” Quee Lee agreed. “Except there isn’t much mystery, because if the captains found something remarkable—”

“We wouldn’t get within ten kilometers,” Perri agreed.

With every tool, including her warm brown eyes, Quee Lee examined the floor and the hole and the blackness below.

Perri did the same.

And then for the first time in perhaps a hundred years, one of them managed to surprise the other.

It wasn’t the adventurous spouse who spoke first.

Pointing down, Quee Lee said, “That hole’s just wide enough for me.”

“If we string tethers to the ceiling,” Perri mentioned. “And if there’s another floor worth standing on below us.”

“What about our friends?”

“I’ll go gather them up,” he began.

“No.” Then for the second time, she surprised her husband. “We’ll leave a note behind. We can tell them to follow, if they want.”

Perri smiled at the ancient creature.

“This is our adventure,” she concluded. “Yours, and mine.”

3

What lay below was the same as everything above. The sole difference was that no public map showed these particular cavities and chimneys, and the long tunnels and little side vents always led to a wealth of new places devoid of names. Perri’s navigational kit claimed that they had wandered twelve kilometers before beginning their hunt for a campsite. A series of electronic breadcrumbs led back to the original hole and their left-behind note, and speaking through the crumbs, Quee Lee discovered that her lady-friend and the twins hadn’t bothered to look for them. She mentioned why that might be, and the two enjoyed a lewd laugh. Then following one promising passageway around its final bend, they entered the largest room they had seen in weeks.

The floor of the room was an undulating surface, like water stirred by deep currents. They selected a spacious bowl of cool gray hyperfiber, and with the camp light blazing beside them, they made love. Then they ate and drank their fill, and at a point with no obvious significance, Perri strolled over to his pack and bent down, intending to snatch some tiny item from one of the countless pockets.

That was the moment when every light went out.

Quee Lee was sitting on her memory-chair, immersed in sudden darkness. Her first instinct was to believe that she was to blame. Their camp light was in front of her. Had she given it some misleading command? But their other torches were extinguished, the night total, or perhaps for some peculiar reason her eyes had suddenly decided to go completely blind.

Then from a distance, with a moderately concerned voice, her husband asked, “Darling? Are you there?”

“I am.” Perri was blind too, or every one of their lights had failed. Either way, something unlikely had just occurred. “What do you think?” she asked.

“That it’s ridiculously dark in here,” said Perri.

Perfectly, relentlessly black.

“Do you feel all right?” he asked.

“I feel fine,” she said.

“I do too.” He was disappointed, as if some little ache might help answer their questions. “Except for being worried, I suppose.”

Perri’s foot kicked the pack.

“Darling?”

“I’m hunting for the echo-catchers.”

“Good.”

Then he said, “Found one.”

She listened for the high squeak of sonar.

But he said, “Nope. Not working either.”

She rubbed her eyes.

“Sing to me,” he said. “I’ll follow your voice.”

Softly, Quee Lee sang one of the first tunes that she had ever learned—a nursery rhyme too old to have an author, its beguiling lyrics about rowing and time wrapped around a long dead language.

Moments later, she heard Perri’s soft steps and one deep breath as he settled on the ground directly to her right.

She stopped singing.

Then Perri called from off to her left, from some distance, telling her, “Don’t quit singing now. I’m still trying to find you, darling.”

A long moment brought nothing. The darkness remained silent and unknowable. And then from her right, from a place quite close, a voice that she did not recognize softly insisted, “Yes, please. Sing, please. I rather enjoy that wonderful little tune of yours.”

4

Quee Lee began to jump up.

“No, no,” the voice implored. “Remain seated, my dear. There is absolutely no reason to surrender your comfort.”

She settled slowly, warily.

Perri called her name.

Clearing her throat, Quee Lee managed to say, “I’m here. Here.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“But I thought I heard—”

“Yes.”

“Is somebody with you?”

Inside the same moment, two voices said, “Yes.”

Then the new voice continued. “I was hoping that your wife would sing a little more,” it remarked. “But I suppose I have spoiled the mood, which is my fault. Please, Perri, will you join us? Sit beside Quee Lee, and I promise: Neither of you will come to any harm. A little conversation, a little taste of companionship . . . that’s all I wish for now . . . ”

Again, with urgency, Perri asked, “Are you all right?”

How could Quee Lee answer that question? “I’m fine, yes.” Except she was startled, and for many rational reasons, she was scared, and with the darkness pressing down, she was feeling a thrilling lack of control.

Her husband’s footsteps seemed louder than before. In the perfect blackness, he stepped by memory, and then perhaps sensing her presence, he stopped beside her and reached out with one hand, dry warm fingertips knowing just where her face would be waiting.

She clung to his hand with both of hers.

“Sit, please,” the stranger insisted. “Unless you absolutely must stand.”

Perri settled on one edge of her soft chair. His hand didn’t leave her grip, and he patted that knot of fingers with his free hand. As well as she knew her own bones, Quee Lee knew his. And she leaned into that strong body, glad for his presence and confident that he was glad for hers.

“Who are you?” asked Perri.

Silence answered him.

“Did you disable our lights?” he asked.

Nothing.

“You must have,” Perri decided. “And my infrared corneas and nexus-links too, I realized.”

“All temporary measures,” the stranger said.

“Why?”

Silence.

“Who are you?” asked Quee Lee asked. “And what’s your name?”

Something here was funny. The laughter sounded genuine, weightless and smooth, gradually falling away into an amused silence. Then what might or might not have been a deep breath preceded the odd statement, “As I rule, I don’t believe in names.”

“No?” Quee asked.

“As a rule,” the voice repeated.

Perri asked, “What species are you?”

“And I will warn you,” the voice added. “I don’t gladly embrace the concept of species either.”

The lovers sat as close as possible, speaking to each other with the pressure of their hands.

Finally, Quee Lee took it upon herself to say, “We’re human, if that matters to you.”

There was no response.

“Do you know our species?” she asked.

And then Perri guessed, “You’re a Vapor-track. Nocturnal to the point where they can’t endure even the weakest light—“

“Yes, I know humans,” the stranger responded. “And I know Vapor-tracks too. But I am neither. And I am not nocturnal, nor diurnal. The time of day and the strength of the ambient light are absolutely no concern to me.”

“But why are you down here?” Quee Lee asked.

Their companion gave no response.

“This is a remote corner of the Ship,” Perri said. “Why would any sentient organism seek out this place?”

“Why do you?” was the response.

“Curiosity,” Perri confessed. “Is that your motivation?”

“Not in the least.”

The voice was more male than female, and it sounded nearly as human as they did. But those qualities could be artifacts of any good translator. It occurred to Quee Lee that layers of deception were at play, and what they heard had no bearing at all on what, if anything, was beside them.

“I could imagine that I am a substantial puzzle for the two of you,” the voice allowed.

The humans responded with their own silence.

“Fair enough,” their companion said. “Tell me: Where were each of you born?”

“On the Great Ship,” Perri volunteered.

“I come from the Earth,” Quee Lee offered.

“Names,” the stranger responded. “I ask, and you instantly offer me names.”

“What else could we say?” asked Quee Lee.

“Nothing. For you, there are no other polite options. But as a rule, I prefer places that don’t wear names. Cubbyholes and solar systems that have remained outside the catalogs, indifferent to whichever label that a passerby might try to hang on its slick invisible flesh.”

Quee Lee listened to her husband’s quick, interested breathing.

After reflection, Perri said, “And that’s why you’re here. This is one place inside the Great Ship that has gone unnoticed, until now.”

“Perhaps that is my reason,” the voice allowed.

“Is there a better answer?” Perri asked.

Silence.

“You have no name,” Quee Lee pressed.

The silence continued, and then suddenly, an explanation was offered. “I don’t wear any name worth repeating. But I do have an identity. A self. With my own history and limitations as well as a wealth of possibilities, most of which will never come to pass.”

They waited.

The voice continued. “What I happen to be is a government official, one of the harmless and noble followers of rules. But when necessary, I can become a brazen, fearless warrior. Except when my best choice is to be a coward, in which case I can flee any threat with determination and remarkable skill. Yet in most circumstances, I am just an official: The loyal servant to any exceptionally fine cause.”

“Which cause?” both humans asked.

“In service to the galactic union,” the entity replied. “That is my defining role . . . a role which I have played successfully for the last three hundred and seven million years, by your arbitrary and self-centered count.”

Human hands squeezed, relaxed.

Quee Lee took it upon herself to confess, “I’m sorry. But we don’t entirely believe you.”

“You claim you were born on the Earth. Is that true, my dear?”

She hesitated.

“’Earth.’ Your home planet carries a simple utterance. Am I right?”

She said, “Yes.”

“I happen to know your small world. But when I made my visit, the stars were completely unaware of that self-given name.”

“And what do you know about the Earth?” Perri asked.

“Actually, quite a lot,” their companion promised. Then once again, it fell into a long, long silence.

5

Separately, Quee Lee and Perri had come to identical conclusions: The voice was rhythmic and deep, not just easy to listen to but impossible to ignore. Every word was delivered with clarity, like the voice of a highly trained actor. But woven through that perfection were hints of breathing and little clicks of tongues or lips, and once in a great while, a nebulous sound that would leak from the mouth or nostrils . . . or some other orifice hiding in the darkness. Whatever was speaking to them was slightly taller than their ears, and their best guess was that the creature was sitting on a lump of hyperfiber less than three meters from them. There was mass behind the voice. Sometimes a limb moved, or maybe the body itself. Perhaps they heard the creak of its carapace or the complaining of stiff leathery clothes, or maybe a tendril was twisting back against itself. Unless there was no sound except what the two humans imagined they could hear out in the unfathomable blackness.

As far as they could determine, their nameless companion was alone. There wasn’t any other presence, or a whisper of a second voice. Somehow the creature had slipped into their camp, perhaps even before the lights died, and neither one of them had perceived anything out of the ordinary.

Or maybe there was nothing but the voice.

Sound. Or a set of elaborate sounds, contrived for effect and existing only as so much noise produced by nothing but the unlit air or the fierce motions of individual atoms.

Somebody could be playing an elaborate joke on the two of them. Perri had many clever friends. A few of them might have worked together, going to the trouble to bring him and Quee Lee into this empty hole, snatching them up in some game that would continue until the fun was exhausted and the lights returned. Quee Lee could envision just that kind of trick: One moment, a mysterious voice. And then just as suddenly, a thousand good friends would be standing around them, congratulating the married pair for some minor anniversary.

“Is this a special occasion?” Quee Lee asked herself.

That route seemed lucrative. She smiled, and the nervousness in her body began to drain away. How many months and years of work had gone into this silly joke? But she had seen through all of the cleverness, and she even considered a preemptive shout and laugh, perhaps throwing out the names of the likely conspirators.

Meanwhile the creature continued to explain what might not be real. “My preferred method of travel is to move alone, and always by the most invisible means. This is standard behavior for officials in my station. We will finish one task in some portion of the Union, and that success brings another task to bear. Since news travels slowly across the galaxy, entities like ourselves are granted considerable freedom of action. No other organization is confident enough to tolerate such power in their agents.”

“What kind of tasks?” Perri asked.

“Would you like an example?”

“Please.”

“I am thinking of a warehouse that I had built and stocked—a hidden warehouse in an undisclosed location. And in the very next moment, I was dispatched to my next critical mission.”

“A warehouse,” said Perri.

“Not a romantic word, I grant you. But it was, and is, a vast, invisible facility full of rare and valuable items. I haven never returned to the site, but it most likely remains locked and unseen today. Idle but always at the ready. Waiting for that critical, well-imagined age when its contents help with some great, good effort. But that is the Union’s way: We have an elaborate structure, robust and overlapping, enduring and invincibly patient; which is only natural, since we are the oldest, most powerful political entity within this galaxy.”

“The Union,” Perri said dubiously.

“Yes.”

“I thought you didn’t approve of names.”

“I offer it because you expect some kind of label. But like any contrivance, ‘the Union’ doesn’t truly fit what is real.” A smug, superior tone had taken hold, but it was difficult for the audience to take offense. After all, this was just a voice in the night, and who could say what was true and what was sane?

“Simply stated, my Union is a collection of entities and beliefs, memes and advanced tools, that have been joined together in a common cause. And what you call the Milky Way happens to be our most important possession—the central state inside a vast, ancient empire.”

“No,” Perri said. “No.”

Silence.

Quee Lee felt her husband’s tension. Leaning forward, she told their companion, “There are no empires.”

A long black silence held sway, and then came a sound not unlike the creak of a joint needing oil.

“Many, many species have tried to build empires,” she continued, naming a few candidates to prove her knowledge of the subject. “The galaxy’s first five sentient races accomplished the most, but they didn’t do much. The galaxy is enormous. Its planets are too diverse and far too numerous to be ruled by a thousand governments, and star travel has always been a slow, dangerous business. When one species rises, it gains control only a very limited region. Measure the history of empires against the life stories of suns and worlds, and even the most enduring régime is a temporary and tiny.”

She concluded by saying, “No one authority has ever controlled any substantial portion of the galaxy.”

“I applaud that generous sense of doubt,” said the stranger. “May I ask, my dear? What are you?”

“What do you mean?”

“By blood, I think you must be Chinese. Am I right?”

“Mostly, yes,” she said.

“And the city of your birth?”

“Hong Kong,” she whispered.

“Hong Kong, yes. A place I know, yes. Of course you understand that your China was a great empire, and more than once. And as I recall from my studies of long-ago Earth, there was a period—a brief but not unimportant time—when the port of Hong Kong belonged to the greatest empire ever to exist on your little world. A minor green island sitting in a cold distant sea called itself Great Britain, and with its steam-driven fleets, it somehow managed to hang its flag above a fat fraction of the world’s population.”

“I know about Britain,” she said.

“Now tell me this,” their companion continued. “An old rickshaw driver plies his trade on the narrow Hong Kong streets. Does that lowly man care who happens to serve as governor of his home city? Does it matter to him if the fellow on top happens to have yellow hair, or is a Mongol born on the plains of Asia, or even a Han Chinese who is a third-cousin to him?”

“No,” she said. “He probably doesn’t think much about those matters.”

“And what about the Hindu peasant who struggles to feed himself and his family from a patch of land downstream from Everest . . . the ruler of a farm that has never even once fallen under the indifferent gaze of the pale Northern man who works inside a distant government building? Does that farmer concern himself with the man who signs a long list of decrees and then dies quietly of malaria? And does he care at all about the gentleman who comes to replace that dead civil servant . . . another Northern man who bravely signs more unread decrees before he dies of cholera?”

Quee Lee said nothing.

“Consider the Mayan lady nursing her daughter in Belize, or the Maori cattle herder in Kenya who happens to be the tall strong lord to his herd. Do they learn the English language? Can they even recognize their rulers’ alphabet? And then there squats the Aboriginal hunter sucking the precious juice out of an emu egg. Is he even aware that fleets of enormous coal-fired ships are landing and then leaving from his coast each and every day?

“Each of these souls is busy, embroiled in rich and complex, if painfully brief lives. Within the British Empire, hundreds of millions of citizens go about their daily adventures. The flavor of each existence is nearly changeless. Taxes and small blessings come from on-high, but these trappings accomplish little, regardless which power happens to be flying the flags. A peasant’s story is usually the same as his forefathers’ stories, and if the peasant’s children survive, they will inherit that same stubborn, almost ageless narrative.”

Neither human spoke.

“Do these little people ever think of that distant green island?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t,” Quee Lee allowed.

“But if they do think of Britain,” the stranger began.

“What then?” Perri prompted.

“Would they love the Empire for its justice, order, and the rare peace that it brings to the human world?”

Neither of them responded.

“Of course they do not. What you do not know, you cannot love or despise. This is true for every life that has walked two moments of time. So long as the lives of these peasants remain small and steady, hating the British is not an option.”

The voice paused, and what might have been a deep breath could be heard. “Make no mistake—I am not claiming that these are unsophisticated souls. They are far from simple, in fact. But their lives are confined. By necessity, the obvious and immediate are what matter to them. And the colors and shape of today’s flag could not have less meaning.”

“Suppose we agree,” said Perri. “We accept your premise: For humans, empires tended to be big, distant machines.”

“As it is for most species,” was the reply.

In the dark, Quee Lee and her husband nodded.

“But I don’t agree with that word ‘big’,” the stranger continued. “I believe that even the greatest empire, at the height of its powers, remains vanishingly small. To the brink of invisible, even.”

“I don’t understand,” said Quee Lee.

“Let me remind you of this: Several million whales swam in your world’s little ocean. They were great beasts possessing language and old cultures. But did even one species of cetaceans bow to the British flag? And what about the tiger eating venison on the Punjab? Did he dream of the homely human queen? And what role did the ants and beetles, termites and butterflies play in the world? They did nothing for Britannia, I would argue . . . and Britannia had no place in their relentless little minds.”

Perri tried to laugh.

Quee Lee could think of nothing useful to say.

“The trouble,” the voice began. Then it paused, perhaps reconsidering its choice of words. “Your mistake,” it continued, “is both inevitable and comforting, and it is very difficult to escape. What you assume is that the names in history are important. Because you are smart, educated minds, you have taught yourselves much about your own past. But even the most famous name is lost among the trillions of nameless souls. And every empire that you think of when the subject arises . . . every political entity, no matter how impermanent and trivial . . . was visible only because it wasted its limited energies making certain that its name would outlive both its accomplishments and its crimes.”

“Maybe so,” Quee Lee allowed.

“Names,” the voice repeated. “The worlds you know wear that unifying trait. The name brings with it a sense of purpose and a handle for its recorded history. Attached to one or a thousand words waits some center of trade, a nucleus of science, and you mistakenly believe that the most famous names mark the hubs of your great cosmopolitan galaxy.”

Perri squeezed his wife’s hand, fighting the temptation to speak.

“But the bulk of the galaxy . . . its asteroids and dust motes, sunless bodies and dark corners without number . . . those are the features that truly matter.”

“Matter to whom?” Quee Lee asked.

“To the weaver ants and lowly fish, of course. The beetles and singing whales, and our rickshaw driver who knows the twisting streets of Hong Kong better than any Chinese emperor or British civil servant. Nameless citizens are those with substance, my dear.” Something creaked, as if their companion shifted its weight, and the voice drifted slightly to one side. “I will confess that my empire is like all the others, only more so. The Union that I love and that I have served selflessly for eons is vast and ancient. But where England made maps and gave every corner its own label, my Union has wisely built itself upon places unknown.”

Husband and wife contemplated that peculiar boast.

Then Quee Lee recalled an earlier thread. “You have visited the Earth, you claimed.”

“I did once, yes.”

“Was this before or after your invisible warehouse?”

“Afterwards, as it happens. Not long after.”

“You mentioned receiving a new mission,” Perri coaxed.

“Which leads indirectly to an interesting story.” The next sound was soft, contented. “My orders arrived by a usual route. Whispered and deeply coded, the instructions from my superiors that were designed to resemble nothing but a smeared flicker of light thrown out from a distant laser array.” The words were strung together with what felt like a grin. “Alone, I left my previous post. Alone, I rode inside a tiny vehicle meant to resemble a shard of old comet, using a simple ion motor to boost my velocity to where my voyage took slightly less than forty centuries—“

“By our arbitrary and self-centered count,” said Perri.

“Which is not such a very long time.” Those words were ordinary and matter-of-fact. Yet somehow the sound of them—their clarity and decidedly slow pace—conveyed long reaches of time and unbounded patience. “I traveled until I came to a nameless world. There was one ocean and several continents. The forests were green, the skies blue with white watery clouds. To fulfill the demands of my new mission, I selected an island not far from the world’s largest continent: A young volcanic island where the local inhabitants built boats driven by oars and square sails, and they put up houses of wood and stone and planted half-wild crops in the fertile black soil. And their moments of free time were filled with the heartfelt worship of their moon and sun—the two bodies that ruled a sky that they would never truly understand.”

“Was this was the Earth?” asked Quee Lee.

There was a pause, and inside the darkness, motion.

And then the voice told them, “When these particular events occurred, my dear, there was no planet yet called ‘the Earth’.”

Quee Lee wrapped both hands around her husband’s arm.

“Remember this,” the voice continued. “The Union is the only power of consequence. And the Union holds its interest only in those dark realms that appear on no worthwhile map.”

6

“A king happened to rule that warm, sun-washed island. He was simple and rather old, and I was tempted to kill him in some grand public fashion before taking his throne for myself. Yet my study of his species and its superstitions showed me a less bloody avenue. The king’s youngest wife was pregnant, but the child would be stillborn. It was a simple matter to replace that failed infant and then bury what was Me inside healthy native flesh. Once born, I proved to the kingdom that their new prince was special. I was a lanky boy, physically beautiful, endowed with an unnatural strength and the gentle grace of wild birds. I didn’t merely walk at an early age, I danced. And with a bold musical voice, I spoke endlessly on every possible subject, people fighting to kneel close to me, desperate to hear whatever marvel I offered next.

“The wise old women of my kingdom decided that I must be a god’s child as much as a man’s. Like a god’s child, I predicted the weather and the little quakes that often rattled the island. I boasted that I could see far into the skies and over the horizon, and to prove my brave words, I promised that a boat full of strangers would soon drift past our island.

“My prediction was made in the morning, and by evening, I was proved right. The lost trireme was filled with traders or pirates. On a world such as that, what is the difference between those two professions? Whatever their intentions, my people were waiting for them, and after suitable introductions, I ordered the strangers murdered and their possessions divided equally among the general populace.”

The voice paused.

In the dark, Quee Lee leaned hard against her husband.

And the story continued. “I was almost grown when that little old king stood before his people and named his heir. Two of my brothers were insulted, but I had anticipated their clumsy attempts at revenge. In a duel with bronze swords, I removed the head of the more popular son. Then I turned my back, allowing my second brother to run his spear through my chest—a moment used to prove that I was, as my people had always suspected, immortal.

“With my two hands, I yanked the spear from my heart.

“In anguish, my foe flung himself off one of our island’s high cliffs.

“‘Someday I will follow my brothers into the Afterlife,’ I promised the citizens. ‘But for the rest of your days, I will remain with you, and together we shall do the work of the gods.’

“And that was the moment, at long last, when the heart of my mission finally began.”

Their companion paused.

“Are you going to explain your mission?” Perri asked.

“Hints and teases. I will share exactly what is necessary to explain myself, or at least I will give you the illusion of insights, placing you where your imaginations can fill in the unnamed reaches.”

“About these natives,” Quee Lee began. “Your people . . . what did they look like?”

Quietly and perhaps with a touch of affection, the voice explained, “They were bipedal, as you are. And they had your general height and mass, hands and glands. Like you, they presented hairless flesh to the world, except upon their faces and scalps and in their private corners. As a rule, most were dirty and drab, and on that particular island, their narrow culture reached back only a few generations. But their species had potential. Following ordinary pathways, natural selection had given them graceful fingers and an evolving language, busy minds and a compelling sense of tribe. In those following years, I showed my people how to increase the yields and quality of their crops. I taught them how to purify their water, how to carve and lift gigantic stones, and I helped them build superior ships that could chase the fat fish and slow leviathans that could never hide from my godly eyes. Then in the shadow of their smoldering volcano, I laid out a spacious palace surrounded by a solid homes and wide avenues, and for three generations, my devoted followers built the finest city their species had ever known.”

Once again, the voice ceased. But the silence was neither empty nor unimportant, accenting a sense of time crossed with clear purpose. Then a smooth laugh came, and their companion remarked, “If the two of you were dropped into similar circumstances, you would accomplish most if not all of my tricks. You are borderline immortals. Spears through your hearts would be nuisances at day’s end. Armed with the knowledge common to your happy lives, you could visit some nameless world and convince its residents that you were divine, and in the next breath, you could call for whatever riches and little pleasures that your worshippers might scratch together for you.

“But what pleasures me is serving the Union.

“What I wanted . . . what my orders demanded from this one place, inside this single moment . . . was the construction of a significant machine, a device that would demand the full focus of a half-born civilization . . . ”

“What machine?” asked Perri.

“If it proves important to know that, then I will tell you.”

But Perri couldn’t accept that evasive answer. “How many people lived in your city? Five thousand? Fifty thousand? I don’t know what you were building, granted. But you’re implying advanced technologies, and I’d have to guess that you’d need a lot more hands and minds than you would ever find on a tiny island in the middle of the sea . . . ”

The first answer was prolonged silence.

Then the sharp creak of a limb or cold leather could be heard, and with quiet fury, the entity said, “You have listened carefully enough, sir. Pay strict attention to everything that I tell you.”

“Remind me what you said,” Perri said.

Another silence ended with what might have been a sigh. “I sat on my throne for seventy summers and several months,” said the voice. “Then one day, I abruptly announced that my city was failing me. With a wave of my fist, I told my followers that they were not truly devoted, and they were not sufficiently thankful for my wise counsel, and I was contemplating the complete obliteration of their island-nation.

“With the next sunrise, the great volcano erupted. The rich rocky earth split wide. Ash was coughed into the blackened sky, and lava flowed into the boiling sea, and boulders as big as homes were dropped onto the cowering, inadequate heads around me. Then I pretended a sudden change of mind. I showed pity, even empathy. On the following day, after the dead were buried and the damage assessed, I dressed in a feathered robe and walked to the summit where I told the mountain to sleep again—which it would have done on its own, since the eruption had run its course. But a single moment of theatre erased the last shreds of doubt. Again, I had convinced my followers that I was supreme. You could not hear one muttered complaint about me, or doubts about my powers, or the slightest question concerning each of my past decisions.

“That seamless devotion was necessary.

“You see, the eruption was not a random event. And I didn’t make the mountain tremble and belch just to scare the local souls.

“Even as I sat on my throne, I had been working. My assignment demanded the kinds of energy generated by top-grade fusion reactor. But reactors produce signatures visible at a great distance. Neutrinos are difficult to shield, and I didn’t want prying eyes to notice my industrial plant. So instead of a reactor, I employed the lake of magma directly beneath our feet, creating an inefficient but enormous geothermal plant. When that plant awoke—when the first seawater poured down the pipes and into the reaction vessels—my island was shoved upwards like a balloon inflating. Watchful eyes noticed that every tide pool was suddenly baking in the sun. Our island was significantly taller, and a thousand hot springs flowed out of the high crevices, and the black ground was itself warm to the touch.

“On that good day, I ordered every woman of breeding age to come to the palace, to arrive with the evening bell, and I welcomed each of them individually, giving them a feast and plenty to drink, as well as jewelry and robes finer than anything they had known. Then to this nervous, worshipful gathering, I announced that each of them was carrying a child now.

“I promised my wives untroubled pregnancies and healthy, superior babies.

“Both promises came true.

“And you are correct, Perri. Sir. Fifty thousand followers would never have been enough. No natural species can bring the mental capacity demanded by this kind of delicate, highly technical work. So I enlarged the natives’ craniums and restructured their neural networks, flinging them across fifty thousand generations of natural selection. Then I served as the children’s only teacher. I taught them what they needed to know about the high sciences, and I made them experts in engineering, all while carefully preparing my kingdom for the next change.”

Perri said, “Wait.”

In the dark, Quee Lee felt her husband’s body shifting. She recognized his excitement and interest, his emotions mirroring her own.

Again, he said, “Wait.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve been thinking about what you’ve told us.”

“Good.”

“Where your logic leads . . . ”

Silence.

“If you were willing to rewrite the biology of one species,” Perri said, “you could just as well reshape others too.”

“Ants?” Quee Lee blurted. “Were you a god to the island’s ants?”

“Ants have no need for gods,” the voice corrected. “They demand nothing but a queen blessed with spectacular fertility. But you’ve seen my logic, yes. You are paying attention. But then again, I knew that the two of you would prove a worthy audience.”

Some small object clattered against hyperfiber—a clear, almost bell-like sound expanding and diminishing inside the gigantic room.

The voice returned. “By the time my first grandchildren were born, the ocean around my island was lit from below. Which was only reasonable, since the city above was just one portion of a much greater community—a nation numbering in the billions. My people supplied the genius, but to serve them, I had built a multitude of obedient minds trained for narrow, exceptionally difficult tasks. A full century of careful preparation had made me ready to begin the construction of a single mechanical wonder.

“Which was the moment, I should add, when all of my many troubles began . . . ”

7

In the smothering blackness, Quee Lee held her husband by an arm, by his waist, and then she twisted her body in a particular way, inviting a groping hand, not caring in the least that the nameless entity might be able to perceive their timeless, much-cherished intimacies.

Perri started to ask the obvious question: “What troubles?”

But the voice interrupted. Louder than before, it said, “Human beings are an extraordinarily fortunate species. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“I feel lucky,” Quee Lee said.

But Perri guessed, “You’re talking about something specific. Aren’t you?”

“Tell me your opinion,” the voice said. “Is this vessel a true blessing for you and yours?”

“You mean the Great Ship,” she said.

“I mean the machine that surrounds us,” it said. “The name itself has zero significance.”

Perri laughed. “Well, I know at least a thousand other species that could have found it first. They were more powerful, more numerous, and far older than we are. All of them should have grabbed it up before we ever knew it existed.”

“It is a magical machine,” Quee Lee offered.

The entity made a few soft, agreeable noises. “Our galaxy has stubbornly refused to be dominated by any single species. But humans stumbled across this prize, claimed it first, and have held on to it since. A single possession has lifted the human animal into an exceptionally rare position. Your best captains have no choice but thank the stars and Providence for this glorious honor. Today, your artisans and scientists are free to drink in the wisdom of the galaxy. Your wealthiest citizens can make this long journey in safety, sharing their air with the royalty of a hundred thousand worlds. But I think your greatest success rises from the hungriest, bravest souls among you.

“Each year, on average, seventeen-and-a-third colonial vessels push away from the your ports. How many of your willing cousins are dropped to the surface of wild worlds and lucrative asteroids? How many homes and shops are being erected, new societies sprouting up in your wake? Now multiply those impressive numbers by the hundreds of thousands of years that you plan to invest in this circumnavigation of the galaxy. The totals are staggering. No society or species or even any compilation of cooperative souls has enjoyed the human advantage, and there is no reason to believe it will happen again.

“And consider this: How many species buy your berths? Thousands arrive each year, and in trade for a safe journey, they surrender every local map, cultural experiences and open-ended promises of help. That’s why each of your new colonies has a respectable, enviable chance of survival. And that’s why your species is hugging a small but respectable probability of dominating the richest portions of the galaxy.

“So now I ask you: When will this galaxy of ours become known everywhere and to every species as ‘the Milky Way’?

“In other words, when will this wilderness become your possession?”

Considering that possibility, the humans couldn’t help but smile.

But then Quee Lee sighed and shook her head, saying, “Never. Is that the answer you want?”

The voice turned quiet again, nearly whispering as it explained, “That kind of success shall never happen. No, never. Even in your blessed circumstances, this little whirlpool of creation remains too vast and far too complex for any species to dominate. Your makeshift empire is doomed at its birth. The best result that you might achieve—and even this is an unlikely future—is for this machine to complete its full circuit of the galaxy without being stolen from you, and for you to leave scattered in your wake twenty million human worlds. But what are twenty million names against those trillions of rocks big enough to be called planets? I promise that no matter its blessings, each one of your colonies will struggle. It is inevitable. Your species is relatively late on the scene. Easy rich worlds are scarce and typically walked by someone else. By the minute, your galaxy grows older. And with every breath, the sky grows more crowded. New species are evolving, and thinking machines are designing their next generations, and almost everything that lives strives hard to live forever, or nearly so.”

The smiles had vanished.

For a long moment, neither human spoke.

Then Quee Lee suggested, “Maybe our empire should stop naming our worlds. If we emulated your Union . . . if human beings decided to rule the dark and empty and the unmapped—”

“No,” the voice interrupted.

Then with a palpable scorn, it added, “I will share with you one common principle known by every true empire. Whether you are British or Mongolian, Roman or American: You may never, ever allow a competing empire to sprout within your sacred borders.

“My Union stands alone.

“Never forget that.

“And when the inevitable future arrives . . . when the final star burns out and the universe pulls itself into a great empty cold . . . my Union will persist, and it will thrive, living happily on this galaxy’s black bones: A force as near to Always as that word shall ever allow.”

8

The humans felt chastened and a little angry, powerless to respond yet nonetheless intrigued by the stark implications. They held one another in ways that spoke—the touch of fingers, the pressure of a fat-clad knee, and the shared tastes of expelled air carrying odors that could only come from Perri, and only come from Quee Lee.

The voice returned, quietly mentioning, “My mission to the blue world had begun so easily, with much promise. Yet now its nature changed. In relatively quick succession, three problems emerged, each capable of threatening the project and my sterling reputation.”

A thoughtful pause ended with a brief, disgusted sound.

“Remember the pirates mentioned before? The seafarers whom I let my people kill? They had floated out from the main continent, and with another hundred years of experience, their descendants were eager to return. That rocky green wilderness still lay over the horizon, but now it was speckled with dirty cities and fledging nations. Unlike my little island, those far places had always enjoyed culture and a deep history, every corner of their rich landscape adorned with some important little name.

“Bronze-and-brick technology was at work. Kings and educated minds were beginning to piece together the first, most obvious meanings of the universe. The largest triremes could wander far from land, and their captains knew how to navigate by the stars and moon. That those captains would try to visit my island was inevitable, which is why I took precautions. The leviathans patrolling my bright waters were instructed to scare off every explorer, and should fear not work, they were entitled to crush the wooden hulls and drown those stubborn crews.

“A few ships were sunk off our coast.

“The occasional corpse washed up on shore, swollen by rot and chewed upon by curious or vengeful mouths.

“One of the dead had been a scientist and scholar, and even as he drowned, he managed to grab hold of his life’s work—a long roll of skin covered with dense writing and delicate sketches.

“The body was looted, and the book eventually found its way into the appreciative hands of one of my grandchildren.

“The island’s original natives could never have understood the intense black scribbling, but my grandchild was more than intelligent and highly creative, he was also curious and unabashedly loyal to me. Using code-breaking algorithms, he taught himself the dead man’s language. In his spare moments, he managed to translate the text in full. His purpose, it seems, was to make me proud of his genius. He was certainly thrilled of his own accomplishment, which was why he shared what he had learned with close friends and lovers. Then he walked to the palace and kneeled before my throne, presenting both the artifact and his translation for my honest appraisal.

“’They speak of us,’ the young man reported. ‘The rest of our world believes we are gods or the angels of gods or we have descended from the stars. They have convinced themselves that if they defeat the sea monsters and outsmart the currents, they can row themselves into our harbor and stand among us, and they will be heroes in the gods’ eyes. And for their extraordinary bravery, we will award them with the secrets of All . . . ’”

A brief pause.

“I’ll ask this question again,” said Perri. “This species . . . were they human . . . ?”

A sound came, soft but perhaps disgusted.

“Atlantis,” Quee Lee whispered. “Is that this story?”

“My guess exactly,” said Perri, hugging her until her ribs ached. Then he said the ancient name for himself, in the appropriate dead language.

“Once again, you have forgotten: The galaxy had no name for that world, much less for that long-ago island. But I won’t stop you from imagining your Earth and its legendary lands, and I won’t fight the labels that help you follow what I happen to say.”

In the darkness, Perri squeezed his wife again, and she pushed her mouth into his ear, saying with relish, “It must be.”

They had decided, together.

It was Atlantis.

“My grandchildren,” the voice continued. “Several generations had passed since the first of them were born, and I should confess to one inevitable event. I have always taken lovers from the locals. A lover supplies information and oftentimes can be a tool for good methodical management. Bedding those who are most beautiful and intriguing is a natural consequence of my station. But one of those grandchildren proved more irresistible than usual. She was a young woman, as it happened. Though it just as likely could have been a man . . .

“By the standards of her species, she was physical small and exceptionally lovely.

“Among her gifted peers, she was considered brilliant and singularly blessed. The finest of the fine . . .

“That I took her into my bed was natural. That she retained her virginity until that night only enhanced her reputation with her people, and to a degree, with me. The bloodied sheet was hung from the palace wall for a full day, and when she appeared again in public, cheers made her stand tall as a queen—the center of attention smiling at her appreciative world.

“I was very fond of that little creature.

“As a lover, she was fearless and caring, bold and yet compliant too. And when we were not making love, she would ask me smart little questions about all matters of science and engineering. Her particular expertise involved the heart of the device that we were building together. There were puzzles to work through, matters that I didn’t understand fully myself. I had never built such an object, you see. That’s why the brilliant grandchildren were critical. But even though she understood many of the ideas behind our work, she always wanted to know more, and if possible, hold what she knew more deeply.

“Charming and crafty, she was, and I let myself be fooled. I confessed that there were subjects that could never, ever to be discussed with her people. ‘You will repeat none of this again,’ I warned. ‘Not even to the wind.’

“She promised to remain mute.

“Then I explained to her the true shape of the galaxy, and its great age, and I told the violent history of our glorious universe.

“And yes, there were moments when I mentioned the Union and my small, critical role within it.

“Then because she seemed so interested in the subject of Me, I confessed my age and gave a brief thorough accounting of past missions as well as some of the tricks that I was capable of.”

The voice fell away.

In the blackness, a body stretched until the bones or carapace creaked, a sharp dry crack coming at the end.

“That lover was my second challenge,” said the voice. “Although at that particular moment, I didn’t appreciate the danger.”

Quee Lee leaned away from Perri, begging her dark-adapted eyes to find any trace of wayward light. If she could just make out the creature that was sitting so close to them—

No. Nothing.

“One of our shared nights never seemed to end,” said the voice. “Normal fatigues don’t trouble me, but my lover, no matter how much improved genetically, needed sleep. She lived for dreams. Yet the girl somehow resisted every urge to close her lovely dark eyes. Twice in the dark, she managed to surprise me with tricks she had never shown before. I was appreciative. How could I not be? But then as the full moon set and the bright summer sun began to rise, she whispered, ‘I was wondering my lord . . . about something else . . . ’

“’What?’ I asked.

“’But maybe I shouldn’t,’ she conceded.

“’Ask me anything,’ I said, never voicing the obvious possibility that I wouldn’t reply, or that I might simply lie.

“With a sleepy slow voice, my lover confessed, ‘I am curious. When you speak of old missions, you usually seem to be out between the stars, or huddled beside some dying star, or cloaked inside a storm cloud of interstellar dust . . . ’

“I nodded, and for a moment, she seemed to drop into sleep.

“But then she roused herself with a gasp, straightening her little body before asking, ‘Why come here? Why visit our little world, my lord?’

“’It suits my present mission,’ I conceded. ‘Your volcano and the sea water are rich with rare elements and useful minerals—‘

“’But you have told me this before . . . in other nights, you explained that in the baby days of any solar system, some if not most of the new worlds are flung out into the night. Their oceans freeze. Their atmospheres fall as snow. But radiation keeps their iron cores molten, and volcanoes still bubble up beneath the bitter ice, and a god like you could surely bring temporary life to those unnamed realms . . . ’

“I listened to her, perhaps not quite believing just how bright she was.

“Then very quietly, I reminded her, ‘Like those cold places, this world possesses no name. As far as the universe is concerned, your home is a random lump of dust and still-simple life forms.’

“For a long while, she stared at me.

“Those beautiful dark eyes . . . I cannot mention those eyes and not feel shame . . . a burning disgrace that keeps me from describing to you just how deep their hold was on me . . .

“But then the eyes closed, and my lover drifted into a rich, much deserved sleep. I thought the matter was finished. I didn’t want to entertain any other possibility. And really, what reason did I have to believe that this worshipful little creature was a threat, or even if she was a threat that she could be ever present a genuine danger to the likes of me?

“I covered her with a fine linen sheet.

“Then for the following days and months, and years, nothing changed. No word or incident raised even the tiniest suspicion on my part. My lover was the same to me as she had always been, and I was as pleasant and giving to her and to all of my people.

“And then my third challenge arrived. This danger came from the sky, and even at a great distance, it brought the worst possible trouble. Out on the edge of the solar system was an automated probe. A harum-scarum probe was moving at a small fraction of light-speed. The harum-scarums have always been aggressive in their explorations and colonizations, and now one of their sharp-eyed robots was plunging out of the darkness, threatening to fly past my world while taking note of everything that might bear interest.

“I couldn’t allow myself or my good work be seen.

“And sadly, the machines that I had left in orbit couldn’t protect me. I needed to leave the island. Wisely, I didn’t offer reasons or predict when I would return. As far as my people knew, I would be back among them before the next sunset or the coming full moon. But I begged them to continue our work—the delicate fabrication of a single machine that meant everything to me and to them.”

In the dark, the voice dropped into a long airy sigh.

Then quietly, but with an unhealed pain, their companion said, “This was the moment when the rebellion began. And I think you can guess who stood on the silk cushions of my empty throne, whirling a titanium hammer above her head, shouting to the throng, ‘It is time to save our world, my friends! To rescue our futures and gain control over our souls!’”

9

Emotions lay rich and fresh in the silence, born out of a sadness that could not be forgotten. Or maybe there was only silence, black and seamless, and the misery and burning sense of loss were supplied entirely by the human audience. It was impossible to tell which answer was correct, or if both were a little true. But then the humans heard a limb flex, the invisible body creaking as it shifted, not once but three times in quick succession. When the voice returned, it seemed slower. Each word was delivered alone, and between one word and the next laid a tiny silence, like a cold black mortar pushed between warm red bricks.

“I could have destroyed the automated probe at a distance. I could have used methods that would have made harum-scarum scientists believe that bad luck was responsible. Some random rock, a cosmic hazard that slipped past the machine’s various armors. Nothing would seem too unusual about that. But erasing the danger was not the only problem. Harum-scarum probes are relatively common in our galaxy, and if I blithely obliterated them whenever our paths crossed, somebody would eventually see the pattern in my clumsiness.

“No, what I did was rise up into the sky to meet the danger directly.

“Like you, I am the loyal subject to a variety of laws concerning motion and energy. I had to race out into the solar system for a considerable distance, and then with methods that I cannot share, I invisibly changed my trajectory, racing back again, making certain that my momentum carried me close to the probe’s vector.

“Together, that machine and I dove into the hot glare of the sun. I studied my opponent while it absorbed images of the two inner worlds. Then we climbed away from the sun, and at a moment when I would escape notice, I drifted closer and touched the machine with a thousand fingers, allowing its giant eyes to do their work even as I changed a small portion of what it could see.

“Together, we passed between the gray moon and my blue-green world.

“And then the danger was finished. The probe turned its attentions to the little red world coming next, and with my chore accomplished, I glanced backward, examining my home with my own considerable eyes.

“The rebellion was well underway.

“Twenty different security systems had been fooled, or by various means disabled. And now my clever little grandchildren had full control over their land and the ocean around them.

“Feigning loyalty, they had continued building the machine.

“Pretending subservience, most of them moved through their lives in the expected ways. But others openly prayed that I was dead, even while they planned my murder should I return. And still others pretended to die, their names removed from the city’s rosters, freeing them to journey over to the mainland, taking with them tools and skills as well as a story that would inspire the primitive souls they would find waiting there.

“I was furious.

“In ways quite rare to me, I felt the powerful, consuming need for revenge.

“But motion and energy still held sway. I could not roar home in the next instant, and if I didn’t wish to be noticed by the probe beside me, I would have to be patient enough to obey my original plan.

“Easing away from the probe consumed many days.

“I spent another month pushing against the universe, slowing myself to a near-halt before turning and plunging back into the brilliant sunshine.

“By then, the harum-scarum eyes were distant. But if the probe happened to glance back at my world, it might have noticed an island exploding before its time, a dark cloud spreading while a deep bubbling caldera defined the island’s grave. But I resisted that instinctive violence. Destroying my own work would have been an unacceptable cost, and worse, it would have been graceless.

“And of course I could have remotely shut down the entire operation, protecting my investment from malicious hands. But that meant new risks as well as long, embarrassing delays.

“Instead, I decided to dance with complete disaster, but aiming for total success.”

After those words, a long pause seemed necessary.

Finally, Perri said, “You won’t tell us. I know. But we would appreciate to know what the stakes were.”

“I would like to know,” Quee Lee said.

“What exactly you were building?” her husband pressed.

“Britannia,” the voice replied. “Like any empire worth its salt . . . ” A weak laugh washed over them. “How can you separate a true empire from all of the little pretenders? What did the British possess that their vanquished opponents lacked? Why were those Northern men superior to the tropical peasants in the field and the dogs in the street?

“Any good empire holds at least one skill that is its own.

“The Greeks had their highly-trained hoplites and several unique if contradictory forms of government. The Chinese had the most enduring civil services ever seen on your world. Romans were possessed by their engineering and brutal legions. And so long as British boats owned the seas, their power was accepted by a world that saw no option but bow in their mighty presence.

“An empire is always smarter than its competition.

“And my Union is far, far smarter than the human species. Or any other species you can name, for that matter.

“The device I was building . . . ? Well, I will tell you that it was a single component meant to be set inside a much larger machine. And that it was extremely rare and very valuable, embodying sciences that you have never mastered. Once assembled, the full apparatus can wield principles that your most brilliant minds might recognize as possible, but only that. The apparatus is magic. It is gorgeous. It was, and is, worth every cost.”

A brief pause ended with Quee Lee’s voice.

“So you returned to the Earth,” she said. “To Thera, or Atlantis. Although it wore different names then, I suppose.”

“Whatever the world, whatever the island,” said the voice. “Yes, I returned, yes. To find my grandchildren engaged in an artful rebellion.”

There was a long, contemplative pause.

Finally Perri asked, “And what happened then?”

“Worth every cost,” the entity said once again. “I speak without doubts, telling you what I did that day. And for that matter, what I would do on this day, in an instant, if I saw any threat to my enduring Union.

“I would protect what I love.”

10

Until that moment, the voice had been just so much noise. It was interesting and entertaining noise, the words intriguing if not completely believable. The narrative was compelling enough for the humans to feeling empathy for the creatures that could well have been their own ancestors. Every portion of the disjointed tale deserved their attention as they tried to predict what would happen next and next after that; but there was no moment when they stopped wondering what kind of body was connected to the voice. Until then, that was the central question that kept begging to be answered.

Then they heard the words, “My enduring Union,” and that simple utterance changed everything.

Wrapped around a bald statement was stiff, unyielding emotion. Quee Lee and Perri heard the threat, the promise, the conviction and purpose—and they instantly believed what they heard. Now both of them were considering what it would mean if this story, unlikely as it seemed, was in some fashion or another true. And that was when the formless entity beside them—mysterious and unknowable, bristly and proud—became markedly less interesting than the grim bit of history it was sharing with them now.

Human hands grabbed one another.

Each lover felt the other’s body bracing for whatever came next.

Another silence was what the voice decided to offer. And then from the perfect darkness came a sound not unlike a tongue or two licking against lips threatening to grow dry.

Quee Lee and Perri had been married for tens of thousands of years. But as long as that might seem, marriage was infinitely older than their single relationship. And there were species that took intimacy to higher levels than humans could manage. The Janusians, for instance: Their little husbands rooted into the body of female hosts, literally joining into One. Yet among the human animals, Quee Lee and Perri were famous. Their relationship had evolved gradually into a complex and robust, enduring and very nearly impossible to define melange. There were a few humans who spent more time together than the two of them. Unlikely as it seemed, some married souls enjoyed their physical lives even more than these two managed. But no one could believe that any other human pair, on the Ship and perhaps anywhere else in the universe, was emotionally closer than that ancient Earth-born lady and her boyish life-mate.

At some point, everybody tried to tease them.

The happy couple generally welcomed good-natured barbs and admiring glances. But when asked to explain their success—when some friend of a friend insisted on advice for less-perfect relationships—they grew testy and impatient, even a little defensive. The truth was that they were helpless to define their relationship. A marriage was always larger than its participants, and what they possessed here was as mysterious and unlikely to them as it seemed to distant eyes. They couldn’t understand why they had drawn so closely together. They didn’t see why life had not yet found the means to yank them apart. But they were undeniably intimate and deeply dependent, up to the point where Quee Lee and Perri could never imagine being separated from one another in any lasting, hellish way.

“Can you read each other’s thoughts?” people wanted to know.

Not at all, no.

“But it seems you can,” some maintained. “The way you know what each other wants, what you’re about to say and do—“

Did they do that?

“There’s a trick at work,” a few declared. “Dedicated nexuses let your minds share thoughts and feelings. Is that what you’re doing right now . . . ?”

Not even a little. In fact, they made a point of avoiding mechanical shortcuts to authentic tongue-and-expression conversation.

Eventually somebody would ask, “When have you felt closest?”

What did that mean? Close how . . . ?

“What was the day—the incident—when you felt as if you were a single brain shared by two independent bodies . . . ?”

There were thousands of stories worthy of repetition, each able to satisfy the audience if not themselves. Several dozen favorites had become minor legends among the passengers. But the best answer was never offered, not even to the closest, dearest friends. It happened on that particular evening as they sat inside the perfect darkness, deep within the unmapped Vermiculate, immersed in the most isolated corner yet discovered within the Great Ship. That proud and stern and eternal voice promised them that it would do anything to protect what it loved, which was the Union; and for a singular moment, Quee Lee and Perri were one irreducible soul.

Now they finally believed the unlikely story.

Unseen tongues licked at dry lips, and the two lovers held each other with strong arms, sharing of flurry thoughts, speaking with nothing but the touch of fingers, the sound of breathing, the push of heavy breasts and the telltale flinch of a nervous penis.

“There is a Union,” they decided together. “It is real.”

And in the next moment, it occurred to them that the Union’s loyal servant would never do anything that did not, in small ways or great, help its ageless cause.

Quee Lee pressed hard against her husband, and she shivered, and just before the voice spoke again, she whispered an obvious possibility into her husband’s ear and skull:

“Our friend is on a mission! Now!”

And in the next instant, with thrilled horror, both of them thought, “It’s telling us the story for a reason . . . and we are the mission!”

11

With a sense of deeply buried pain, or at least an old, much-practiced anger, the voice continued.

“At last, I returned to the island. At last, I touched down in the Sunset Plaza, on an ellipse of crimson glass brick reserved for my shuttle and my immortal body. The plaza was flanked by tall apartment buildings buried beneath masses of vines—engineered greenery that thrived in the volcanic warmth, producing enough fruit and sweet nuts to feed the residents within. A thousand of my grandchildren quickly gathered around me, while thousands more sneaked looks from behind the curtains of their comfortable little homes. Every face made an effort to smile. Every head dipped in a show of respect—a gesture that I had never demanded from my subjects, that arose long ago on its natural own. Only one important face was missing, but the brave traitors anticipated my first question. Several knelt before me, palms to the sky, and they explained that I had been gone longer than anticipated, and my arrival had proved quite sudden, but yes, my mistress was as happy as anyone could be. In fact, she was waiting for me at the palace, rapidly making herself ready for my pleasures.

“The avenue was lined with pruned trees thriving inside big copper pots and rows of intricate geometric sculptures cut from the black native stone. The smallest citizens barely noticed my passing. They were the ants and fat beetles that I had reinvented for the purpose of little jobs, and unburdened by the demands of awe, they continued cutting down the weeds and disposing of trash. But a crew of enhanced crabs was pulling superconductive cables under the pavement, and when I passed near, they paused long enough to salute me with their elegant pincers—a signal learned from the grandchildren.

“Everybody was working hard to appear worshiping. Everybody wanted to shine with joy. And a few even managed to convince themselves that they were being honest. ‘You were gone too long,’ several complained, at different moments but always with the same worried, slightly put-upon tone. And then one or two remarked, ‘We feared you were lost, that some horrid disaster had claimed you.’

“If that is what they wanted, those voices kept their thoughts hidden.

“Then at the mouth of an alleyway, I noticed a very young grandchild standing in the shadows, waiting for something. Not for me, it seemed . . . but in his stance and attitude, I could see anticipation.

“I paused and asked his name, even though I had already found his face in the public files. He introduced himself, and with a charming little smile mentioned that he had no memory of me. I had left for my errand among the stars while he was still just a toddler.

“He was barely more than that now. I smiled, telling him that it was my pleasure to meet him.

“He mentioned that I looked exactly as he expected, except I wasn’t tall enough of course, and then his gaze drifted off toward the island’s slumbering volcano.

“’What are you waiting for?’ I inquired.

“’For you,’ he replied. But before there was any misunderstanding, he added, ‘I’m waiting for you to pass, and then I can go about my business.’

“’What is your business?’

“’To walk down to the Sunset Plaza and watch the night come,’ he explained.

“’You like the setting sun, do you?’

“The young eyes smiled, and the mouth too. Then a smart little voice said, ‘Yes,’ and nothing else.

“The bodies surrounding us began to relax.

“With a fond hand, I stroked the boy’s thick black hair and kissed him on the nose, and then continued with my triumphant stroll to the palace.

“No one was invited to follow me inside, and no one asked to join me. My shadow passed first through the iron gates and beneath the brass arches and into the grand hall. The air was scented with spice and smoke. The floor and walls and high ceiling were tiled in a fractal pattern, cultured sapphires and diamonds lending accents to an example of mathematical beauty that I have always appreciated. My throne stood at the end of the hall—the oldest object in the palace, gold flourishes and silk laid over my adoptive father’s original chair.

“My shadow hesitated, and so did I.

“My grandchildren stood in a crowd outside, waiting for me to vanish.

“Suddenly a great damp shape emerged from a back door, walking on long mechanical legs. The creature was a leviathan whose ancestors had swum the local sea. I had made him smaller while changing his lungs and flesh to where he could thrive in indoors, adeptly serving me with whatever little duty that I might require.

“With a high-pitched warble, he welcomed me home.

“Whatever plots were lurking about, I sensed he was not involved and almost certainly unaware.

“I asked if I had been missed.

“’Always,’ he replied with a quick series of clicks.

“’Where is she now?’ I inquired.

“’In your quarters, lord.’

“’And has she been faithful to me?’

“’No,’ the creature replied, without hesitation. ‘I have seen her use her hands and several plastic devices. And once, the edge of a large pillow.’

“’Thank you for your honesty,’ I said. ‘And good evening to you.’

“No shadow led the way now. Alone, I climbed a long flight of dimly-lit steps and entered a narrow hallway that only seemed endless . . . an illusion lined with tall doors meant to impress and confuse the rare visitor. I walked a short distance and opened what seemed to be a random door. There was only one bedroom inside the palace, and it never occupied the same position twice. I entered through a random wall, and my lover flinched in surprise, starting to pull the sheets over her naked body before realizing it was me, only me.

“Together, we celebrated my return.

“I had been absent even longer than I had anticipated. The young creature that I had left in this bed was noticeably older. A few white hairs and a hundred little erosions marked the natural decline of a creature not born immortal and never told to expect such blessings. But she was just as fierce a lover as always, maybe more so. She insisted on satisfying herself by various means, and whenever my attentions seemed to waver, she would offer encouragements or measured complaints.

“’What kind of god are you?’ she teased me once, in the dark. ‘Are you going to let this old lady beat you at your game?’

“’I am tempted to lose, yes,’ I confessed.

“Perhaps she heard more than one message in those words, because she paused and pulled away from me. Then like a hundred times before, she settled on my chest, legs spread, the smell of her thick and close.

“In a whisper, she mentioned, ‘Your journey must have been considerable.’

“’My task was difficult,’ I said.

“’We have continued with our work.’ She said, ‘Our work,’ to make certain that I would hear the loyalty in those words. Then after a pause, she added, ‘But of course you kept track of our progress.’”

“’Always,’ I said.

“’Have we missed any goals?’

“’Never.’

“’Are you proud of us?’

“’Along the narrowest tangents, yes. Yes, I am very proud.’

“She refused to be surprised by my measured answer. And what worry she let show was small and easily controlled. The creature was exceptionally bright, after all. And she was wise in rare, precious ways. Extraordinary dangers were lurking, and she must have realized there was no way to keep me from seeing pieces of her scheme.

“Silently, she dropped her face to my face and kissed me.

“Then I placed my hand against her little throat, feeling her breath and the flinching of soft muscles, and I eased her back up into a sitting position. With a flat, cool tone, I said, ‘It was reasonable, holding to the work schedule. And I was most impressed by how you managed to fool my security systems.’

“Perhaps her plan was to claim innocence. ‘I didn’t try to fool anything,’ she might have said. ‘I don’t know what you’re accusing me of.’ Denial might have given the plotters precious time. But it also might have angered me, which would have brought my wrath down on them even sooner than they had planned.

“So instead of lying, my lover decided on poise. She shrugged her shoulders, asking, ‘What do you know?’

“’That the good machine being built inside our mountain is almost finished. But your lieutenants have surreptitiously slipped other devices into its workings. You devised some very clever, extremely powerful bombs that you hope won’t be noticed, and you will soon obliterate the purpose of my coming to this world.’

“Most souls would have tensed, hearing those words. Many would have panicked. But for my lover, that moment brought relief. Her duplicity was laid bare, and the simple fact that she was alive meant that perhaps she still retained some little chance of success here.

“I felt her throat relax against my hand.

“Then with great seriousness, I added, ‘I also know you hope to murder me. Tonight, if possible. You have an array of weapons hiding here, and you have modified any piece of machinery that might injure me. I can even see dangers inside you, darling. Your body fat has been laced with acids that can be set free with a thought, turning you into a burning puddle that falls over my writhing, helpless body . . . ’

“She stared down at me.

“In her gaze, I could see her asking herself if this was the moment for suicide. But why would I lie beneath her if I felt at all at risk?

“With a reasonable tone, she asked, ‘Can we kill you?’

“’If I was foolish and a little blind, perhaps. But I am not, and I am not.’

“She nodded, accepting that verdict.

“And then she tensed through the shoulders and along her back, and with a small furious voice, she asked, ‘But why shouldn’t we try to kill you? When your work is finished, you intend to murder all of us. Isn’t that so?’

“I didn’t respond immediately.

“’You told me as much,’ she claimed. ‘When you sang about your secret Union and your need for nameless places . . . you practically confessed that when you were finished with this place, you wouldn’t leave witnesses behind.’

“I waited for a moment. Then I warned her, ’You don’t quite understand.’

“Then I dropped my hand, the fingers and broad palm stroking her body down to the point where her legs joined together. ‘You are a special, special soul,’ I told her. ‘My work would have been finished in another few years, and my plan was to take you with me. Out to the stars, out into the rich cold darkness.’

“The shock rolled across her features.

“Quietly, almost angrily, she said, ‘No, you’re lying.’

“But I was speaking the truth.

“With a fond, slightly paternal voice, I asked, ‘How do you think I was brought into the Union? No one is born into this noble service. The rank and responsibilities are earned only on exceptionally rare occasions. In my case, another servant visited my home world and built several marvels before retreating back into the darkness with his treasures, and one of the treasures was the man lying beneath you now.’

“’No,’ she whispered.

“And then, in pain, she said, ‘Maybe. But this changes nothing. I wouldn’t abandon my world, and I certainly won’t let you to blow up this volcano and make it as though this place never was.’

“’Is that what you think will happen?’ I asked. ‘That I would slaughter you and yours for no reason but my convenience?’

“She hesitated. Then with a figurative acid on her tongue, she asked, ‘What do you mean?’

“’Unless provoked, I will not murder.’

“By the light of the moon, my lover looked into my face, and the beginnings of an explanation occurred to her. ‘You won’t murder, but you might take back all of your gifts. Our minds. The genetic manipulations. Wipe clean the ideas and concepts you brought down here to serve your damned Union.’

“I threw my palm across her mouth.

“Then I yanked her close, saying, ‘Yes. That was my kind, responsible plan. You would come with me, and my magical device would come with us, and the other grandchildren would wake the following morning to discover . . . nothing. There would be a shared dream of a magical civilization, a public memory that would turn to legend in another day, and in another ten generations that would vanish into a muddled, impossible story.’

“She lay against me, her heart beating against what passed for my ribs.

“’I am sorry,’ she told me.

“Into my ear, she said, ‘Really, we haven’t done anything wrong. Not yet. I can give commands, and every weapon will be put away, and you won’t have to worry about any of us lifting so much as a lard-knife against you.’

“’That is not enough,’ I said.

“’And you can kill me,’ she promised. Then she repeated her offer, sounding as if she was begging. ‘Kill me, and maybe the other adults. But leave our children. They don’t know anything.’

“’Like the boy I spoke to? That child waiting between the plaza and the palace?’

“She hesitated.

“’At this moment,’ I said, ‘that tiny fellow is sitting beside the water, bare toes in the surf. And do you know what he is watching with all of his interest, every shred of passion? He watches the sky.’

“She did not move.

“’The sky,’ I repeated. ‘And in particular, he stares at this night’s brightest stars.’

“The woman could not breathe.

“’You are a crafty soul, my dear. My darling.’ I told her, ‘I am extremely impressed by the thoroughness and audacity of your plan. Threatening the machine as well as my own immortal self . . . those are the tactics that anyone would expect. But you also dispatched a team of technicians to the mainland. You convinced the worshipful souls living there that they should help you. Since then, our people and theirs have been living in a distant valley, secretly fabricating an amazing machine of their own.

“’A radio beacon, as it happens.

“’To the best of your ability, you have been marking my passage across the heavens. You guessed that I was subverting a set of prying eyes, and you were correct. Your hope was to broadcast a huge, important signal. You wanted to be noticed. You wanted the probe to see you, perhaps. Or if you missed that mark, then at least one loud intelligent scream would race its way through the heart of our galaxy . . .

“’Your secret hope was to accomplish what I would never allow . . . you wanted to name your world, and to name it in exactly the manner that would make the universe take note of your presence.

“’And you were right, my sweet darling. That would have been your only hope of salvation.

“’But I visited that far valley and your secret beacon. Just this morning, I destroyed the dishes and power plant, and I slaughtered everyone in my reach, but I left the local communication system intact. During these last hours, every time you spoke your fellow rebels, you were actually speaking to me.’”

Finally, the voice paused.

In the perfect darkness, a deep useless breath was taken.

Then the entity was talking again, quietly admitting, “I gave my lover one last freedom. She could be the last to die, or first. She chose to be first, and she did that herself, releasing the acids inside her body. But I was already standing at a safe distance from our bed, my back to the carnage. Hearing the screams and smelling the blistered flesh, I kept my eyes averted, reminding myself that the worst of this awful night was finally finished.”

12

The two humans clung to one another.

In the same moment, in a rough chorus, they asked, “What happened? What did you do? What about the other people? What?”

A tight slow creak was audible, old leather or old bones moving.

From a point markedly closer than before, a mouth opened and breathed and then breathed again.

“I did precisely what I promised.” The voice seemed to be within arm’s reach. “However imperfectly, I have always strived to serve my cause, and that includes punishing those who dared rise up against me. I had no choice but gather the worst of the offenders on the Sunset Plaza, and with the rest of the grandchildren watching, I removed them from the living world. Then I ordered the low-animals to clean the bricks of blood and pink tissues, and the dead bones were ground up and piled high on the nearest beach. And within five years, those who had survived my justice had managed to make up for lost time. Within ten years, my work was finished, and I carved away the gray summit of the volcano and pulled from the hot workroom a single machine encased in the finest hyperfiber—a wonder of genius and competence that made my stay on that world worth any cost.”

The voice drifted even closer, and feeling the intrusion, Quee Lee instinctively leaned away.

Perri held her and spoke past her, asking, “When did the mountain erupt?”

Nothing.

“After you abandoned the world, did the island explode?”

A sound of amusement, weary and cool, ended with the simple pronouncement, “Never, no.”

They waited.

“Your assumption has been that this was the Earth. And that is a reasonable, wrong assumption. But I let you believe what you wanted. As a rule, every species, no matter how open to odd notions and alien fancies, will find its own stories to be the most compelling.

“No, this wasn’t your cradle world. And its people were perhaps not quite as human as I might have let on.”

“What happened to them?” Quee Lee pressed.

“As I promised my lover, I undid my fancy tinkering. I made her citizens simple again, just as I pulled back the engineering of the other species. The population scattered. The palace was abandoned. Without trained hands to make repairs, the city fell into ruins. Within a few years of my departure, the island was a mystery already famous across half of that world. But its mountain would never erupt. My work had stolen away too much heat, and the magma lake below had cooled and turned to stone.”

The voice paused.

Then with a matter-of-fact tone, it explained, “The Earth is blessed in many ways. It has a mature, very stable sun. Comets are rare beauties in the sky, not constant hazards. And it possesses a relatively thin crust, easily pierced and quick to bleed. But this world that I speak of is notably different. Its skin is much thicker than the Earth’s, and much more resilient. As its core generates heat, oceans of magma build up slowly, millions of years required to reach that critical point when a thousand eruptions come at once.

“That harum-scarum probe surely recognized the inevitable—a world perched on the margins of a grand, yet thoroughly natural disaster.

“I left that world and placed my magical machine in a secret place. A new mission called to me from the sky, and I was en route when that nameless world suddenly and violently attacked itself. The sulfurous gases and blistering lava flows achieved everything that I had counted upon. Every convincing trace of my visit was erased. The continents were wracked by quakes. Ten thousand volcanoes spat ash and fire, and they exploded, flinging their poisons into the stratosphere. Every forest burned. Every breath brought blisters and misery. The ocean floors were wrenched upwards, forcing saltwater over the coastlands. My little island was washed clean beneath a quick succession of tsunamis, erasing even the palace. The human-like creatures were reduced to a few scattered populations, ignorant and desperate. And after another thousand years of geologic horror—when the skies finally cleared and the lava cooled to glass—not a single example of that very promising species could be found in Creation.”

Those deadly words were absorbed in silence.

Then Quee Lee said, “How awful.”

Softly, the voice asked, “In what way is this awful?”

“You allowed that to happen,” she began.

“But the people were doomed,” it said. “Long before I knew of their existence, they had a fate to face, and despite my considerable powers, there was little I could have done, except delaying the story’s end by one day, or at the very best, maybe two.”

The humans said nothing.

“If you need righteous anger,” it continued, “direct your emotions toward the harum-scarums. Their probe saw the same future that I saw. Three of their colonies were near enough and powerful enough to launch rescue missions. Better than me, they could have saved a worthy sampling of those people before they passed out of existence. But no missions were launched. Their costs and the benefits were too much and too little, respectively. The battered world remained nameless until a starship eased its way into orbit. That particular ship was bringing colonists, I should mention—people who didn’t care about the bones under their feet, people who wanted nothing but to start new lives on this rich empty place.”

Quietly, Perri asked, “Is it a harum-scarum world?”

“No,” the voice replied, “it is not.”

“Then who has it?”

“Who else would be a likely suspect, my friend? Remembering all that we have discussed by now . . . ”

Humans had claimed the empty world. The colonists might even be humans that had come from the Great Ship . . . people whom Quee Lee and Perri had met and even known well at one time or another . . .

Quee Lee was desperate to talk about anything else.

And Perri was too. With a scornful, demanding tone, he said, “I still don’t believe in your Union.”

“No? In what ways do you doubt it?”

“When you describe this organization, it sounds like an exclusive club or somebody’s secret society. Not the imperial underpinnings of a powerful political machine.”

A long pause ended when the voice said, “Power.” It said the word four times, each utterance employing a different emotion. Amusement was followed by disgust, and then came contempt, and finally, a different species of amusement—a joyful, almost giddy rendering of the word, “Power.” After that, there was a laugh that lingered until the voice decided to speak again.

“As you must have guessed by now,” it told them, “I am embroiled in a new task in the service of my Union. A mission full of facets and difficult challenges, yes, and it is not something to be accomplished in an easy few centuries, either.”

The humans held their breath.

The voice pushed even closer, less than an arm’s length away, and from a mouth that they could only imagine came the reminder, “I did once visit your cradle world. Your Earth. Yes, I did.”

Quee Lee nodded.

“Before it was named,” Perri recalled.

“Moments before,” the voice added. And then the bulk of an invisible body drifted even closer, hovering within a tongue’s length of Quee Lee’s ear, and an intimate whisper offered her a single date. A specific time. Then a place inside a city that she would never see again.

Quee Lee shivered.

Perri reached out with one arm, aiming for the face that had to be lurking in the blackness . . . but his hand closed on nothing, and nothing else came from the voice, and after a few moments more of clinging comfort with one another, their camp lights returned—a scorching white glare of photons that left them blinking, blinded in a new way altogether.

13

They didn’t sleep that night, and they didn’t miss sleep until the middle of the following morning. By then, Perri and Quee Lee had thoroughly explored the enormous room and most of the little tunnels leading out from it. But they didn’t find any trace of visitors other than themselves. Their sniffers tasted surgically clean surfaces and cold air uncluttered by even a single flake of lost skin, and just as puzzling, none of their machines could explain why they had failed last night. Whatever the voice was, it had been careful. With its absence, it proved its great power . . . at least when it came to fooling a couple peasants who were ignorant of the real powers of a galaxy that they had barely begun to know.

There was talk about returning to the flex-car, or at least contacting their missing friends.

But one last tunnel needed a quick examination. And with Perri at the lead, they marched up into an increasingly narrow space that turned sharply, revealing a pair of security robots waiting for anyone who might wander where they didn’t belong.

The robots were in slumber-mode, facing in the opposite direction.

Perri retreated, pulling his wife behind him. “They’re the last in a string of sentries,” he decided. “I bet if we found our way to the other side, we’d come across barricades and official warnings from the captains not to take one step farther.”

“The captains don’t know about our route?”

“Not yet,” he said. Then with a soft conspiring voice, he added, “Maybe we should hurry home. Now. Before we get noticed.”

They discovered their friends waiting at the flex-car. An argument had just ended, and one of the twin brothers refused to say anything to anyone. Apparently he had lost on the competition for the rich woman’s affections, and his anger helped Quee Lee and Perri avoid the expected questions.

The tiny expedition abandoned the Vermiculate before evening.

Home again, the old married couple made love and ate enough for ten hungry people, and throughout the sex and the dinner, they discussed what they should do next, if anything. And then Quee Lee slept hard for three dream-laced hours. When she woke, Perri was standing over her. He was smiling. But it was a grim, concentrated smile—the look of a man who knew something enormous but unsatisfying.

“Want to hear a rumor?” he asked.

She sat up in bed, answering him with a look.

“Like we heard before, the captains did discover the hole in their maps, and they sent an old robot down into the hole. But it got lost and climbed out again, and it couldn’t explain where it had gone wrong.”

“That’s the story I remember,” she said.

“Engineers tore open the robot. Just to identify the malfunction. And that’s when they found a message.”

Quee Lee blinked, and waited.

“Addressed to the Master Captain,” he continued, his smile warming by the moment. “After a thousand security checks, the invitation was delivered. Except for the Master Captain, and maybe a few Submasters, nobody knows what the message said. But a few days later, alone, the Master Captain walked down that tunnel and vanished for nearly five hours. And when she emerged again, she looked sick. Shaken sick. The rumor claims that she actually cried in the presence of her security troops, which is why the whole story refuses to get wings and soar. It doesn’t sound at all like the benign despot we know so well.”

His wife agreed with a nod. “When did this happen?” she asked.

“Ten years ago, nearly.”

“And since then?”

“Well,” said Perri, “the Master Captain has quit weeping. If that’s what you’re curious about.”

She lay back on her pillows.

“No,” her husband said.

“What else?”

“I didn’t wake you just to tell you something that might have happened. Or even to give you another mystery to chew on.”

“Then why am I awake?”
“I know a man,” Perri said. “And he’s very good pulling old memories out of very old skulls.”

The magician was named Ash.

He was human, but he lived inside an alien habitat where the false sun never set. Sitting in a room full of elaborate machinery, Ash told his newest clients, “I can make promises, but they don’t mean much. This date is a very big problem, madam. You were alive then, yes. But barely. This is a few years before bioceramic brains came into existence. You could have been the brightest young thing, but my tricks work best with the galactic-standard minds . . . brains that employ quantum many-world models to interface with a trillion sister minds . . . ”

“Can you do anything?” Perri asked.

“I can take your money,” Ash replied. “And I can also dig into the old data archives. You claim you have a place in mind?”

“Yes,” Quee Lee said. Then she repeated the location just as the voice had given it to her.

“I assume you think you were there then,” Ash said.

“I don’t know if I was.”

“And this is important?”

“We’ll see,” she said.

Ash began to work. He explained that on the Earth, for this very brief period of history, security systems as well as ordinary individuals tried to keep thorough digital records of everything that happened and that didn’t happen. The trouble was that the machinery was very simple and unreliable, and the frequent upgrades as well as a few nasty electromagnetic pulses wiped clean a lot of records. Not to mention the malicious effects of the early AIs—entities who took great delight in creating fictions that they would bury inside whatever data banks would accept their artistic works.

“The chances of success,” Ash began to say.

Then in the ancient records, he saw something entirely unexpected, and lifting his gaze, he mentioned to Quee Lee, “You were a pretty young lady.”

“Did you find me?” she asked expectantly.

“Too easily,” he allowed. Then he showed her a portion of the image—a girl who was nine or maybe eight years old, dressed in the uniform mandated by a good private school.

With a shrug, Ash allowed, “No need for paranoia. This does happen, on occasion.” He gave commands to a brigade of invisible assistants, and then said, “If I can dig up a few more records, I think I can piece together what you and the man talked about.”

“What man?” she asked.

Perri asked.

“The man standing beside you,” Ash remarked. “The man with the golden balloon.” Then he showed an image captured by a nearby security camera, adding, “I’m assuming he’s your father, judging by his looks.”

“He’s not,” she whispered.

“And now we have a second digital record,” Ash said happily. “Hey, and now a third. See the adolescent boy down the path from you? Wearing the medallion on his chest? Well, that was a camera and a very good microphone. His video has been lost, but not the audio. I can’t tell you how unlikely it is to have this kind of recording survive this long, in any usable form.”

“What is the man saying to me?” Quee Lee asked nervously.

“Let me see if I can pull it up . . . ”

And suddenly a voice that she hadn’t thought about for eons returned. The young girl and the stranger were standing in Hong Kong Park, on the cobblestone path beside the lotus pond. A short white picket fence separated them from the water. Standing in the background were towers and a bright blue sky. With the noise of the city and other passersby erased, the voice began by saying, “Hello, Quee Lee.”

“Hello,” the young girl replied, nervous in very much the same fashion that the old woman was now. “Do I know you?”

“Hardly at all,” the man replied.

The girl looked about, as if expecting somebody to come save her. Which there would have been: Quee Lee was the only child to a very wealthy couple who didn’t let her travel anywhere without bodyguards and a personal servant. “Where are my people now?” she seemed to ask herself.

The voice said, “I will not hurt you, my dear.”

Hearing that promise didn’t help the girl relax.

“Ask me where I came from. Will you please?”

The youngster decided on silence.

But the strange man laughed, and pretending the question had been asked, he remarked, “I came from the stars. I am here on a great, important mission, and it involves your particular species.”

The girl looked up at a face that carried a distinct resemblance to her face. Then she looked back down the path, hoping for rescue.

“In a little while,” said the stranger, “my work here will be complete.”

“Why?” the girl muttered.

“Because that is when one of your mechanical eyes will look at the most lucrative portion of the sky, at the perfect moment, and almost everything that you will need to know about the universe will be delivered to your doorstep.”

The pretty black-haired girl hugged her laptop bag, saying nothing.

“When that day comes,” said the man, “you must try and remember everything. Do you understand me, Quee Lee? That one day will be the most important moment in your species’ history.”

“How do you know my name?” she asked again.

“And this is not all that I am doing on your world.” The man was handsome but quite ordinary, nothing about him hinting at anything that wasn’t human. He was wearing a simple suit, rumpled at the edges. His right hand held the string that led up to a small balloon made from helium and gold Mylar. He smiled with fierce joy, telling her, “It has been decided. Your species has a great destiny in service of the Union.”

In the present, two people gasped quietly.

“What’s the Union?” the girl asked.

“Everything,” was the reply. “And it is nothing.”

The girl was prettiest when she was puzzled, like now.

“You won’t remember any portion of our conversation,” the man promised. “Ten minutes from now, you won’t remember me or my words.”

One hand smoothed her skirt, and she anxiously stared at her neat black shoes.

“But before I leave you, I wanted to tell you something else. Are you listening to me, Quee Lee?”

“No,” she claimed.

The man laughed heartily. Then he bent down, placing their faces on the same level, and when he had her gaze, he said, “You were adopted, only your parents don’t know that. The baby inside your mother had died, and I devised you out of things that are human, but also elements inspired by a wonderful old friend of mine.”

The girl tried to step back but couldn’t. Discovering that her feet were fixed to the pavement, she looked down and then up at the other adults walking past the long brown pond, and when she tried to scream, no sound came from her open mouth.

“I am not gracelessly cruel,” the stranger told her. “You may think that of me one day. But even though I live to aid the workings of an enormous power, I make certain that I find routes to kindness, and when it offers itself, to love.”

The little girl couldn’t even make herself cry.

“Part of you,” he said. Then he paused, and from two different perspectives, the audience watched as his free hand touched the girl’s bright black hair. “The shape of your mind was born on another world, a world too distant to be seen today. And I once lied to that mind, Quee Lee. I told it that I could stand aside and watch it die forever.”

She had no tears, but the man was crying, his face wet and sorry.

“I wish I could offer more of an apology,” he said. And then he rose up again, pulling the balloon’s string close to his chest while wiping at his wet face with a wrinkled sleeve. “But much is at stake . . . more than you might ever understand, Quee Lee . . . and this is as close to insubordination as this good servant can manage . . . ”

Then he glanced at the security camera hidden in the trees and handed the string and balloon to the girl beside him. “Would you like this, Quee Lee? As a little gift from your grandfather?”

The girl discovered that she could move again.

“Take it,” he advised.

She accepted the string with one little hand.

For a brief instant, they were posing, staring across the millennia in a stance that was strained but nonetheless sweet—the image of a little girl enjoying the park with some undefined adult relative.

“I will see you later,” he mentioned.

Quee Lee released the string, watching the gold ball rise faster than she would have expected—shooting into the sky as if it weighed nothing at all.

When her eyes dropped, the stranger had stepped out of view.

And a few moments later, her father ran up the path to join her, asking, “Where did you go? I couldn’t find you anywhere.”

“I didn’t go anywhere,” the girl replied.

“Tell me the truth,” the scared little man demanded. “Did you talk to somebody you shouldn’t have talked to?”

She said, “No.”

“Why are you lying?” he asked.

“But I’m not lying,” she protested. Then with a wide, smart grin, the young Quee Lee added, “The sky is going to talk, Father. Did you know that? And he promised me, he did, that I am going to see him again later . . . !”

Originally published in Galactic Empires, edited by Gardner Dozois, (2008).
Updated for publication in The Greatship, by Robert Reed (2013).

A Few Words with Robert Reed

What was the inspiration for this story? / Where did it come from?

I had an assigned topic: Galactic empires. I don’t devote a lot of bandwidth to the old-fashioned faster-than-light Romes that SF loves, but one of my major playgrounds begged for some treatment of the subject. The Great Ship is undeniably ancient, but if the early universe can produce enough intelligence and willpower to build such an object, where has that intelligence gone? And more to the point of “Golden Balloon,” what about those billions of years between the Great Ship’s birth and the present day? Ask Quee Lee and Perri. The general consensus is that the first wave of civilizations vanished quickly, for this reason or that reason . . . but I have to wonder: Is that a respectable conclusion?

With those questions in mind, I built an empire out of invisible buttresses. A subtle, half-defined empire whose story is told through a narrator with his own subtle, half-defined nature.

What are some of your favorite short stories?

Certain titles pop into my head. Unfairly pop in, because I read quite a lot for a lot of years.

“The Women Men Don’t See” by James Tiptree Jr.

“They’re Made Out of Meat” by Terry Bisson

“Aye, and Gomorrah” by Samuel R. Delany

If you can only live to see one science fictional innovation, what would it be? Why?

The SF world congratulates itself on its forward vision. But there’s a strong conservative element to the field. One scenario that gets huge play: Aliens arriving inside starships, usually of the faster-than-light variety. This is a replay of Europeans landing in the Americas. But we aren’t Natives and the ETs aren’t going to be the same as us, with a few centuries of boat-tweaking and disease-resistance thrown into the package. The Fermi Paradox is a vivid, living problem. What I hope for/believe in is a single bright shout from the sky. Dull as it might seem, signals at the speed of light are quite a bit more likely than Vulcans coming out of warp. So yeah, I’m hoping for getting us connected to the galactic Internet.

What are you working on?

I’m working on little stories now, plus for a long-delayed sequel to my Amerindian series with Raven Dream and Mara. And this summer, with some luck, I should start work on the next Great Ship book—my followup to The Memory of Sky.

Cold Words

Juliette Wade

I scent Human outside the door: our linguist, Parker. He never comes to the Ice Home while I attend Cold Council—he must bring important news! I bow to haunches, then excuse myself from Majesty’s presence, quickly as I can without inviting snarls from the others.

Parker stands waiting, his body showing agitated despite its covering clothes. I’ve told him many times that decorative cloth is most appropriately displayed on a wall, not dragged through mud and weather—but I won’t chide now. I begin to fear for our project.

“Rulii,” Parker says, self-lowering with respectful Warm words, “Are you certain there’s no way I can enter audience with Majesty Gur-gurne?”

He, enter audience? I lean close to his ear, since listeners would take offense that I don’t dominate him with Cold words in reply. “What, Parker, have your superiors abandoned you? Do the Allied Systems punish you for our previous failure?”

He shakes his short mane. “No, Rulii. They want too badly to place a spaceport here. They may blame me for the language error that cast insult on Majesty, but they still need me for my own studies. I came to tell you the Systems have granted my request: a replacement negotiator arrives tonight. But if I could speak to Majesty before she arrives . . . ”

He must fear indeed, to propose such a risk. “What is it? Still the problem of Cold words? Someone of Rank among your people must grasp the dominator’s tongue, Parker, or Majesty will brand you Barbarians!”

Parker’s fur-naked brown face shows embarrassed. “This new negotiator is a more gifted speaker than the last,” he says. “Officer Jasmine Hada will speak Cold words well enough not to Warm Majesty’s presence inadvertently.”

“Then this is news of triumph. We shall have our spaceport!” And all that comes with it—so close is the conclusion of my life’s hunt!

“Yes, but Hada is too skilled. She even bears the authority to propose terms. Why should the Allied Systems grant Aurru spaceport such importance, if it’s meant only to be a way-stop between star territories?” Parker frowns. “I fear some hidden intent of unfairness to the Aurrel people.”

My hackles rise. I know much of unfairness, as the only one of Lowland race on the Cold Council—and also of hidden intent. My own is to use this spaceport to bring Human silver to the Lowlands, thus raising my nape-bitten race. If Parker scents true, this Officer Hada could ruin my hunt before its final pace. “When will she take foot in La-larrai City?”

Parker lowers his head. “She comes down by shuttle at the sunset hour. Your presence at her arrival would grant us Cold honor—and we might make sure of her.”

Wauuunn! My skin tenses at the thought of ice-winds at sunset. My Lowlander’s fine fur gives scant protection, and too little heat remains in my blood, so I’ll need more—but how can I refuse? “Yes, I’ll go with you.”

Parker shifts feet in discomfort, almost like one of us. “Still, I wish we didn’t need her. Majesty Gur-gurne would admit me if my Rank were high enough. As Councilor, couldn’t you raise me enough to try?”

“Parker, you know it’s impossible.” I toss my mane. “I’ll meet you at sunset, but for now I must return to Council, before Majesty grows impatient.”

Too late: Majesty has gone out to choose his dinner, taking Council with him and leaving the outer door open on the stone walkway above the animal pens, where I must follow. My fear of shiver-shame rivals the cold—I should have stoked my blood hotter before I left my house.

Outside, sun lowers toward its set, blooding the snow-heavy peaks of the Dominator’s Teeth against the sky. Majesty paces beside his lengthening shadow, with heavy beads of silver-glass chiming in his dark mane: royal ice that only he of most exalted Cold may bear. Below the stone walkway, a dozen horn-blunted urrgai have been separated from the mobs in the pens, lined up with their rumps within his reach. He comments on their quality while his submissive heavy-furred Councilors bob their noses approvingly.

No hunting pack, these!

Blunted now is the fierceness that incited their tundra ancestors to annex our lands. They depend on the urrgai that our Lowland Clans first bred tame, and their ancient hunt-calls have changed in sense, to Cold words proclaiming dominator status. Only in Majesty’s exalted presence must the Cold words be used by all as they were long ago: the language of the ice-hunters.

“Ru-rulii! Bow-bow,” Majesty orders. “Come, tell me of your Human petitioner.” All along his dense-furred muzzle, Cold words shape the satisfied smile of the superior race.

I could bite him.

“Bel-belly, Majesty.” I bow to haunches on the stones, lower my head. “Par-parker tells me that the new Human negotiator, Officer Ha-hada, comes tonight. Hint-hint: grant me your favor for the meeting.”

Majesty makes me wait. No more than I expect, after that first debacle. But he hasn’t expelled me from Council, nor shamed me through the Clans. He still entertains me in my pursuit of the spaceport.

Wind ruffles my mane-hackles, carrying no scent of spring-wake so soon to come. Instead it carries the scent of Councilors, the rank stink of Majesty’s favor—also the tempting smell of urrgai. Hunger rouses as my blood heat wanes; soon it will turn savage.

“Bite-bite,” Majesty offers insult. “These Humans beneath their adornments are pup-naked; they bore me.”

I stay low. “Bel-belly: they offer silver, cloth, the unimaginable. They fly.”

Majesty tosses his royal-beaded head. “Bite-bite: so they are like grouse; how pitiful.”

“Hint-hint,” I beg. “Their spaceport can be built on Lowland south of the riverport in Ro-roghell: a safe distance from here, yet well protected from any Barbarian incursion. Their offered price is tenfold generosity. Bel-belly: name a day when I may bring them before you.”

“Bite-bite,” says Majesty, without force. “Their talker Par-parker is Warm, speaks Warm.”

With one snap he insults Parker, and insults me. Majesty is too Cold for patience: should we offend him even once more, he will exile Humans among the Barbarians who threaten the borders of our tribute nations.

But if Officer Hada succeeds? This Human spaceport promises riches wherever it is built! Majesty Gur-gurne cares nothing for Lowland; he will give it away with tail turned, and on Human silver, Lowland will rise.

“Bel-belly,” I humble myself lower. “Majesty, the talker Par-parker shall not warm your presence. The negotiator, Officer Ha-hada, begs Cold audience.”

Again Majesty makes me wait. Ice-wind penetrates my fur; I begin to feel it. If I do not find privacy soon, I risk being cast down among the Shiverers—

But now Majesty raises his hand to my mane, behind my ear. Hooking with his thumbs, he spreads his finger pads apart, strokes in favor-scent above the bronze beads that mark my Councilor’s Rank.

“Thank-thank,” I say. “Cold honor, Majesty. Bel-belly, the audience—”

Majesty interrupts, a laugh-howl to the harsh chime of royal ice. “Ru-rulii, bow-bow: go, welcome your Human, but I grant no audience today.”

I bow my head. Parker will expect me soon; I must hide myself in safety, put cold and hunger at bay before I go to face what Officer Hada may bring. Once out of sight, I run full fours from the wind, back to my house to fill my need for molri.

Molri dominates my thoughts by the time I reach my house. I take the fat-lamp down from the urrgai-horn above my lintel, and light it at the drowsy log fire in my confronting-room. I unbolt my inner door and rush through my den rooms, where the walls are covered with tight-stitched furs against the invading cold. These walls replaced the battle gear I shed when Majesty Gur-gurne called me from the Barbarian front to create me Councilor in La-larrai City—but when I go outside to better my Lowland race, I need different armor.

In the flaying room, I open the ice-locker. Ah, the sight of hanging sides of urrgai, buolun! Hunger howls, fiercened by molri’s delays. I could eat an entire beast at once, but mustn’t yet; I push through to the back where my molri is stacked on the ice-blocks, take up three short sticks and crush them between my hindteeth.

A rise of slow pleasure dilutes the pain of chewing bitter wood. I quiver and weep as the sweet thaw moves outward. Molri at winter’s end lacks potency to heat my resistant blood, yet if I sought stronger—in the mature bark the tanners use to stew their leathers—then death would snap me quick. One more stick. A risk, with so little left and no idea when spring-wake will bring fresh shoots. This one sends heat to my toes; also to my head, bringing agitation, but shiver-shame is the more serious danger tonight. A mouthful of herb to confuse the smell, and then out I go to find Parker.

I race through streets where the snowless winds have frozen mud to ice. My mouth aches. As pleasure fades the pain will worsen, along with aggression, hunger, exhaustion—but I could never raise my people without molri. My Barbarian victories alone could not keep me in Council if I were seen to shiver! Shiverers are demeaned and expelled from all worthy places of company, reduced to covering themselves with prey-fur in subversion of natural order. I had enough of that in puphood—so I chew my sticks, and go to meet Parker. This Human spaceport will allow me to land the quarry that has eluded me in a lifetime of hunting alone.

The sky yet glows when I find Parker on the flat land beyond the Stinking District. Parker insists the Human shuttle lands safest here, but I don’t like it; it drags of my indigent years in Ro-roghell. I wonder that Parker’s short nose does not object, as mine does, to the vermin-infested roofs of untanned prey-hide. My heart rushes with hot, irritated blood, and my feet urge to move—perhaps I have chewed too much molri.

“Rulii!” Parker calls. “I’m grateful you join me here.”

I stand to match his height, shifting my belt-purse to my stomach. “Parker, I could hardly be elsewhere on such an occasion! I hope you are wrong about Officer Hada—and that she speaks Cold as promised.”

Parker gives his strange flat smile of blunt teeth. “Rulii, I’ve never told you this, but I’m thankful for your kindness in speaking Warm to me.”

Is this kindness? No; it’s a compromise of ignorance! I don’t know how to place Humans into natural order, for though Parker and I have gained some interdependence, I still struggle to place his Rank. Should I not self-lower before the Human wealth, and respect their promises, which are all my hope? “I show respect to rich Human offers, Parker. You might stand Cold if you chose.”

“Dominate you? I don’t think so. If I had that measure of skill in Aurrel language, our first negotiation would not have failed.”

I toss my mane. “Ar, do not pretend modesty, Parker. You were diverted from your work to become translator; you didn’t expect to act as language teacher when Majesty would not admit you to audience! Never deny that you speak Aurrel.” Indeed, he speaks too well; even the first day I met him I felt the measure of his years here. Whenever I look at his strangeness, I fear our Warm speech makes us sound a pair of gutter-hounds; yet when I listen blind, we seem littermates, such is this talker’s skill. I do not know to love or cringe, that a foreign creature can nudge me so close.

Parker smiles again. “Rulii, no matter what happens tonight, you must know that my best prize in this negotiation has been meeting you—you are a good friend.”

Friend? Parker has explained this word to me: a close person, not skin-close as a littermate or consort, but closer than huntmate, because friend implies interdependence without Rank. Interdependence without Rank! I didn’t believe it possible until I saw him send the failed Human negotiator away—dismiss a superior, yet himself remain unscarred, unshamed. Then I scented how small is my understanding of Humans, and of him. How can he call me good friend?

“I don’t know,” I say. “I tried to beg audience for Officer Hada today, but could not.”

“It’s for the best. I am sure you will succeed another day.”

His trust makes me nervous, restless. Somehow I think this Officer Hada will be easier: she shall dominate us both as Rank demands. I wait for natural order to descend from the pale-touched sky.

“Rulii,” Parker asks suddenly. “Do you feel well?”

Wauuunn! I, well? Gums sore, blood impatient, stomach snarling? An instant I want to curl and weep; but looking at him, I show my teeth. “Why do you ask me this?”

“I’m sorry.” Parker shows me his hands: short, stiff, single thumbs placed far to the side; long, long, soft brown fingers ending in covers like pale coins instead of claws.

Hand-showing, a Human submission move. But the rest of his body speaks anxiety.

“Rulii,” he says. “You’ve given unexpected gifts to my own project here. My scientist huntmates have struggled to win contacts among your people, but you have helped us to learn Aurrel ways and nature as none other before.”

I toss my mane. “You demand little, Parker; it is easy to satisfy you.”

“So you’ve told me.” He breathes deep, shifts feet. “Except, we found—well, we made more discoveries than we looked for, after you permitted our imaging, and gave us of your hair—” He looks away to one side. “—and your blood.”

“Discoveries?” I ask. “But blood is blood, of one color whether of Councilor, Shiverer, Tributary or Barbarian.”

“Ahm—then let us speak of it later.” Still he shows anxious: watches me from eye-corners, and hides his hands in purses at his hips. He often hides his hands when they feel chill; clothes may serve humans like fur, I think, to warm as well as to allow these flat-muzzled, unpatterned creatures to distinguish one another. This time, though, it is body-talk, and his stance troubles me. Should I fear, as he does?

I hear an ear-paining whine, and soon the shuttle comes down on our sleeping soil. Parker runs toward the thing, but to me its sound shrieks run—I wait till it quiets, walk to flank Parker as the door opens.

Hada, a tiny female, emerges from strange light. So different from Parker! Her mane is beautiful, long black streaked with gray—but her face? So flat it seems impossible.

“Welcome to you,” says Parker, Warm and respectful. Perhaps because of his suspicions, he doesn’t use ‘belly to you,’ the submissor’s greeting—yet his body submits as his words do not. He curves his spine, lowers his head. “Officer Jasmine Hada, word of your skills comes before you, and we are honored.”

“Belly to you,” I add, bowing also, but too tense to fall to haunches—how fortunate that Humans prefer to stand. “I am Rulii, of the Cold Council. Eagerly I have awaited your coming, honored Hada.”

Hada speaks, Cold words in a high sweet rowill-song voice. “Thank-thank: you do well to meet me here, host Councilor Ru-rulii. Your sponsorship grants us Cold honor in our pursuit of richer trade through this territory of stars.”

Perfect!

Wrong.

Her speech turns my stomach as even the Barbarian dialects do not—I cannot think why! I try to respond, but she flickers one hand up to her head, gesturing an ear turned toward Parker. “Bow-bow,” she says. “I favor you, Par-parker for the language information you have given me. This opportunity gives me deep pleasure.”

The word ‘pleasure’ in my ear spikes need through my spine; my stomach pangs.

“Thank, Hada,” Parker says. “I wonder—” He looks at me. “Rulii, what’s wrong?”

What can I say? I lower my head, showing sorry. “Parker, the Cold words of honored Hada strike me strangely.”

“Strangely?” Parker sounds surprised. “How so?”

How can I explain what I don’t understand? Hada’s Cold words are perfect! Her motion too enspirits Aurrel, so why this revulsion? Why this urge to scream pretender, wretch, when she brings everything I have desired? I came here wary of deception, yet never imagined this!

“Bow-bow,” Hada says. “Par-parker, if you did not have the language problem solved, you should not have requested my services.”

Instantly, Parker tenses for Rank dispute.

But why? He never fought Rank with the last Human councilor, even while sending him away! Now he and Hada stand confronting, each as alien as the other. I can’t stand to watch them. My ears pull back; my feet try to move, pace, run.

Parker backs from his aggression. “Rulii,” he murmurs. “Are you all right?”

To answer would weaken me before a dominator. I walk away fast, fight the urge to drop to fours on uneven ground patched here and there with old snow. Night wind rakes claws through my fur; Hada’s Cold words torment me. What is it—the wind, the stink, her alien appearance, her odd sweet smell that gives me such horror to hear her speak? Or is it my own agitated imagining?

“Hark! Rulii!” Parker’s urgent voice, Warm like a brother at my ear. “Have we offended you? Tell me how to amend.”

I want to snap at him, but stop myself, recognizing molri-aggression. My blood poison has confused me; perhaps I’m wrong about Officer Hada, and should accept her obvious skill—but somehow I cannot. “Parker, I’m sorry. I cannot bring honored Hada before Majesty.”

“Why is this?”

“Majesty will not accept her. She is—” Warm? Vile? Presumptuous? What?

“Rulii, what is she?”

Too nervous, I can’t think! Hunger sinks teeth in me; when I look at Parker, shameful pup-urges tempt me to lick his chin. My skin begins to fear the wind.

“So sorry,” I say, “she’s not ready.”

“Please,” Parker says. “Rulii, please tell me why.”

“She is not ready!” I leap to fours, and run. Humans surpass in walking, but not running, so Parker won’t catch me; yet fast as wind I could never outrun myself. Escaping the stink, I let anger drive my footsteps back to the ice-locker, to the source of my failure. The sight of molri dizzies me. How this poison-bark mocks! Keeping me Councilor in La-larrai, allowing me to pursue this spaceport—yet bringing me down just when my quarry is in sight?

Fury clenches my fists around the sticks; I race to my confronting-room before need can stop me, and dash them into the fire.

Now my folly turns teeth and bites. Why, why did I burn it all?

Need-sickness has defeated my soldier’s will. My mouth gapes dry while my skin pulls tight, every scar stretched—and twice my illness has forced me to plead away from Cold Council. Though warmer breezes have spared me public shiver-shame, they haven’t brought me the molri scent I weep for.

In such condition, I haven’t dared face Hada to hear her Cold words again—and Parker has sent no word to confirm or deny his suspicions of her. I had hoped my sickly silence would gain each of us time to seek answers, but tonight I learn it has only baited Majesty’s curiosity. He demands that I bring Hada for audience at dinner tomorrow.

I drag my feet downslope toward Parker’s house. The shadow of the old city wall seeps nearer amidst Cold houses of stone and iron, inexorable as the disaster reaching toward me. All around, muddled sunset breezes taunt of spring-wake, but as I pass through the enclosed arch into Westrun district, the scent of Majesty’s favor in my mane makes me feel ill.

At Parker’s house, a fat-lamp glimmers above the door. I gather myself and enter.

His is a strange confronting-room: the hearth empty; the floor strewn with red-tasseled cloth cushions that would be ruined in a fight; the mottled stones and beams warmed by sourceless light; and only a single lacquered leatherwork on the wall, one I gave him from my own collection. The slots of his inner door will admit my scent, and Majesty’s, to the den rooms, but what nose there could notice them?

Someone does stand guard, though—Parker opens the inner door. His den rooms exhale moist air smelling of steamed grain and leaves: a manger smell, except no person would ever cook for his urrgai, or even a house-kept ogollo! A baffling smell, singular to this house in all Aurru.

“Parker,” I say, sinking to haunches. “Suffer me to tread your territory?”

“Rulii!” Parker smiles to see me, yet his body shows more anxious than ever. “Please, come in, will you take meat?”

My stomach rolls. “Thank: no meat, only words.”

“We’ll come to you, then,” he says. “Make welcome.”

Now Officer Hada emerges from within. Less sweetness in her scent today, but she is draped with a long embroidered flag that entirely hides her legs.

Ah, this female—no muzzle, now no legs? I feel faint!

“Hint-hint,” Hada says. “Please, Councilor, sit down.”

My mane-hackles bristle; with or without molri, her Cold Words anguish me. I sink to haunches among the tasseled cushions, rest my hands on my knees while my head weighs like stone. Of what use Majesty’s interest, if Hada fails before him? Without this spaceport, the best chance for my people is lost—oh, I will die! How could I bear to run longer?

“Forgive our many mistakes in this hunt,” says Parker. “You run swiftly, while we stumble at your hind haunch, but we mean no insult. Why do you say that Hada is not ready for audience with Majesty Gur-gurne?”

If he signals to me of her intent, I can’t detect it. “I lay you no blame, Parker. Honored Hada, your Cold words are masterful—I cannot understand the instinct that moves me against them. Were I Majesty, I should long since have granted land for your spaceport. It shall be a wonder, and a prize for many.” I must tell them their audience is already won, but I can’t say the words.

“Councilor,” says Hada. With the tang of tension rising from her, and the narrowing of her hidden-lid eyes, I think she mistrusts me. “Hint-hint: perhaps Majesty Gur-gurne desires more than this. More silver we may provide; engines; tools for mining which spare much labor. We can grant such to Au-aurru, if we achieve the audience we seek.”

She baits greed with me. At once Parker straightens indignantly—I speak before he can offer Rank dispute. “Your offers chill me to awe, honored Hada, but you misunderstand the trap in which we now stand. Just tonight, Majesty has asked to see you.”

“Tonight?” Hada mimes attentive ears with her cupped hands. “Bow-bow: happy news. I see no trap.”

“No trap Majesty himself has laid. But if we insult him twice over we end our hunt hungry, no matter what the price.” I bend to the cushions, lower my chin to my hands in apology for what must be said. “Honored Hada, to me your Cold Words sound as the pretender’s yap; how, then, should they sway my impatient Majesty? I scent failure imminent, though I know not the cause. I do not wish Majesty to brand Humans a Barbarian Race.”

“Barbarian Race!” Suddenly Hada’s pose speaks of outrage, and Cold disdain. She turns away from me. “Par-parker, bow-bow: I will not stand responsible for this! Bite-bite: the fault must be in the Cold words you have sent me to learn.”

Were Parker one of my own people, I should see his hackles rise. “Hada,” he says, “you grasp language too simply. Do you think I run deaf and blind here for seven years, to instruct you astray? Think which is your own territory, and which mine.”

Territory? But this seems another dispute of Rank! Both their bodies claim Cold dominance though Parker doesn’t change his Warm words. I have never seen Humans grapple—will they now?

No: Hada chatters sharply in her own language, a sound of bone flutes rattling on stone. Parker’s face and body tell me he understands, but he chooses his own tongue to growl back. Then Hada turns to me. Her black eyes glitter rage, like the cornered gharralli.

“Host Councilor, Bow-bow: you have long honored Par-parker, taking him as your huntmate, but our pursuit is larger. I would prefer to meet Majesty Gur-gurne without you.”

I shake my head. “What?”

“Hada, think,” says Parker. “Only a member of the Cold Council can sponsor audience.”

“Bow-bow: then I should withdraw, Par-parker, and you begin again. I think another sponsor may advance us without Ru-rulii’s objections.”

Parker protests. “Begin again? Do you know how hard it was for me to find Rulii, when our research group remains under cover of wilderness, unable to establish public presence?”

“Bow-bow,” Hada frowns. “You will not distract me into advancing your private aims, Parker. My concern is for Systems goals here.”

“And what might those goals be? Polishing your own reputation, perhaps?”

This is beyond endurance! “Parker!” I cry. “Honored Hada, listen. There is no other in all Aurru to aid you as I do. Leave me, and your spaceport fails.”

Hada snaps her head around to face me. “Ru-rulii, bow-bow: then say why it is you want us for yourself so badly. You hide your true motive from us.”

Wauuunn! My true motive flouts Rank, first tenet of natural order! What will they do if I reveal the secret I have so carefully guarded?

“Honored Hada,” I say, “the other Councilors are heavy-furred. As dominators they already control all tribute, and they will not nose your bait of silver or engines. But for my Lowland people who now have nothing? Despised for Shiverers, our goods and animals taken without recompense? Your spaceport is a promise such as I have never seen! How should I not give my last breath for your success?”

Hada’s eyes fix on me. The dominator who depends on Rank will resent interdependence; she will despise me for my presumption. I try not to belly abject on the cushions before her.

“Bite-bite,” she says. “I think you lie, if you deny you want riches for yourself. You have personal reasons to need them.”

Not the attack I expected! I shake my mane. “What?”

“Hada,” Parker warns softly. “Majesty Gur-gurne personally granted Rulii’s place at Council for heroism. He has never dishonored our goals in any way. I have given you information concerning the race division between the long-furred and downy-furred Aurrel Clans; this only confirms that Rulii will support us fully. Should he not bear concern for our success?”

Her spine is a knife. “Bite-bite,” she says. “His problem—”

But Parker interrupts her in his own language, pleading with body and face. In his shallow gurgles I recognize the word, friend.

I tense. Does he make public claim of intimacy with me? But though insolent, this word friend is obviously powerful, for it softens Hada’s pose.

“Hark-hark,” Hada says. “Please excuse me, Councilor; we will speak again.” She departs through Parker’s inner door, her strange flag undulating with the movements of her hidden feet.

Parker looks at me; I look at him. His mix of familiar and strange may be difficult, but still I prefer him to Hada—I know him. This flat brown face, the short curled mane and soft fingers, they are all Parker. His voice is the only one in La-larrai to speak kindly to me.

I could weep.

I did not fight my last battle on the field: I grappled sweat-teeth-and-claw to drive away Barruna, the last littermate who nudged for passage through my inner door. Where molri dominates can be only loneliness—but I have been very lonely.

“Rulii,” Parker says. “I want to explain something to you.”

I keep cautious eyes on him. “Your word, friend?”

“No, the work of Officer Jasmine Hada. Hada roves star territories. She works six months to learn what might take others six years, arrives, speaks, departs. She has great skill, but she doesn’t solve problems; only deftly uses the solution provided to her. Since her arrival I have detected no deception, only support for our spaceport project. But seeing her Cold words fail, she fears that her next hunt will be delayed.”

I shift my seat. “What you describe seems no hunt, Parker. Only the scavenger doesn’t expect to find its meat still struggling.”

Parker’s eyes widen, white rims around deep brown. “Scavenger!” A contained laugh gurgles, then dies in his chest. “Rulii, you’ve helped me in my own research without objection, but I hope I haven’t made myself scavenger in your eyes.”

“Certainly not, Parker.” I close my eyes, turn ears to him, so that I may feel him closer. “I don’t mock when I name you huntmate.”

“You are kind, Rulii.”

“And you are Warm, Parker. No insult, but from my Lowland heart.”

He remains silent a moment. “I wonder,” he says. “Hada believes you treat us differently from your own Aurrel people, that you judge us lower for our foreign appearance—and this is a thing that Humans don’t like.”

“I would never. To treat you thus would be to give you up already for Barbarians. I strive to face Humans in thoughtful respect: Hada as my dominator, you as—” I am moved to confess, “You, as my brother.”

“Rulii—your brother? Waauw.” This sounds almost a lament, but soon I realize it must be one of his own words. He sits quiet, and though my contentment would be lost if he came nearer, I wish him beside me. “Rulii,” he says. “I know you’re ill. If you can name me brother, will you permit me to help you?”

Fear seeps into my thickened blood. I stare at the stone wall—if I look at him, I might panic. “A malady of the season, no more. It will pass.”

Parker sighs. “My scientists,” he says. “They have looked into your blood.”

“Into it?” My sinews tense, stabbing pain.

“Rulii, they see something there—a medicine—I don’t know how it is delivered, but I know it hurts you.”

Molri—he knows of the molri! I will be named impostor, chained to die of exposure on the Dominator’s Teeth! My voice quavers. “This is not help, Parker; you ruin me.”

“I don’t ask for reasons,” Parker says. “It shall not bear on your honored sponsorship. You have helped me; now let me help you in return.”

“Wauuunn!” I cry. “Parker, you will end me!” On fours I stumble to his door, struggle into the street. The flood of spring-wake breeze dizzies me with need—yes, there is molri-scent at last! I know where I must go.

Parker follows. I hear him calling behind me—press faster, every fiber of my muscles strung with threads of pain. At last his noises fall behind.

Now I take to hind-toes, to walk cleaner and with less public notice. The scent of Majesty’s favor draws unfortunate attention, but it somewhat confuses my own scent, and its authority lowers heads around me, shielding me from curious eyes.

Every roundabout turn is mudded with spring-wake and with shame. Above, a slim-moon sky weighs of alien star territories; the close streets are more familiar, my own furred people walking between the fat-lamps that invite welcome above the doors. How fortunate that I scent only strangers.

The death smell of the tanner’s district thickens ahead: prey-hide torn from bodies, mature molri-bark torn from twisted trees. But the fresh scent remains. New shoots are here somewhere. Disgust and desire churn together, and my feet begin to tumble over each other. I shouldn’t rush like this. What if others also seek the shoots? What if the tanners’ patrols walk their fences late?

Does it matter tonight if I’m seen, when Parker knows what even my own littermates do not? Would he protect me, if only to advance his own cause?

Sheer habit enforces me to caution. I fall to fours and creep low past the tanning houses, hoping that no one has put nose to guard.

Outside the stone fences the wind blows colder. Pain-threads knot beneath each of my standing hairs; I begin to shiver. I start my search in the safest place, by the woodland edge, following my nose between dirty humps of shaded snow, over rough ground softened here and there with sprouting grasses.

Others have been here today. I smell musk, overturned dirt, crushed molri, but find nothing. Molri shoots loom in my waking dream as tall as the Dominator’s teeth; I groan aloud.

I must go closer to the fences.

Scent grows in my nose along with danger. There—where a thick root twines beneath the stone fence of the tanner’s yard, a clump of fresh suckers has sprouted as yet undetected by patrol. More, and taller than I’d hoped. I draw a musk-perfumed cloth from my purse, hold my knife with my thumbs. My hands shake, while I press the shoots between blade and finger-pads. I feel around to wrap any fallen shoots in the cloth. Their fresh-cut odor drowns me.

I can’t wait; I bring a hand to my mouth.

Aaaah—

A wet thaw-feeling—my hand is wet, saliva drooling from the corner of my mouth, my stomach sparking fire. My thoughts clear suddenly at a sound of footsteps.

How much have I eaten?

I never chew molri by the fences, only inside my house where it is safe! Fool, fool!

I gather knife and cloth, push them into my waist-purse, then drop to fours and go. Past the tanning-houses I race, ears turned backward. No one emerges pursuing, but I won’t make it home before I am altered—my body can’t go fast enough!

Or maybe I do have a chance: gradually the pain-threads come undone, my muscles ease and lengthen, strand by strand. A longer stride; now a full stride, a reaching stride, delicious! Faster, faster, avoid the street of Parker’s house, yes, I can make it home in time.

Faster, faster, running feels good.

So good!

The cold night can’t touch me, open streets on every side beckon outward—I run too fast to turn, could laugh, hahuu, but would rather run, run. I shoot inward through the old city gate, a stone from a sling.

Why do I go home when I could hunt?

Why hunt, when I could leap to the stars?

Star territories in my stride!

No, home; I must go home, go home. Someone ahead, so go around? But just watch, they’ll never catch me, I am too fast-fast! A race, a game: who will get to Rulii’s home first?

Rulii will! Hahuu, no one is faster than I!

Round the corner I smell Human; I tumble to a stop, laughing. There Parker stands at my darkened door, tense, small.

“Parker!” I butt his chest, cuff-embrace, lick his face. “Cheer yourself, brother Parker, cheer, come in, make welcome!”

“Whouu, Rulii?”

“Hahuu!” I hop through my door, light lamps, fetch my best cushions for the empty floor, stoke the fire but I am hotter—oh I love my house! I twirl, dance, “Come in, Parker, make welcome, come play!”

Parker shuts the door, poor fellow, so slow. “Rulii, are you all right?”

“Hahuu, Parker, shall we play a game? Such a funny pup!” I pounce and tumble him, catch him in my arms, roll him over me, pin him on the cushions.

“Rulii, what—what are you doing?”

“Hahuu!” I burrow my nose into his funny false fur to his pup-skin, sniff-laugh-laugh. “Parker, my funny brother—hahuu—you are as smooth as—as a big nipple!”

He pants like me. “Ru—”

I cry it out. “Ruuuuuu!”

He tries to get up; I pin him again, nuzzle his neck.

“Parker, I have no friend, no friend but you, Parker-brother-friend!”

My stomach lurches suddenly; I jerk away, vomit on the stones—green of crushed molri.

“Ghaad.” Parker stands up, shakes his hands. “Stop, Rulii, stop!”

I toss my mane. “Hahuu! Now it’s out, Parker, oh I hate molri! Now it’s out I am happy-happy!” I leap, fall to fours, chase in a circle with my tail high, pat the floor at his feet. “Come again, Parker, come play.”

“No, Rulii, you scare me, you need help.”

“I am fine-fine.” I pant at him, pat the floor again. “Come come.”

“You need medicine, before this kills you, whatever it is. I prepared for this, I brought—” He turns, takes two steps toward the outer door.

NO!

“No doctors!” I bunch leap bite throw—

His limbs splay, his head hits, he falls—

Parker limp, crumpled on my floor. Sour blood on my teeth, blood soaking fast from his hip, blood of one color whether Shiverer-Tributary-Barbarian-Human-Rulii-Parker! Oh I have killed him, what have I done, what have I done?

Get help. Get help, how can I get help, no doctors, no doctors? What can I do? Oh Parker oh brother brother Parker!

He moves. Opens eyes, curls on his side in pain. His hand creeps to his chest.

“Parker,” I moan, reach for him, “Parker belly sorry Parker what can I do? Wauuunn!” I can’t turn away; I can’t stand still, my feet stamp, stamp, I turn in a circle. Now he holds a small gleaming object beside his mouth.

“Hada,” he says. I can’t understand the rest.

My door bursts open. I jump backward—Hada stands fierce pointing something at me. A weapon—must be a weapon, I have not seen its like.

Parker struggles to sit, falls back.

My words tumble tangle, “Hada, help, help Parker, quick, help!”

Gharralli-black eyes. “Bow-bow belly down,” she shrieks. “Hold still, Councilor, or you die!”

Hold still? “Wauuunn!” I back to the wall, rock, stamp, swish my tail, toss my head. Hold still? Hold still? I will burn up!

“Leave him,” Parker grunts. “Me first.”

Hada puts away her weapon, takes her eyes off me. I hop-hop backward, run a circle back to Parker. Hada holds a case open—jewelry, liquor-jars, and light inside—pulls back Parker’s clothes—blood, blood—everything so slow, so slow, is she in time? Have I killed him, Parker my brother? Slow, slow, she works; slow, the blood stops. Now only closed marks of my teeth on brown pup skin.

“Parker, Parker,” I cry, “belly, sorry!” My body fists, my stomach heaves, I fall to fours, off my feet. Parker says something—Hada comes at me—I can’t release arms, legs—dizzy—Hada’s face all fear, no weapon but a needle in her hand. Plunges it into my neck.

Cold.

Human voices speak across the room.

Hada, angry. Parker, weak—and a third, unexpected, calm but oddly far away like a voice around a corner.

I can’t turn to look; my body quakes in shiver-shame, reliving an ancient invasion. Cold overruns Warm until my every vein flows with snowmelt. “I have ended my own hunt,” I mutter through chattering teeth. “I will die.” Yes—climb the Dominator’s Teeth before anyone can chain me, and leap the cliffs.

“Hark.” Parker’s voice, soft, in Aurrel. Wauuunn—I felt him my brother, but like Barruna now he will hate me! “Rulii,” he says, “You won’t die. We gave you our medicine at the right time. Hada, we must help him. Find blankets.”

Hada speaks low in her language, harshly.

“Yes,” I say. “Show no mercy. I’ll kill myself if you do not kill me first.”

But a warm thing drapes over my shoulders: Hada stands over me, tinier without an outer layer of her clothes.

“Rulii,” Parker’s voice speaks full of sighs. “You didn’t mean to hurt me. You were not yourself.”

I manage to turn my head, find him close by, lying on my cushions. Ah, the sight of him, his clothes torn and blood-soaked! I remember my teeth sinking into him—my stomach heaves, but I am already empty. I moan, “I belly to you, Parker—belly, sorry!”

Hada bends over me, presses on my neck, mutters to a gleaming object in her hand and a voice comes from it. It speaks and speaks as she moves around me, nudging, poking, pricking. At last she looks at me Coldly. “Hark-hark: you and Par-parker will both mend, but you have made a grave error.”

I try to hide my nose with my hand still shaking. “It is my shame, honored Hada. I did not know Humans were so—fragile.”

“Bite-bite,” she says contemptuously. “No, your error was your medicine.”

“Molri,” I sigh. “Indeed.” No heat left in me. As yet, no aches or hungers to replace it, but for how long?

“Hada,” Parker says, “help me closer to him.” He groans as he shifts nearer, even with Hada half lifting him. He lays a warm flat hand beside my nose. “Rulii,” he says. “I have known of your medicine—molri—months already. It’s been one of my major projects.”

“It has?” Dizzying thought.

“Yes. Else I could not have helped you tonight. I don’t wish you to eat it again.”

Were he not touching me, I would hide my face. “My need—”

Hada snorts.

“We have something else,” says Parker. “A different medicine, which I asked my scientists to fit to you. But it won’t give the pleasure you have known, which may be difficult.”

“What?” I raise my head to look into his eyes. “Is this what you think of me, Parker? That I would submit myself to molri merely for pleasure? Such a thing merits no suffering nor sacrifice!”

Hada’s voice is brittle. “Sniff-sniff: what else can it be for?”

I push up on my elbow, shake my mane. “A singular reason: to stop me shivering. Else I could rise no higher than any other Lowlander.”

“Shivering! Ghaad.” Parker hides his brown face with his hands, muttering. “Rulii,” he says. “Truly is this separation in the Clans not about appearance, about seeing fine or heavy fur, but about shivering?”

“For certain!” I toss my mane. “The Shiverer is weak, unworthy, as I am without my molri. Though tonight I have shown unworthy even with it.” What a puzzle—can he have run here for so many years and never understood this?

Hada blinks her dark eyes, shakes her head. “Sniff-sniff: why do you not wear clothes?”

Parker scoffs even before I do. “Hada, no one wears clothes here. Cloth itself is a great luxury. Rulii tells me I need not flaunt Human riches as I do, but I would prefer to show wealth by wearing cloth than poverty by wearing skins.”

“Parker—” I must ask. “Your new medicine—will it stop me shivering?”

He sighs. “I don’t know.”

“Wauuunn!”

“Yet it may—Rulii, it may, I’ll ask for you.” He bends close. “It’s not fair, that you could be forced to this, an addiction, a—a dangerous medicine, simply because of the fur you were born to. Humans have experienced things like this; I’ve told you we don’t like to see people scorned for such reasons.”

Hada rouses. “Par-parker, bow-bow: we cannot intervene in Aurrel ways. Do not let this personal thing influence our project here.”

“But if Majesty Gur-gurne despises Lowlanders just as he despises us, it has every bearing on our success. Of all Lowlanders only Rulii has risen this far—and at such a cost! It is no wonder that he dislikes Rank!”

That gets me up. I struggle to haunches, toss my mane, indignant. “Parker, how can you say this? I, dislike the Rank I have fought my whole life to gain?”

Parker shows me his hands. “Belly, sorry,” he says. “But you say you want to advance your people, Rulii. We understand this: our world has worked hard to free itself from Rank, and we could do more than offer riches here. We could press your people’s suit with Majesty!”

“Stop!” I show my teeth. “Attempt to do so, and I will shame you for Barbarians myself!”

“Par-parker,” Hada says. She rises now, claiming Cold dominance. “Bow-bow: remember who is the negotiator here, and who the talker. If these people will not rise above such simple distinctions, we cannot help them.”

“Simple!” Their strange disputes are suddenly explained—in fury I surge to my feet. “Bow-bow, you Humans, listen to me! Are we simple, we Au-aurrel, just because we know natural order when we see it? Hark-hark: simple, yes: simple and true! Bite-bite: you claim you do not like to see a people lowered unfairly, but you lower mine, only because you see Rank in us! Bow-bow: look at yourselves, in Rank dispute amongst the two of you since Ha-hada first came here. You have not risen above Rank, only denied it while defending it in smaller pieces! When Par-parker treads the negotiator’s role, he must submit—when Ha-hada treads the expertise of the talker, she must bow! That is where the truth of your Rank lies. How dare you lower us!”

They cower against the cushions. They know what I could do, were I not a civilized creature. How pitiful!

“Humans,” I bark. “Bite-bite: you travel star territories, you see medicines in blood, but for all that you are prey. See how you fear me, though I am better now than a dumb creature to attack you, when my molri does not bring me low. Your clothes are no better than prey fur, subversions of natural order, and without them you would shiver worse than I! Is it any surprise that I cringe to hear in your shallow mouths the Cold words of the dominator?”

My own words silence me. I flop exhausted to the cushions and cover my nose with one hand. This is the explanation they have demanded, but it only proves that all hope is gone from our hunt.

Hada neither speaks nor look at me; she crosses her arms tight over her chest.

“You wound me, Rulii,” Parker whispers. “I hope you don’t mean this—that you merely speak from shock, or that I mishear you . . . ”

How can I have said such a thing to him? I whimper. “Hnnn, I don’t mean it, Parker; I was angry. You have saved my life tonight, and truly I have no brother but you.”

“Hark,” Parker says. “I believe I understand your talk of Rank, yet this is not of our thinking. Humans bow—or, we try to bow—first to merit in skill.”

Ah, so this is the invisible territory they guard so jealously: a borderline of skill that reverses their Rank. I choose words carefully. “You must realize, I have watched you argue this between yourselves, both with bodies and with words. Yes, Parker is powerless to speak to Majesty without Hada’s Rank of negotiator—but you, Hada, never forget you would be speechless without Parker and his long hunt here. Rank and interdependence, both together, create natural order.”

I have Hada’s attention now. “Hark-hark,” she says sharply. “We Humans know interdependence well.”

“Do you truly? Majesty thinks he knows it, yet he places Rank far first when he fails to repay the Lowlanders who feed and fight for him. Measure him beside us: we grow plants we cannot eat, to care for the low beasts that sustain our strength. And what of you, Hada? Here Parker has been the hunter to bring down the beast of our Aurrel tongue, yet you chastise him when he has not made it soft enough for your teeth to manage.”

Her face works, angry. “Bow-bow: my teeth are sharp enough.”

“Do not convince me, Hada. Convince Majesty.”

“Hark-hark: I shall, tomorrow evening,” she says, gharralli eyes glittering. “Bow-bow: enough foolishness, now. We must begin our preparations.”

I had entirely forgotten! Moon must be low by now, and I with no sleep, no sure medicine that will allow me to face Majesty safely—wauuunn! “I will do what I can,” I say. But now that I have seen Humans as Majesty does, what can I say to defend them? I cannot change nature! “Parker, how do you believe we should proceed?”

“Do as you wish.” Parker closes his eyes. “I will not be there.”

Ar, no—I have driven him away! “Belly,” I say, “Parker, we—”

Hada interrupts. “Par-parker, bow-bow: you forget you still bear obligation to the Allied Systems.”

“My obligation is to my own scientists.” Parker says, keeping steady eyes on me. “And to the progress of Aurrel research, not to spaceports. I will no longer play Lowlander to Hada’s Majesty. Rulii—” He touches my wrist; through my fur I feel the strange soft tips of his fingers. “I need treatment, from the doctors at our research station in Oll-ollugha forest. I won’t leave you without medicine—there is enough here for several days—but we will not speak again until your negotiation is over.”

My chest tightens. “But Oll-ollugha is wilderness! Parker, Majesty may not want you in his presence, but I do.”

Parker’s voice stiffens. “Hada can do what you need. She came here for this—she would never leave here with her reputation damaged. She says she has teeth; now let her use them.”

I don’t know if Hada has enough bite for Majesty—but determination, she has in plenty. She and I walk together beneath hangings of rich embroidered cloth and lacquered leather toward Majesty’s Ice-fang door, wearing—at her own insistence—beaded waist-purses, invisible medicines, and nothing else.

Is she more natural without the subversion of her heavy clothes? Or with her small stature and furless flesh exposed, is she more delicious? Our night-long preparations have pushed me too far outside myself to judge.

Two heavy-furred submissors with iron hooks pull aside the strings of sharp mirrors that bar the door, revealing Majesty Gur-gurne at his table. His beads of royal ice capture the light of fat-lamps, making him seem larger; his mouth gapes as he looks at Hada.

I must breathe calmly, stop myself shivering from pure fear. Parker’s medicine serves well enough, but I find I miss molri’s flush of carelessness. Ar, Parker, I was wrong when I told you I cared nothing for pleasure!

“Bow-bow: sit,” Majesty calls. “Hark-hark: at last Ru-rulii’s rumored negotiator joins me at table! Ha-hada, make welcome.”

Hada replies with deepened tone, “Thank-thank, Majesty: your invitation grants me Cold honor.”

Majesty laugh-howls. “Hark-hark: how you sound like a singing bird, Ha-hada! Sniff-sniff: is this the common voice of the female Human?”

Wauuunn! Will my hunt fail before our negotiation begins?

“Bel-belly, Majesty,” says Hada. “This was a song of thanks, but in speech I hope I am not such a delicate bird, to die of cold in your exalted presence.”

She has changed her voice! Suddenly a faint iron-on-iron shriek pierces her words, nothing we planned. Unbreathing I wait for Majesty’s answer.

“Bow-bow: take meat with me,” he says, no mocking now. “We shall speak of your hunt soon enough.” As we sit, the obedient submissors bring forward plates of seared urrgai tongue marinated in voghi liquor and sprinkled with early ruz blossoms.

Majesty raises his jeweled dinner-knives to cut his meat; petals of ruz float in sweet voghi-scented blood. But as I lift my own knives, he stops me suddenly. “Hark-hark: Ru-rulii, no.”

My stomach tightens. “Majesty?”

“Bow-bow, before we eat or talk, raise your bowl,” he says. “A toast to our guest.”

“Bel-belly: to our guest.” What does he intend? I lift my bowl forward while Hada tenses, alert for defense or attack.

“Ha-hada, hark-hark,” says Majesty. “To the health of your new young, to your fight-strength returned and to the continuance of your Clan in great numbers!” He lowers his head to drink of ihlu.

Hada looks to me, sharply.

Now I grasp it: it is her nipples Majesty has remarked, swelling as they do from her chest, bare and brown-tipped with no covering fur. “The suckling mother,” I say, and bend to my drink, hoping she will understand. Here, such would indeed be cause for congratulation.

She calms. “Thank-thank, Majesty.” With each word the hint of shriek in her voice appeals more to me. “Health to all the Clans of Au-aurru, to the Clan of Majesty Gur-gurne, and to Majesty himself in singular.” A toast she has made up, but I surmise it will belly to Majesty’s liking.

“Ahhh Ha-hada.” Majesty shakes head, shoulders and tail, now relaxed. “Hark-hark: your Warm talker gave me little hope, but I smile to find a dominator among Humans. You are no songbird, but a harrihi!” He begins to eat, cutting and spearing his meat, tossing it back into his mouth, and Hada imitates him.

My surprise hisses out. Harrihi, the raptor—that is the sound in Hada’s voice! I understand her skill now: with her voice predatory, her manner is so Aurrel that her lack of muzzle or standing ears seems almost a surprise. Can she truly have done this across other worlds, with creatures even more alien than herself?

“Ru-rulii, bite-bite: you are half-sleeping.”

I turn to find Majesty’s gold eyes intent on me.

“Bow-bow,” he says. “Eat; these last days I begin to think you suffer a condition.”

Cold fear blows through me, but I don’t shiver—truly, Parker and his medicine have saved me from death on the Dominator’s Teeth today! “Bel-belly: it is only anticipation,” I say. “I confess I wish to speak of Humans.”

“Hark-hark: I notice how you precious them, Ru-rulii! Well then. Ha-hada, bow-bow: tell me, what is this spaceport?”

Hada flicks a hand through her long mane. “Hark-hark: a spaceport is a landing-place, Majesty. Humans stop there for food and fuel, thus easing our trade between star territories.”

“Hark-hark: yes, Ru-rulii has told me you fly.” Majesty laughs, but offers no insult—she is harrihi now, not grouse. “He tells me you wish to purchase land for a generous price. We have such land to offer; unused grasslands plenty in our Lowland south.”

I scent my prey at close pace; my heart speeds, but I make myself eat.

Hada smiles. “Thank-thank: indeed, Ru-rulii has spoken to us of these grasslands. Yet our eyes turn differently. Your eastern rocky flatland would serve us better, at a price you may suggest.”

What? She has lost pace with me completely! “Ha-hada,” I say, “sniff-sniff: eastern flatland? Will you abandon your plans for Lowland so quickly?”

“Bow-bow,” she says. “I had no such plans, Ru-rulii.”

How she stares—I understand suddenly that she baits me. I snap my teeth shut, but I have already said too much.

“Ru-rulii,” says Majesty. “Bow-bow: I thought you desired a Human spaceport. But now it appears you desire it singularly in Lowland. Sniff-sniff: is it only on your own territory that this spaceport will bring you satisfaction? Your Councilorship, your houses here and in Ro-roghell, they are not gifts enough?”

My breath shallows; my mind races to escape the trap before it can close. “Bel-belly, Majesty, do I appear to concern myself with territory? Hark-hark: I worry for all Au-aurru! I wonder why Ha-hada should change her proposal so late, unless she bears some concealed intent.”

Majesty’s hackles rise—oh, I have alarmed him! He turns eyes-ears-nose to Hada while she sits stiff, her pupils widening. “Hark-hark: a strange move indeed,” he growls. “Bow-bow: explain yourself, Ha-hada. This is the behavior of a Barbarian, if Ru-rulii scents true.”

Wauuunn! I have destroyed everything! Now Majesty will banish them, their spaceport, their research and their medicines, and I shall have condemned myself to return to molri, to die of it after a lifetime’s bloodless hunt!

“Bel-belly,” says Hada. “I am no Barbarian, Majesty.”

Hiding my shaking hands, I force myself to speak. “Hark-hark: indeed, honored Ha-hada, I do not wish to believe this of you. Tell us then why our eastern flatland smells so good.” And let her words somehow appease Majesty!

Hada bends her head. “Bel-belly: Majesty, I meant no ambush. I am new-come to this negotiation, and perhaps I had not told Ru-rulii: I have always desired this flatland location. Humans shall bring goods through this spaceport, yet it must also provide of its own—resources.”

Majesty throws his head back and howls. My heart is half-frozen before I hear him break into a laugh. “Hark-hark! Resources, Ha-hada! Ar, I see you are a negotiator indeed!”

Her lips curl down. “Bel-belly, Majesty—”

Majesty stamps the pads of one hand on the table. “Bow-bow: if you negotiate for land, this is something. But if you desire land-and-take-of-prey, our negotiation changes. Au-aurru must demand you render tribute.”

She calms at once. “Hark-hark: we can deliver tribute, Majesty. This is simple.”

See how certain she is! Majesty demands that she submit, placing Human star territories among the tribute nations of Aurru—yet she shows no sign of tremor!

Ah, no. I see it now: this is not courage.

What tribute could we demand that Hada would not find simple? She finds all of us simple. She and Majesty match eyes, confronting, but neither one sees the truth: that each of them believes his, her people superior and the other to be tamed! I must not allow them to reach agreement upon such terms. What good are riches, if all Aurrel blindly consents to play Lowlander to Human Majesty?

I scent only a single way to turn them aside—in a word each one might privately ignore, but which I believe in the ears of the other neither would dare deny.

“Hark-hark!” I toss my mane, to draw their eyes. “What a happy day, when Human and Au-aurrel enter for the first time into interdependence!”

Hada takes the bait. “Bel-belly: this interdependence is welcome. You will find we have much to offer you.”

Majesty gapes in amusement. “Hark-hark: indeed? I grow impatient to see these offerings!”

“Yet, Majesty, bel-belly: what a puzzle!”

My tone has caught him; he closes his mouth, turns ears to me. “Sniff-sniff: puzzle, Ru-rulii?”

“Hark-hark: why, we know less of our new huntmates than we do of Barbarians! In a single hour’s interdependence, how can we know what prey they shall seek on our soil, or how much?”

Majesty snorts, but without humor. “Bow-bow: look, this one hardly eats at all.”

My heart beats running pace. “Sniff-sniff: but how can we judge if Humans shall fly alone as harrihi, or as rowill, to blacken the sky? How should we attempt in one night to guess their future take, in order to measure fair tribute?”

Hada quickly spreads her hands. “Hint-hint: Majesty, surely Ru-rulii overstates himself. Humans are not unknown to Au-aurrel; not when our talker Par-parker and his scientists have run here so long.”

“Bow-bow!” Majesty shows irritated now, shaking his beads harshly. “Indeed they are known to Au-aurrel, Ha-hada: known to Ru-rulii in singular. He has run leader in your hunt from the first, and he is right; we make no bargain tonight.”

She protests, “Bel-belly, Majesty—”

Majesty will not hear her now—but his ear may still turn to me. And in mentioning Parker, Hada has roused to my mind a new offer, one that both may consider.

I lower my nose beside Majesty’s hand. “Hint-hint, Majesty: forgive Ha-hada her eagerness. She rightly praises Par-parker, for he has learned our natural order, even while his huntmates shelter lonely in Oll-ollugha. He shows that Humans can understand interdependence, given a fitting opportunity. Majesty, my house of honor in Ro-roghell stands empty. Let me give it to Parker and his people—a step forward, yet a safer one. How better to take Human measure than to bring them among us?”

Majesty touches my mane—I have never felt his favor so welcome. “Ha-hada, bow-bow,” he says. “Your people should gain much to satisfy them at the riverport, observing Au-aurrel Clans, their travel and trade.”

As I raise my head, she meets my eyes differently—changed by our close struggle, even as I have found myself changed in my struggle to understand Parker. But will she nose this bait? Will she be scavenger enough to take the scraps we offer? “Bel-belly,” she says. “A research station favored by Council, in a public center? Yes, this can satisfy us; we may speak of spaceports later.”

Ar, is it success that I feel now, chasing warmth over my skin? This is not simply happiness to see Parker satisfied in his project. I have brought more than silver to Lowland; I have brought Humans! A greater prize than I hunted for—a live one, and far more dangerous. In this struggle Parker has already felt my teeth, and I have felt him reach deep as blood: we are both swayed. In Ro-roghell, Humans shall not pass blindly as through a spaceport, but touch us and be touched—hereafter Lowlander, even Shiverer may not bear the same meaning. Those soft Human fingers, gently pressing, will tear us from our thinking into a new place.

Majesty drains his bowl of ihlu, takes it in two hands and dashes it against the table’s edge; Hada jumps with shock, her eyes white-rimmed as he offers her one of the two shards. “Ha-hada, bow-bow: take this fang, as token of our agreement.”

Pressing her lips tight together, Hada takes the piece of glass with her fingers.

“And Ru-rulii, bow-bow: you shall act our will in this matter.”

I lower my nose to the table, my heart running ahead already to Oll-ollugha and the warm lands. “Thank-thank,” I say. “Cold honor, Majesty.”

Parker, my friend, I shall come to you with good news.

Originally published by Analog Science Fiction and Fact, October 2009

The Hand is Quicker—

Elizabeth Bear

Rose and I used to come down to the river together last summer. It was over semester break, and my time was my own—between obligatory work on the paper I hoped would serve as the core of my first book and occasional consultations with my grad students.

Rose wore long dark hair and green-hazel eyes for me. I wore what I always did—a slightly idealized version of the meat I was born with. I wanted to be myself for her. I wondered if she was herself for me, but the one time I gathered up the courage to ask, she laughed and swept me aside. “I thought historians understood that narratives are subjective and imposed!”

I loved her because she challenged me. I thought she loved me too, until one day she disappeared. No answer to my pings, no trace of her in our usual haunts. She’d blocked me.

I didn’t handle it well. I was in trouble at the university. I was drinking. I wasn’t maintaining my citizenship status. With Rose gone, I realized slowly how much my life had come to revolve around her.

No matter how she felt about me, I knew she loved the river-edge promenade, bordered by weeping willows and her namesake flowers. Those willows were yellow as I walked the path now, long leaves clinging to their trailing branches. The last few roses hadn’t yet fallen to the frost, but the flowers looked sparse, dwarfed by the memory of summer’s blossoms.

The scent was even different now than it had been at the height of summer. Crisper, thin. The change was probably volunteer work; I didn’t think the city budget would stretch to skinning unique seasonal scents for the rose gardens. I knew Rose was older than I, no matter how her skin looked, because she used to say that when she was a girl, individual cultivars of roses had different odors, so walking around a rose garden was a tapestry of scents. Real roses probably still did that.

I didn’t know if I’d ever smelled them.

Other people walked the path—all skins. The city charged your palm chip just to get through the gate. I didn’t begrudge the debit. It wasn’t as if I was ever going to get to pay it off. Or as if I was every going to get to come back here. This was a last hurrah.

I edited out the others. I wanted to be alone, and if I couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see me. That was good, because I knew I didn’t look happy, and the last thing I wanted was some random stranger reading my emotional signature and coming over to offer well-meaning advice.

Since this was my last time, I thought about jumping skins—running up the charges, seeing some of the other ways the river promenade could look—fantasyland, or Rio, or a moon colony. Rose and I had done that when we first started coming here, but it turned out we both preferred the naturalist view. With seasons.

We’d met in winter. I supposed it was fitting that I lost her—and everything else that mattered—in the fall.

Everything changed at midnight.

Not my midnight, as if honoring the mystical claptrap in some dead fairy tale. But about the dinner hour, which would be midnight Greenwich Standard Time—honoring the mystical claptrap of a dead empire, instead. I suppose you have to draw the line somewhere. The world is full of the markers of abandoned empires, from Hadrian’s Wall to the Great Wall of China, from the remnants of the one in Arizona to the remnants of the one in Berlin.

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings.

I was thinking about that poem as I crossed Henderson—with the light: I knew somebody who jaywalked and got hit by an unskinned vehicle. The driver got jail time for manslaughter, but that doesn’t bring back the dead. It was a gorgeous October evening, the sun just setting and the trees still full of leaves in all shades of gold and orange. I barely noticed them, or the cool breeze as I waited, rocking nervously from foot to foot on the cobblestones.

I was meeting my friend Numair at Gary’s Olympic Pizza and I was running a little late, so he was already waiting for me in our usual corner booth. He’d ordered beers and garlic bread. They waited on the tabletop, the beers shedding rings of moisture into paper napkins.

I slid onto the hard bench opposite him, trying to hide the apprehension souring my gut. The vinyl was artistically cracked and the rough edges caught on my jeans. It wasn’t Numair making me so anxious. It was finances. I shouldn’t be here, by rights—I knew I couldn’t afford even pizza and beer—but I needed to see him. If anything could clear my head, it was Numair.

One of the things I liked about Numair is how unpretentious he was. I didn’t skin heavily—not like some people, who wandered through underwater seascapes full of sentient octopuses or dressed up as dragons and pretended they live in Elfland—but he was so down to earth I’d have bet his default skin looked just like him. He was a big guy, strapping and barrel-bodied, with curly dark brown hair that was going gray at the temples. And he liked his garlic bread.

So it was extra-nice that there were still two pieces left when I pulled the plate over.

“Hey, Charlie,” he said.

“Hey, Numair.” Garlic bread crunched between my teeth, butter and olive oil dripping down my chin. I swiped at it with a napkin. I didn’t recognize the beer, dark and malty, although I drank off a third of it making sure. “What’s the brew?”

“Trois Draggonnes.” He shrugged. “Microbrew license out of . . . Shreveport.com, I think? Cheers.”

“Here’s mud in your eye,” I answered, and drained the glass.

He sipped his more moderately and put it back on the napkin. “You sounded upset.”

I nodded. Gary’s was an old-style place, and a real-looking waitress came by about thirty seconds later and replaced my beer. I didn’t know if she was an employee or a sim, but she was good at her job. The pizza showed up almost instantly after that, balanced on a metal tripod with a plastic spatula for serving. Greek-style, with flecks of green oregano visible in the sweet, oozing sauce. I always got the same thing: meatball, spinach, garlic, mushrooms. Delicious. I’d never asked Numair what he was eating.

The smell turned my stomach.

“I may not be around much for a while.” I stuffed the rest of the garlic bread into my mouth to make room. And buy time. “This is embarrassing—”

“Hey.” He paused with a slice in midair, perfect strings of mozzarella stretching twelve inches from pie to spatula. They glistened. The booth creaked when he shifted. “This is me.”

“Right. I’ve got financial trouble. Bigtime.”

He put the slice down on his plate and offered me the spatula. I waved it away. The smell was bad enough. Belatedly, I turned it off. Might as well use the filters as long as I had them. The beer still looked appealing, though, and I drank a little more.

“Okay,” he said. “How bigtime?”

The beer tasted like humiliation and soap suds. “Tax trouble. I’m going to lose everything,” I said. “All assets, all the virtuals. I thought I could pay it down, you know—but then I got dropped by the U., and there wasn’t a replacement income stream. As soon as they catch up with me—” I thought of Rose, to whom Numair had introduced me. They’d been Friday-night gaming buddies, until she’d vanished without a word. I’d kept meaning to look her up offline and check in, but . . . It was easier to let her go than know for certain she’d dumped me. Amazing how easy it was to lose track of people when they didn’t show up at the usual places and times. “I got registered mail this morning. They’re pulling my taxpayer I.D. I’ll be as gone as Rose. Except I came to say goodbye before I ditched you.”

He blinked. Now it was his turn to set the pizza down and push the plate away with his fingertips. “Rose died,” he said.

I rubbed the back of my neck. It didn’t ease the sudden nauseating tightness in my gut as all that bitterness converted to something sharp and horrible. “Died? Died died?”

“Died and was cremated. Her family’s not linked, so I only heard because she and Bill went to school together, and he caught a link for her memorial service on some network site. You didn’t know?”

I blinked at him.

He shook his head. “Stupid question. If you knew— Anyway. I guess you’ve tried everything, so I’ll save the stupid advice.”

“Thank you.” I hope he picked up from my tone how fervently glad I was. Nothing like netfriends to pile on with the incredibly obvious—or incredibly crackpot—advice when you’re in a pickle. “So anyway—”

“Give me your offline contact info?” He held up his phone and I sent it over. It was a pleasantry. I knew what the odds were that I’d ever hear from him. And it wasn’t like I could keep my apartment without a tax identification number.

However good his intentions.

Right then, a quarter of the way around the planet, midnight tolled. And I fell out of the skin.

It was sharp and sudden, as somewhere a line of code went into effect and the last few online chits in my account were levied. I blinked twice, trying to shake the dizziness that accompanied the abrupt transition, eyes now scratchy and dry.

Numair was still there in the booth across from me. It was weird seeing him there, unskinned. I’d been right about his unpretentiousness: he looked pretty much as he’d always done—maybe a little more unkempt—though his clothes were different.

Since he was skinned, I knew I’d dropped right out of his filters. I might as well not exist anymore. And Gary’s Olympic, unlike Numair, had really suffered in the transition.

The pizza that congealed on the table before me was fake cheese, lumpy and dry looking. Healthier than the gooey pie my filters had been providing a moment before, but gray and depressing. I was suddenly glad I hadn’t been chewing on it when the transition hit.

The grimy floor was scattered with napkins. The waitress was real, go figure, but a shadow of her buxom virtual self—no, she was a guy, I realized. Maybe working in drag brought in better tips? Or maybe the skin was a uniform. I’d never know.

And there was me.

I was not as comfortable with myself as Numair. I didn’t skin heavily, as I said—just tuning. But my skins did make me a hair taller, a hair younger. My hair . . . a hair brighter. And so on. With them gone, I was skinny and undersized in a track suit that bagged at the shoulders and ass.

Falling into myself stung.

I reached out left-handed for my beer, since Numair was going to get stuck for the tab anyway. It was pale yellow and tasted of dish soap. So maybe the off flavor in the second glass had been something other than my misery. Whatever.

I chugged it and got out.

The glass door was dirty, one broken pane repaired with duct tape. On the way in, it had been spotless and decorated with blue and white decal maps of Greece. I pushed it open with the tips of my fingers and moved on.

Outside, the street lay dark and dank. Uncollected garbage humped against the curb. Some of it smelled organic, rotten. A real violation of the composting laws. Maybe they didn’t get enforced as much against businesses. I picked my way across broken cement to the corner and waited there.

There were more people on the street than there had been. Or maybe they’d been there all along, just skinned out. You could tell who was wearing filters by the way they moved—backs straight, enjoying the evening. The rest of us shuffled, heads bowed. Trying not to see too much. The evening I walked through was full of bad smells and crumbling buildings that looked to be mostly held together by graffiti.

“Aw, crap.”

The light changed. I crossed. Of course, I couldn’t get a taxi home, or even a bus. Skinned-in drivers would never see me, and my chips were cancelled. I wouldn’t get through a chip-locked door to take the tube.

I wondered how the poor got around. I guessed I’d be finding out.

I didn’t know my way home.

I was used to the guidance my skins gave me, the subtle recognition cues. All I was getting now was the cold wind cutting through a windbreaker that wasn’t warm enough for the job I expected it to do, and a pair of sore feet. Everything stank. Everything was dirty. There were steel bars on every window and chip locks on every door.

I’d known that intellectually, but it had never really sunk in before what a bleak urban landscape that made for. Straggling trees lined unmaintained streets, and at every corner I picked my way through drifts of rubbish. I knew there wasn’t a lot of money for upkeep of infrastructure, and what there was had to be assigned to critical projects. But it didn’t matter; you could always drop a skin over anything that needed a little cosmetic help.

Sure, I’d seen news stories. But it was one thing to vid it and another to wade through it.

About fifteen minutes after I’d realized how lost I was, I also realized somebody was following me. Nobody bothers the skinned: an instantaneous, direct voice and vid line to police services meant Patrol guardian-bots could be at our sides in seconds. It was a desperate criminal who’d tackle one of us. One of them. But that was another service I couldn’t pay for, along with a pleasanter reality and access to mass transit.

I wasn’t skinned anymore, and I bet anybody following me could tell. Of course, I didn’t have any credit, either—or any cash. I guessed unskinned folks still used cash, palm-sized magnetic cards with swipe strips. A lot of places wouldn’t take it anymore. But if you didn’t have accounts or a working palm chip, what else were you going to do?

Well, if you were the guy behind me, apparently the answer was, take it from somebody else.

I was short and I was skinny, but living skinned kept me in pretty good shape. There were all kinds of built-in workout programs, after all, so clever that you hardly even noticed they were healthy. And skinning food kept the blood pressure down no matter how many greasy pizzas you enjoyed.

My pursuer was two thirds of a block back. I waited until I’d put a corner between me and him. As soon as I lost sight of him, I broke into a run.

It was a pretty good run, too. I was wearing my Toesers, because I liked them, and if they were skinned nobody could tell how dumb they looked. Also, they were comfortable. And supposedly scientifically designed for natural running posture, so you landed on the ball of your foot and didn’t make a thump with every stride. Breath coming fast, feet scissoring—I turned at the first corner I came to, then quickly turned again.

Unskinned folks looked up in surprise as I pelted past. One made a grab for me, and another one shouted something after, but I was already gone. And then I was on a side street all by myself, running down a narrow path kicked in the piles of trash.

Maybe this was an even more desolate street, and maybe most of the lights were burned out, but I kept on running. It felt good, all of a sudden, like positive action. Like something I could do other than wallowing. Like progress.

It kept on feeling like progress all the way down to the river’s edge. And then, as I stopped beside a hole snipped-and-bent in the chain link, it felt like a very bad idea instead.

The river was a sewer. When I’d been here before—okay, not down here under the bridge, but on the bank above—it had been all sunshine and rolling blue water. What I saw now was floating milk jugs and what I smelled was a sour, fecal carrion stench.

I put a hand out to the fence, the wire gritty, greasy where my fingers touched. It dented when I leaned on it, but I needed it to bear my weight up. A stitch burned in my side, and every breath of air scoured my lungs. I didn’t know if that was from running, or because the air was bad. But it was the same air I’d been breathing all along. The filters didn’t change the outside world. Just our perceptions of it. So how could the air choke me now when before, I breathed it perfectly well?

Shouts behind me suggested that maybe my earlier pursuer had friends. Or that my flight had drawn attention. I was in shadow—but the yellow track suit wasn’t anyone’s idea of good camouflage.

Gravel crunched and turned under my feet. I pushed the top of the bent chain triangle up and ducked through, into the moist darkness under the bridge.

Things moved in the night. Rats, I imagined, but some sounded bigger than rats. What else could live in this filth? I imagined feral dogs, stray cats—companion animals abandoned to make their own fate. Would they attack something as large as a man?

If they did, how would I fight them?

I groped along the bridge abutment, feeling with my toes for a stick. The old stones swept down low, the arch broad and flat. I kept my hand up to keep from hitting my head on an invisible buttress. The masonry was slick with paint and damp, mortar crumbling to the touch. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, but light concentrated by the oily river reflected up, and I could see the stones of the bridge’s underside clearly.

I crept into that dank, ruinous beauty until the flicker of lights against the chain fence told me that my pursuers had found me, and they had come in force. My chest squeezed, stomach flipping in apprehension. I crouched down, tucked myself into the lowest part of the arch, and fumbled out my phone.

“Police,” I said. Even if my contract had been cancelled, that should work. I’d heard somewhere that any phone can always dial emergency. And there it was, a distant buzz, and then a calm voice answering.

“Emergency services. Your taxpayer identification number, please?”

My voice stuck in my throat. I’d never been asked that before. But then, I’d never been calling from an unskinned phone before. Without thinking, I rattled off the fourteen digits of my old number, the one that had been revoked. I held my breath afterward. Maybe the change hadn’t propagated yet. Maybe—

“That number is not valid,” the operator said.

“Look,” I whispered, “I’m in a dispute with Revenue Services. It’s all going to be sorted out, I’m sure, but right now I’m about to be mugged—”

“I’m sorry,” said the consummate professional on the other end of the line. “Emergency services are for taxpayers only.”

Before I could protest, the line went dead. Leaving me crouched alone in the dark, with a glowing phone pressed to my ear. Not for long, however: in less than a second, the dazzle of flashlight beams found me. Instinctively, I ducked my head and covered my eyes—with the hand with the phone.

“Well hey. What’s this?” The voice was deceptively pleasant, that seductive mildness employed by schoolyard bullies since first Romulus beat up Remus. The flashlight didn’t waver from my eyes.

I flinched. I didn’t answer. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I didn’t have a voice.

I tried to find the part of myself that managed unruly students and lecture-hall hecklers, but it had vanished along with my credit accounts and the protection of the police. I ducked further, squinting around my hand, but he was just a shadow through the glare of his light. At least three other lights surrounded him.

He plucked the phone from my hand with a sharp twist that stabbed pain through my wrist. I snatched the hand back.

“Huh,” he said. “Guess you didn’t pay your taxes, huh? What else have you got?”

“Nothing,” I said. The RFID chip embedded in my palm was useless. Would they cut it out anyway? I had no cash, no anything. Just the phone, which had my whole life on it—all my research, all my photos. Three mostly-finished articles. There were backups, of course, but they were on the wire, and I couldn’t get there without being skinned.

I wasn’t a skin anymore. Objects, I realized, had utility. Had value. They were more than ways to get at your data.

“Your jacket,” the baseline said. “And your shoes.”

My toes gripped the gravel. “I need my shoes—”

The dazzle of lights shifted. I knew I should duck, but the knowledge didn’t translate into action.

At first there wasn’t any pain. Just the shock of impact, and an exhale that seemed to start in my toes and never stop. Then the pain, radiating stars out of my solar plexus, with waves of nausea for dessert.

“Jacket,” he said.

I would have given it to him. But I couldn’t talk. Couldn’t even inhale. I raised my hand. I think I shook my head.

I think he would have hit me anyway. I think he wanted to hit me. Because when I fell down, he kept hitting me. Hitting and kicking. And not just him, some of his friends.

It’s a blur, mostly. I remember some particulars. The stomp that crushed my left hand. The kick that broke my tailbone. I got my knees up and tucked my head, so they kicked me in the kidneys instead. Gravel gouged the side where kicks didn’t land. If I could burrow into it, I’d be safe. If I could just fall through it, I might survive. I thought about being small and hard and sharp, like those stones.

After a while, I didn’t have the breath to scream anymore.

At first the cold hurt too, but after a while it became a friend. I noticed that they had stopped hitting me. I noticed that the cuts and bruises stung, the broken bones ached with a deep, sick throb. My hand felt fragile, gelatinous. Like a balloon full of water, I imagined that a single pinprick could make the stretched skin explode back from the contents. I prodded a loosened tooth with my tongue.

But then the cold got into the hurts and they numbed. Little by little, starting from the extremities. Working in. It mattered less that the hard points of gravel stabbed my ribs. I couldn’t feel that floppy, useless hand. The throb in my head slowly became less demanding than the throb of thirst in my throat.

In the fullness of time, I sat up. It was natural, like sitting up after a full night’s sleep, when you’ve lain in bed so long your body just naturally rises without consulting you. I thought about water. There was the river, but it smelled like poison. I’d probably get thirsty enough to drink it sooner or later. I wondered what diseases I’d contract. Hepatitis. Probably not cholera.

My cheekbones were numb, along with my nose, but I could still breathe normally. So the nose probably wasn’t broken. The moving air brought me a tapestry of cold odors: sour garbage, rancid meat, urine. That oil-tang from the river. Frost rimed the gravel around me, and in noticing that I noticed that the morning was graying, the heavy arch of the bridge a silhouette against the sky. There was pink and silver along the horizon, and I knew which direction was east because the sun’s light glossed a contrail that must have sat high enough to reach out of the Earth’s moving shadow.

Footsteps crunched toward me. I was too dreamy and snug to move. I’m in shock, I thought, but it didn’t seem important.

“What’s this?” somebody said.

I flinched, but didn’t look up. His shadow couldn’t fall across me. We were both under the shadow of the bridge.

“Oh, dear,” he said. The crunch of shifting gravel told me he crouched down beside me. When he turned my chin with his fingers and I saw his face, I was surprised he was limber enough to crouch. He looked like the bad end of a lot of winters. “And you lost your shoes too. What a pity.”

He didn’t seem surprised when I cringed, but it didn’t light his eyes up, either. So that wasn’t a bully’s mocking.

“Can you walk?” He took my arm gently. He inspected my broken hand. When he unzipped my jacket, I would have pulled away, but the pain was bad enough that I couldn’t move against him. When he slid the hand inside the jacket and the buttons of my shirt, I realized he was improvising a sling.

As if his touch were the opposite of an analgesic, all my hurts reawakened. I meant to shake my head, but just thinking about moving unscrolled ribbons of pain through my muscles.

“I don’t think so.” My words were creaky and blood-flavored.

“If you can,” he said, “I’ve got a fire. And tea. And food.”

I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, his hand was extended. The left one, as my right hand was clawed up against my chest like a surgical glove stuffed overfull with twigs and raspberry jam.

Food. Warmth. I might have given up, but somewhere in the back of my mind was an animal that did not want to die. I watched as it made a determined, raspy sound and reached out with its unbroken hand.

Letting him pull me to my feet was a special kind of agony. I swayed, vision blacking at the edges. His steadying hand kept me upright. It hurt worse than anything. “Come on,” he said.

I remember walking, but I don’t remember where or for how long. It felt like forever. I had always been walking. I would be walking forever. There was no end. No surcease.

Pain is an eternity.

His fire was trash and sticks ringed with broken bricks and chunks of asphalt. It smoldered fitfully, and pinprick by pinprick, the heat reawakened my pains. The soles of my feet seeped blood from walking across the gravel. I couldn’t sit, because of the tailbone, but I figured out how to lie on my side. It hurt, but so did anything else.

There was tea, as promised, Lipton in bags stewed in a rusty can. I hoped he hadn’t used river water. It had sugar in it, though, and I drank cautiously.

The food was dumpster-sourced chicken and biscuits, cold and lumpy with congealed grease. I ate it with my good hand, small bites. The inside of my mouth was cut from being slammed against my teeth. If I chewed carefully, on one side, the loose tooth only throbbed. I hoped it might reseat itself eventually.

Why was I thinking about the future?

The sun had beaten back the gloom enough for even my swollen eyes to make out the old man across from me. He had draped stiff, stinking blankets around my shoulders, but as the sun warmed the riverbank, he seemed comfortable in several layers of shirts and pants. A yellowed beard surrounded his sunken mouth. His hands were spare claws in ragged gloves. He drank the tea fearlessly, and warmed his share of the chicken on the rocks beside the trash fire. I thought about plastic fumes and kept gnawing mine cold.

After a while, he said, “You’ll get used to it.”

I looked up. He was looking right at me, his greasy silver ponytail dull in the sunlight. “Get used to being beaten up?” My voice sounded better than I’d feared. My nose really wasn’t broken. One small miracle.

“Get used to being a baseline.” He bit into a biscuit, grimacing in appreciation.

I winced, wondering how long it would take me to start savoring day-old fast food fat and carbohydrates. Then I winced in pain from the wincing.

The old man chewed and swallowed. “It’s honest, at least. Not like putting frosting all over the cake so nobody with any economic power can tell it’s rotten. What’s your name?”

“Charlie,” I said.

He nodded and didn’t ask for a surname. “Jean-Khalil.” I wondered if first names only was part of the social customs of the baseline community.

The shock was wearing off. Maybe the sugar in the tea was working its neurochemical magic. My broken hand lay against my belly, warmed by my skin, and the sweat running across my midsection felt as syrupy as blood.

I kind of wanted the shock back. I looked at the chicken, and the chicken looked back at me. My gorge rose. Bitterness filled my mouth, but I swallowed it. I knew how badly I needed the food inside me.

I balanced the meat on the fire ring next to Jean-Khalil’s. “You eat that.”

He wiped the back of his hand across his beard. “I will. And you need to get to a clinic.”

I put my head down on the unbroken arm. If I didn’t get the hand seen too, even if I survived—even if I didn’t have internal injuries—what were the chances it would be usuable when it healed? “I don’t have a tax number.”

“There’s a free clinic at St. Francis,” he said. “But it’s Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

I managed to work out that if I normally met Numair on Tuesdays, it would be just after dawn on Wednesday. Which meant, depending on when the clinic opened, something over 24 hours to wait. I could wait 24 hours. Could I sleep 24 hours? Maybe I’d die of blood poisoning before then. That might be a relief.

I had heard of St. Francis, but I didn’t know where it was. Somewhere in this neighborhood? If it offered a clinic for baselines, it would have to be. They couldn’t get through the chip gates uptown.

Despite the blankets heaped over me, I thought I could feel the ground sucking the heat out of my body. The old man nudged me. I opened my eyes. “Edge over onto this,” he said.

He’d made a pallet of more filthy blankets, just beside where I lay. With his help, I was able to kind of wriggle and flop onto it. I couldn’t lie on my back, because of the tailbone, and I couldn’t use the hand to pillow my head or turn myself.

He rearranged the blankets over me. Something touched my lips: his gaunt fingers, protruding from those filthy gloves. I turned my head.

“Take it. It’s methadone. It’s also a pain killer.”

“You lost your tax number for drug addiction?” I had to cover my mouth with my unbroken hand.

“I’m a dropout,” he said. “Take the wafer.”

“I don’t want to get hooked.”

He sighed like somebody’s mother. “I’m a medical doctor. It’s methadone, it’s 60 milligrams. It won’t do much more than take the edge off, but it might help you sleep.”

I didn’t believe him about being a dropout. Who’d pick this? But I did believe him about being a doctor. Maybe it was the way he specified medical. “I was a history teacher,” I said. I couldn’t bring myself to say professor. “Why do you have methadone if you’re not an addict?”

“I told you,” he said. “I’m a doctor.”

“And you dropped out.”

“Of a corrupt system.” His voice throbbed with disdain, and maybe conviction. “How many people were invisible to you, before? How much of this was invisible?”

If I could have had my way, I would have made it all invisible again. This time, when he pressed his hand to my mouth, I took the papery wafer into my mouth and chewed it. It tasted like fake fruit. I closed my eyes again and tried to breathe deeply. It hurt, but more an ache than the deep stabbing I associated with broken ribs. So that was something else to consider myself fortunate for.

I knew it was just the placebo effect and exhaustion making me sleepy so fast, but I wasn’t about to argue with it.

I said, “What made you decide to come live on the street?”

“There was a girl—” His voice choked off through the constriction of his throat. “My daughter. Cancer. She was twenty. Maybe if she hadn’t been skinning so much, in so much denial—”

I put my good hand on his shoulder and felt it rise and fall. “I’m sorry.”

He shrugged.

It was a minute and a half before I had the courage to ask the thing I was suddenly thinking. “If you’re a dropout, then you have a tax number. And you don’t use it.”

“That’s right,” the old man said. “It’s a filthy system. Eventually, you’ll see what I mean.”

“If you don’t want it, give it to me.”

He laughed. “If I were willing to do that, I’d just sell it on the black market. The clinic could use the money. Now rest, and we’ll get your hand looked at tomorrow.”

I don’t know how I got to the clinic. I didn’t walk—not on those bare cut-up feet—and I don’t remember being carried. I do remember the waiting room full of men and women I never would have seen before I lost my tax number. Jean-Khalil had given me another methadone wafer, and that kept me just this side of coherent. But I couldn’t sit, couldn’t walk, couldn’t lean against the wall. He got somebody to bring me a gurney, and I lay on my side and tried to doze, blissfully happy there weren’t any rocks or dog feces on the surface I was lying on.

It doesn’t take long to lower your standards.

I realized later that I was one of the lucky ones, and because of the broken bones I got triaged higher than a lot of others. But it was still four hours before I was wheeled into one of the curtained alcoves that served as an examining room and a woman in mismatched scrubs and a white lab coat came in to check on me. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Dr. Tankovitch. Dr. Samure said you had a bad night. Charlie, is it?”

“The worst,” I said. She was cute—Asian, plump, with bright eyes behind her glasses—and I caught myself flirting before a flood of shame washed me back into into myself. She was a contributing member of society, here to do charity work. And I was a bum.

“Honestly, there’s not much you can do for a broken tailbone except—” she laughed in commiseration “—stay off it. So let’s start with the hand.”

I held it out, and she took it gently by the wrist. Even that made me gasp.

She made a sympathetic face. “I’d guessing by the bruises on your face you didn’t get this punching a brick wall.”

“The cops don’t come if you’re not in the system.”

She touched my shoulder. “I know.”

I got lucky. For the first time in weeks, I got lucky. The hand didn’t need surgery, which meant I didn’t have to wait until the clinic’s surgical hours, which were something like midnight to four AM at the city hospital. Instead, Dr. Tankovitch shot me full of Novocaine and wrapped my hand up with primitive plaster of Paris, a technology so obsolete I had never actually seen it. Or if I had seen it, I’d skinned it out. She gave me some pain pills that didn’t work as well as the methadone and didn’t have a street value, and told me to come back in a week and have it all checked out. The cast was so white it sparkled. Guess how long that was going to last, if I was sleeping under bridges?

She didn’t offer me the clinic’s contact information, and I didn’t ask for it. How was I supposed to call them without a phone? But I was feeling less sorry for myself when I staggered out of the alcove. I planned to find Jean-Khalil again, and ask him if he’d show me where he looked for food and safe drinking water. I was clear-headed enough now to know it was an imposition, but I didn’t have anywhere else to turn. And he’d sort of volunteered, hadn’t he, by picking me out of the gutter?

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

It was Mark Twain. But then, so were a lot of true things. And I was determined to prove myself more like the dog than the man. Jean-Khalil was an old man. Surely he could use my help. And I knew I needed his. I didn’t see Jean-Khalil. But just as the waves of panic and abandonment—again, just like after Rose—were cresting in me, I spotted someone. Leaning against the wall by the door was Numair.

Numair had seen me first—I’d been moving, and he’d been looking for me—so he saw me stop dead and stare. He raised his hand hesitantly.

“Buy you dinner?” he asked. He didn’t flinch when he looked at me.

From the angle of the light outside, I realized it was nearly sunset. “As long as we can get it someplace standing up.”

That meant street meat, and three hotdogs with everything were the best food I’d ever tasted. Numair drank beer but he didn’t eat pork, so he ate potato chips and watched me lean forward so the chili and onions didn’t drip down my filthy shirt. I knew it was ridiculous, but I did it anyway. It felt like preserving my dignity to care. What dignity? I wasn’t sure. But it still mattered.

“I’m sorry,” Numair said. “I’m really sorry. If I’d realized you didn’t know about Rose—I just never imagined. You two were so close. And you never mentioned her—I figured you didn’t want to talk about her.”

“I didn’t.” We’d had a fight, I wanted to say. Something to absolve myself of not checking. But when she stopped logging in, I figured she’d just decided to cut me off. She wouldn’t be the first, and I knew she had another life. A wife. We’d talked about telling her she was having an affair.

And then she’d just . . . stopped messaging. People fall out of social groups all the time. It happens. I guess somebody more secure wouldn’t have assumed they were the problem. But I was used to being the problem. Numair’s the only friend I have left from the gang I hung around with all the time in grad school.

I swallowed hot dog, half-chewed. It hurt. He handed me an open can of soda, and I washed the lump down. “How’d she die?”

She hadn’t been old. I mean, she hadn’t skinned old. But who knew what the hell that meant, in the real world.

“She killed herself,” Numair said, bluff and forthright. Which was just like him.

I staggered. Literally, sideways two steps. I couldn’t catch myself because the last hotdog was balanced against my chest on the pristine cast. I already had the instinct to protect that food. I guess you don’t have to get too hungry to learn fast.

“Jesus,” I said, and felt bad.

He made a comforting face. And that was when I realized that if he could see me, he wasn’t skinning. “Numair. You came all the way down here for me?”

“Charlie. Like I’d let an old friend go down without some help.” He put a hand on my shoulder and pulled it back, frowning. He looked around, disgusted. “You know, you hear on the news how bad it is out here. But you never really get it until you see it. Poisoned environment, whatever. But this is astounding. Look, we can get you a hearing. Appeal your status. Maybe get you a new number. You can stay with Ilona and me until it’s settled.”

There were horror vids about this sort of thing. The baselines lived outside of social controls, after all. There was nothing to keep them from committing horrible crimes. “You’re going to take in a baseline? That’s a lot of trust. I’m a desperate woman.”

He smiled. “I know you.”

Ilona only knew me as a skin, but when I showed up at her house in the unadorned flesh, she couldn’t have been nicer. She, too, had turned off her skinning so she could see me and interact. I could tell she was uncomfortable with it, though—her eyes kept flicking off my face to look for the hypertext or chase a link pursuant to the conversation, and of course there was nothing there. So after a bit she just showed me the bathroom, brought me clean clothes and a towel, and went back to her phone, where (she said) she was working on a deadline. She was an advertising copywriter, and she and Numair had converted one corner of their old house’s parlor into an office space. I could hear her clicking away as I stripped off my filthy clothing and dropped it piece by piece into the bathroom waste pail. It was hard, one-handed, and it was even harder to tape the plastic bag around my cast.

It had never bothered me to discard ruined clothing before, but now I found it anxiety-inducing. That’s still good. Somebody could wear that. I set the shower for hot and climbed in. The water I got fell in a lukewarm trickle; barely wetting me.

They probably skinned it hotter when they showered.

I tried to linger, to savor the cleanliness, but the chill of the water in a chilly room drove me out to stand dripping on the rug. As I was dressing in Ilona’s jeans and sweatshirt, the sound of a child crying filtered through.

I came out to find Numair up from his desk, changing a diaper in the nook beside the kitchen. His daughter’s name was Mercedes; she’d always been something of a little pink blob to me. I came up to hand him the grease for her diaper rash and saw the spotted blood on the diaper he had pushed aside.

“Christ,” I said. “Is she all right?”

“She’s nine months old, and she’s starting her menses,” he said, lower lip thrust out in worry. I noticed because I was looking up at the underside of his chin. “It’s getting more common in very young girls.”

“Common?”

With practiced hands, he attached the diaper tabs and sealed up Mercedes’ onesie. He folded the soiled diaper and stuck it closed. “The doctor says it’s environmental hormones. It can be skinned for—they’ll make her look normal to herself and everyone else until she’s old enough to start developing.” He shrugged and picked up his child. “He says he treats a couple of toddlers with developing breasts, and the cosmetic option works for them.”

He looked at me, brown eyes warm with worry.

I looked down. “You think that’s a good enough answer?”

He shook his head. I didn’t push it any farther.

They put me to sleep in their guest room, and fed me—unskinned, the food was slop, but it was food, and I got used to them not being able to see or talk to me at mealtimes. After a week, I felt much stronger. And as it was obvious that Numair and Ilona’s intervention was not going to win me any favors from Revenue, I slowly came up with another plan.

I couldn’t find Jean-Khalil under the bridge. His fire circle was abandoned, his blankets packed up. He’d moved on, and I didn’t know where. Good deed delivered.

You’d think, right? Until it clicked what I was missing.

I showed up at the free clinic first thing next Tuesday morning, just as Dr. Tankovitch had suggested. And I waited there until Dr. Tankovitch walked in and with her, his gaunt hand curved around a cup of coffee, Dr. Jean-Khalil Samure.

He didn’t look surprised to see me. My clothes were clean, and the cast was only a little dingy. I’d shaved, and I was surprised he recognized me without the split lip and the swelling.

“Jean-Khalil,” I said.

I guessed accosting the clinic doctors wasn’t what you did, because Dr. Tankovitch looked as if she might intercept me, or call for security. But Jean-Khalil held out a hand to pause her.

He smiled. “Charlie. You look like you’re finding your feet.”

“I got help from a friend.” I frowned and looked down at my borrowed tennis shoes. Ilona’s, and too big for me. “I can’t do this, Jean-Khalil. You’ve got to help me.”

I’m sure the clinic had all sorts of problems with drug addicts. Because now Dr. Tankovitch was actively backing away, and I saw her summoning hand gestures. I leaned in and talked faster. “I need your tax number,” I said. “You’re not using it. Look, all I need is to get back on my feet, and I can help you in all sorts of ways. Money. Publicity. I’ll come volunteer at your clinic—”

“Charlie,” he said. “You know that’s not enough. The way you live—the way you have been living. That’s a lie. It’s not sustainable. It’s addictive behavior. If everybody could see the damage they’re doing, they’d behave differently.”

I pressed my lips together. I looked away. Down at the floor. At anything but Jean-Khalil. “There’s a girl. Her name is Rose.”

He looked at me. I wondered if he knew I was lying. Maybe I wasn’t lying. I could find somebody else, skin her into Rose. Maybe she’d have a different name. But I could fix this. Do better. If he would only give me the chance.

“You’re not using it,” I said.

“A girl,” he said. “Your daughter?”

“My lover,” I said.

I said, “Please.”

He shook his head, eyes rolled up and away. Then he yanked his hand out of his pocket brusquely. “On your head be it.”

I was not prepared for the naked relief that filled me. I looked down, abjectly, and folded my hands. “Thank you so much.”

“You can’t save people from themselves,” he said.

Originally published in
The Book of Silverberg: Stories in Honor of Robert Silverberg
edited by William Schafer and Gardner Dozois (2014).

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

Robert Reed (www.robertreedwriter.com)

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

Juliette Wade (talktoyouniverse.blogspot.com)

Juliette Wade has turned her studies in linguistics, anthropology and Japanese language and culture into tools for writing fantasy and science fiction. She lives the Bay Area of Northern California with her husband and two children, who support and inspire her. She blogs about language and culture in SF/F at TalkToYoUniverse and runs the “Dive into Worldbuilding!” hangout series on Google+. Her fiction has appeared several times in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Clarkesworld, and in various anthologies.

Elizabeth Bear (elizabethbear.com)

Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. When coupled with a childhood tendency to read the dictionary for fun, this led her inevitably to penury, intransigence, and the writing of speculative fiction. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell Award winning author of twenty-five novels and over a hundred short stories. Her dog lives in Massachusetts; her partner, writer Scott Lynch, lives in Wisconsin. She spends a lot of time on planes.

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). The innagural edition of his Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology series will be launched by Night Shade Books in 2016. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.