Issue 8

© Wyrm Publishing, 2015
wyrmpublishing.com
forever-magazine.com

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the eighth issue of Forever Magazine!

I spent a few days last month at Worldcon in Spokane, Washington and ran into some of our readers and authors. It was nice to be back among fellow science fiction fans. I often feel a bit isolated from that community here in the small NJ town I live in, so I try to make the most of every moment. I always return mentally energized and physically exhausted.

A lot happened at Worldcon and I wish I had the time or energy to write it all up. As far as Forever is concerned, it was an opportunity to line up some stories for future issues. On a more personal level, it planted the seeds for a number of interesting projects that I hope to be able to share with you soon. After the Hugo Awards (yes, I’m deliberately not talking about them), I discovered that I would have been a close 2nd in nominations for Best Editor Short Form if all that controversial stuff didn’t happen. All I have to say about that is a quick thank you to everyone that saw fit to nominate me. It means a lot, even when you aren’t a nominee.

As always, thanks for reading! If you enjoy the issue, please consider posting a review on Amazon, B&N, or any of the other places that sell Forever! Until next month . . .

-Neil

Gas Fish

Mary Rosenblum

“Actually, I am glad that you decided to investigate us.” Jovan’s director, Sandra Li, was trying hard to be polite. “Considering your reputation, Mr. Kraj, a clean bill of health from you should be worth quite a bit.”

“You make me sound like a witch hunter.” Anton smiled. “I only report facts.”

“The facts can by slanted to suggest fallacies.”

“That’s so.” Anton refused to be annoyed. “You could say that I report the truth rather than facts. The truth is not always factual.” He turned away to lean his elbows on the deck rail, sweeping the cluster of beach houses and the dock below with a long slow stare. The microcameras mounted on his headband rig were synched to a tiny implant on his eyelid. Online participants would see what he saw—neat cottages and pristine white sand dotted with a few beach towels and sunbathers.

He had taken Elliot to a diving resort every summer—a small private place on a cove like this one. During that last horrible year, he had paid to have the hospital run scuba virtuals designed for the paralyzed. So that Elliot could dive as much as he wanted. Anton unclenched his teeth. “Your research facility has all the ambience of an upscale resort,” he said mildly.

“This was a resort.” Li flushed. “You’re too well informed not to know that the property was donated to Jovan Corporation. Or have you already condemned us, Mr. Kraj?

“Why should I condemn you? Call me Anton,” he said as she turned away without speaking. Her reserve had finally cracked. Pleased, Anton followed her across the deck and down the weathered wooden stairs. Dry facts didn’t sell well. Participants wanted drama, emotional displays, enticing visuals. “If your facility is everything you say it is, then you have no worries.” He smiled at her. A tip had suggested that Jovan was not on the up and up. He had his top informant working on that hint. Bogus science was big business—and the cost was sometimes . . . human. “My participants are curious about you,” he said.

“Participants.” Li stopped abruptly and looked back at him. “Your audience does not participate. They only wish to be entertained. That is all that matters.” Her gaze focused on his headband. “I suppose you’ll use all this?” she asked bitterly.

“If it fits.” Anton smiled gently. “Whatever you may wish to believe, Ms. Li, I have never slanted my stories against an innocent party.”

“Who appointed you judge?” she snapped.

“My son.” The words caught him by surprise, and he focused quickly on the blue horizon, panning for stock background. Perhaps it was the sea that brought Elliot back so sharply—they had been diving when the symptoms had manifested. Anton shook his head, angry at himself. Li’s narrowed eyes suggested that she had noticed his reaction. “I simply report the facts,” he said harshly. “Why Jupiter? Why should we spend time and lots of money to send a probe into its atmosphere? We can’t live there. Mining anything from that hellhole would be impossibly expensive. Why not invest our resources in the Mars terraforming project?”

“I think we are facing a crisis,” she said softly. “We must choose whether to spend our precious resources on expanding our current environment or leap into the unknown and deal with what we find there. Perhaps this a test of evolution. If we cannot evolve, we will be trapped here forever—on Earth, on whatever replicas of Earth we can create on Mars or the orbital platforms. To evolve, we must look beyond ourselves.”

“To Jupiter?”

“It is a first step.” Her eyes were luminous in the hazy afternoon light. “We may find nothing, but we need to look. If we lose that sense of wonder, that burning need to go and find out that has taken us this far—we’re through, at a dead end, at . . . ” She caught her breath and blushed. “Well, your participants should like that bit of melodrama.” She leaned her face into a retinal scanner set into the wall beside the door. “We need to move on. I have a meeting at four. The actual Jupiter probe is being constructed in another building. That’s our next stop. This is our simulation lab.”

Anton followed her into a small antechamber, thinking that he had just caught a glimpse of the real Sandra Li. Idealist, he thought. And naive. Pale green coveralls hung on the walls above pairs of plastic boots. A second door let them into a cavernous building.

“What exactly do you simulate in here?” he asked. Floor, walls, and ceiling were painted a soft pastel yellow. The rear half of the building was nothing but a large diving pool with ladders at each end, and a squat electric crane. Its boom stuck out over the water. The air was cool and humid, thick with sea smell.

A ten foot long, vaguely whale-shaped model stood in the middle of the floor between the diving pool and the entrance. It had blue plastic skin, a thick stubby tail and two pairs of oversized fins along its sides. Elliot would have been fascinated, Anton thought, and then pushed the thought out of his head. “That’s your probe?” Anton focused on it, thinking ugly. “A big fish?”

“It’s a scale model of the probe.” Li nodded. “This is where our prototype trains for the conditions he is likely to encounter once he has been deployed. He will be swimming in a gaseous sea of ammoniated water vapor and tremendous turbulence. Fish are excellent models, so we use a combination of virtual simulation and actual subsea training.”

“He?” Anton raised his eyebrows.

“A bit of anthropomorphism.” Li smiled primly. “We recovered the core of our AI system from the first probe, but this time we overlaid with a simulated human personality shell.”

“Your last probe failed rather immediately, didn’t it?”

“We underestimated the extent of the turbulence it encountered.” Li scowled at his innocent tone. “We have a much better knowledge of conditions, thanks to the information it sent us. This system is experimental. but so far our tests indicate that the combination is much more successful than an unenhanced AI at making fast and effective decisions in unexpected situations of crisis.”

“It’s a very expensive system,” Anton murmured.

“Jonah is very creative.”

“Jonah?” Anton studied the whale-shape for his participants. “Pun intended, right? Is this him?”

“I’m him.” A boyish tenor came from the direction of the empty pool. “But yeah, I guess you could say I got swallowed by a whale. Or a robot tuna, anyway.” There was a grin to his tone.

That voice raised the hairs on Anton’s neck. He turned—automatic reflexes making it a slow pan so that he didn’t dizzy his participants. That voice . . . A large silvery fish-shape floated in the pool. It looked something like the prototype, but smaller and a bit more streamlined.

“Jonah, this is Mr. Kraj.” Li smiled at the fish. “How did the tests go?”

“Fine, of course. You’re Kraj, the docu-dramatist?” The voice brightened. “Cool. I always wanted to be famous. You wanted publicity, right Sandy? You got the biggest.”

“Publicity,” Li muttered under her breath. “Not a trial.”

Coincidence, Anton told himself numbly. He was hearing something that wasn’t there. “You . . . you’re using a child’s personality to operate a million-dollar probe?”

“I’m no kid. What’s your problem, mister?” The silvery fish rose in the water to point a blunt, blind snout at Anton. “You think I can’t can do it? You ought to see how I handle an updraft storm.”

“Jonah, easy.” Li sounded grimly amused. “He doesn’t know how good you are.”

Elliot’s voice. The fish was speaking with Elliot’s voice. Anton clung to the mask of a professional smile. Pitch, syntax, word choice—all Elliot. You think I can’t do it? Elliot had said that once—those very words. On their first deep dive together.

Coincidence, Anton told himself. Elliot was dead. Elliot had been dead for nearly a decade—long enough for Anton to forget, to remember wrong.

Bullshit, all of the above. Except for the stark truth of his son’s death.

“Mr. Kraj?” Li touched his elbow. “Is something wrong?’

“No.” Anton blinked. “Nothing.” He had been staring at a blank patch of wall like an amateur—so much for using this bit of visual. “I . . . I apologize.” Endit, he subvocalized, instructing his biointerface to turn off record mode. Only then did he force himself to look at the mechanical fish. “I’m sure that you’re very good,” he said. “Perhaps you can talk to me some more.” Although he didn’t want to hear his son’s voice coming from this . . . artifact. But why would they program evasion into their AI? This . . . thing might spill facts that Li and her bunch would not.

“I don’t know if I want to talk to you,” the fish said sullenly. It submerged, slopping a foamy wave of seawater across the floor. Anton looked down at his soaked shoes.

“You offended him.” Li raised an eyebrow at him. “We left the personality shell reasonably intact, so Jonah can be as touchy as any thirteen year old—even if he isn’t driven by hormones. His current body is similar to his Jovian form.” She nodded at the obese whale on its stand. “He practices in the water, and he practices with his Jovian form, hooked into virtual simulations via a direct bio-interface.”

“Why thirteen?” Anton blurted. “And where did you get that personality?”

“Humans are least concerned by their mortality at that age,” Li said. “They are at their peak of creativity and curiosity.” She eyed him warily. “Jonah is easily the most expensive component of our Jovian fish. But Jupiter is unpredictable. We hope to avoid the accident that claimed our first probe.”

“Who was the donor for the personality construct?” Anton asked again. He had said was, as if the donor was dead.

“That’s confidential. I doubt it’s even on file.” The wariness on Li’s face deepened and she glanced pointedly at her watch. “I am late for my meeting. I have instructed our medical staff to implant you with an ID chip.” She didn’t sound pleased. “It will permit you to wander around the facility as you will. Our staff will answer any and all of your questions. Our only requirement of course, is that you not record any developmental specifics.”

“I’d like to talk to Jonah,” Anton said, but she was already walking briskly back up the path toward the main building. He should have pursued the subject of Jovan’s funding. Anton scowled, annoyed at himself. He had let himself be distracted.

The fish had spoken in Elliot’s voice.

“Excuse me, sir.” A coveralled young man tapped Anton on the shoulder, startling him from his reverie. “If you’ll come with me, I’ll escort you to the clinic. They’ll give you your ID chip there.”

The technician’s timing suggested that they had very good security here. The video eyes were well hidden. “Fine.” He smiled pleasantly at his escort. Cooperation won’t buy you anything, he thought silently. If you are a scam, I will expose you to the world.

“This won’t hurt a bit,” the clinic doctor told Anton. It was the usual lie, but the implantation didn’t hurt much. Afterwards, the doctor sprayed a liquid bandage over the implantation site and sent Anton on his way. He didn’t look particularly happy about doing the implant.

This was a very close-knit little company, Anton decided. Nobody really wanted him sniffing around. Which was typical, but this bunch was acting just a bit too helpful. As Anton left the clinic he wondered what they might be hiding behind that pretense of goodwill.

Tech stocks were hot investments on the world stock exchange—volatile and potentially big money-makers. They were almost as volatile as the entertainment industry’s stocks. Which prompted a lot of speculative research. And prompted some unscrupulous companies to suppress data that might compromise a promising new product. The penalties were high for that kind of scam, but so was the potential profit if everything turned out all right. Anton rubbed the implant site on his shoulder as he climbed into the cab waiting for him at Jovan’s main gate. To his surprise, it was driven by a real person.

“Where to?” the freckled girl behind the wheel asked.

Anton gave her the address and leaned back as the cab pulled away from the gate. Was that Li watching from the shadow of the gatehouse? He peered through the rear window, but whoever it was had vanished. Frowning he scratched the implantation site again.

“You just get a shot?” the cabby asked.

“No.”

“I hate shots. All those vaccinations. I think they’re just a gimmick, you know?” She negotiated a hairpin turn at breathtaking speed. “Just another hook to snag our money. Scare tactics. Me, I haven’t done one since I was a kid, and I’m healthy.”

“Good for you.” Anton sighed.

“Look at that plague that came out of South America—the one that was gonna kill off the world. They did a vaccine for that, and people got sick anyway.”

“That was because the vaccine was shit.” Anton sat up straight on the cheap plastic seat. “The people who made it knew it was shit when they marketed it. They made a lot of money, knowing it.”

“Jeeze, you don’t say?” The woman glanced back over her shoulder, pale brows arching skeptically. “That’s shitty.”

She didn’t know? How could she not know? “How old were you eleven years ago?”

“Me?” The cabby shrugged. “Eight. Almost nine.”

How soon we forget, Anton thought bitterly. “Do you know how Santorres kills?” He stared at the passing landscape, watching the protected wetland transform slowly into urban sprawl. “It doesn’t. It temporarily paralyzes the muscles that let you breath and make your heart beat. If your family can afford to keep you on total life support for a year or so, and if you don’t die from some kind of secondary infection, you’ll be fine. Fed Med doesn’t cover that kind of treatment.”

“So you gotta go to a private hospital? You’d have to be rich.” The cabby shook her head. “Man, that would be an ugly choice. Go broke or save your brother, or kid, or whoever. Whatever happened to the creeps who made the bad vaccine anyway? I bet they lived happily ever after.”

“It was an ugly choice,” Anton said very softly. “And the people responsible got the death penalty. Every one of them.”

The cabby looked at him, then turned quickly back to the road. And shivered. She didn’t say anything else until she let him out at the edge of the plaza where his building was located.

“I went to Belize at the beginning of the pandemic. To do a docu-drama on it. I was doing straight news then.” Anton leaned down to zip his card through the cab’s reader. “My thirteen year old son went with me. We were both vaccinated.” He added a generous tip and pocketed his card. “I watched the execution of the company’s top executive. Have a nice day,” he said gently.

The cab zoomed off as he walked slowly across the plaza. It was sunny, but he shivered, as if invisible clouds had blocked the sun. Yesterday, he thought as he rubbed the insertion site again. Bad stuff. Don’t think about it. Think about Li instead. Like why she had given him the chip when she clearly didn’t want to. And who had ordered her to do it. That who would be important.

The sun had sunk below the city skyline, but golden light still seeped between the towers, turning the massed blooms on a flower vendor’s cart into a riot of glowing colors. Anton paused to buy a handful of lilies on his way to the tower where he had short-leased an apartment.

The dozen or so public screens mounted on walls along the edges of the plaza displayed a kaleidoscope of image-bites as a dozen different online purveyors offered entertainment, or news—which was even more entertaining because it was real. More or less, Anton thought sourly. Reality was a matter of interpretation—Li was right. Hidden cameras beneath the screens monitored eye-track points—the more people who looked at a screen, the more viewer-hours of attention a company amassed, increasing their ratings. High ratings sent their stock up on the international exchange. A media company’s value could fluctuate dramatically during the course of a single program day. A good media artist could increase a company’s value enormously.

Which was why everyone wanted him, Anton Kraj—one-man ratings booster. Which would only be true until he bored his participants, Anton thought bitterly. Oh, he could tell himself that he presented the truth and truth alone, but he presented it to his participants’ tastes.

If Jovan was an innocent research firm, he wouldn’t waste a single minute designing a special about it. That wasn’t what his participants wanted. They wanted guilt. Collusion. Maybe a whiff of decaying bodies, buried in some landfill. Entertainment, Li’s voice echoed in his head. Truth, he countered. Entertaining truth yeah, but truth nonetheless. He smiled crookedly as he let himself into the tower lobby. He needed to review the day’s takes of the Jovan site, edit them a bit, and archive them. Mostly they would provide stock that could be edited into later takes, when he needed to segue from one scene to another. The elevator let him out onto his floor. One wall of the hallway was transparent, so that he could look down into the tower’s garden core. It had been landscaped as a rainforest. He paused for a moment, remembering the rainforest preserve he had visited with Elliot, on their Belize trip. A child ran down the path below, and for a heart-stopping instant he saw Elliot in the slight, dark-haired figure. And wished briefly that he’d rented in a tower with a different landscaping motif.

“Hello, neighbor.”

Anton jumped and turned around. The slight, sandy-haired man smiling and holding out his hand looked vaguely familiar. “Hello,” Anton said warily.

“I saw you moving in.” The small man nodded. “I live next door—just wanted to say hi.” He held out a long-fingered hand. “I’m Cam.”

“Anton. Come in,” Anton said, suddenly grateful for company—any company. “Can I get you a drink? I’ve got beer. Nothing more sophisticated, I’m afraid.”

“Thanks.” Cam followed him into the room, glancing around curiously.

There wasn’t much to see. Generic leased furniture, his studio hardware in one corner. Anton poured beer into two glass and put the lilies into a third glass because the leased dishes didn’t include a vase. When he turned around with the beers, he found Cam standing at his workstation, staring at the single holo of Elliot that Anton had kept.

“Your kid?” he asked as Anton handed the beer. “He looks like you.”

“Yeah, I guess he does.” Elliot hadn’t inherited much from his mother—as if their pre-conception custody agreement had prejudiced their gametes. Regretting his invitation, Anton stripped off his headband, detached it from the virtual skinthins he wore beneath his clothes, and tossed it onto the workstation.

“You’re in media?” Cam’s eyes lighted up “Advertising?”

“News.” Anton shoved the holo back behind the solid cube of his hard-data safe, extracted the day’s data-sphere from his skinthins and socketed it into the unit. He’d archive it into his Net studio later. “Docudrama.”

“News? You’re kidding?” Cam leaned forward eagerly. “Wait a minute . . . You’re not Anton Kraj? Kraj the Shark? Yeah, sure you are. I saw an interview with you once.” He slapped his knee and laughed with delight. “You’re the best. You sure go for the jugular. Blood everywhere.”

“Thanks.” The praise felt sour and Anton had a sudden image of Sandra Li’s luminous face as she talked about evolution and Jupiter. You have to know, he told her silently. You cannot be innocent.

“So who are you investigating this time?”

“Jovan Corporation.” Never underestimate the value of gossip. “They’re launching another Jupiter probe.”

“Space exploration.” Cam scowled and swallowed beer. “We can barely feed ourselves as it is. We need to concentrate on the Mars terraform, not throw precious resources away on exploration that doesn’t get us anything useful.”

“Maybe you’re right.” Anton shrugged and sipped at his own beer. Cam’s tirade had had an artificial feel to it—as if he was trying to elicit a response from Anton instead of airing his genuine feelings. He’d used the same trick often enough in his own interviews. “So what do you do?” he asked, to change the subject.

“I’m with InfoSearch. If it’s on the Net, we can find it,” Cam quoted theatrically. “And we can. Legal or not, but I didn’t say that.” He finished his beer. “Let me know if you ever need any research. I’ll give you a professional discount.” He gave Anton a crooked smile. “Stop in anytime,” he said. “I owe you a beer.”

“Maybe I will.” Anton followed Cam to the door, relieved that he was leaving. Lonely, he told himself as the door locked behind Cam. But the whole episode had the same unnatural as Cam’s tirade. As if his neighbor had wanted to make contact with Anton. And he had certainly seen Cam somewhere before.

Anton shrugged, and sat down at his workstation. Time to go through the day’s takes and separate stock visuals from the good bits. He popped the datasphere from his hard-memory safe, and into his Net terminal. Some bits of his conversation with Li might be worth editing into a bite. For the next two hours he chopped her words and images into chunks and reassembled them into a seamless and passionate monologue about evolving humanity and Jupiter. Then he overlaid the whole with a good synthesizer track and a subtle background of waves breaking. It was what she had said—only more so. Anton ran it again, frowning. Framed by an expose, her words would sound utterly hypocritical. It would be a damning and potent segment.

Would she ever dare to believe in anything that strongly again? Anton shook his head angrily, because that was not his problem, and this kind of speculation had never troubled him before. His joints popped as he stretched, and his stomach reminded him fiercely that dinner was overdue. Sandra Li had made her choices and compromises, whether she believed in anything or not. She’d have to deal with the price.

Go eat, he told himself. Or finish your beer, have another, and go to bed. Instead, he found himself calling up the segment of the day’s take where the mechanical fish poked its snout out of the diving pool.

A Fedmed clinic stood on nearly every corner. The government guaranteed basic health care to everyone. If you wanted treatment that went beyond basic care, you went to a private hospital. Maintaining a victim of the Santorres virus for the required year or more was not included in basic coverage. The only way to pay off the life-support bill after Elliot’s death had been to sell any of Elliot’s tissues, organs, or test results that were marketable. The hospital had provided the counseling and the contract. Organs. Tests. Nothing else.

Anton sat at his workstation until the early hours of the morning, listening to a mechanical fish speak with his son’s voice.

“Everybody’s at the meeting.” Jonah’s voice startled Anton as he prowled through the eerie and empty boat house. “The place is dead.”

“I wouldn’t say that.” Anton lifted his head to stare at the video eye he had located on one of the rafters. “I bet Security isn’t at the meeting.”

“Oh. Well.” Jonah’s tone suggested a shrug. “She’s scared of you. Sandy.” Thoughtful tone, now. “How come?”

“What makes you think she’s scared of me?” Anton looked at him finally, found himself unnerved by that eyeless silver snout. He did not want to be talking to this . . . thing. “How do you see without eyes?”

“She planted you with a chip and she didn’t want to.” Lying still in the water, he elevated his tail slowly, so that water sheeted down the big flukes and dripped off with the sound of rain falling. “As for eyes—I can see in spectra you don’t even know exist. Who needs eyes?”

“You’re right about her being scared,” Anton said. AI, he thought. Would Elliot have inferred this much? Yes, he decided. Elliot had been so smart. The old grief seized him in its claws. “So who told her to open all the doors for me?” he asked harshly.

“Guess.”

“The Web corporations that are putting up the money.” Anton forced a smile. “It’s a very good idea to be nice to me.”

“Why?” Jonah sounded curious. “I watched all your stuff, you know. You’re not like a lot of people who do news stories. You don’t make it up. You just take boring stuff about stupid greedy people and make it sound a lot more exciting than it is.”

“Gee, thanks,” Anton murmured.

“We’re not faking anything.”

Watch, he’d said, not participate. The second choice was the idiom of the day. Interesting. “If you’re not faking anything then Ms. Li has nothing to be afraid of.” He walked over to the edge of the pool and sat down. “So tell me about yourself.”

“Me?” Jonah had sunk to his dorsal fin in the water. Now he bobbed slowly up and down so that thick, sluggish waves slopped against the rim of the pool. “Why me?”

“Because you’re the most interesting person in the place.” Anton pulled off his boots, rolled up his pants and stuck his feet into the cool water. “How cold is Jupiter going to be?”

“Where I’m going to swim, you mean?” Jonah’s voice brightened. “It’s pretty warm—about ten degrees centigrade. There’s water—although its ammoniated. Stuff could live there. Bacteria. Maybe more complex stuff.” He paused, and Anton heard evasion in that silence.

“Your first probe didn’t find any evidence of life,” he said carefully.

“Did your homework, huh?” Another pause. “It . . . didn’t, but we did some computer extrapolations. From some fragments of data that the probe sent back just before it was . . . destroyed. It could all be wrong.”

This was the tone Elliot had used when he didn’t want to lie, but he didn’t want to admit something either. “What kind of extrapolations?” Anton drew a slow breath. “If you tell me, I won’t put what you say online.”

Jonah was silent for a moment. “We’re just making it all up,” he said at last.

His caution reminded Anton of Li’s tone the day before. What weren’t they telling, here? Anton leaned back, so that Jonah’s sleek silvery body was entirely in his vision-field. “What destroyed the first probe?”

“Turbulence,” Jonah said calmly. “They don’t really figure that I’ll last all that long. But I’m going to surprise them.” He slopped another wave across Anton’s wet pants. “I’m good. I’m better than they think—even Sandy.” Pride hummed in his words, banishing all sense of evasion. “You just wait. I’ll show them everything.”

“I bet you will,” Anton said and thought, I can’t stand this. He turned off the recording feature. “I had a son once.” He looked into that eyeless face. “You would have liked him.” Face it, he thought bitterly. Face how you feel about this . . . kid. AI. Space probe.

“You talk like he’s dead.” Jonah lay still in the water.

“Yes.” Anton exhaled, moving his feet slowly in the cool water. “He caught Santorres.”

“I’m sorry. There’s a good vaccine for it now.”

“I know.” Anton felt a sudden pressure against his slowly numbing feet. Jonah had nudged him gently. Anton reached down and laid a hand on the his wet cold back. To his surprise, the silvery material gave slightly beneath his palm. “You remind me of Elliot,” he said. There. Out loud now. Face it.

For several moments Jonah was silent, then he lifted his blind fish head from the water. “Maybe I could show you where I’m going to go,” he said.

“I’d . . . like that.” Anton blinked as a red star began to pulse in the upper right corner of his vision field. Urgent relay from one of his sources. “Accept,” he murmured.

“You owe me.” A black-sun icon flashed against the backdrop of the diving pool. It was The Rev—the most talented of his hacker-informants. “I made the Jovan thing solid for you,” The Rev’s voice whispered over Anton’s implant. “Their money goes through a bunch of small intermediary firms in the Web, but I nailed the source. I dumped it into your secure filespace.” He chuckled. “I scored, man.”

“The punchline?” Anton murmured. “Whose money is it?”

“Europa AM. They need to lose a little cash this year. Temporarily anyway. Hey—you work for WorldNews. Their stock is down on the Exchange. You gonna rescue them with this Jovan thing?”

“Don’t I always,” Anton drawled.

“Tough shit for Jovan, huh?”

“They’re a scam,” Anton said, but The Rev’s icon had already vanished.

So Europa AM was using Jovan as a money-sink. A huge and powerful corporation with tentacles woven all through the economic Web, they were surely recouping that money as it surfaced elsewhere—all nice and clean now. All it would require was a minimum of cooperation from Jovan. And The Rev had dumped proof of that cooperation into Anton’s secure file.

“You’re wearing a bio-interface,” Jonah said.

“Huh?” Anton glanced down, his thoughts scattering. “Yes, I do,” he said cautiously.

“Cool.” Jonah reared up in the water so that they were on a level. “Nobody here wears one. It’s xenophobia. As if you could turn someone into a machine just by doing a direct brain interface.”

Anton smelled sea and a hint of something else. Ozone? Plastic?

“It makes you more like me.” Jonah sank slowly and gently back into the water. “I like that,” he said with a grin in his voice. “Quicker, you know? Sandy’s interface is so clunky. Come on,” he said in a conspiratorial tone. “I’ll show you Jupiter. I can hack your bio-access in about two seconds, but we’ve got to hurry. The meeting’ll be over soon. I’ll meet you in the sim lab, okay?”

Anton didn’t really want to do this. He heard Elliot every time Jonah opened his mouth, and this was not a healthy state of mind. But something was odd here, and he had a feeling that it was connected to those sims. Anton approached the sim lab, wondering if his chip would really open the door for him.

Hoping it would save him? He let his breath out in a rush as the door slid obediently aside. So much for salvation. Suppressing a sigh he walked into a standard VR cubicle. It had blank white walls—except for the open pool in the center of the room. Jonah was already waiting for him, slopping small impatient wavelets onto the composite floor.

Anton wondered if everyone wore boots around here.

“You got a full bio-face direct-linked into your skins, right?” Jonah sounded preoccupied. “Just a minute. I should be able to hack in through our system . . . got you!”

The room shimmered and vanished. Anton staggered as pale buff padding appeared centimeters from his nose. In a burst of claustrophobic reaction he pushed himself backward, bumped hard into the lab’s invisible wall. In virtual, he was lying in a padded, coffin sized space. Virtual, he reminded himself, and his spike of panic subsided somewhat. “Where are we?” he asked through gritted teeth.

“In my pod.” Jonah’s voice came over his implanted com-link. “I don’t get released until we’re down into the atmosphere. Too much radiation up high. Just relax. You’re ghosting me—I’m actually navigating the virtual—you’re just along for the ride. So you can’t do anything on your own. Here we go.” His voice went boyish and excited again.

The padded womb that held Anton split open suddenly and an invisible hand propelled him forcefully into bright light. None too soon, he thought grimly, and tried to look back. Nothing happened. Nothing happened when he waved his arms. He let them fall limp to his sides, and simply looked. Wisps of white cloud streaked the incredibly blue sky and a sliver of moon hung above the horizon. An Arizona sky, he thought and turned his gaze downward.

No. Not Arizona. Salmon, orange, rose, yellow, and pink clouds formed a twisted landscape of canyons and ridges, twisted into spiraled whorls, pierced here and there by towering mounds of white cloud. The bulbous whale shape he had seen in the boathouse drifted along beside him, fins and tail propelling it with easy grace. Jonah? They were descending rapidly into a shadowed canyon between two spirals of rose and salmon colored cloud. “What are they made of?” Anton gasped. “My God.”

“Hydrogen sulfides and ammonia crystals. The white clouds are pure ammonia.” Jonah sounded preoccupied. “We’ve got to watch out for turbulence.” The whale veered left and Anton found himself following.

I’m a fish, he thought. Not an ocean fish but a gas fish. He laughed. “It’s beautiful. Look—those clouds remind me of thunderstorms.” Anton found his view shifting until he was focusing on one of the towering structures that mushroomed up through the pink layer.

“They’re not. They’re updraft storms that come from way down and can take you up here like a runaway elevator. You can go from 10 degrees centigrade to minus 230 in no time flat. That’s why people said life probably hadn’t evolved on Jupiter.” His voice lowered conspiratorially. “They were wrong.”

“Not according to the data your probe sent back.”

“Yeah, well, right at the end I . . . it . . . sent some more data. The stuff I told you was garbled. The hardware was getting trashed and the . . . probe was dying.” He fell briefly silent. “If you really work at it, you can fill in the blanks.”

He sounded defensive, as if he was continuing an argument begun in the past. Life on Jupiter? “How was the first probe lost?” Anton asked absently.

“It came apart in an updraft storm.” Jonah’s tone was flat and emotionless. “That’s what we got to watch out for. They’re not sure that this body could survive a big updraft either.”

He expected to die here. It hit Anton suddenly and hard that Elliot had had that same expectation from the very beginning. He must have overheard whispered conferences with the doctor. And he knew about Santorres. He had hidden it for a long time. Anton swallowed a lump of pain and looked down, banishing thought with Jupiter’s incredible beauty. They had almost reached the hydrogen sulfide clouds. “Is it me, or is it getting a little warmer?” Anton asked.

“It is. The virtual cues your skins to interpret temperature change. If I go too deep I really get cooked. Where we’re going it’s above freezing. It’s like this sea—at least compared to what’s up here. It’s not really liquid, you know, but close enough. I want to . . . show you something.” He sounded suddenly shy. “Just to see what you think.”

Anton tensed as the first wisps of vapor thickened around them. For a time he was blind, then the clouds thinned and he gasped. He was suspended in a misty world beneath a pink and rose sky that glowed gently overhead. They were gliding beneath the pink cloud sky, swooping and dipping like sea gulls though a universe of fog. Shapes formed and dissipated in the mist and Anton wondered if he was seeing them or if his brain was creating them out of the opalescent nothingness. “Look.” Jonah’s voice vibrated with excitement. “Over there.”

Anton looked, his vision linked to Jonah’s. And saw . . . a shape. It undulated slowly and majestically in the gale-force wind that carried them along, sparkling into visibility as it twisted. Reds, oranges, and opalescent purple glinted on its translucent surface. Anton thought of a giant bed sheet blowing in the wind—an ephemeral bedsheet woven of shimmering translucent threads. Jonah was working his fins and tail like any fish and they were getting closer to the billowing shape.

“What is that?” Anton’s eyes widened as he realized just how big that sheet was. It seemed to be a lacework of threads—millions of interwoven threads with beads of color at most of the intersections. “This wasn’t in your probe’s report,” he gasped.

“I call it a reef.” Jonah laughed, and it was so much Elliot’s laugh that Anton clenched his fists. “Other things live in it and on it, just like fish on a reef. You’ll see.”

The reef tearing, Anton noticed, shredding continuously in the wind. One piece twisted completely free, fragmenting into rags that fluttered away in the wind. A portion snagged briefly on the main mass. It seemed to stick, and the adjacent threads shimmered. “It’s reattaching,” Anton breathed.

“The other pieces might stick to other reefs,” Jonah said. “Maybe . . . that’s how they exchange information.”

“What are they made of?”

“I dunno.” Jonah’s tone was a grin again. “I’m going to find out, this time. Uh oh.” His tone changed. “Incoming!”

In an instant of unsettling disorientation, the mist world vanished. Anton swayed, regained his balance as the white walls of the VR cubicle reappeared around him. “Jupiter is . . . incredible.” He looked down at the pool, but the silvery fish shape had already sunk beneath the surface and vanished. “Thanks for taking me,” he said softly, still dazed by what he had just witnessed.

“Hey, any time.” Jonah’s voice came in over his implant, bright with that note of shared conspiracy again. “I better beat it. I’m supposed to be working through some tests. Nice hardware you got. Later.”

“Later,” Anton said, and thought lonely kid.

He wasn’t a kid. Anton turned to face Sandra Li as she hurried through the door.

“Mr. Kraj.” She smiled warily at him. “I’m sorry I was unavailable. I didn’t expect you here so early. I hope you weren’t bored.” She glanced at the pool. “It’s boring to watch somebody else doing virtual. Jonah should have loaned you goggles at least.”

“He didn’t have to.” He was curious about her reaction. “I’m better equipped than you might think.”

“Lenses? Bio-interface?” A shadow of revulsion flitted across her face. “You’re braver than me, to let someone poke around in your brain. I suppose, in your business, it’s worth the risk. So.” She put a smile back onto her face. “Did he show you his Jupiter? Or ours?”

“He showed me reefs.” He watched her closely for a reaction. “You folks never mentioned them.”

“They don’t exist.” Only a brief tightening of her lips suggested any reaction. “Don’t forget that you’re dealing with a thirteen year old kid, Mr. Kraj. With a child’s need to fantasize.”

“There are no reefs then?” He smiled. “I can quote you?”

She shrugged. “The first probe transmitted the entire contents of its memory as it was being destroyed. It was an emergency protocol designed to give us a copy of everything—but the transmission was badly garbled.” She finally looked away. “Jonah has spent a lot of time with that data. If you run it through enough enhancement protocols you can extrapolate almost anything. Could you just leave the reefs out of your . . . story?” Above her casual smile, her eyes were anxious. “They’re Jonah’s fantasy. His imaginary friends. That’s all.”

“So there is no life on Jupiter?” he persisted.

“We . . . can’t say that for sure.” She flushed. “What are you getting at?”

“I’m not sure,” he said and they smiled at each other politely. “Tell me about your funding,” he said as she ushered him out of the boat house. “I’m curious.”

“Our tax records are in a public-access database.” She raised an eyebrow. “What are you really asking me, Mr. Kraj? Can we stop playing games, please?”

“There are some cash-flow brokerages that are . . . shall we say . . . unscrupulous. Fate seems to smile on them. A border war benefits arms sales. A new rice virus causes local famine and boosts commodities prices in one country and ag technology prices in another. They make money. They are a very good investment,” he mused. “If you don’t mind the cost in human suffering.”

“I would like to end this.” Li stopped in the middle of the path and faced him. “You are implying that one such unethical firm has funded us. I would appreciate it if you would give your vague accusations a name, please.”

“Europa AM.” He watched her face closely.

“I asked you to end the game.” She didn’t quite meet his eyes. “You know that we are not funded by Europa.” She shrugged and began walking briskly up the main path. “If someone said that we are, then you should find a more reliable source of information. You may tarnish your reputation for being right, Mr. Kraj.”

She was lying. “Perhaps.” Anton didn’t try to keep up with her brisk angry stride. He turned on his recording feature and got a good take of the old resort building emerging from the coastal shrubbery. The swimming pool had been maintained, and a couple of employees were sunning themselves on towels. He could make this place look like a huge luxurious scam with very little editing.

“I’m sorry for losing my temper.” She waited for him at the top of the path. “Can I offer you lunch? Our cafeteria is quite good.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I do have some more questions for you.” He followed her into the resort’s old restaurant—now a staff cafeteria. This early, they pretty much had the room to themselves. A small buffet offered salad makings and two soups, along with breads that smelled fresh.

“We’re a boost to the local economy.” She smiled crookedly as she arranged sushi around a mound of marinated vegetables. “There wasn’t much local economy left, after the resort closed. Mr. Kraj, we are an entertainment-oriented society. Science has to be sexy, or it gets no money. Unless it is backed by commercial money, and then it has to make money.” She faced him, clutching her plate like a shield. “We’re forgetting how to look to the future—to wonder. We’re only concerned with the moment.”

“Is this tirade directed a me personally, or the media as a whole?” Anton selected a slice of tomato, added it to his plate. “Why should anyone pay to satisfy your curiosity about Jupiter?”

“My curiosity?” Li closed her eyes briefly. “Doesn’t anyone else want to know? Does it have to make money or boost some media company’s stock on the Exchange? Yes, I know it does.” She marched stiffly to an empty table. “Maybe this race has already dead-ended.”

“I doubt it.” Anton seated himself across from her. “Where did you get Jonah’s human overlay?”

“We purchased the virtual recordings from a broker.” She blinked. “You’re welcome to look at the invoice, but the donor’s name isn’t on it. What does this have to do with Europa AM?”

“Nothing.” Anton pulled his notebook from his pocket, laid it beside his untouched salad and opened his atrium. “I’d like to see that invoice, please.”

For a moment Li stared at him, her lips tight. “Excuse me.” She rose, picked up his notebook, and carried it over to the wall. Plugging it into a dataport, she touched keys for a few moments, then unplugged it and brought it back. “I downloaded it into your atrium.” She set the notebook down on the table with a small click and glanced at her watch.

“Another meeting?” He raised an eyebrow.

“A sim session with Jonah. Our version, not his.” She picked up her tray, then stood still, staring down at Anton. “Have you ever faced a difficult decision about something you believed in?” she asked quietly. “Or do you believe in anything at all?”

“I believe in truth,” he said, but she was already carrying her tray to the kitchen.

So the shimmering reef was Jonah’s fantasy. Or perhaps it was his hope. Anton accessed his atrium and stared at his plate as the images appeared on his lenses. New data, he subvocalized, and an invoice appeared, black letters floating in a sea of blue. Jovan Corporation had purchased rights to certain bio-medical records from a broker, who had purchased them from a private hospital.

The patient’s name was not part of the contract.

The hospital was the one in which Elliot had died.

Endit. The letters vanished. He realized that he had clenched his hands into fists, and opened them slowly. He picked up his tray, carried it to the kitchen window, and set it down beside Li’s untouched food. We are not doing justice to the local resources, he thought as he set the tray down.

“I’m not certain that I understand your complaint,” the hospital administrator said politely. He looked down at the surface of his teak desk, sitting straight but relaxed in his tastefully decorated virtual office. “You sold us various organs, clone rights for several cell types, and you released any claim to recorded test results. The contract was standard and legal. It was signed and retina-printed by you in the presence of our in-house notary.”

“I have my own copy of the contract.” Anton clenched his teeth. “I know that I waived my claim to test results.” He had tried to remember them all—biochemistry, EEG, EKG, various scans of organs, brain, tissues. Nothing that would give a space probe his son’s personality. “I’m asking about the virtual interactives that Elliot spent time with. Those were not tests.” He leaned forward, wanting to grab the man by the shoulders and shake him. How would the virtual react if he did? “The interactives were entertainment, not treatment.” Although the doctor had suggested it. He said they got less depression and consequent suppression of the immune system if paralyzed patients could at least move in virtual. “They were my gift to Elliot.” They had dived together, hiked, and climbed mountains. “Did you record my son’s virtual time?”

“There’s no need to get angry, Mr. Kraj,” the administrator soothed.

“I want to know if the interactives were recorded.” Anton uttered each word slowly and clearly. This conversation was like trying to wade through mud. “That’s all.” They had to have been recorded. That was the only way someone would have enough input about Elliot to create someone who laughed like he had, who said things Elliot would have said. People had watched the two of them play, had listened to them talk. Anton drew a slow deep breath, trying to calm himself.

“I’m sorry.” The administrator said stiffly. “I see no reason to access our files at your demand.”

“I’m his father. His legal guardian.”

“You released all rights to your son’s test results. You were paid for that release. That is the end of the matter. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

“Go to hell. Exit.” Anton pulled off his skinthin gloves as his room reappeared. He put his head down on his desk wanting to pound on it with his fists until the fake wood cracked and broke. Or his fists did.

“You have a visitor,” his House system announced. “Your neighbor, Cam.”

“I’m not home. House, cancel that.” He sighed. “Let him in.” He hadn’t decided if he liked his neighbor or not, but right now any distraction was welcome.

“I’m glad you were home. I want to celebrate with someone.” Grinning, Cam waved a champagne bottle and twin glasses at him. “Real California vintage. Sonoma Valley. Drip irrigated with one hundred percent fresh water and hand-picked.”

“What happened?” Anton straightened, and tossed his gloves onto his desk.

“I filled this tough contract.” Cam laughed as the cork popped and bounced off the ceiling. “Even I had my doubts about whether I could do it. I’d say I’m even better than I think, but actually, I was just lucky.” He handed Anton a tulip-shaped glass of pale wine. “Cheers.” The glasses chimed faintly as they touched.

“Congratulations.” Anton lifted his glass and sipped.

“What’s wrong?” Cam perched on the corner of Anton’s desk. “I’m not so full of myself that I’m totally blind. Did you get kicked off your story?”

“Nobody kicks me off a story.” Anton’s lips twisted. “A very polite hospital administrator just told me that my son’s medical records were none of my business.”

“Oh yeah. Hospitals.” Cam drank wine and rolled his eyes. “They figure they own your soul as well as your body.”

Anton winced.

“I like you. I really like your online stuff. You go for blood and you don’t fool around.” Cam stared into his wine, one foot swinging idly. “Do you ever use uh . . . illegally obtained information?” he asked after awhile.

“Hacked, you mean?” Anton studied him. “If I did, I certainly wouldn’t admit it to anyone.”

“Yeah.” Cam swirled the wine in his glass. “Let’s just say I might . . . be able to get a copy of those records for you.” He gave Anton a cautious sideways glance. “Maybe. And maybe not.”

Anton sipped his own wine. This could be a set-up. There were certainly plenty of people who had reason to nail him. Cam had never felt quite right to him. He was careful never to ask about the source of his informants’ information. Penalties for illegal entry into private dataspace were very high, and ignorance was a shaky defense at best. But he was good at smelling a trap. “I’d like to get hold of those records,” he said cautiously. “I’d be very indebted.” He studied the tiny bubbles rising in his glass.

“If I find anything out, it’s a gift.” Can leaned over to touch the rim of his glass to Anton’s. “Because you’re good at what you do.”

“Thanks.” Anton let Cam refill his glass and suppressed a brief twinge of uneasiness.

He didn’t want to talk to Jonah any more, but if he was going to gut Jovan in the end, Jonah was their weakest point. The rest of the staff presented a united and unanimously uninformative front. With the right slant he could turn the probe-AI into an exploited child slave, or a monster. Whichever worked best. Jonah was the hook that would land him his audience and boost NewsNet’s stock out of its current slump. For at least a week, anyway.

Business. So why the hell did he feel guilty?

“I’m glad you’re spending time with Jonah.” Sandra Li nodded from behind her desk. Gray light from the overcast day cast shadows beneath her eyes, as if she wasn’t sleeping well. “He likes you.”

“He’s an AI,” Anton said.

“Yes.” Li turned to look out her window at the gray convergence of sea and sky. “He is, isn’t he?”

Then she suggested that he go swim with Jonah. Which was what Anton had intended to ask, but he had expected her to balk. She had let him sit in on one of their training sims, too. No reefs in her version, but she had given him quite a tour. Anton pondered the change in her behavior as he walked down to the boathouse. Before, she had been helpful because someone had ordered her to be helpful. He wondered what lay beneath her gracious invitations. Something. She was neither naive nor stupid, and she knew he was on to them. There was no doubt that Europa AM was slipping money through the convenient economic wormhole of Jovan Corporation, even if it would be difficult to prove in court. Sandra Li, director, knew it.

A chilling possibility occurred to Anton as he walked into the cavernous boat house. Accidents could happen out in the ocean. Was she that desperate? A coveralled technician sat cross-legged beside the diving pool, a notebook on his lap. “Hi.” He smiled, polite but wary. “If you’re looking for Jonah, he’s just finishing a test sequence. Five minutes, okay?”

“Ask him if he wants to take me swimming, will you?” Anton looked over the technician’s shoulder as the man relayed his question to Jonah. He focused his cameras on the screen, even though the numbers meant nothing to him. Scientific ambience.

“Sure I’ll take you swimming.” Jonah’s voice sounded in his ear. “You could have asked me yourself, you know. Just access fish and you’ll get me. I set it up when I hacked you into the sim.”

“He says he’d be glad to take you swimming.” The technician touched his laptop screen and the numbers winked out.

“What’s it like working with him?” Anton asked curiously.

“With Jonah?” The technician smiled at the empty pool. “Sometimes you forget he’s not a kid. And then he does a whole string of stress calculations, or figures something out long before you do, and you remember what he really is. Jonah does have quite a sense of humor.” His grin widened. “I do most of the undersea testing with him, and he’s really gotten me good a couple of times. I’m all done here. SCUBA gear is in that locker.” He nodded. “Need any help?”

“Thanks, I’ll manage.” Anton watched as the technician tucked the notebook into his coverall and left. He was friendlier than most of the people here. “Can I buy you a beer some afternoon?” he asked. “I’d like to get a feel for the project and for Jonah—through your perspective.”

“Sure, I guess.” The technician was trying to sound nonchalant, but he was pleased. “Hey, I’ve always wanted to be famous.”

Him and everybody. “Great.” Anton clasped his hand briefly.

“I’m Denny O’Shea.”

“I look you up.” Anton headed for the gear locker. Maybe he had finally found his crack in the staff’s united front of silence. Anton plugged a new hard-data sphere into his skinthins and inspected the scuba gear. The racked tanks were light—cutting edge bio-rebreathers, he noted. His skinthins were waterproof, so he left them on as he donned a lightweight wetsuit.

“You don’t really need to interview Denny, do you?” Jonah’s voice sounded in his ear. “I turned off the sound on the Security monitors for the room so you can talk,” he said cheerfully.

“Well, no I don’t really think I can use an interview with Denny.” Anton found himself unexpectedly reluctant to lie to Jonah. “But I might. You never know. So don’t tell him, okay?”

“I won’t.” Jonah sounded thoughtful. “He would be hurt. Thanks for going swimming with me.”

“Like I said—you’re the most interesting person here. And the smartest,” Anton said, hearing that echo of loneliness again. “Do they know that you’ve hacked their security to pieces?”

“Nah.” Jonah’s sheepish tone made Anton smile. “I don’t do anything. It was a challenge, you know? Well, I did do a little bit, I guess.” His sheepish tone intensified. “I hid you an access, and I fixed your chip.”

“My chip?” Anton donned his breather mask and carried his fins over to the pool.

“It was only supposed to work when Sandy keyed you in. And some places were locked off. Like the sim lab. She guessed when she found you there, but she didn’t say anything to me.” Jonah surfaced, water running down his silvery back. “You can go anywhere anytime, now.”

“You won’t get in trouble?” Anton asked, and realized that he was really worrying. A.I. Not kid. Not son. He let his breath out slowly. “What’s it like for you, here?” Anton checked to make sure that his headband was in place and that he was still in record mode.

“It’s fine.” Jonah sank slowly beneath the surface. “I run a lot of tests in the water. This body has some modifications so that it feels pretty much like the body I’ll be wearing on Jupiter. We even found a good offshore rip that is a little like the wind I’ll be riding.”

The body I’ll be wearing, he had said. As if the soul could be decanted from one container to the other. As if he was software, Anton reminded himself wryly. Jonah wasn’t confused about his identity. He submerged, pressure squeezing his ears until he swallowed and they popped. The white-noise whisper of underwater filled his head.

He loved to dive. It was as close to flying as you could get as a land bound mammal. He had taught Elliot, and Elliot had loved it, too. He swallowed, and concentrated on following Jonah’s sleek silhouette. They went out along the edge of the cove, staying inside its protective arms. Sea anemones bloomed along the rocky underwater slopes, salmon and rose—the colors of Jupiter’s hydrogen sulfide cloud layer.

“Do you know that tube worms live in volcanic vents?” Jonah’s tone was thoughtful. “Life is really adaptable. I bet there are all kinds of creatures living in Jupiter’s layers. Maybe even . . . intelligent species.”

“Maybe.” Anton swam up beside Jonah, hearing a kid’s dreams in his voice. “Then you’ll be more famous online than me, even.”

“Yeah.” Jonah angled downward toward the base of a coral pillar. “Look, a ray.” A slender arm emerged from Jonah’s belly, and he prodded the sand with a three-fingered hand. The ray erupted in a cloud of silt, flapping away to settle sullenly to the bottom once again. “That would be a good design for Jupiter’s gas sea,” he said casually.

“Jovian rays would have to be a lot more solid than those reef creatures you showed me.”

“Gas rays,” Jonah said. “They could be more solid. They could even be intelligent.”

“Gas rays.” Anton caught hold of Jonah’s dorsal fin, let Jonah pull him through the water. “You think they’re there, too, don’t you?” he asked softly. “Intelligent rays?”

“Didn’t Sandy tell you?” Jonah’s tone was flat. “They’re an illusion of computer manipulation.”

“She told me,” Anton said softly. “Are they there?”

“Yes.” Jonah speeded up. “I’m going to give them real proof this time—solid proof.”

I’m going to get well, Elliot had said in that same tone. Brief guilt pierced Anton. If he exposed Jovan for the fraud it was, then Jonah wouldn’t get to go. But if Jovan was the scam that he suspected, then they would probably fail to actually launch the project anyway. Or they might abort the project and leave Jonah cut off and stranded.

“If I was straight software, I wouldn’t care,” Jonah said thoughtfully. “Sometimes I wish . . . ” He fell briefly silent. “Want to see a neat place I found?” he asked abruptly. “It’s a reef where some of the corals mutated. They formed these really neat spires.”

“Show me,” Anton said. What do you wish? he wondered. That you didn’t have to care? Me, too, he thought bitterly. “I saw some mutated corals down off the coast of Mexico once.”

They went and looked at the beautiful coral garden, and they raced across the cove. (Anton lost, even though he suspected that Jonah was holding back). Jonah showed him his favorite places—the private gardens of a lonely child. And Anton rode the watery rollercoaster of the offshore currents, clinging to Jonah’s dorsal fin.

They explored the whole cove, equally excited by small finds of dark purple urchins, a rare type of whelk. It was fun. “Do you remember that time on the Barrier Reef?” Anton asked, as he crawled exhausted out of the water. And with a clench of fear, realized what he had just said. “Never mind.” He pulled his mask off and busied himself with disconnecting his rebreather. “I’m tired.”

“Okay.” Jonah floated in the pool, motionless as a dead log. “You coming back tomorrow?”

“I . . . I don’t know.” Anton didn’t look at him. “I . . . might have to work on another piece.”

“Yeah.” Jonah sank like a stone. “Sure.”

“Wait,” Anton said, but he got no answer.

He was still recording. “Endit,” he subvocalized. “Delete all.” The whole day. All of it.

Are you sure? his system voice whispered through his implant. Really sure?

“I am not sure of anything anymore.” He stood, his muscles shaky because he hadn’t dived for a long time, carried the equipment back to its rack. “I’m not sure of one damn thing.” “Cancel delete.” He banged the rebreather onto its rack.

The windows of the main hall were open. He heard laughter and smelled coffee. He had meant to interview some of the staff today, but he had connected with O’Shea. And their polite wariness would feel like an accusation. You are going to kill Jonah’s dreams. No, Anton thought angrily. You are.

In the end, Jonah would still lose. Someone always did.

His anger tasted sour in his mouth, like old ashes.

He stopped in at a public clinic on his way home. One was much like another. The pictures on reception-room walls varied, but that was about all. “How may I direct you?” asked the flesh-and-blood receptionist. “General medicine?”

“Psychiatric,” Anton said and handed the man his card.

“Follow the purple line.” The receptionist zipped his card through a reader and handed it back with a professional smile. “Have a nice day.”

Anton grunted. A line of purple light appeared at his feet. It led through a door and he followed it down a wide hallway, past unmarked doors that concealed diagnostic cubicles with their sick, or anxious, or depressed occupants. Bland, gentle music played in the background and the air smelled faintly of flowers. The private hospital where Elliot had dreamed and died had been even prettier—with holographic windows full of scenic views and gourmet food.

And when it was all over, you were left with your grief and the bills. And they devoured the body and soul of the loved one you lost. The purple light-line ended at one of the ivory-colored doors. Anton opened it, walked through and sat down in the padded recliner before the room could invite him to do so.

“Hello, Anton.” A man shimmered to life beside the couch, seated and relaxed in a matching chair. “What’s troubling you today?’

He always got a male holo. Anton wondered what it was in his personal file that prompted male images only. “I’ve seen a ghost,” he said.

“A ghost, really?” The holo-doctor leaned forward, his expression interested. “Where?”

At Jovan, he would say, and then the doctor-protocol would ask him if it was someone he had known, and then it would ask him how he felt about that person’s death, and . . .

I have found my son and he is as unreal as you. Only I am having trouble remembering that.

“So where did you see this ghost?” the doctor-image prompted gently. Warmly.

“I didn’t.” Anton got up. “I saw a fish. There are no such things as ghosts.”

“Sit down and relax, Anton. There’s no hurry. Tell me about this fish.”

Anton closed the door behind him. The purple light had vanished, but he had no trouble finding his way back to the reception area. The receptionist looked up from his screen, his young face indifferent behind his professional smile. “Have a nice day,” he said.

His rented apartment looked unfamiliar when he opened the door. He stood on the threshold trying to remember other apartments, details of upholstery or color scheme or layout. Remembered only rooms, beds, tables set with microwave meals. All that remained were the stories—the editing, the careful scene choice that gave the piece its emotional shading. And he wondered suddenly if he was any more human than Jonah.

“Yo, Anton. I thought I heard the elevator.”

Anton looked over his shoulder. Cam was grinning. “You got it,” Anton said softly. A crystal of ice began to form in his gut. “Come in.” He ushered Cam inside. “Let me have it.” He leaned his back against the door, as if Cam might try to bolt.

“Yes, I got it.” Still grinning, Cam pulled a hard-data sphere from his pocket, tossed it lightly on his palm. “They sure ran a lot of tests on your kid.”

“Santorres was new and interesting.” Anton plucked the sphere from Cam’s palm, walked over to his desk and socketed it into his terminal.

“It’ll come up as a list.” Cam looked over his shoulder. “You want details, you can window in to that particular test. I lifted it all—the doctors’ log, and everything. Just for good measure. Man, it was some job. They got good security there.”

“I imagine they do.” Anton pulled on gloves. All private hospitals had tight security. They wouldn’t attract clients, otherwise. “I’m impressed. Ah.” The syllable was in between groan and sigh.

He had known they would be there—recordings of those virtual afternoons. But seeing them listed with blood pressure, urinalysis, CAT scans—it hit him hard. Virtual Interactives—the filename was there in damning black letters. Anton touched the capital V, and blinked as he found himself donning scuba gear on a rocky shore.

“I can’t wait to get out there.” Elliot wiped his mask with an anti-fog cloth. “Let’s do that one reef—the one with all the anemones. Dad?” He looked up at Anton, his eyes wide in his tan, healthy face. “I forget sometimes, when we’re diving like this. Maybe it’s easier to let virtual be real if you don’t have a future. I know I’m not going to get better. You don’t have to pretend for me, Dad.”

“Endit.” Anton closed his eyes. The hospital had sold this moment. Strangers had watched. Maybe they had snickered. Slow hot anger flushed his skin.

“Bad news?” Cam asked.

Anton blinked at him. “Tell me what I owe you for this,” he grated. “Whatever you want.”

“I said it was a gift.” Cam shook his head as he got to his feet. “I’m glad I could help, but it looks as if I brought you a bunch of grief. If there’s anything more I can do . . . ”

Anton shook his head. “Thanks,” he whispered. “Thanks a lot.”

“Sure.” Cam paused in the doorway. “I’ve got a bottle of really good Napoleon brandy on my shelf,” he said. “Knock on my door any time.” He lifted a hand and left.

Anton drew two slow calming breaths as the door closed behind Cam, then turned back to the terminal. His legs ached from the unaccustomed exercise of swimming. He hesitated, remembering Jonah’s voice as he talked about Jupiter. Jonah. Elliot. Prototype. Stolen soul. Anton pulled his gloves back on. “Fish.” He blinked as the room shimmered and vanished.

He had expected some kind of atrium. Instead he found himself skimming through opalescent mist beneath a pink sky. Some distance ahead, Jonah swam gracefully through Jupiter’s ammoniated gas-sea, twisting in and out between the frail wind-borne reefs. Apparently Jonah hadn’t yet realized that Anton had dropped into ghost mode. Anton opened his mouth to speak, closed it as Jonah swooped upward and rolled, obviously playing, enjoying himself. Playing, the way Elliot had played among the virtual corals of Earth’s sea. Anton swallowed, gathering the words to speak, to tell Jonah . . . what?

Without warning, the opalescent mist-sea erupted. A pillar of cloud burst skyward. The rose and gold hydrogen sulfide ceiling seemed to shrink from the contact, opening like a wound as the ugly column pierced it. A hapless reef was sucked into the churning vapor, shredding away into fragments that swirled and vanished in the turbulence. Jonah had turned to flee. His thick tail churned, huge flukes fanning desperately, fins working. But he was made to ride the wind, not defeat it. He slid tail first toward the column.

“Jonah!” Anton yelled. A finger of cloud curled around him, and for an agonized instant he seemed to hold his own against the storm. Then, in horrible slow motion, a fin tore away, then part of his fluke. Writhing as if in agony, Jonah disintegrated, ripped slowly to pieces by the invisible claws of the wind. A shrill terrible scream echoed through Anton’s skull, and he screamed with it, a hoarse, riven cry of horror.

Then he was back in his room. Panting, he stared down at his hands, at the red marks his nails had left on his palms. “Jonah,” he whispered.

A dream, he told himself. It was an electronic dream, a simulation, no more real than his dives with the paralyzed Elliot.

The reality waited on Jupiter. A roomful of technicians would record Jonah’s dying screams as he was torn apart, frozen, burned, and crushed by the gas giant. They would observe and analyze the same way they had observed and analyzed Elliot’s dive. You don’t have to pretend for me, Dad . . . Anton closed his eyes and shuddered. Jonah was only a prototype. A machine. They were entitled to observe. Breathing through his mouth, Anton entered his Office. “Access Legal Aide,” he said harshly. “I want to sue for illegal use of my son’s private records.”

Anton was more than a little surprised that Jovan’s security let him through the gate at the cove’s entrance. A storm was moving in and coveralled men and woman hurried past, heads bent against the gusts. The wind carried sand, scouring the exposed skin of Anton’s face, and the Jovan employees stared at him with open hostility. They knew about his suit. Invasion of privacy, the lawyer had informed him. We will sue for that, and for breach of contract. Anton stood in front of the reception screen in the entry that was still decorated in oceanfront resort style, half expecting to get an icon and a polite message telling him that Ms. Li was permanently busy.

“You.” She stared at him from the screen. “I never thought you’d have the nerve . . . Oh yes, I do want to talk to you, Mr. Anton Kraj.” The screen went blank.

A green light-line winked on in the floor. He followed it to the ocean side of the building, and into a small, bright office. Orchids bloomed in the windows, filling the room with a humid tropical scent. “I can’t believe you did this.” Stiffly upright behind her desk, Li tapped a sheet of hardcopy with one fingernail. “I would like to hear your reasons before I have you thrown off the property.”

“Reasons?” He met her angry glare. Her skin looked as if it had been stretched tightly over the bones of her face, and her eyes were darkly shadowed. “How can you even ask? You used my son’s dying . . . our last months together . . . ” He choked, struggled for rational, civilized words. “When I held his hand, he couldn’t even close his fingers around mine. All we had were those dives together. You used all that.” His voice cracked. “You used his hope, his fear, his few moments of joy. You used it.”

“Mr. Kraj. Anton.” She leaned toward him, her eyes huge and dark in her thin face. “I am sorry. I did not know and . . . I am truly sorry. We bought those recordings in good faith. We should have checked the hospital’s release, and we didn’t. That’s our fault, yes. But we did not steal your son’s soul. Those recordings were treated with great respect. What is done is done.” She was pleading now, one hand stretched across the satiny surface of her desk. “Jonah exists. We won’t be able to use him as he is, if the court decides that we have no rights to those original files. We won’t be able to make the launch.” She looked him directly in the eyes. “He wants to go, Anton.”

“He’s an artificial intelligence.” He turned his face away. “Don’t play emotion games with me.”

“Are you really that cold?” she breathed. “You have such a reputation for finding out scams and fraud. But it’s always in the sciences. Why, Mr. Kraj? Are you punishing all of science because one small company was careless?”

“They were not careless. They were intentionally fraudulent. I’m not punishing anyone,” he said stonily.

“Bullshit.” She stood. “Security.” She raised her voice. “You may escort Mr. Kraj from the premises now.”

“Sandy?” A familiar male voice issued from invisible speakers. “We’ve got trouble. Jonah’s gone.”

“What?” Li glanced sideways at Anton. “What do you mean, gone? I told you to keep an eye on him, Denny.”

“I was.” Denny sounded miserable. “He was running the sims—his own, you know? and I went to grab a sandwich at the cafeteria because he’s always in there for at least a couple of hours. I was just gone ten minutes. When I got back, he was gone.”

“Cove security here. Brevin.” A deeper voice superimposed itself over Denny’s. “We just picked something up on its way out of the cove. It looks like Jonah’s signal.”

“It is,” Li said tightly. She pressed the heel of her hand to her temple. “Where is he heading?”

“Maybe toward The Run.” Brevin sounded doubtful. “I might be wrong. It’s hard to track him. That offshore storm is kicking up a hell of a lot of silt. And he knows not to go there, so I don’t know.”

“We can’t take any chances,” Li said tightly. “Pick me up on the dock in one minute.”

“On my way.”

“Use the big boat.” Her voice was harsh. “We might need the cradle.” She lifted her head and looked at Anton. “He’s on his way out to The Run,” she said coldly. “It’s a rocky chute between the headland and the big rocks at the cove mouth. The current is a killer when the tide has turned. And we’ve got storm surge on top of it all. The rocks could seriously damage him.”

Like the storm had torn him to pieces in the sim Anton had stumbled into? “You told him?” he asked softly.

“I didn’t, but everybody knows.” She palmed the door open, started down the hall at a fast walk. “I . . . didn’t tell him who had filed the suit. He likes you.” Her voice dripped bitterness. “He thinks you are his friend.”

And it occurred to Anton that she had wanted them to be friends, to perhaps let his friendship with Jonah become their shield. No wonder she had been so willing to let Anton play with Jonah. Nice bit of attempted manipulation.

Right now, he didn’t care. “I’m coming with you.” He caught up with her.

“Like hell.” She burst through the door at the end of the corridor.

Wind whipped Anton’s hair into his eyes as he followed. The offshore storm was building fast, whipping the cove into white-capped waves. A boat churned through the chop, engines throbbing a low note as it sidled up to the dock at the foot of the slope. Li broke into a run, her feet pounding the wooden planks. The boat was already starting to pull away from the dock as she leaped on board. They weren’t going to wait for him. Anton sprinted to the edge of the dock and leaped. He landed with centimeters to spare, tottering as the boat yawed in the chop. For a terrible instant he thought they were going to let him go over, leave him to drown or flounder back to the dock. Then hands grabbed him and hauled him onto the slippery deck.

“Take him back,” Li snapped, livid with anger. “Never mind, there isn’t time. Just stay out of our way. This is your fault.” She turned her back on him and ducked into the cabin.

The two coveralled men on deck gave him quick sullen looks. One of them followed Li into the cabin. “Look, I’m worried about him, too,” Anton said to the one who had helped him. It was Denny. “How are you going to find him?”

“We already know where he is.” Denny looked unhappy. “He’s got a locator beacon that can be activated by remote. He’s in The Run. If he gets too badly bashed up he could wreck some pretty expensive hardware.”

Suicide? Anton clung to the rail as Denny hurried away. No, he told himself. This wasn’t a moody teenage kid, this was a carefully engineered machine intelligence. It would not damage itself intentionally. The leaden sky mocked him and the clouds on the horizon reminded him of the updraft storm that had destroyed Jonah in his sim.

The overlay was an experiment, Li had told him. Maybe this was a moody kid. Maybe worse than the average moody kid. The boat bucked and rolled as the captain and angled toward the narrow channel between a rocky cliff face and a cluster of three huge rocks that jutted thirty feet above the water. The Run. Water churned white and spray exploded as storm waves thundered onto the headland. Fangs of rock gleamed wet and black between the breaking waves. The captain held the boat at the edge of the worst turbulence. It was rough. Incoming waves, driven by the approaching storm, lifted the nose of the boat from the water, then let it slam down into the following trough. Anton’s stomach clenched unhappily.

And then, as a wave receded, he caught a glint of silver almost directly below him. Or maybe it was a trick of the light. He strained his eyes, hanging on to the bucking rail, waiting for the wave to recede. There! The silver glint could be Jonah’s tail fluke. If so, he was lying on the bottom, rolling like a driftwood log in the wash of the waves. How long until he rolled onto the rocks? He blinked away a vision of Jonah rupturing in the updraft storm.

Pound on the cabin door, he thought. Tell them. But by the time he got their attention, explained, the boat would have drifted away. Or Jonah might have hit the rocks. A life-ring hung on the railing, attached to a stout rope. Anton yanked it free, and unclipped the ring from the line. The rope might be strong enough to haul Jonah up, or at least keep him here, away from the rocks. Wrapping the end of the rope about his fist, Anton kicked off his shoes and jumped into the trough between waves.

The retreating wave sucked at him, trying to drag him out to sea. He fought it, angling downward, groping for Jonah’s hull because he was blind in the silty wash. His lungs felt as if they were on fire when the knuckles of his rope hand banged something that wasn’t quite as hard as metal. Chest aching he grabbed, hung on tight as the surge tried to tear him loose. Tail, he thought in relief. Flukes . . . The sea dragged them both along the bottom and he heard the dull scrape of rocks against Jonah’s body. He fumbled the rope around Jonah’s tail just in front of the flukes. It was only as thick as his ankle. Lungs on fire, he headed for the surface.

“Anton?” Jonah’s voice exploded in his head. “What are you doing?”

Anton’s head broke the surface and he gasped, desperate for air. A wave caught him by surprise, picked him up, and tumbled him end over end. His shoulder scraped rock as a giant’s hand shoved him through the water. Then his head hit, and pain sheeted red through the darkness behind his eyes.

Swim or you drown. Old reflexes took over and he tried, but his legs moved heavily, sluggishly. His right arm was numb—an icy weight that dragged him deeper. He reached groggily for the ring on his diving vest . . . pull it, Elliot, pull the ring before you think you need to. That’s rule one on a dive.

Oh yeah, Elliot was dead, and he wasn’t diving. He was drowning.

Anton could barely feel the water at all—was floating in a gentle darkness. Then something hard bumped him with enough force that he almost yelled and drowned right there. A moment later water broke across his face and he was gasping, choking, trying to suck air into lungs that hurt like hell.

“What were you doing?” Jonah’s exasperation reverberated through his head. “You almost drowned.”

Jonah was holding him in his retractable manipulator arms, Anton realized groggily. “I was . . . trying . . . to get a rope on you.” And Jonah had saved him. The irony made him laugh, and he choked again. “Thought . . . you were in trouble,” he managed to gasp.

“I wasn’t.” Jonah sighed. “I made it through The Run easy. I was just . . . thinking. Sandy is chewing me out even as we speak,” he said a little sulkily. “I just didn’t feel like talking to anyone.”

“Why?” Anton whispered. “Why take the risk?”

“They were underestimating what I could do. I know how this prototype works better than anyone.” His voice had gone hard. “And what does it matter if I get bashed up? Some asshole filed suit against us. If he wins we won’t launch, and then I’m just a worthless piece of junk.”

An engine growl rose above the whine of the wind and the slap of the water. “I’m the asshole,” Anton said quickly. They wouldn’t let him near Jonah again. “I filed the suit.”

“You?” Jonah’s arms quivered and for an instant Anton thought he would drop him. “Why?” he asked, and the hurt in his voice made Anton close his eyes briefly.

“Li thinks it’s revenge, but it’s not.” Anton’s teeth were starting to chatter. “You’re wrong, Jonah. This program is a scam,” he said. The boat was almost on them now. “The people who are funding you don’t really care. They may yank their money any time and leave you stranded up there for good. They may want you to fail. You just don’t know, and your director doesn’t want to know. You’ll end up as a sacrifice for no good reason.” Rationalization. His own voice mocked him. That’s not why you filed the suit Anton Kraj, admit it.

Someone splashed down into the water beside them, and rough hands seized Anton. “They’ll destroy you,” he gasped. “Or Jupiter will.” Then a wet-suited figure was belting a harness around him. A winch whined, the line jerked tight, and they hauled him onto the deck like a hooked fish, shivering and dripping.

Jonah never answered him.

They escorted him from the cove—very politely and very firmly. He took an auto-cab to his tower, soaking wet, shivering in spite of the heat blasting from the vents. They had let him know—Li and the others—that he had made a total fool of himself. And that he was no longer welcome at the cove.

It was the silence in his head that hurt. And that shouldn’t matter at all, because Jonah was a machine and any echoes of Elliot were just that—programmed responses lifted from more than a thousand hours of virtual interactives. But he kept remembering what Jonah had said about the prejudice against a bio-interface. Like you could turn someone into a machine by doing a direct brain interface . . . The public believed precisely that.

So did it follow that the reverse was true? Could you turn a machine into a child? Anton zipped his card through the cab’s reader as it pulled up in front of his tower. He had answered that question for himself when he had panicked and jumped into the water.

“Have a nice day,” the auto-cab said in a sweet androgynous voice.

He changed into dry clothes, squeezed by his impersonal apartment. He had welcomed the transient life of rented space. Those rooms with their standard decor permitted no ghosts, no tricks of association to hook him back into yesterday. He had spent the last ten years living in the immediate now of a new story, a new scam to untangle, the demands of piecing a drama together from words and images.

His terminal chimed softly. “Mr. Truc is calling,” his system voice told him.

Samuel Truc was his lawyer. Anton reached for his gloves. “Access,” he said aloud, and found himself in his lawyer’s Office. The virtual room was furnished heavily in dark wood, and the small Asian Truc looked positively tiny behind the polished expanse of his huge desk.

“The judge granted our request for an injunction against further use of the interactive recordings.” Truc was smiling. “Jovan filed an immediate petition for review with the appellate court. The court declined to review. That is a good sign.” He nodded briskly. “Our suit against Sweet Mercy Hospital has not yet been scheduled, but we should hear within the week.”

Anton nodded, wanting to feel triumph. He merely felt tired. And cold. Who is the owner of a soul? he wondered bitterly. Who holds the copyright?

“I’ll contact you when the case is scheduled. I have very few doubts as to the outcome.” Truc eyed Anton, obviously waiting for some kind of reaction.

“Thank you, yes,” Anton said heavily. “I appreciate all you did.”

He exited quickly, rude, and unable to be anything else. The sterile room mocked him. Stranger’s room. Not home—never home. Home had ended with Elliot. He went out into the hall and knocked on Cam’s door. He opened it immediately and smiled.

“Ready for that brandy?” He swung the door wide.

Cam’s apartment was decorated in much the same style as Anton’s. Leased decor. Holos of adults and children in smiling, self-conscious poses cluttered the horizontal spaces, but in spite of this evidence of home and family, the room was as impersonal as Anton’s. Again, something nudged him, something to do with Cam.

At the moment, he didn’t really care. Accepting the glass of liquor Cam handed him, he dropped onto the sofa.

“To confusion.” Perched on the arm of a fabric-covered recliner, Cam lifted his glass.

“Confusion,” Anton echoed and raised the glass to his lips. The brandy burned all the way down and the fumes seemed to soak instantly into his brain.

He found himself telling Cam everything—about Elliot and Jonah, about the launch he could stop, and Jovan’s clandestine connection to Europa. “They’re using him,” he said, seeing that Cam didn’t really care, but unable to stop telling him. “Even Li is using him.” The words slurred as he tried to get his tongue around them.

“You’re doing the right thing.” Cam was sitting beside him, although Anton didn’t remember him moving from the chair. “You’re right to stop them.”

Anton tried to nod, but the brandy had short-circuited his brain and nothing worked very well. It was getting dark, and he wanted to ask Cam to turn on the lights, but he was too comfortable to make the effort of speech, and Cam agreed that he was doing the right thing. He was sleepy, and his eyes kept closing. He struggled to open them one last time, caught a glimpse of Cam’s face close to his and felt his neighbor’s fingers on his face, stroking his neck. Stop it, he tried to say, but he was too tired, and his eyes closed, and he couldn’t get them open again.

The salmon and gold light of Jupiter woke him. Anton blinked and stretched and he tilted sideways, gliding down through the opalescent mist. Ahead, a gold and orange reef drifted along on the wind. Adapted for this world, it was easy to forget that this ‘breeze’ was a good two hundred kilometers per hour. Things were flying into the reef, ducking in and out of the ever-changing folds as if they were playing tag. They reminded him of the rays he and Jonah had watched in the cove. Jonah’s gas rays, he thought and stiffened, wide awake now. The reaction stalled his forward momentum and the wind shoved at him, trying to tumble him like the waves had tumbled him in the cove.

Automatically he kicked, as if he was swimming. And moved forward. Flying. A sudden exhilaration filled him. This might be a dream, but it was fun. He stretched his arms in front of him, looked down at the articulated manipulators that appeared. He was a gas fish, like Jonah. The reef was close. He canted his body slightly, changed course to slide in a long lazy arc around a slowly twisting protrusion. This close, he could see how the reef continuously tore in the wind and continuously repaired itself. Rays scattered gracefully, and a couple of smaller ones followed him, as if they were curious. It was like diving in a current. You didn’t fight the flow. You used it to send you where you wanted to go. He looped and rolled, exhilarated. And laughed as the small rays mimicked him. “I know someone who wants to meet you,” he said, and wished that Jonah could share this dream. Swimming hard, he climbed over the top edge of the reef. The wind eroded it into a fine red-gold dust that scattered and vanished. Seeds? he wondered. Spores? A large shape moved in a fold of the billowing reef. Anton hesitated, wondering if he should flee, reminding himself that this was only a dream as the shadow bulked closer.

“Hi.” Jonah emerged into view, his flukes moving slowly and rhythmically. “I fixed the sim so that you don’t have to ghost.”

“I thought . . . I was dreaming.”

“I wanted to talk to you.” Jonah’s tone was sad. “I’m sorry about hacking you in here like this.”

“It’s okay.” Anton managed to hold his place by working his tail and side fins slowly. “I . . . I didn’t expect to hear from you again.” He groped for the words he needed, but the wind had scattered them.

“Sandy told me that . . . the overlay came from your son.” Jonah’s fins and tail moved with a ponderous grace that fit this world of wind and immensity. “You told me I reminded you of him. She said the hospital sold it without telling you.”

“Yes,” Anton said hoarsely. Above them, the reef seemed to writhe in the wind, constantly reshaped and reshaping. Like human lives, he thought, and laughed bitterly. “You do remind me of Elliot. Way too much. I should probably go in for treatment. But it doesn’t alter the fact that you’re a pawn.” Anton clenched his fist, but the gesture didn’t translate into virtual. “I still plan to stop them from using you.”

“Why?” Jonah let the wind take him, swooping gracefully away, gliding and looping like the rays who flapped, startled, out of his way.

“Because . . . I care about you.” This world demanded truth. “You have some of . . . my son’s soul. And to hell with what the theologians might say about that. I don’t . . . want you to die.” Again, he didn’t add.

For awhile Jonah was silent, and they drifted along on the wind beneath a rose and gold ceiling of hydrogen sulfide, bejeweled with droplets of ammoniated dew. Beautiful, Anton thought. This world is beautiful.

“If you win your suit,” Jonah said at last. “What will happen to me?”

“I . . . ” Anton swallowed. “I could offer Ms. Li a release to use Elliot’s records. With the condition that you remain on Earth.”

“I don’t belong on Earth.” Jonah banked away from Anton, propelling himself with powerful sweeps of his tail. “You don’t understand, Anton.”

“You will die here,” Anton said harshly.

“You said that. You can die on the street. Or in bed.” He drifted on the wind, silhouetted against the pink sky. Two blood red rays spiraled around him in widening arcs. “Sandy thinks this is illusion—my fantasy extrapolated from the bits of data we salvaged from the first probe.” Jonah’s voice was sad in his head. “The first probe wasn’t overlaid with a personality, but it was pretty complex—cutting edge of the last generation of organic cores. It . . . I . . . talked to the rays. Not in words, you know. It happened after I was damaged—before the system shut down. It didn’t come through in any form they could understand in the data dump. So they thought it was noise. They used that probe’s transmissions to create me—like they used Elliot’s dives.” He drifted gently down to Anton’s level again. “I remember them, too.” Floating, nose to nose with Anton, he bumped him very gently. “I’m as much them as I am Elliot, Anton. I belong here.”

Communication. Anton’s mind reeled. First contact. Alien sentience.

“If you keep me on Earth, I still won’t be Elliot. I want to go home, Anton.”

Home. The word struck him like a fist. “Exit,” Anton whispered, sliding down the Jovian wind. “Exit, please.”

He woke in his own bed, blinking away fractured visions of pink clouds and Cam’s smiling face close to his own. Dreams, he thought, struggling out of bed. Drunken dreams. He held his head in his hands, waiting out the fierce pulse of pain at the base of his skull. Hangover? Alcohol was not his thing, and the brandy had hit him hard last night. He remembered Cam’s hands on him just as he passed out, and rubbed his face with a scowl. Wrong idea, Cam. His fingers paused as they encountered a small soreness on his shoulder. It felt like the spot where they’d implanted the security chip. He scratched, flaking off a tiny scab. Bright blood smeared his fingertips. Infection? It felt more like a scratch, and he wasn’t sure if that was where the chip had been inserted or not.

It would be something to keep an eye on. Anton made his unsteady way to the shower, where he ran the water hot and cold until the worst of the headache had passed.

It wasn’t a dream. The more he tried to tell himself that it was, the more he knew it for a lie. Jonah had hacked him into his virtual Jupiter. Anton had passed out while still dressed in his skinthins. His bio-interface had given Jonah access.

Who is the owner of a soul?

I want to go home, Jonah whispered in the hiss of the shower. Anton turned off the spray, wrapped a towel around his waist, and went to his terminal. He was in luck. Denny O’Shea was listed in the local database. He was home. His image formed above the terminal holo-stage, yawning and sleepy-eyed.

“What do you want?” he asked as he recognized Anton. “I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”

“Don’t exit.” Anton gripped the edge of the table. “I need to know . . . what are you going to do with Jonah?”

“What do you care?” Denny’s face was hard.

“If you couldn’t use him for the probe, what would you do with him?” Anton persisted.

“We aren’t going to do anything with him.” Denny shook his head and stifled a yawn. He’s a probe. The only one we have. We’re going to have to wipe the AI’s memory shell right down to the core and start over from scratch. It’s gonna put the launch off a whole year. At least. Thanks to you.”

“Is it scheduled? Stripping his memory?”

“This is my day off. I was out late last night. I’m going back to bed.”

“Wait!” Anton cried, but Denny’s face had vanished from the holostage.

Anton leaned forward and buried his face in his hands. Jonah was right. He wasn’t Elliot. He wasn’t a Jovian ray, either. He was a probe. A machine. You just reformatted and started over. “Access Sandra Li,” he said hoarsely. “This is an emergency.”

Li looked through her window, her face etched with bitter lines. “We have become addicted to entertainment.” She glanced sideways at him. “You of all people must know that. Reality must be exciting. Stimulating. Do you know how much the Mars Project is spending on PR?”

“Yes,” Anton said evenly. “I do. They tried to hire me.”

“That figures.” Her lips twisted. “I know about Jonah’s rays. I do not know if there is any reality there, or how much. AIs become . . . creative as they die. Some of the final data is suggestive, but we don’t have enough to get us free media attention,” she said grimly. “And we can’t afford people like you—people who could turn a scrap of hope into an established first contact.”

“I don’t do that.” Anton met her angry stare. “That’s why I turned the Mars people down.”

“That makes you a saint?”

“Not at all.”

Her shoulders slumped and she looked away. “Europa—yes—Europa, damn it—offered us enough funding to get us back to Jupiter. We lost our previous funding because we didn’t find anything wonderful,” she said bitterly. I pretend that I don’t know how Europa gets its money, or what the cost is. But that’s a lie.” She raised her head, bleak shadows filling her dark eyes. “No one else knows, except me. I am a fanatic. But that’s no justification, is it? If Jonah sends us solid evidence of life on Jupiter—I won’t need Europa. Or people like you. The media will love us. We need to keep exploring, Anton. Or we’ll stagnate here and die as a species.” She looked away. “I am very sorry about your son,” she said slowly. “I told you so, and I meant it. It is a bitter coincidence.”

“The media will love you for about a week,” Anton said absently. Something was bothering him. It was a tremendous coincidence, yes. And cosmic coincidences did happen, yes . . . He let his breath out slowly. “I wish I could say that you’re wrong.” He looked past her, out to the blue sea where he had gone diving with Elliot and never would again, except in his dreams. “I have instructed my lawyer to request that the injunction be lifted. We are withdrawing our suit against you.” Truc had had a fit. “I will sign a release granting you rights to the VR recordings. I won’t get in the way of your launch.”

“What?” She blinked, hope struggling with distrust in her face. “I’m . . . I’m delighted.” She lifted her hands palm up. “What made you change your mind?”

“Jonah.” He bowed his head. “And you, partly. You believe in what you’re doing. I thought I did, too. Now . . . ” He gave her a crooked smile. “Maybe you were right. That I have spent my life on vengeance.” He turned away from that window full of sea and memory. “Let Jonah go be what you made him to be.”

“Anton . . . ” She held out her hand. “Thank you,” she said softly.

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak, turned to leave.

“I’ll reactivate your chip,” she said as the door opened for him. “If you want to visit Jonah. It will let you onto the field to watch the launch, too.”

He didn’t want to watch the launch, didn’t want to see Jonah again. “Thank you,” he said politely, and left.

It was time to start a new project. WorldNews was going to be pissed, but he had the final say. That was line one in his contract. So they could bitch all they wanted about not getting the Jovan expose. He had plenty of possibilities on file.

All science. He smiled crookedly as he entered his virtual Office. Maybe he would try hunting in some other preserve this time. Mail cluttered his virtual desktop. He glanced over it, swept most of it into the trash. One message caught his eye however. It was from the informant who had sold him his information on the Europa connection.

He didn’t need it anymore.

Anton started to file it until he could email a quit message, but he windowed into it instead, curious as to what new info his talented contact had hacked.

“Hope you’ve got your story ready to go.” The Rev’s voice sounded in his head. “Europa had a bad day. Several wrong decisions got made by minor nodes—who probably wish they were dead if they aren’t already corpses. I guess Europa has been teetering on the edge for awhile now, keeping it quiet. It finally leaked. We’re talking bigtime economic crash. Europa is pulling in its hundred heads. Which means the wormhole’s gonna close. Jovan’s gonna get left high and dry. Fact is, I’m kinda surprised they didn’t get axed two weeks ago when the whole thing started to come apart.”

Anton sat staring at his desktop after the voice ended. So Europa was going to pull its money. Jonah wouldn’t get to Jupiter after all. His flash of relief made him wince. He was never going to exorcise Elliot from Jonah. Anton scowled, tugged once more by that nagging sense of wrong.

The Rev had been surprised that Europa hadn’t pulled their funding two weeks ago.

He had started investigating Jovan Corporation two weeks ago. A feathery chill tickled the back of his neck. More cosmic coincidence? He had picked up the tip on Jovan’s connection to Europa from a mediocre source. That tip had been the key that had let The Rev track down the proof. And that tip had just happened to come to him—Elliot’s father. The one man who might let vengeance take control, and who had the power to trash Jovan.

He accessed Sandra Li.

“I was in a meeting.” She raised a wary eyebrow. “What can I do for you?”

“Who shoved me down your throat?” he asked harshly. “It’s important.”

“Europa, through our intermediaries.” She looked away, blushing. “I guess they figured a clean bill of health from you would be the best cover.”

Or else they had wanted Anton to do what he had almost done—stop the launch. That chill tickle at his neck was growing worse. “Is the launch still on? No problems with Europa?”

“Yes, it’s still on.” She looked surprised. “Not even Europa could stop it now. And why would they?” She was getting angry. “Whatever their ethics or lack of them, they are behind this. Don’t ask me to walk away from them now. It’s too late.”

“I hope you’re right,” he said. “I’ll talk to you later. Exit.” For a moment or two he sat staring at his Office’s wall. She still thought of him as the enemy. Maybe that would never change, either.

Why didn’t Europa simply pull their funding? Perhaps a public admission of the Jovan connection would compromise another illegal wormhole.

And maybe Europa was backing Jovan because someone inside believed the way Sandra believed.

The Rev didn’t think so, and the Rev hadn’t been wrong yet.

The launch was scheduled for tomorrow. Anton wondered if Cam might be able to find something out. Thoughtfully he went next door. The door opened to his touch, unlocked. The room was empty, the holos gone from the shelves and table tops, all surfaces dusted and clean. Anton wrinkled his nose at the prickly scent of anti-viral disinfectant.

Cam had moved out.

Coincidence upon coincidence—that he should get a tip about Jovan, that Cam should happen to be a good enough hacker to get him the proof he needed. It was damned hard to crack a private hospital database.

Too many coincidences. Way too many. And he knew Cam from somewhere. Toss that coincidence onto the scale and it went tilt. Anton went back to his apartment and accessed his Office. From there, he emailed the Rev with two questions, asap mode: Who really owned Sweet Mercy Hospital, and was there any way for Europa to make any money at all on the shuttle launch or the Jovan project?

He didn’t hear from the Rev until just before dawn. The terminal’s chime woke him from his uneasy drowse on the sofa. He struggled up out of a nightmare in which giant rays tore Jonah apart with terrible fangs.

What is a soul? Who owns it?

“Access.” He fumbled his gloves on. This time, his informant had left him his answer in lines of neat typeface floating on a blue background.

Europa.

Blow it up for the insurance.

Anton stared at the words, cold horror squeezing the back of his neck. Sandra Li would have done it—insured their project. Of course. She was the meticulous type and she would have spent the money to safeguard her obsession against accident. The shuttle crew would die in the process, but that kind of price had never bothered Europa in the past. So Europa would collect some of the money it needed from Jovan, and any further drain on its assets would end on the launch pad.

Neat scheme.

“Access Sandra Li,” Anton rasped. “This is an emergency.”

Her image formed, but it was flat and immobile, an icon only. “I’m attending the shuttle launch,” she said in the kind of voice you use to leave messages. “I’ll be back in my office on Monday morning. If it’s an emergency, you can get in touch with the Jovan main office. They will be able to relay a message to me.”

Shit. Anton stared at her image, sweat tickling his scalp. “Access Jovan main office,” he snapped.

“Hi.” A blonde man with a young face appeared. “Nobody is here right now, but talk to me, and I’ll pass your message on as soon as someone comes in.”

Anton exited. Sweating in earnest now, he accessed the media services, surfing through the newslines, one after the other, skipping from knifing, to car chase, from murder, to mayhem—all the juicy tidbits that kept the access percentage up there. But one newsline was doing its community -service bit, offering a schedule of local and regional coming events.

Including a schedule of shuttle launches for the Southern California Regional Trans-Port. A launch was scheduled for two hours from now. When he windowed into that listing, the Jovan Project was listed on the cargo manifest.

“Access fish,” he rasped, and wondered if Jonah could connect. “Fish! Jonah? Can you hear me?” No answer, but maybe he could hear and not answer. “Europa needs money,” Anton said. “They can get it by blowing up the launch. You are insured. They will collect through Jovan. Jonah get out of there.

No answer. Anton cradled his head in his arms, tears of frustration burning behind his eyelids. No way . . . no way to reach him in time.

Well, maybe. He got to his feet, drew a deep breath. If he hired a private jump jet . . . if they didn’t get shunted into a minor airfield . . . then maybe. Just maybe . . .

“West public landing strip is closed for the next hour. Shuttle launch,” the pilot said. He was young and disdainful, recently military and not very impressed with commercial piloting.

“What happens if you land?” Anton studied the sprawl of the Trans-Port. It was a city unto itself, handling travel all over the globe and up to the orbital platforms as well. “Will they shoot us down.”

“Nah, this isn’t anything important.” The pilot snorted, faceless beneath his VR flight visor. “I’ll just collect a three hundred Pounds International ticket. And my boss will be pissed.”

“Give me your reader.”

The pilot handed it over without comment. Holding it where he could see the numbers, Anton zipped his card through the slot and keyed in a payment of six hundred PI. Finger poised to enter it in, he looked at the mirrorshade surface of his pilot’s visor.

“My boss can be pissed.” He shrugged. “Maybe it’ll cure his constipation. One ringside seat for the shuttle launch, coming up.”

“Thanks,” Anton said, and watched his reflected face grin a distorted grin on the curved visor.

He had the door open before the skids had even touched down. His pilot yelled at him as Anton bailed out, but Anton ignored him. He’d spent plenty of time in jump jets and knew to keep away from the jet blast. Fine dust rose in choking clouds and the hot exhaust licked across the scarred pavement, scorching his ankles as he ran for the orbital launch paddock.

The orbitals lifted from the seaward edge of the Port, where they could ditch into the ocean if they needed to. Only one launch was scheduled the day, so Anton headed for the big bellied orbital crouched on the fire-marked launch ramp. Li could be anywhere. He had a feeling that she would want to oversee everything from the fueling of the shuttle to the loading of the project’s cargo pod. He crossed the adjacent paddock at a trot, earning curious stares from uniformed Port employees.

Security wasn’t military grade out here, but he wondered why nobody had intercepted him. Then he remembered the chip. Of course they were running a constant scan, just to monitor crowd traffic and to make sure that unauthorized citizens didn’t wander into the wrong area. Protected by Li’s chip, he could go wherever he pleased. Panting, clutching his aching side, he slowed, scanning the bustle of Port employees for somebody—anybody—who might have authority. And who might know where Li was.

The pale blue of a Jovan uniform caught his eye and he veered toward the trio. The blonde man looked familiar. The darkhaired woman, too. He’d interviewed her on his first day at the cove, groped vainly for her name. “Excuse me,” he said. “Where can I find Sandra?”

They turned three equally hostile faces toward him. Looked quickly at each other. “I don’t know.” The dark woman lifted her chin. “Excuse us. We’re busy, Mister Kraj.”

“Damn it, this is an emergency.” Anton struggled for control. “Someone is going to blow up this damn launch. For your insurance.”

They stared at him coldly.

“You fucking idiots,” he snarled. Another flash of Jovan blue caught his eye and he turned, shading his eyes against the sun. Yes, it was Li. And she was talking to someone in a Port coverall. He laughed as Anton watched, head coming up and tilting in a familiar gesture. And then he turned farther, and Anton saw that it was Cam.

Only his name wasn’t Cam.

The last puzzle piece fell into place. You could change your eye color, your skin color, your face. It was a lot harder to change the way you moved. Anton spent his life staring at the way people moved as he edited a dozen takes into one seamless whole.

Cam had been arrested on suspicion after a small research facility burned to the ground. Two people had died, and the private organ bank that had catered to the elite under the auspices of a phony research foundation had been incinerated—all proof of illegal activity burned to useless ashes. Anton had still managed to make life difficult for the owners, but Cam—his name hadn’t been Cam then—had gotten off. No evidence.

Anton wondered if Europa had had a finger in that pie, or it Cam was merely a popular freelancer. Cam looked up as Anton broke into a run. He said something to Li and then strolled around the corner of the waiting room. “Stop him,” Anton yelled, but a jet was landing on a nearby strip, and she couldn’t hear him. “He’s a freelance terrorist.” Anton grabbed her by the arm as she recoiled. “The man you just talked to. He was pretending to be my neighbor—he’s the one who gave me the information about Elliot’s VR records. Don’t you see? Europa set me up to stop you, only I didn’t. Now they’ll blow the launch. You’ve got to cancel it. There’s a bomb on board.”

“Stop it.” She pushed him away. “You have this rescue fixation, don’t you? Last time you jumped overboard and damn near drowned. They’ll fine me ten thousand PI if I hold up the launch. If I were you I’d go visit a clinic. Deal with your dead son, Anton.” She turned her back on him. “Besides,” she tossed over her shoulder. “If anyone did try to get onto the shuttle, or go near it, they’d alert the Port security.”

“I didn’t alert them,” Anton said softly. He swallowed, remembering that drunken evening and Cam’s fingers on his face. “He copied my chip.” The brandy must have been drugged. Cam had used a fast-heal culture to close the site. Hence the puzzling scab. And he had been smart enough to replace the chip after he had copied it. “What did he want?” Anton rasped.

“Nothing, really.” For the first time, she looked troubled. “He asked me if I was staying to see the launch.” Bitterness drew her mouth down again. “Are you going to pay the fine if I hold up the launch?”

“To hell with the fine!” He wanted to punch her. “Sandra, I agreed to let him go. I meant what I said.” Jonah was at least partly Elliot. Can a soul be divided? “This is real. I’ve been a fucking pawn.” His voice trembled, and for a moment he wondered if she might be right—if he was crazy. “Europa has been using me, and my son.”

“My God.” She pressed her hands to her face for an instant. “How can you do this to me? We’re so close, and you’re asking me to throw it all away. We won’t get another chance, because yes, Europa is cutting our funding. You were right. Are you happy?”

She was right. She had no reason at all to trust him. Anton started for the shuttle.

“Goddamn it,” she yelled after him. “I’m calling security.” She turned on her heel and marched toward the control building.

If Cam thought that the launch wasn’t going to go, he might blow it up right here on the ramp. Anton slowed, death-fear shivering through his flesh. How would he do it? Think, he told himself. Think fast. The shuttle loomed over him, its skin discolored by reentry, offering a thousand good hiding places for an explosive device. He needed a scanner. He needed a working brain . . . Three figures in Port uniforms were heading purposefully for the shuttle. Security? “Fish”, he said desperately.

“Anton?” Jonah sounded sleepy. “What are you doing here?” Pause. “I thought you weren’t going to come.”

“Jonah, somebody wants to sabotage the shuttle. What would be the easiest way, using the least amount of explosive?”

“Loading the shuttle schematics,” Jonah said in an absent tone. “Lemme look.” Three seconds ticked past. Four. “If he blew the fuel line while we were lifting, it would cause the auxiliary tank to blow, too, and we’d come apart into confetti. Did you tell Sandy?”

He sounded worried, but not afraid. Maybe fear of death was the dividing line between human and machine. “I told her,” Anton said tightly. “She doesn’t believe me. What if he blows it now?”

“It won’t do a lot of damage, but it’ll do some.” Jonah was silent for a moment. “I’m right above the main fuel feed,” he said at last. “If it’s a big blast it’ll probably fry me. Access to the line is right under me.” The security people were running now—three muscular, grim-faced men.

“Where?” Anton said tightly. “I’m about a meter forward of the rear landing gear.”

“Go two meters farther back. Look up.” Jonah’s voice was terse in his head. “There’s an access panel for checking a valve—about 15 cm square. It should be locked.”

He found it. It wasn’t locked. He could feel Jonah above him, feel Elliot’s quiet patience as he lay in that hospital bed, plugged into tubes and pretend vacations, waiting for his father to let him die. “It’s here,” Anton breathed. Such a small thing—a small flat rectangle of black plastic. He didn’t see any wires. Footsteps slapped on silocrete. No more time . . . At the edge of the launch paddock, a Port employee shaded his eyes to stare at Anton.

Cam? He was reaching into a pocket. For a detonator? Anton grabbed the box and stepped away from the shuttle’s pale belly. He moved so slowly, as if the air had thickened to jello. The security people were almost on him. Throw it, throw it! Pivoting—so slowly—he flung it toward the empty paddock next door—felt an instant of relief as it left his hand, because he had won. He had fucking won.

He didn’t hear the explosion, was aware only of bright light that hurt his eyes, and then an impact like a truck hitting him, or a giant baseball bat.

There was no pain.

Pain came in tiny sharp attacks like rat teeth gnawing at him. He retreated from it, hiding in the darkness from the pain-rats, curled into himself. But Elliot talked to him, so he wasn’t alone. They flew through Jupiter’s opalescent sea together, and the rays talked to them without words, and Elliot’s happiness warmed him like sunlight.

But after awhile, the darkness shrank. And when it grew too small and thin to hide him anymore, he woke up. To whiteness. He stared at it, groping for meaning in that unfamiliar landscape. Ceiling, his mind finally gave him. Walls. Hospital bed. His hand looked unfamiliar on the white spread. But when he tried to move his fingers they moved. So it had to be his hand. Tubes ran from both arms, out of sight behind his head. To a machine. He remembered the machine that had hummed to itself at the head of Elliot’s bed.

And he remembered. Jonah. The shuttle’s fire-stained belly. Throwing the bomb.

It had been a dream, Jupiter and Jonah’s happiness. And grief pierced him, wrung a groan from him. A nurse came in, carrying a big thermal mug with a plastic straw sticking out of it. “How are you feeling?” he said with a smile.

“Did they launch?” The words came out as an unrecognizable croak, and the nurse shook his head.

“Drink this.” He held the straw to Anton’s lips. “And then you need to sleep.”

The mug held juice, sweet enough to make him dizzy, and the nurse fiddled with the machine, and he went to sleep before he could ask any more questions.

But this time when he woke up, Li was there, sitting primly on the chair beside his bed.

“Why are hospital rooms always white?” he croaked.

She raised one eyebrow. “I don’t know.”

“Where’s Jonah?” He struggled to sit up, shocked at the instant tremble in his muscles. “How long have I been here?”

“You’ve been here almost a month. Jonah is on Jupiter.” She turned her head to look out the window.

He had never seen her smile before. It made her almost beautiful.

“You were right,” he whispered.

“We were right. Wait until you see what we’re giving the media.” The afternoon sun slanting through the window turned her skin to gold and glinted in her hair. “They never found out who planted the bomb.” She looked down at him again, and with an awkward, almost shy gesture, she reached over to lay her hand on his. “The explosion would almost certainly have damaged or destroyed Jonah. Thank you.” She pressed her lips together tightly for a moment. “You sustained some brain damage. That’s why you’ve been here so long.”

Brain damage. Anton felt a chill, but everything seemed to work.

“Doctor Mishna treated you here. This is a private clinic, and she is a very good neuro specialist. There will be no impairment, and Jovan is picking up the tab.” She got to her feet. “I think you were the first genuine friend Jonah had.” She looked sad for a moment. “He was never really human to us, but I think he was to himself. And, I think, to you.” She paused for a second as if she expected Anton to answer, then shrugged. “When you get out, you can come access Jonah’s full transmission.” Her smile lighted her face again. “He’s having a good time.” At the door she paused and looked back. “You were right about public interest waning eventually,” she said gravely. “We need to make sure that people stay interested.” She paused for a moment as if she expected him to say something, then lifted one shoulder in a lopsided shrug. “I’d like to hire you.”

“To do PR?” He blinked.

“More than that.” Above her smile, her eyes were anxious. “You could make people understand how important this is—what it means to all of us. I’ve got plenty of funding.” She looked away from him. “I sold my soul to Europa,” she said in a low voice. “Nothing changes that. I’d do it again if I had to.”

He closed his eyes, seeing her face as she told him about evolution, about how humanity needed to grow. “Maybe I could work for you,” he said. When he opened his eyes she was gone and the nurse was back, fiddling with the machine and saying rest.

And he did, and he dreamed that he was ghosting Jonah, and they circled a reef, and the reef sang to Jonah without words, only Jonah understood, and some of that song and that understanding filtered into Anton and filled him with the immense and violent beauty that was Jupiter. And the sky wasn’t pink, it was another color all together, and the shimmering air smelled like spring and lilacs and chicken soup, and he and Jonah were happy. Hybrid soul, he thought. Human, machine, and alien. “You’re changing,” he said. “Maybe you’re growing up.”

And Jonah’s answer rippled through the mist like a gentle wave, and Anton smiled and went back to sleep. If he took a job with Jovan, he’d have to find a place to live for more than a month or two. It might even become home.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 1996.

A Few Words with Mary Rosenblum

What was the inspiration for this story?

Gasfish is based on one of the themes that powered much of my SF: What is the definition of “human?” We have no definition and as we move into a very near future of engineered human genomes and human/computer interfaces, we still have no answer to the fundamental question of “what is it that makes us human.” What is it? I don’t have the answer yet, but we’d sure better think about it, because it’s going to open a huge can of legal worms very soon now.

What are some of your favorite short stories?

I love the stories that challenge our concrete preconceptions, and the number of individual stories is too large to list here. Some of the authors that challenge your perceptions of “the way things are” and our notion of “human” include Nancy Kress and Octavia Butler among others. Hmmm. Is it a surprise that women authors, who were so marginally included in “human” for so long, are often the ones to explore that definition? I wonder.

You have one wish, you can make one from a story or novel you've written a reality. What would it be?

Wow. You are talking to the near future writer whose dystopian Drylands world that fueled many of my short stories is coming true in my lifetime. But hey, the cellular construction technology that I described in Skin Deep, originally published in Asimov’s, is now a reality as we use 3-D printers to create new skin from human cells, with the potential to grow organs the same way. So hey, some of the good stuff is coming true, too! But, the tracking technology of Search Engine is also a reality, or pretty darn close to it. Although we’re not required to wear chips. Yet . . . So reality has always walked hard on my heels, both good and bad.

Do you have anything coming out in the months ahead?

Ah, I got into content editing for new authors, which I find that I love as much as I love writing. It started because I watched my writing students get totally scammed by the fake “publishers” that started taking advantage of the publishing revolution. After spending thousands of dollars and selling maybe ten copies, the authors believed their books were failures, where it was a matter of no quality editing and bogus marketing promises. I find that I get a lot of pleasure out of working on a book with an author, making it as strong and engaging as it can be, helping that author understand the publishing realities, and seeing that book show up on the online bookstore shelf as something that readers will be happy they purchased. Actually, my enjoyment of editing surprised me, but then again, I always hated the first draft, loved the revision part of writing—the real part of writing to my mind—so maybe it’s not such a surprise!

Whispers

Maureen F. McHugh and David B. Kisor

The plague is not the only health problem in the countryside surrounding Tai’an. Shandong is a rural province, the Appalachia of China. Shandong peasants are the hillbillies of China, and have something of the same reputation—apparently not very bright, distrustful of strangers, local boys who let you think you’re real smart until they get you out on their own terms. I don’t know if they’re moonshiners; the clear local sorghum liquor (which we foreigners call “jet fuel” because it smells like fingernail polish and is usually about 150 proof) is probably too cheap to encourage much bootlegging.

Not that it’s Lexington or Louisville. A Kentucky girl like me doesn’t feel at home; after all, Kentucky isn’t particularly famous for its brine-pickled vegetables (not just cucumber; but carrots, and cabbage with hot peppers, too). The land is bare and brown, the hills covered in places with dead grass and a few pine trees, but in other places scratched to bare, baked or frozen earth.

I work in a clinic about an hour south of Tai’an, headed toward Qufu, the ancient birthplace of Confucius. The town is called Lijiazhang, and the clinic is brick and concrete. It used to be a store. I vaccinate for plague, and treat a lot of poverty-related diseases, too. Tuberculosis is rampant because they burn bituminous coal (this part of Shandong is coal country, mountainous like West Virginia). Bituminous coal is soft, high-sulfur coal. Black-lung stuff when they mine it. Here, after they get it out of the ground, they grind it to powder in places with so little regard for workers’ health that OSHA representatives would probably have seizures, then they mix it with mud to make dull-black round bricks with holes through them. They burn the bricks in stoves to heat and cook. The bricks burn more slowly than pure coal.

We burn the bricks in the clinic, too. Our stove is a red-brick affair, kind of like an oven. It’s got a vent, but the pipe doesn’t draw correctly, and it’s thick with whatever the stuff is that clogs coal stoves. I thought I read that the stuff is dangerous and can cause explosions, but nobody seems particularly concerned. Much of the smoke from the stove hangs in the clinic. Like everybody else, I’ve had a chest cold since November, and when I spit into the toilet after working all day, my saliva is laced with black from the smoke. We test ourselves for tuberculosis every sixty days. So far, nobody has tested positive. I wonder what two years in China is going to do for my health. Besides lung damage from the pollution, they still use DDT and pesticides that have been banned in the US for fifty years. It would be ironic to have survived the plague in my childhood only to die a few years from now of cancer that originated in exposure from something in Tai’an.

Particularly since, after an initial burst of enthusiasm, the locals have made it clear that they don’t think much of the efficacy of Western medicine in treating EID. The new vaccine is only about 50 percent effective. Furthermore, if the host has already been infected and the virus is latent, vaccination can activate it. It’s hard to explain to people that the vaccine doesn’t cause the disease. It’s not what they want—they want Western medicine to provide instant answers, or they’ll go back to their own methods.

Surely, at the end of a long day with the lepers, tired out of his mind, even Albert Schweitzer sat on his cot among his chickens and goats and wondered how he had managed to so thoroughly screw up his life.

Terry, Megan, and I are at the clinic by 8:00 A.M. We are medical practitioners, MPs. I hope to go to medical school when I get back to the States and become an MD. I thought that coming to China would give me practical experience, and that it would be a chance to travel. A once-in-a-lifetime chance. Maybe, like Dr. Schweitzer, I would find my calling.

My third patient this morning is a boy about sixteen, whose name is Zhao Lianfeng. Small-boned, with tiny beautiful hard brown hands, dirt ingrained in the knuckles. He has a fever, difficulty breathing, anxiety, and he tells Xiao Cao he hears voices whispering in his blood. Entotic Illusory Disease (EID) means illusions in the ear. Zhao Lianfeng is lucid, despite the whispering he hears. Patients often are. No one has ever been able to explain the whispers, despite all the mumbo-jumbo we rattle off about fever and R-brains and induced dream states.

“What do the voices say?” I ask. I ask a lot of my patients that. I get some strange answers.

“They are whispering in a foreign language,” Xiao Cao translates.

Sometimes they are whispering too quietly for the patient to make out the words.

I stroke his forehead, and he looks up at me. The Chinese don’t touch much across genders. Boyfriend and girlfriend don’t hold hands in public, although a couple of boys can walk down the street with their arms around each other’s shoulders and nobody pays any attention. But I touch my patients a lot. Sick people need comforting.

I can’t do a lot else for Zhao Lianfeng. The only things I can give him are fluids for dehydration, broad-spectrum antibiotics against secondary infections, and something for his breathing. He will either live or die. So I hold his hand, while his mother, a middle-aged woman with a perm that lays precisely as the rollers were placed in her hair, watches me. After a moment, the inhaler has helped his breathing. “Shi hao ma?” I ask, “You good?” in the local version of Mandarin.

He smiles for me. “Shi haode,” he says. “Good.” His hand is calloused. Peasant boys have calloused hands. In Shandong, peasant isn’t a description of what you do for a living. This boy doesn’t farm, he works in a village factory. He helps make parts for motor scooters. But he is still a peasant, because he wears quilted navy-blue cotton jackets and pants. Because he lives in a village. Because, at sixteen, he has finished school and says shi haode instead of hen hao, the way a city boy would. Like saying “ain’t,” or “pitcher” for “picture.”

I smile at Zhao Lianfeng, and I smile at his mother.

His mother doesn’t smile. She isn’t fooled, she knows my remedies are temporary. For my records, I ask for a history. Has he had a history of illness? I check bronchitis without bothering to ask; here everybody has bronchitis in the winter. How about his family? Xiao Cao translates: the boy’s father is dead of EID, which the Chinese around here call the Whispers, his mother had it but recovered, twelve years ago. His sister had it as a child, but survived. Anyone else? His mother shakes her head.

“Didi,” the boy says, “little brother.”

The mother turns her head away.

I press her through Xiao Cao: what happened to the little brother?

“Baixuebing.” Xiao Cao finally translates, “White blood sickness.”

Leukemia. The leukemia rate among children in China is one of the highest in the world, the result of years of toxics being dumped into the air, the land, and the water. I put my forms in his folder. At the end of the month, I’ll tabulate it all, send my report to someone in Geneva at the World Health Organization. It’s all entered into a data file, but nobody pays much attention to the results. There’s no pattern, or rather, no particularly surprising pattern. EID is virulently contagious, spread by contact, endemic. It is particularly bad among the impoverished, who are, of course, susceptible because of poor nutrition and health and overcrowding. Although, since EID has killed over a billion-and-a-half people world wide, over-crowding in places like Bangladesh and Mexico City is much less of a problem than it used to be.

I survived because I am an American, and, as a child, I was among the first to get it. I got it in 1996, when hospital care was available that wasn’t available a year later, when medical services were completely overwhelmed by the number of cases. My father got it early, too, but died despite great medical care. My mother didn’t get it until three years later, when medical care was nearly non-existent, but she survived anyway. Like Zhao Lianfeng’s mother survived it.

Zhao Lianfeng does not want to let go of my hand, but I have other patients, so he must. If his mother had brought him in for a vaccination two years ago, he might not be sick now. The disease can lie dormant for years, though, so if he’d had it already, but was asymptomatic, the vaccine might have activated the virus too.

Sometimes they live, I think. And then there’s the next patient, there’s always a next patient.

Usually part of me is numb. I’m tired all the time from my chest cold, and the number of patients is overwhelming. Patients are all frightened; some are brave, some aren’t. I treat toddlers, I treat old people. A lot of them die. A lot of them don’t even die of EID; China doesn’t need EID to find a way to kill you. Just breathe coal dust all winter, or drink yourself to death on 150 proof sorghum liquor, or die of untreated diabetes, or heart disease, or the astounding cancer rate, or pneumonia. Or get run over by a coal truck out in the country, and die because there’s no medical aid at all for most of the villages.

When I come back to the clinic the next morning, Zhao Lianfeng’s fever has spiked to 41 degrees Celsius during the night, about 105 Fahrenheit. Now it is down around 39 degrees. His mother has spent the night with him. When I come by his bed, she watches me without reproach. Without much hope, either.

“Daifu,” Lianfeng says when I lean over him. “Doctor.” I sit down for a moment and hold his calloused, dry-hot hand.

Their faces are the pinched angular faces of country people. Square-jawed. For all their differences of race, they are like the faces in the black-and-white photos of people from places with names like Jackson Hollow and Stinking Creek. Or like the Dust Bowl faces of Okies.

I have the strange urge to lean over and kiss Zhao Lianfeng’s cheek. It comes over me with patients sometimes; I never tell anyone. It is not an Albert Schweitzer love-of-all-mankind urge, it is just an urge to touch that young and shining skin, those hectic red cheeks. Even dried by fever.

He says something, and I recognize eryu, “whisper.” They are whispering. “Ssss ssss ssss,” he says, trying to mimic the sibilance he hears.

I hold his hand and rub his forehead.

“Kate,” Xiao Cao says. Patients waiting. Triage, ignore the dying boy I can do nothing for, concentrate on finding the ones I can help.

Xiao Cao doesn’t have that pinched look. He is thin, a beanpole of a young man, but he is a city boy. He graduated from the Foreign Languages department in Tai’an Teacher’s College, his father is a professor. I like Xiao Cao, he is open and trusting and naïve. Chinese young people seem younger than their peers in the States. Maybe that is simply because he is less sophisticated in my culture than he is in his own. Maybe I seem simpler, unsophisticated, to him.

He is also a tremendous help in the clinic. He has been vaccinated against EID, and is happy to be a model of the efficacy of the vaccine. He preaches western medicine to the patients, thinks of us as the Americans who have developed the vaccine, who will save everyone if they will just come and let us.

I worry about what he tells people; his ideas are a weird mix of what we tell him and local speculation. One day he announced to me that the reason we foreigners get so many colds is that we wear flat shoes. Colds come from the ground, up through your feet, he told me. Wear heels and get your feet off the ground, and there is less surface for the colds to get through.

I wonder what kind of life it is for a young man like him, working with Americans and sick people.

The morning is the usual parade. Most people do not come to us unless they are very sick. We refer some on to the hospital in Tai’an, but most don’t go. In China, your health care is paid for by your work unit, that is, your factory or employer. But the peasants don’t have work units, and they have to pay for their own health care, up front. If a dying man walks into a Chinese hospital without cash, he dies in the waiting room. I palpitate a man’s stomach, find a mass. I tell him he needs to see a doctor in Tai’an, give him a prescription for pain, and he goes home to die.

A woman with tuberculosis I can treat. I start her on a course of antibiotics, tell her to send the rest of the family to be tested in case they have caught it from her.

We stop accepting patients at 11:30; lunch is at noon.

“Daifu,” Zhao Lianfeng says. His fever is up to 40 degrees Celsius. I take his hot hand. I used to want to clean them up, the rings of dirt on their collars distressed me, but dirt doesn’t really hurt or help him now. I sit a moment, give him a new IV bag, go on to lunch.

Lunch is hot and spicy cabbage, clear soup, and rice. It’s one of my favorite lunches, but Terry doesn’t really care for cabbage.

“You know what I’m really hungry for,” Terry says.

It’s a game, a kind of torture we inflict on ourselves. Sometimes I’ve played with tears in my eyes, but one of the unwritten rules is to pretend it’s only a game.

Terry’s meal is pizza, a big tossed salad with ranch dressing, a two liter bottle of Coke. He swipes his kinky blond hair out of his eyes and throws in a Steelers-Oilers game. Tall, fair Terry is so foreign-looking that I’ve seen him cause bicycle accidents; most of the locals have never seen a foreigner, and when they see us, they stare. As we walk down the street, the whispers follow us, “Weiguoren, weiguoren.” Foreigner, foreigner.

Megan’s meal is steak, baked potato, broccoli with cheese sauce, and apple pie.

My meal is skillet-fried chicken, mashed potatoes with milk gravy, and green beans. My mother’s, but I don’t say that. I’ll write it in my next letter. Thinking of my mother makes me think of Zhao Lianfeng’s mother, sitting next to her son at the clinic. I bet I know Zhao Lianfeng’s favorite meal—Chinese dumplings, potstickers.

I don’t want to go back to work. I want to go home.

The next morning, I am surprised: Zhao Lianfeng is still holding on. He does not say daifu when I sit down, but he opens his eyes. I take his hand, smile at him. “Hold on, little brother,” I say in English.

He closes his eyes.

Xiao Cao comes to tell me I have patients, and Zhao Lianfeng opens his eyes. He says something to the air, to no one in particular.

“They are whispering,” Xiao Cao translates.

“What are they whispering?” I ask.

For a long moment, Zhao Lianfeng does not answer. Then he says something “ . . . shi haode.”

“They say, hold on, you’re good, you’re okay,” Xiao Cao translates.

I smile and nod. “Shi haode,” I agree, “you’re good.”

Zhao Lianfeng doesn’t seem to care, he just closes his eyes.

I check on him on and off during the day. We have twenty-seven beds, all filled. Zhao Lianfeng’s temperature is back up between 40 and 41 degrees, somewhere around 104 degrees Fahrenheit. He is not really conscious. It is really only a matter of time.

I am hoping that when I come to work the next morning, the bed will simply be empty. But the next morning, Zhao Lianfeng is still there, still suspended between consciousness and unconsciousness, still running a fever that must, by now, be causing brain damage. There are no facilities here for rehabilitation, so if he is brain damaged, he will go back to his village and his mother will take care of him. Or not take care of him.

So I begin to hope that he will die. Maybe I am terrible, maybe Albert Schweitzer would feel differently. I know that there is sanctity in all human life and that I took an oath—even medical practitioners take an oath—but there is sanctity in death, too.

Zhao Lianfeng doesn’t die. Not that whole long day.

Nor the next day, although the fever is wasting him nearly down to the bone. I force myself to sit down, to take his hand and brush his hair off his forehead, but long black hairs come away in my hand.

His mother sleeps sitting on the floor, her back to the wall, or wakes and waits.

After three days, I am thinking the unthinkable. There are lots of things I could add to his IV bag and Zhao Lianfeng would slide gently away. I’ve never done it. Doctors, real full-degree MD doctors do it, although usually not officially. I think Megan has done it, although she says she hasn’t. Terry never would. Terry might be from the suburbs of Chicago, but he comes from a conservative family. Terry brought his Bible to China with him, belongs to a Bible Study group at home. Terry really believes in the sanctity of human life and lets God make all the calls on the quality of life.

Albert Schweitzer would leave it to God. Kate Lambert of Lexington, Kentucky doesn’t trust leaving things to God, or to other men, either. Maybe we’re supposed to make that decision, maybe that’s part of being a healer.

But I don’t do it because I can’t do it in front of his mother. Not that she would know, necessarily; I put antibiotics in his drip, how could she know this is different? But she would be watching and I just can’t see myself doing it under her eyes. What if I were wrong? It’s not likely that he has a chance of recovery, nothing in my experience indicates that Zhao Lianfeng will ever go back to the little sweatshop run by his village and make parts for motor scooters again. Most likely he will die without my help or, at worst, he will recover from EID and go home to his village with cerebral palsy, or aphasia or paralysis, maybe end up tied in a bed and fed with a spoon.

Most likely, I tell myself, he will die. Eventually I’ll forget about him, forget about feeling guilty. Eventually I’ll go home to Lexington, Kentucky, and eat skillet-fried chicken and mashed potatoes with milk gravy.

After five days, Zhao Lianfeng’s fever begins to drop. It drops to 39 degrees Celsius, spikes 41 again, drops again to 39 by the sixth day. By the seventh day, it is below normal, which is common after a fever. He isn’t conscious, although his eyes are slightly open.

His aunt sits next to the bed; his mother has gone home to rest a few days. I keep an IV of glucose going, and antibiotics, of course, and otherwise avoid the bed.

Two days later, he is still not conscious, not truly. His aunt can prop him up in bed, and he’ll even take broth, but he’s in a vegetative state. Which may be permanent. When he closes his eyes, he looks angelic, his wrists as thin as a child’s. I stop to look one afternoon, and he is curled up on his side with his thumb in his mouth.

After that, I ask Megan to take over. She doesn’t ask for any explanation; once in a while we just trade patients.

We are done with him, and his family comes with a truck borrowed from the headman of their village, bundles him into quilts, and takes him home.

That weekend, Terry decides that I need R&R. What he really means is that it is his and my turn to spend a weekend in Beijing going to foreign motels in our cheap Chinese coats, looking like the missionaries who come down from the hills to buy supplies. We take the train to Jinan, and then six more hours to Beijing, and eat lasagna at the Jianguo Hotel coffee shop. It’s a bland concoction of cheese and meat. So many Chinese are lactose intolerant that they don’t eat cheese (which has never explained the popularity of ice cream, but it’s true), and every time we go it’s been so long since I’ve eaten western food that it makes me sick, but it’s still wonderful. Even in the evening, jagged out on Cokes and crying in the bathroom with the water running so Terry won’t hear.

Two days of hot running water, heated rooms, Cokes, and candy bars. It costs half my monthly stipend, but there’s not a lot else to spend my monthly stipend on, so I can’t really get upset. I use the hotel long distance phones to call home, “How are you, Mom?” “It’s eight o’clock in the evening here, what time is it there?” “How are you, how’s your cold?” “The cold is doing great, Mom, but I feel terrible, ha ha.”

And then, Sunday night, we take the train, soft sleeper berths, back into China. My backpack is stuffed with Cokes and Snickers Bars and two buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken to share with Megan for manning the store. Hell of a dinner we’ll have, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Qingdao beer.

It’s all incredible luxury; my monthly stipend is 1600 yuan, less than $400 US. Making parts for motor scooters, Zhao Lianfeng probably made around 200 yuan a month. Good money in China, but it doesn’t buy many cans of Coke at 4 yuan a pop.

Just because Zhao Lianfeng can’t afford it, does that mean I should forego it all myself? I don’t know what Albert Schweitzer’s view was on going native, but I suspect he’d find my existence decadent.

“Daifu,” he says, beaming. It’s March, six weeks after Zhao Lianfeng left the clinic, bundled in cotton quilts. The weather is warmer, but he is still bundled up, still painfully thin. His mother has his arm, steadying him. His coordination has been affected by the fever. Still he smiles at me. “Daifu,” he says.

His mother explains through Xiao Cao that he has been after her to come see the daifu. He seems delighted and childlike, a bit simple. He smiles and smiles, eyes squinched in the sunlight.

“Come in, let me look you over,” I say.

Underneath his cotton shirt, his collar bones rise like wings, but he seems basically healthy. His chest is clear, his ears and eyes good. His blood pressure is low, but not drastically, his heart sounds strong.

His mother explains that he was like a baby at first, but that he has been “growing up.”

“Daifu,” he says, and then, in Chinese I can barely follow, “Doctor, they tell me, tell you, it’s good.”

I smile and nod. His speech is childlike. I’ve no way of testing the amount of damage done.

He frowns, and takes my hand and repeats insistently—Xiao Cao translating—“Tell her, they tell me, it’s good.”

“Shi haode,” I agree, in my lame Chinese, “It’s good.”

He is distressed, though. My response isn’t what he wants. He looks thoughtful. Frowns a moment. Finally he says, slowly, “Hold on, little brother.”

English. Did he hear me say that? And now he remembers? “Incredible!” I say, delighted. Who knows how the human mind works, what it remembers, what it doesn’t?

But he doesn’t care about my response. He takes my hand and repeats, in the same slow way, “Hold on, little brother.” He is probably even mimicking my inflection, he sounds as if he is trying to comfort me. Of course, I’m vulnerable. We are all living on the edge of nerves, Terry, Megan and I. There’s not much left over to comfort each other, and I want comfort, so badly. I can feel the tears rising in my eyes.

He nods, thin faced, clear-eyed. He’ll come back, he promises.

And he does, every couple of weeks. At first, he comes with his cousin or his uncle, getting off the bus carefully, like an old man. Each time we go through the same ritual, and I check him over. Then he sits and watches me while I work with other patients. In June, Megan’s two years are up, and Terry and Xiao Cao take her to Beijing and put her on a plane home. The next time Zhao Lianfeng comes to see me, he gets off the bus alone, no cousin or uncle helping him, and stands in the hot June sun, smiling at his accomplishment. I introduce him to Jeff, Megan’s replacement, and I give him a Snickers bar from Beijing. He thinks Snickers Bars are shi haode.

In June, one of our EID cases (we average about fifteen a month) goes through the same stages as Lianfeng’s. She is a woman in her forties, but after five days of high fever, her temperature comes back to below normal. By the seventh day, she is curled up on her side, sucking her thumb. At the end of the month, I include the information in my report to Geneva.

In July, Lianfeng is still thin, the points of his bare shoulders are sharp under his skin. He wears a bright pink strap T-shirt and baggy, navy-blue pants. His speech improves. He learns a little English. “Hello, Kate-ah Daifu,” he says when he gets off the bus in August. A miracle, I think. A tribute to the resiliency of the human body. And, despite his fragile look, he remains surprisingly healthy. His lungs stay clear even in this country, where it seems that no one has clear lungs. A little bundle of bone, he sweeps out the clinic one day.

“Do you work, do you have a job?” I ask through Xiao Cao.

He nods. He is making parts for motor scooters again, although he looks like a stiff wind would knock him over. “Okay, Kate-ah Daifu,” he says, “Lianfeng okay. They tell you, thank you.”

My Chinese is getting a little better. “Who are ‘they’?”

“Eryu-de,” he says, and I have to get a translation. He doesn’t want to tell Xiao Cao, but he finally does, “Whisperers.”

“Do you still hear whispers?” I ask. I’ve never heard of anyone still hearing whispers after they’ve recovered, but it could be residual damage.

But he doesn’t want to talk in front of Xiao Cao, countryside boy saying foolish things in front of the city boy. He turns his head away and won’t answer.

EID cases are on the upswing worldwide. The disease seems to have changed. It’s done this periodically over the last twenty years. It doesn’t seem to start in one area and travel; when it changes, it seems to change abruptly all over the world, all at once. One of the more peculiar qualities of EID. We have twenty-one cases in August. Seven of our cases exhibit the Lianfeng cycle. Eleven of the more traditional cases die, three recover in a more typical fashion.

In September, Zhao Lianfeng cleans our coal flue. He has quick hands, the hands of a mechanic. My uncle, my father’s brother, had those hands, stained around the nails with oil and grime after a Saturday spent fixing the car. My uncle is dead of EID, died when I was nine; the sudden strength of the memory surprises me.

In October, I realize that Zhao Lianfeng is growing. He is seventeen, and it’s not unheard of for seventeen-year-olds to grow, but he is still so thin, so fragile-looking. But he’s added two inches, he looks me in the eye. Me, the solid, heavy-hipped 5’7” giantess from the west.

I don’t give him physical exams anymore, but with this sudden growth spurt, I feel compelled to have him sit on the examining table. He climbs up for me, and I realize that over the last couple of months he has regained all the coordination he lost. His temperature at his monthly exam is 35 degrees Celsius, way below normal. His blood pressure is 85 over 50. I smile at him, pretending not to be concerned. He has bruises under the skin on the insides of his elbows and knees. Anemia? Leukemia? Bruising is a symptom of leukemia, but usually there is a rise in temperature. I’ve never heard of somebody with leukemia having a low body temperature. Maybe the EID caused heart damage, but his hands are not cold.

I need Xiao Cao for this. “Lianfeng,” I say, “I want you to go with me to the hospital in Tai’an.”

Xiao Cao knows this is bad, but his face betrays nothing.

“Don’t worry about money,” I say, “this won’t cost you anything.” I don’t want to alarm him. I want to have blood tests run. I think of the hospital in Tai’an, and cringe, remembering water standing on the uneven concrete floor, spittoons in the corners. They have a heart-lung machine, the only one in the province, but they still give injections with re-usable syringes. Hepatitis? Could this be some odd manifestation of hepatitis?

“Kate-ah Daifu,” Lianfeng says, “mei guanxi.” “It doesn’t matter.”

“Shi haode,” I say, “it’s good.”

He shakes his head. “Tai’an hospital, no go,” he says. And launches into a torrent of Chinese with Xiao Cao. A conversation in Mandarin sounds like an argument in English. Sometimes I wonder if the Chinese are all slightly hard of hearing. But the upshot is that he says he doesn’t need to go, he is not sick. He says that several times, emphatically. Despite the evidence in front of me, despite a chest like a washboard, despite the yoke of his collar and shoulder bones, despite his deer-narrow wrists.

“He says it is ‘them,’” Xiao Cao reports. “He says they are just still making some changes.”

“What does he mean, ‘them’?”

“I think he means demons,” Xiao Cao confides. “Guai-zi ma?” he asks Lianfeng.

Lianfeng snaps a negative, offended, and launches into a torrent.

I can’t follow the rest of the argument. It must be hot, Xiao Cao is angry. When Xiao Cao gets angry or has a beer, his whole face flushes down to his collar, as if he has been washed in watercolor. He is flushed now, and arguing back.

“Enough!” I finally shout. “What?” I say to Xiao Cao.

Xiao Cao has a sense of the enormity of his responsibilities as mouthpiece for western medicine, and he draws himself up. “He says I am calling him a stupid peasant,” Xiao Cao explains. “He says he doesn’t believe in demons, and that the whisperers are real. It doesn’t matter what you call it, though, it is superstition, whether you call it demons or whisperers.”

Lianfeng knows he’s being slandered, he can see it in Xiao Cao’s face. “Kate-ah Daifu,” he begins, but is immediately defeated by his lack of English vocabulary. In frustration, he turns on Xiao Cao again.

Again I manage to stop it. The important thing is the low body temperature and blood pressure, the bruising at his joints. I think the whispering is a red herring; it’s probably residual brain damage from the fever, or even some sort of tinnitus. Maybe he’s making meaning out of white noise; I don’t know or care.

He argues—the whisperers say he is all right.

“Then it won’t hurt to go to the hospital,” I say.

Xiao Cao translates with glee, and Lianfeng can clearly think of no counter argument.

But the way he looks at me needs no translation. Betrayed by his beloved Kate-ah Daifu.

Wednesday morning, we are supposed to go to the hospital. It is a clear, cold October day, just two weeks after the October first holiday. October first is the Chinese Fourth of July. It and May Day are the only two official holidays. I don’t know whether Lianfeng is going to get off the bus or not, but I am hoping. I don’t know what village he lives in; if Lianfeng doesn’t get off that bus, he could disappear out of my life forever, just slip into the vast pool of humanity in China, and I would never know.

I stand there in my quilted navy-blue coat, with my cap pulled down over my ears, and watch for the red-and-white long-distance bus. Finally, it comes slowly through the little town of Lijiazhuang, slowing to rattle across the railroad tracks, and stopping to let people off at the railway station. I can hear the gears grind a block away, and the blue smoke of the exhaust rises.

It stops in front of the clinic, and two men get off, but neither of them is Lianfeng.

I am not surprised. I am feeling as if I am supposed to be surprised, but I am not. I betrayed Lianfeng’s trust in the argument with Xiao Cao, I could tell. I don’t know what else I could have done, though.

“Kate-ah Daifu?” one of the men says.

It’s not Lianfeng. Oh Lord, is the boy sick? If he is sick, what can I do for him in a village in the middle of nowhere? The logistics of getting him to the hospital in Tai’an seem insurmountable. And how would I pay for a hospital visit?

“Come in,” I say, “come in,” gesturing like a friend for the man to follow. “Xiao Cao. Xiao Cao!”

It is Lianfeng’s uncle (mother’s younger brother, Chinese is very specific about family relationships). Lianfeng is fine, he explains through Xiao Cao. He could not come today, he is sorry. There is a chance for a big order for motor scooter parts, but Lianfeng must build a machine, a kind of stamp or mold—Xiao Cao’s English doesn’t include much practice at manufacturing parts. Lianfeng, it turns out, can build machines like no one else. He is making the village wealthy, the uncle says proudly.

“He’s sick,” I say.

No, the uncle says, Lianfeng said that Kate-ah Daifu would be very upset, but she must understand, he is fine. But he will come Friday, and go to the hospital with her.

China. Goddamn China, where you make plans and they say, sorry, not today. No tickets available for the train. Or they come at seven in the morning, unannounced, and say, are you ready?

“You don’t understand,” I say, searching my smattering of Chinese. Anger, I discover, improves my ability to speak. “He is sick.” I grasp for something to make them understand the importance. “I don’t know, I think, baixuebing.” White blood disease. Leukemia. “Maybe,” I add in English, for Xiao Cao to translate, “I don’t know. I need a hospital to tell me.”

The uncle is a young man, in his thirties, a peasant with bad teeth and thoughtful eyes. He listens, and absorbs, and is very still. He looks at me for a long moment. Then he nods, and, through Xiao Cao, he says to tell me that he will bring Lianfeng tomorrow. He cannot bring him today, the bus back to the village doesn’t leave until two, it will be too late when he gets home.

He won’t stay, he has errands to do in Lijiazhuang.

Watching him walk off through the crisp morning, carrying his string bag for purchases, I am embarrassed by my anger. The man has made a trip that will cost him ten hours out of his day, in order to make excuses for Zhao Lianfeng. Because I’m a western doctor, and western doctors are important, have a certain prestige. Forget that I’m not really a doctor—in China, I have more training than most of the local doctors. If the plague hadn’t hit China, maybe there would be a phone, but there is no phone in the clinic, maybe no phone in Zhao Lianfeng’s village. Oh, China! Oh, Lianfeng!

At least the uncle understands the importance of getting Lianfeng here.

Thursday morning, we ride the train to Tai’an together. We are riding hardseat for the hour trip to the city. It’s a local train, lots of stops, lots of peasants getting on all bundled-up in quilted jackets and layers of pants, women carrying bags the size of suitcases. The men slouch on a seat—if they can get one—and go to sleep. The women tend children, passing out drinks and orange slices to pacify them. The children drink tea out of jars.

Lianfeng has the seat next to the window, and I’m sitting in the middle. He watches out the window. It’s his first trip to the city. I don’t have enough Chinese, and he doesn’t have enough English for us to talk, but the distance between us feels more profound than that. The man sitting across from us leans forward and asks me how old I am.

I tell him twenty-seven, and that I’m American, since that is usually the next question.

He asks me something else. Every trip is like this, a series of questions that would be too personal to ask back home. Fortunately, I can’t understand him, so I smile and shrug and say I don’t speak much Mandarin. He asks me again, and then smiles at my incomprehension, says “American” in Chinese, and nods.

I glance at Lianfeng, but he is not looking at us. The man asks him something, and Lianfeng answers him reluctantly. The man has found a source of explanation, and Lianfeng is forced to talk. Daifu, he explains. American doctor. Albert Schweitzer. Dragging an unwilling boy to Tai’an “for his own good.”

Lianfeng is more interested as we pull into Tai’an. It must seem like we go through a lot of city before we get to the train station. What would he think of Beijing? I wonder. Coming into Beijing by train we always pass a big amusement park; Ferris wheel, roller coaster, the works. I could take him to a western hotel, buy him a duck dinner in the restaurant near Tiananmen Square, go to the Great Wall. The trip of a lifetime for a peasant boy.

A trip to the Tai’an hospital will have to do. (Unless he is dying, I think, admitting the thought for the first time. If he is dying, I’ll take him to Beijing.)

The hospital is as horrible as I remember. Patients sleep in beds covered with quilts and blankets from home. Women bring food—Chinese hospitals don’t provide food, although there are vendors who will sell a patient a dinner. The bathroom is not western: a trench in the concrete floor, washed with water and disinfectant. A man crouches in the hall, his IV on a stand. He wears pants and a T-shirt, and has his jacket slung over his shoulders, so that the sleeve doesn’t interfere with the tubing in his arm. He’s smoking a cigarette and talking to another man, maybe a friend come to visit. They look up in curiosity as we pass.

“Dr. Lambert.” My liaison at the Tai’an hospital is a woman, Dr. Yi. She doesn’t speak much English. I have a list of instructions carefully written out for me by Xiao Cao. She reads them and nods, smiles at Zhao Lianfeng, and says something reassuring. I sit while she prods and taps and peers and draws blood. He is embarrassed to death by the request for a urine sample.

“Four o’clock,” she says when she is finished, pointing to the clock and then holding up four fingers. Test results at four o’clock.

I promise we’ll come back. She nods, smiles at me. Then takes my wrist. “TB test?” she says. “You TB test, yes, no?”

“TB test no,” I say. “No TB.”

Lianfeng is standing there, happy to be wearing a shirt again, but when I say “no” he looks up, hair in his eyes, and cocks his head, as if listening. His eyes drift left, the way people’s eyes do when they are thinking of something. It is activity also common in some types of seizure, and he looks so strange that Dr. Yi and I both stop talking. He says something to Dr. Yi.

She answers him, explaining TB, I guess.

“TB yes,” he says to me.

“TB no,” I say, feeling foolish and ungrammatical. We test ourselves for TB every couple of months, except in the summer. I can test myself at the clinic.

Dr. Yi says something to him.

He shakes his head at me, says in Chinese, “They tell me.” I can understand what he is saying.

“Who are ‘they’?” But either he doesn’t understand or won’t answer. “TB yes,” he says firmly.

What the hell, I dragged Lianfeng all the way here for his tests, the least I can do is let her stick me for TB. And it will empower Lianfeng, give him back some self-respect.

Of course, in this hospital with spittoons in the corners, the TB sticks are modern, Japanese, efficient. By four o’clock, Dr. Yi will tell me what my TB results are. In the clinic, we still use the old serum test with the injection under the skin and the three day wait to see if there’s a reaction.

I take Lianfeng shopping. He has a list from his parents, aunts, uncles, cousins. Prices are too high, he clicks his tongue in disapproval and shakes his head. He buys some tools. The shop girls intimidate him with their ponytails and bracelets of watches (Beijing fashion a year out of date). But he is more himself, animated and full of energy. More energy than I have. It’s ironic that he still looks like bone and wire covered in skin and I still have western hips, but he’s got twice the energy I do.

He eats pretty well, too. We order half a kilo of dumplings and two dishes of pork and vegetables and a couple of cans of orange soda. He eats three-fourths of it, and even jokes with the waitresses.

Dr. Yi is waiting for us when we get back to the hospital. She is like many doctors with some college training, she reads medical English, and she has copied out test names and test results for me in careful printing. The results make no sense. His white blood count is not high, it’s normal. He is negative for hepatitis, TB, and diabetes. His cholesterol count is 66. That’s about half mine, and I’m very low. His blood pressure, as I noted, is abnormally low.

She has done a few other tests as well. He is EID positive, of course. I am EID positive, anyone who has ever had the disease is. On the multiphage index, the test of immune capabilities, he scores a chart-shattering thirty-one. The average score in the US is twenty-one, the average score in most Third World countries is around fourteen. On the viral index for a range of cancers, his results are so low that they don’t even register. Everybody—everybody—has some precancerous cells in their body. If you measure six or below on the scale, that means that a normal immune system is able to handle whatever minor cell breakdown you experience as a result of exposure to sunlight or the normal carcinogens (like coal smoke). Six to ten suggests the need for monitoring, and above ten means that you are either at high risk or already have a malignancy.

“Shi-haode,” I say, bemused.

He tells me he knows. He is grave.

Then Dr. Yi hands me my test results.

Lianfeng reaches out and takes my wrist. Carefully he says, “Hold on, little brother.”

I have TB.

TB is no big deal. I can treat it with antibiotics at the clinic. But it means that I can’t work with patients until I’ve run the treatment course, twenty-one days of antibiotics since I am asymptomatic.

Lianfeng’s blood results obsess me. I include them in my monthly report to Geneva. I go through our records until I find a history of the middle-aged woman whose disease went through the Lianfeng cycle in September and who is from Lijiazhuang, and Xiao Cao and I go to see her. She is like Lianfeng was in the first weeks, childish and simple, but I persuade her husband, and the four of us, Mr. Qian, Mrs. Zhang (husbands and wives do not have the same name in China), Xiao Cao, and I take the train to Tai’an, where Mrs. Zhang is given a full blood work-up.

Her results are not as good as Lianfeng’s, but they are startlingly better than they should be.

“Do you hear whispers?” I ask her through Xiao Cao. She looks at her husband, who is frowning, and leans forward conspiratorially. Like a little girl with a secret, she tells Xiao Cao that “they” upset her husband, so she doesn’t speak of them.

Zhao Lianfeng comes to see me on Sunday, his only day off, and I sit with Xiao Cao and question him about how he feels, about the whisperers. They have taught him to think differently, he says. Sometimes now he can see better ways to make things. They have made him smarter. The village has made a contract to sell motor scooter parts to Guangzhou—which we call Canton—because he has figured out ways to make them cheaper.

“Who are they?” I keep asking, but he doesn’t know. He can only shrug.

“Where are they?” I ask.

In him. And then, surprisingly, in me. “In Xiao Cao?” I ask.

He shakes his head and then looks thoughtful, eyes to the left, that sudden-struck look he had in the hospital in Tai’an.

“He says not, because of the vaccine,” Xiao Cao reports neutrally.

He can understand a little about me, though, because the whisperers are in me, too.

“Can they make me healthier?” I ask.

No, he says, then hesitates. Then firmly, “No, the mold was not right.”

I write it all down.

During the day, I write down lists of things I know about EID. Long and obsessive lists, since at first I do not exclude anything. I write down that it killed my uncle and my father, although not my mother or myself (but it is not gender specific, the World Health Organization’s statistics have found no correlation between mortality and gender). I tell Terry and Jeff, show them the test results, and we talk about it long into the night.

On the twentieth day of my course of antibiotics. I take the train to Tai’an alone, although Terry and Jeff have given me instructions that I have to call and tell them how things turn out. At the Tai’an Guesthouse, I pay and make a long distance call to Geneva, Switzerland. The only name I know is Dr. Geuter, the name on the address I use to mail my reports, and it takes over an hour of long distance operators and receptionists in Geneva before I finally get to him. When I tell him what I have found, he transfers me yet again, to a woman named Ilse Erandt, who speaks clear English with the almost British accent of some Germans.

She listens as I pour out my theory. Probably, over the years, she has gotten these kinds of calls before, I think. People who think that the plague is from God, or from Venusians, or from the increase of active cultures in our diet from eating yogurt. When I finish, she is silent, and I listen to the crackle of the open line, not as clear as it would be from Beijing. Maybe I’ve been in China too long, maybe I’m losing my mind.

“When did he come into your clinic?” she asks.

“March,” I say.

“That’s the earliest case of Windhouk Syndrome so far,” she says. And explains that until I called, the earliest case they knew of was from a camp outside Windhouk, Namibia, back in July. That person was killed in a riot. They have hundreds of cases from August, but the survivors are all still childlike.

“March,” she says. “I would like to see this young man.”

There are dust storms in Beijing. Sand blown in from the Gobi is turning the sky yellow, even at noon. Sandstorms are not like they are in Lawrence of Arabia, they are more like a yellow fog. The Chinese call it ghost weather.

The plane climbs above the yellow, rising out of it until the sky is blue and only the land below is stained yellow. From above, there are thin places and thicker, darker places, as the wind moves the sand in currents.

I have been thinking about the whispers.

It’s possible that Lianfeng has anthropomorphized the changes the disease has caused. That his mind, in order to cope with his brain and body, has manufactured a “them” that “tells him.” But there are two things that keep coming back to me. The first is his insistence that I get a TB test. Maybe it was just a way for him to turn the tables on me because he was angry at me for making him go to the hospital, a kind of “if I have to, you have to” tit-for-tat. But I feel as if he knew I was going to test positive. And he said that it was because the whisperers in me had told the whisperers in him.

Second is something Terry brought up in one of our late-night discussions; the peculiar way that the disease patterns seem to change worldwide, all at once. Lianfeng had the Windhouk Cycle in March, another patient, thousands of miles away in Southern Africa, demonstrated the same symptoms a couple of months later. And when there was an upswing in the disease, it was worldwide. When that happened before, in ’98, ’02, and again in ’07, there were attempts to link the upswing to everything from magnetic storms and sunspots to the greenhouse effect, and on through to astrology.

What if EID is like the sandstorm, not just the grains of sand individually, but the whole? All interconnected. Then it would make sense that, for the whisperers, what happened in Lijiazhuang, China, and what happened just outside Windhouk, Namibia, could be connected. Lianfeng is the first cell to change in a whole body that’s changing.

He’d told Xiao Cao that the whisperers couldn’t improve me because “the mold wasn’t right.”

If they have got that right, that’s going to cause some real change, because, since the US and EC perfected the vaccine in 2010, most of the industrialized countries have been fully vaccinated. And Lianfeng had told Xiao Cao that the whisperers were in Lianfeng, and were in me, but that they weren’t in Xiao Cao, because of the vaccine.

All over the world, in places like the outlying suburbs of Mexico City, and Mozambique, and Bolivia, and all the forgotten countries of the world where the vaccine hasn’t come, there are lots of people for whom “the mold is right.” People who will be healthier, and smarter, and who, like Lianfeng, may be able to improve their village sweatshops. Maybe there is a whole economic miracle about to unfold in the Third World, while the US, locked out by the vaccine, can only watch.

It’s only speculation. And it’s hard to imagine, watching Lianfeng sleep beside me in his seat.

Geneva is lightyears—a full century!—away from Beijing, and nothing I have told Lianfeng could possibly have prepared him. He stands in the airport in his new Beijing clothes, looking at the advertisements, the mixture of foreigners, innocent of the West.

Dr. Erandt is a woman my mother’s age, wearing a beautiful suit the creamy brown of eggshells. Dr. Erandt’s Chinese translator has an earring in his nose. Lianfeng can’t stop staring at it (and neither can I). I haven’t had a decent haircut in over a year, and I’m still wearing my awful cotton coat from China.

“I am so happy to meet you,” Dr. Erandt says, shaking Lianfeng’s hand. “You don’t have any idea how happy I am to meet you.”

“Dr. Erandt,” I say, “have you ever had EID?”

“No,” says Dr. Erandt, “I was lucky.”

Lianfeng looks at me. He couldn’t have understood, I asked in English. But he nods. “Weiguoren,” he says to me.

Foreigners.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, April 1993.

A Slow Day at the Gallery

A.M. Dellamonica

The museum escort Christopher had requested arrived just as he was winding up a self-guided tour of the Earth exhibit. Staring at Monet’s Waterlily Pond, he was lost in a passion more intense, he suspected, than any he had expended during either of his two brief marriages.

The painting been reframed, but was otherwise unchanged since the last time he had seen it, fifty years before. As he gazed at its placid flowers and vibrant willow leaves, Christopher even began to imagine that the grooves time had left on him—age, injuries, bitterness—were just as superficial.

Same man, different frame. He could do this.

Leaning heavily on his cane—museum air exhausted him, even here—he tore his gaze away from the shimmering canvas and faced the Tsebsra museum guide. It looked like a badly executed balloon-animal: a tubular sac of tight, rubbery skin balanced on lumpy legs. Stringy eyestalks dangled from the bulb at its top, while the bottom of its body tapered into a long, rubbery tail decorated with blue stripes. The markings meant it was young, probably still ungendered. It wore a floor-length apron printed with its museum ident and, at the moment, it was standing almost upright. The pose could have been reminiscent of a praying mantis, if only the insect had been bleach-white, headless, and lacking its four upper limbs.

As the guide approached, a faint chime sounded in Christopher’s left ear. “Museum staff member, late adolescent, name on ident equates to Vita,” said his protocol software in a smooth, feminine voice. He had named the program Miss Manners—Em for short. “Posture indicates polite, professional interest and includes appropriate respect due an adult of your years. Vita is curious about the camera you are carrying.”

Christopher smiled at the guide.

“Your expression has been interpreted by Vita’s proto and it appears receptive to conversation.”

So. Converse. He opened his hand to fully reveal the camera, which had captured a shot of the Monet on its tiny screen. “Just didging some postcards for the grandkids.”

The alien speech was a series of intestinal-sounding gurgles, almost like water boiling on a stove. There was no variation that Christopher could hear, but the translation came through Em immediately. “It looks different from the ones I’ve seen before. Bigger.”

“It’s antique. Like me.”

“Would you like me to take a shot of you with the painting?”

“Sure,” he said. At that, one of its feet whipped up with alarming speed to snatch the device out of Christopher’s hand; its tail slewed around to balance its body weight and its spine bent into an S-curve. Thus contorted, it was able to drop an eye-stalk directly on the scanner. Heart pounding, Christopher grinned into the lens, resisting an urge to wipe the palms of his hands on his hips. It snapped the picture quickly and returned the camera back.

“It would be polite to look away now,” Em said, so Christopher turned back to Monet. The guide sidled up close and then shifted away. It had probably been advised to widen the space between them to a more human-appropriate distance.

“Do you have many?”

“Many what?”

“Grandchildren, sir.”

“Three boys, four girls.”

“Ah. So they’re all grown?”

“No. Humans are gendered at birth.”

“Vita appears mortified,” reported Em. “You should have corrected it more gently.”

“My apologies,” the alien said.

He shrugged—let its software interpret that.

He had first seen this painting eighty years earlier, when he was in his teens. He had seen digital prints of it when he was even younger, of course—Monet was inescapable. Even so, Christopher had never understood the big fuss until he’d taken a school trip to the National Gallery.

He had been fooling around with his mates, ignoring the tour, aggravating his teachers and the guards before finally ducking the group altogether. In search of a place to smoke, he had rounded a corner and found the Monet. Recognition had stopped him, nothing more—he paused, frowned, noticed that it was different from the digitals he had seen. Prints couldn’t do justice to oil; couldn’t communicate the singular way these paintings glowed. Monet’s luminous sunlight on water had crept up on him like a pickpocket. He barely noticed when it made away with his heart.

“This was painted around 1900 A.D. as you reckon time, at a population cluster in Europe called Giverny. Monet had a house there. He painted this garden many times . . . ”

“France,” he growled.

“Pardon?”

“Giverny is in France.”

A pause. “Are you all right, sir? My proto believes I have upset you.”

“Upset?” he managed. “Nah, just older’n hell.”

“It would be perfectly understandable if receiving instruction in your home culture from an offworlder . . . ”

What? Made me want to gut you?

“I just need to sit down,” he said, retreating to the cushioned bench in the middle of the room. This gallery was built to look like an authentic Earth museum—off-white plaster walls, smooth hardwood floors, ceiling lights angled to spotlight each work. Furniture, thank Christ, to ease the aching feet of contemplative patrons. The paintings were displayed too close to each other, though, crammed practically into a collage that extended from floor to ceiling. There was a mishmash of periods and styles: Andy Warhol’s soup cans cuddled next to an amateurish painting of a dog. This was, in turn, located beneath Sir Stanley Spencer’s Saint Francis and the Birds and above an Ansel Adams photograph of an American mountain. Only the Monet had any space to itself, and that was probably because there was extra security hidden in the wall on which it was mounted.

“Grandkids made me promise to snap ‘em the damned painting,” he puffed.

A bubble of fluid jittered beneath Vita’s skin, indicating—according to Em—surprise. “You didn’t come . . . it wasn’t your wish to see it?”

Keep a lid on your emotions, old boy, Christopher lectured himself. “Don’t go for the impressionist stuff, and I saw it in London once anyway. I’m more of a sculpture man. I came for the Tsebsra sculpture.”

“I see. Then . . . you don’t like it at all?” Vita’s eyestalks quivered. “The way it glints? The shades of green . . . ”

“It’s all right. You do like it, I take it?”

“I think it’s wonderfully natural,” Vita gushed. “Tseb work is so formal and mannered. I visit it every day, as soon as I come in. My parents brought me, the day it arrived.”

“When was that . . . ten years ago, surely?”

“As your time is reckoned. The Nandi sold it to the museum after . . . ” Vita shut up abruptly and Christopher didn’t need Em for once to tell him the pause was an awkward one.

“Oh. The Lloyds of London thing?” He managed to keep his tone off-hand. The National Gallery had lent a Nandieve museum the Monet and a quartet of other paintings. The aliens had paid a ludicrous sum for the loan. A sweetheart deal, or so it must have seemed to the Gallery’s perpetually underfunded curators.

Unfortunately, failure to check the fine print of cultural difference led to disaster in short order. To the Nandi, the word ‘loan’ implied an indefinite term of visitation. They refused to return the paintings.

The Gallery spent fifteen years trying to get Waterlily Pond back. They were deep in negotiations when some bright bulb in Gallery management decided to put in an insurance claim, asking to be compensated for the value of the time the painting had spent offworld. Reasonable enough, perhaps—but when Lloyds cut the cheque to the museum, the Nandi claimed this made the painting theirs. The next thing anyone knew, they had auctioned it off to the Tsebsra.

Fumbling in his vest pocket, Christopher produced a case of small gelatinous tablets, selecting a marked placebo and pressing it under his tongue. He massaged his left armpit gently, pretending to work out a pain that wasn’t there. “You only get two heart transplants these days before they list you as inoperable,” he commented to Vita, figuring that the bunching of its many eyes indicated interest in his movements.

He’d guessed wrong. “Personal medical information is not discussed openly here,” Em scolded, but before it could tell him how to apologize, Vita piped up, forcing it to translate instead.

“It’s okay. We’re not all as rigid as the protos are programmed to say we are.” A previously invisible fissure opened under the eyes, revealing an immense empty space bordered by sharp black ridges. “I’m not offended.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I forget I’m not home. Get to be my age, it’s more or less a license to be rude.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely. No family is complete without a cantankerous retired war-” His turn to stop short: he had almost said veteran, and soldiers were never allowed here.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Vita is alarmed,” Em reported.

“Warhorse,” he said. “It’s a saying. It means I’m old meat, child. Unfit for dogs.”

Its head expanded slightly and a grinding sound issued from its throat. “Noise equates to a laugh, tone denotes relief,” reported Em.

It and me both, Christopher thought. What was wrong with him?

“I came to see the Spine,” he said finally, getting to his feet. “Would you take me?”

“Are you feeling better?”

“Well enough.”

“This way, then.” Tail swirling, it crooked a toe in the direction of the exit. Christopher got one last hurried glance at the water lilies and then they were gone.

Outside the authentic human museum with its authentic humidity-controlled air, he felt himself reviving. They passed into an ornately carved walkway, lined with windows and meant to communicate with the sensitive feet of the Tsebs, a lumpy obstacle course of knobs and gaps. Christopher’s ankles ached as he struggled to traverse it without falling. Just another hurdle, he told himself, like ducking the police or smuggling his false ident out of humanspace. He’d been retired for twenty-four years when the boys approached him for this job. Until a minute ago, he would have sworn he remembered his business.

His cane twisted unexpectedly at the apex of the arch, causing him to wobble. He had braced it in what looked like a knothole, but the knot was mobile, rotating against the force of his weight. Vita caught his elbow with one foot, swung its tail around an upward-thrusting piece of walkway, and heaved in counter-balance. Its grip was weak, and Christopher could feel that the Tseb’s strength would never hold his full weight.

Between them, though, they managed to keep him upright. Vita moved his cane to more solid ground. Christopher offered solemn, mumbled thanks. After that, the alien stood closer to him.

Coming off the bridge, Em instructed him to keep his eyes right, towards the ocean. Christopher looked left instead, to a massive hill that rose like a bell-curve from the beach.

“That is one of our burial mounds,” Vita said. “Look away.”

“I thought you were a bohemian, Vita. Hard to offend?”

“Vita’s expression has turned playful. It is receptive to this conversation,” Em said. “However, the topic chosen is highly improper.”

“You want to know about the mound?”

“Why not? I didn’t come five thousand lightyears for Andy Warhol or the damned cuisine.”

“There isn’t much to tell. When we feel that our spirit is about to break with the physical plane . . . ”

“Is that supposed to mean when you die?”

Its head contracted, the skin wrinkling momentarily before expansion somewhere else in its body took up the slack. “Die, yes. When we are dying, we go to a mound and climb as high as we can before weakness overcomes us. It is a last chance to measure the worth of our lives.”

“What if you’re too sick to get there?”

“Someone takes you to the base of the mound. If you are very respected, they may even carry you up.”

“But not always?”

“Nobody can return from a dying place.”

“So you heft your troublesome old Uncle Pete up the hill—”

A loud rush of Vita’s internal fluids startled him so badly he stopped speaking.

“Sound equates to a giggle,” Em said.

“Carry someone up, watch them die . . . and then you stay until you starve?”

“Yes.” Vita paused; Em reported it was afraid of being overheard. “In that case, the measure of worth is not by how high you climb, but by how long you survive.”

“I suppose that makes sense.”

Light steps behind them made them turn simultaneously, continuing along the lumpy walkway like the well-behaved pair they weren’t. He glanced Vita’s way and offered a conspiratorial wink just as a trio of eye stalks swiveled his way in a gesture that, according to Em, meant almost exactly the same thing.

He kept his voice lowered. “Say, what if you’re too sick to be moved?”

“The effort is always made.”

“Even if it kills you?”

“Even then.”

“How come?”

“We are sun people, Christopher. It is unconscionable to fail to die out of doors.”

They stepped out of the walkway and into a darkened gallery. “So what if I was to seize up in here?”

Another alarming giggle. “You’re not a sun person.”

“Good. I’d hate to—”

“Yes?”

“Do something unconscionable,” he finished quietly. His eyes adjusted to the dimness and he saw he was in another three-dimensional nightmare—a floor of knobs, lumps and potholes. Little orifices covered the outer wall, soft and penetrable, intended for Tseb tails. The ceiling was low and the air smelled sickly sweet, laden with alien pollens. Dark shaggy moss like the hide of a buffalo covered the nooks and crannies. A few cameras were tucked here and there in the corners, but overall security was lax. The Tsebs were a civilized people, after all. They had nothing to fear from their own. As for the few human terrorists who had made it through their security screens, they had been ordered—just like Christopher—to destroy the Monet.

Vita was still savoring their rebellion against decorum. “I promise you can die right here, Christopher, and nobody will hold it against you.”

“Swear?”

Instructed by its proto, it awkwardly made a heart-crossing gesture with one upraised foot. “I swear.”

“What if I was one of you?”

It was quiet for long enough that he wondered if he had gone too far, but at last the translation came. “That depends.”

“On what?”

“If it was instantaneous, unexpected, painless—you would be forgiven,” it said. “If not . . . if you knew you were dying, if you tried to get to the sun and failed, or you didn’t try . . . ”

“Big time transgression, huh?”

Its gesture equated, Em said, to a vehement nod. “Everything associated with your death would be shunned.”

“Your culture only takes forgiveness to a point, then?”

“You have to draw the line somewhere.”

“Indeed,” he agreed. “Quite so.”

He let Vita slide back into the proper tour, narrating the history of the Spine as they descended down through the treacherous footing of the gallery. They passed shelves of fungus, tiny statues etched from eggshells, ornately carved crystals and black scrolled wands made of a substance called sea root. Everything was three-dimensional, tactile. Feigning awe, Christopher touched things that felt like peanut butter, dead flesh, adhesive tape, cold steel. He snapped the occasional historical treasure with his too-bulky camera and asked dozens of questions.

There wasn’t a flat surface anywhere. The Tseb didn’t do two-dimensional depiction. Probably that was why human painting fascinated them so.

Art you can’t touch. Daft primitives.

Down and around, hobbled by the lumpy floor, he was genuinely winded by the time they arrived at the Spine.

It was a single glowing sculpture within a massive subterranean chamber, a giant-sized, abstract depiction of the Tsebsra body. Indentations in its belly suggested femininity without insisting upon it; faded bands on its tail hinted at both maturity and youth. It was delicately curved, less knobby than the grotesqueries which had preceded it in the upper galleries.

A pair of Tsebs were lounging at its base, running their feet over the structure, their sluglike pouches extended to lick the surface. They tucked back in when Vita appeared with Christopher, moving back through the exit without a backward glance.

They were alone.

Good. Fewer witnesses, less trouble. He detached the bottom cartridge of his camera and surreptitiously affixed it to the wall beside the door.

“Vita’s sound equates to a contented sigh,” Em reported.

Christopher hadn’t heard anything.

Looking up to the bulging top of the statue, he realized he was disappointed. This was the Tsebs’ Mona Lisa. He had hoped to understand its beauty. He had come so far . . .

“Come on!” Vita gripped his arm, urging him closer. They worked their way to the edge of the sculpture and the alien’s tail stretched out to roam over it lovingly.

Christopher touched the cool surface. Visually it was seamless, a single white structure made of unidentifiable material. But under his fingers the texture and temperature varied: parts of it were woody, others metallic, still others plastic. Towering above them, the statue’s shadow was washed out by the steady golden light emitted from six light globes which encircled it like a wide halo.

This thing predates Columbus and Shakespeare, Christopher thought. It has been sitting here since before my kind invented the printing press.

Nothing. His old heart refused to be moved.

Vita hissed; Em chirped a translation. “When I was new-hatched my parents brought me here. I climbed all the way to the top. The holds look worn down from here at the bottom, but the effect is intentional. You’d be surprised how firm they are! When you are very young, Christopher, you can sit on the top, inflate your sacs, and leap down.”

“That’s a long way to fall,” he said.

“Oh, it’s perfectly safe. Inside the coiled tail is a soft moss, and as babies our bodies are very light. Craket the Maker intended it this way. She felt it was important for the Spine to speak to us differently at the various stages of our lives.”

He squinted at the bulb at the top of the sculpture. “It’s a long way up. Weren’t you scared?”

“Terrified. I had to be coaxed down. My parents were deeply shamed.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

“I am the better for it. Many of my kind only come to see the Spine once or twice. The embarrassment brought me back again and again. It remade my soul.”

“I see,” Christopher said.

“Perhaps you should take a rest. I think it would be comfortable if you wanted to sit here.”

He looked at it dubiously. It was about as high and thick as a park bench, even reasonably flat, but streaks of dried saliva were flaking away where the other Tsebs had been licking it.

Gentle white toes closed on his scarred elbow.

“Are you all right? I know I said it was acceptable for you to die indoors but you would alert me if you were unwell, wouldn’t you?”

“Old man’s prerogative,” he murmured. The grip on his arm tightened and he leaned against it experimentally. Vita gurgled.

“Sound denotes physical exertion,” Em said.

He let himself fall.

He landed atop the alien, tangling a leg and an arm over its twisting body. One of the bumps in the floor caught him in the kidney, a blinding, sudden pain that dulled his awareness of Vita beneath him, bucking and squeaking. Liquids in its body compressed under his weight and its thin skin stretched against him. The sounds it made, according to Emm, equated to surprise and minor pain.

“Christopher? Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” he grunted. “Sorry. I’ll get off you in a sec—just need my pills. Are you hurt?”

“Just pressed,” it said. “Your body is so warm! How do you stand it?”

“Cold blood,” he muttered. Then, opening the packet of tablets, he bounced the golden globs down the length of the white body.

“Bloody hell,” he said, maintaining the façade for one more second. Then the tabs reacted to the room’s ambient moisture. They popped, releasing a gelatinous payload which bound the Tseb to the floor of the chamber.

A chatter like rocks grinding together from the body beneath him.

“Vita is alarmed.”

He rolled off it, backed away. The jelly splotches spread and welded it down—tail, toes, body. It tugged at one with its foot and tore a hunk of skin away. Fluid the color of motor oil flowed into the fuzz that covered the floor.

“Stay still,” he ordered. “You’ll injure yourself.”

“Christopher?”

Retrieving his cane, he leaned hard against the Spine and caught his breath. Vita was still wiggling on the floor.

“Don’t move,” he said again. The web packet from his camera had already expanded to seal the room’s only entrance, encasing it in a gelatinous webwork. It wouldn’t seal them in for long, but he didn’t need long.

“What are you doing?”

“Causing a diplomatic incident,” he said, unpacking the cane.

“What do you mean?”

“Some chaps I know wanted me to destroy the Monet. You see, people back home have been sitting around with their thumbs up their arses for rather a long time, as we reckon it, doing squat about getting the painting back from you.”

The cane was filled with three different harmless fluids, all under pressure. His mates had thought he would spray it over the paintings in the earth gallery. One two, game over. Instead he unpacked its tripod and took careful aim at the top of the Spine. He started the mechanism that would mix the chemicals into an acid. A single green droplet hissed from the tip of the device.

“Squeal denotes pain,” Em said.

He looked at the child. Vita was struggling against its bonds again, and a great hunk of its leg had been torn open.

“Listen to me,” he told it. “Those capsules were meant to hold a human. Your skin is obviously very delicate. You must lie still . . . you’re going to be seriously injured if you don’t stop.”

Vita shuddered once. Little fissures bled at the edges of the jellies that bound it to the floor.

“All right,” Vita said. After a moment, when it had clearly stopped moving, Christopher returned to his destruction of the statue. The cane beeped, indicating that the acid’s mix cycle was complete. He took careful aim at the top of the Spine.

Strong toes gripped his knee then, hurling him backward, off-balance. He fell, tangled in the grip of Vita’s bleeding leg. The cane, still in his hand, rained droplets of acid over them both. He closed his eyes, covered his face. His jacket caught most of it, although he could smell his hair burning.

“Don’t do this, Christopher,” Vita pleaded.

“It’s too late.” He struggled to free himself without tearing Vita’s skin further, wincing as its body gurgled beneath him. The acid was blistering long sticky lines near its eyes, the flesh running like melted cheese. Finally he rolled off of her, propped himself up on his elbows. Taking aim from down on the floor, he began to spray. He laid the acid on the Spine in a straight, consistent layer, just like paint.

Vita yanked his leg and hissed; Em translated. “Stop!”

He struggled to breathe. “The general idea was that by destroying the Monet, you see, we would punish both your museum and the people in my government who let it go. The boys had whipped up these clever gadgets they thought I could slip into this place. They wanted an old man, preferably one who had one toe in the crematorium anyway. But the Earth exhibit is too well protected.” Acrid smoke burned at his eyes, the first chemical reaction of acid burning the statue. “Besides, that painting means more to me than my own mother. You might say it remade my soul.”

“You haven’t got one,” Vita whispered.

“I was going to tell them to stuff their job. But someone else would have gone, don’t you see? And what if I was wrong? What if they did destroy it? It would have been a pointless sacrifice. Cutting off our nose, as they say. I even considered warning the authorities, just to save the painting.”

“Sound equates to a contemptuous snort,” Em said.

“But then I thought—if we’re going to take all these lovely toys halfway across the galaxy, why not put them to real use? Punish the guilty, I reckoned, instead of the innocent.”

Drops of water dribbled down from the ceiling, an immense and sudden profusion of moisture. Striking the acid, it sizzled and steamed. Christopher saw that the Spine was discolored, but not destroyed. The damage was probably reparable, and the acid was being dispersed by the fire system. He was failing.

There was nothing more he could do; he was out of weapons. The boys had tried to build a bomb into a hearing aid or a proto, and all they’d done was blow the tester right into a coma.

He’d come all this way, and at best he would have scared them.

“Vita requires immediate medical attention.” Em gave the words a plaintive tone.

“All right, all right.”

The grip on his knee had loosened, and he managed to stand upright again. The cane’s payload was half used, and so he spent the rest of the cartridge spreading acid on the door seal. Security must be outside by now, trying to cut their way in . . . there was no reason not to help them now.

“Bring a doctor,” he shouted.

He spared a last glance for the intact Spine and then, finally, forced himself to look down. The knobby floor around Vita’s body was filled with golden blood and water, and its struggles were weakening. It had torn itself apart trying to stop him.

And the funny thing was he’d never been the sort who could bear to see someone who was hurt—even scratched—but he could look right at Vita. It was like seeing a movie monster, a stop-motion death-scene. Before he retired, he had bombed a shuttle full of Tsebs over Earth’s lost paintings. He had lain awake nights, imagining they died like humans. Now . . .

“They’re coming,” he said. “Hang on.”

“Sound denotes great pain.”

Take its mind off it, he thought. “I had a part-time job when I was a kid,” he said. “Guided museum tours in my home town. I worked slow days only at first—they wouldn’t trust me with whole groups, just the random wandering tourist. I’m tempted to think that’s what your job here is like, Vita—that we have that much, at least, in common.”

“We have nothing in common,” Em translated. “I’m not like you.”

“I wanted to stay on with that museum, but nobody at home wanted to look at paintings anymore. It’s all digital home galleries and knobby bric-a-brac. There was no job for me.” He knelt, lifted a flap of Tseb skin and tried to press it back against the wound. Frothy orange foam was seeping from its throat.

“Why are you telling me this?” Vita asked, twitching away from the hand he’d clapped over its injury.

“Distraction,” he said.

“From what? Your desecration?”

He glanced at the Spine again, mottled with faint black streaks where the various materials merged. “It didn’t work.”

It laughed bitterly. “You’re saying that because you think I’m dying.”

“No,” Christopher said. He didn’t insult it by apologizing. “You’ll be fine. I’m trying to take your mind off the discomfort.”

“Do you mean pain?” If its body language showed a reaction, Em didn’t catch it.

“Sorry.”

“Chattering at me like a scatbug doesn’t help.”

“They’ll be through the door in a minute. I didn’t know your skin was so delicate, Vita—”

“Shut up.” With that, the alien wound its toes along a hold in the floor and tried to pull itself to the blockaded exit. Pieces of its innards unraveled, stringing along the lumpy floor. Its tail tore loose, lashing the Spine with fading vigor.

It was within a yard of the exit when he finally heard Security breaking through the acid-weakened blockade with a cutting tool. Their faces filled a small gap in the webbing, and then they desperately tore at the rest of it, trying to open the gateway for Vita. One of them extended its tail through the hole, dangling it like a rescue rope.

They weren’t fast enough. The injured guide had stopped moving. Air blatted, escaping the tears in the rubbery white skin as if it was a deflating life raft. Vita’s body shrank, and then went still.

After a moment, the guard’s tail retracted to the other side of the door. Tseb eyestalks crowded the opening. Four or five of them stared at Christopher through the shredded jelly of the once-blocked entrance.

“It was only meant to immobilize,” he said.

There was no response. He threw away the cane and put his hands up. Didn’t they have protos?

“I’m unarmed now,” he said.

No reaction. They actually backed up the corridor, away from him and out of sight.

“Aren’t you going to arrest me?” He rubbed his face, was surprised to find it wet.

Silence. He looked at the knobby, impassable floor. His cane, disassembled and empty, would never hold his weight again. “Hey. You cops. Going to cart me off or not?”

A chime, suddenly, from Em. “You are located in a dying place. Please leave the chamber and surrender yourself to the authorities.”

“What the hell?” He opened his mouth to shout again and then realization hit. They wouldn’t come in. Their art treasure was sealed away, ostracized by rigid beliefs and the blood of a child. They were going to leave Vita’s body here to rot with its beloved Spine.

And who was he to be offended by that?

When another minute passed and they still didn’t come after him, Christopher heaved his body over the base of the Spine so he was inside the curve of its tail. He lay inside, head and legs raised by its height, and found that it fit him just right. The mossy floor was blessedly comfortable, just as the tour had advertised.

“Something soft to land on,” he murmured, settling in. His leg was aching from the pratfall he’d taken onto the lumpy floor and both feet were throbbing. He kicked off his shoes, waggled his toes in the warm, moist air.

One last lump pressed into his hip—the camera. He took it out, set it to slideshow, and projected images onto the curvy white interior of the Spine. Warhol. Spencer. Malta. A fake Picasso. A Bill Reid sketch. The Monet. Himself, posing for fake grandkids. Vita. The Mound. Vita again.

“Expression equates to a friendly smile,” Em said.

Christopher tore the proto speaker out of his ear and flipped back to the paintings.

After a couple of hours, he started to get hungry.

Originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 2002.

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

Mary Rosenblum

One of the most popular and prolific of the new writers of the '90s, Mary Rosenblum made her first sale in 1990, and soon became one of that decade’s most prolific contributors at short story lengths, making dozens of sales to many different magazines and anthologies. Her linked series of “Drylands” stories, about an American Southwest rendered uninhabitable by prolonged droughts, now seems, alas, more germane than ever, and was recently collected in an expanded version as Water Rites. The original version, The Drylands, won the prestigious Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel of the year in 1993. Her other books include the SF novels Chimera, The Stone Garden, and Horizons, and a short story collection, Synthesis and Other Stories. She has also written a trilogy of mystery novels written under the name Mary Freeman. Rosenblum won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2009 for her story “Sacrifice.” A graduate of Clarion West, Mary Rosenblum lives in Canby, Oregon, and runs the website New Writers Interface. Her most recent book is Self Publishing Success: A Handbook for New Writers.

Maureen F. McHugh (maureenfmchugh.com)

Maureen McHugh has written four novels and two collections of short fiction. She won the James Tiptree Award for her first novel, China Mountain Zhang. She was a Finalist for the Story Award for Mothers & Other Monsters, and won a Shirley Jackson Award for her collection After the Apocalypse. After the Apocalypse was also named one of Publishers Weekly’s Ten Best Books of 2011.

She was born in a blue collar town in Ohio. She’s lived in New York City, Shijiazhuang, China, and Austin, Texas. She currently lives in Los Angeles, California where she is trying desperately to sell her soul to Hollywood but as it turns out, the market is saturated.

David B. Kisor

David Kisor is the Creative Director for Growing Sound. He writes songs to promote positive social and emotional learning for families with young children.

A.M. Dellamonica (alyxdellamonica.com)

A.M. Dellamonica is the author of Indigo Springs, which won the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, Sci-Fiction and Strange Horizons, and in numerous anthologies; her 2005 alternate-history Joan of Arc story, “A Key to the Illuminated Heretic,” was shortlisted for the Sideways Award and the Nebula Award. Dellamonica lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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.