Issue 9

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

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the ninth issue of Forever Magazine!

Much of last month was spent catching up on secret projects I still can’t tell you about and reading, lots of reading, for the my Best Science Fiction of the Year series. This past month, the first volume became available for preorder at Amazon and B&N. I know I’ve been working on this for a while, but that just made the whole thing feel a lot more real. I can’t wait to be able to share it with you.

This month, I’ll be visiting the D.C. area and attending Capclave (www.capclave.org). I’ll end up spending most of my time in the dealer’s room selling old my old bookstore inventory and Clarkesworld-related stuff. Ron Guyatt sent me some great postcards featuring some of the series we’ve been using for our covers. So if you’re in the area that weekend, stop by and say hi and I’ll give you some.

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! Nine months in and we haven’t convinced anyone to do that yet, so you could be the first!

Until next month . . .

-Neil

A Glimpse of the Marvellous Structure
(and the Threat it Entails)

Sean Williams

It is difficult to measure the time since my last communication. Too much has passed, I fear, for the suspicion of my demise not to have become a certainty in some minds. Suspend all judgement, Master Catterson, on that score and any other, until I have conveyed the full import of recent events to you.

As suspected, the citizens of Gevira have uncovered something wondrous beneath the veneer of their civilisation—wondrous and at the same time utterly strange and deadly. Here is my account of it, sent a second time in full now I know my previous missives have gone unread. I leave to you, as always, the divination of the will of the Guild.

<First Account>

Security Officer Gluis alerted the shift supervisor of his discovery at 1900 hours. I arrived at 1910. Both Gluis and Supervisor Nemke were in attendance, but no other security officers beyond a small detail preserving the scene from the public.

(As Guild regulations demand, I have attached audiovisual recordings of the events should you need to verify my abbreviated transcript.)

“I’ve called topside.” Nemke indicated the unsealed container that Gluis had pulled out of the habitat walls. “They’re sending an investigator immediately. Before they come, Donaldan, I want you to tell me what you see. Step aside, Rudi, and let him look.”

Gluis backed away with a contemptuous look solely for my benefit. It irked me that Supervisor Nemke insisted on using our first names, but I swallowed my irritation and complied. As the greenest of Nemke’s security detail, I allowed her to educate me only so far as it complied with my goals. You know, Master Catterson, that I consider you my only teacher. That day’s lesson, however, was one I am unlikely to forget.

The container was a standard-issue one-meter cube that slid on low-friction runners from its recess and opened by rolling its flexible top panel along runners down the front of the container, revealing a catalogue number stenciled in black. A quick search of inventory determined that it was supposed to contain scrubbers for the masks used on the main face. Someone—Gluis, I presumed at the time, and have no reason to doubt now—had swept aside the scrubbers to reveal something much more sinister.

The body was curled in a foetal position, with its thighs against its chest and arms tightly folded around its legs. The head had been tipped back to reveal its face. Slight features; a delicacy of ears, nose and jaw; brown hair longer than a man’s; full lips, slightly parted—all suggested, correctly, that the corpse was that of a woman. An attractive one too, I thought, allowing myself the observation in case it related to the woman’s demise and subsequent concealment. Deep frown lines suggested recent unhappiness, not yet smoothed away by death. More scrubbers had been pushed away to reveal her clothing, a khaki fieldsuit of crisply synthetic material. There were no bulges in the pockets, and no obvious sign of injury.

Forensic technology on Gevira lags significantly behind ours, but I could tell that the corpse had been scanned by Gluis and Nemke, and that neither officer had teased the cause of death from other intimate details. It didn’t appear to be murder; that much was clear. The body’s organs had ceased functioning by an act of will. Euthanasia is socially acceptable on Gevira, but that fact prompted more questions than it answered. Why had this woman chosen such an option and then hidden her body in a container where it might never be found? Why was I called out in the middle of the night to witness its examination? Why summon a topsider, furthermore, to investigate what must surely have been a case of no great importance?

The seven habitats on this level are kept uniformly cool in order to prevent thermal leakage into the bedrock outside. So close to the planet’s South Pole, the mine cannot afford any slippage due to melting permafrost. Touching the corpse’s smooth forehead, I found it be precisely at room temperature. The corpse’s memory dump was protected by security algorithms I could not penetrate.

“Well? What do you think?”

“She’s dead, Supervisor Nemke,” I said with practised nonchalance. “Have you IDed her?”

“That’s where it gets interesting.” Nemke looked up as footsteps sounded in the corridor behind us. “Here’s our colleague now. Donaldan, I’d like you to meet Investigator Cotton.”

I turned to see a slight woman approaching with her hand extended, but it was not her hand that made me recoil. Her face took me so completely off-guard that I stumbled backwards a step, caught my boot on the corner of the container, and fell gracelessly onto my backside.

Officer Gluis uttered a restrained but clearly audible guffaw.

“Hello, E. C.,” said Supervisor Nemke, taking the woman’s hand and shaking it firmly. “You’ll have to excuse young Donaldan, here. He’s new. I’ve taken the opportunity to introduce him to the realities of our work.”

“Of course. How better?” Her manner was guarded but not hostile. I felt a feather-light touch on my faked credentials. She was searching my details as smoothly as any Guild operative. Donaldan Shea Lough: security officer in the mines of Gevira, of no interest to anyone.

“You pronounce that . . . Lou? Luff?”

“Low,” I answered, regaining my feet, embarrassed and furious at myself.

“My name is Cotton. E. C. Cotton. Would you care to show me the body?”

I did so, able to take my eyes off her face only while presenting her with the container’s morbid contents. Glancing between them, I confirmed my initial impression.

They were the same. E. C. Cotton and the woman in the container were identical. One wasn’t the clone of the other, however; the match was far too precise to allow for either possibility. Neither was the corpse a manufactured doppelganger of the living version, since even my brief scan proved that the body had once been perfectly vital. The only remaining possibility was impossible—logically, sensibly, patently—but fitted with rumours I had previously regarded as being too strange to be true.

While I stared at her, reassessing all my former opinions, Cotton knelt down to repeat the examination I had performed. She came to the same conclusion.

“Without a doubt, it’s me,” she said. “No sign of foul play. Have you hacked into the dump?”

“I thought we’d leave that to you, E. C. It’s your property, after all.”

“Fair enough.”

She leaned over the corpse and pressed two fingers to the bone behind its right ear. I was close enough to feel the warmth of her living body but found no opportunity to eavesdrop on the data transaction. She, like the corpse, was protected.

“It’s empty,” she said. “The memory has been erased.”

“Completely?” Supervisor Nemke looked disappointed.

“I’m afraid so.” Cotton stepped back, wiped her hand on the thigh of her fieldsuit, and glanced at me. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, newbie. Don’t worry about it. Things like this happen all the time down here.”

That she could be so nonchalant about it was perhaps the strangest thing of all. Why is that, precisely?”

“We’d all like to know the answer to that question. You’ll forget you asked, one day.”

Not me, I swore—and I renew that pledge to you now, Master Catterson, never to become like those who live in this place, inured to all that is fearsome or fantastic. No matter how many conundrums we encounter, the insoluble is not something to be shrugged off lightly or, worse, turned into a joke.

Gluis, smirking, wandered off to talk to the perimeter detail.

“We’re analyzing the surveillance records of this area,” Nemke said as though this were a perfectly ordinary murder scene. “Someone must’ve placed the body here. We’ll find out who it was and—”

“What, track them in the mines?”

“We’ll do our best, E. C.”

“I won’t hold my breath. In the meantime, you have my authority to dispose of the body as you see fit. Autopsy it, recycle it, donate it to science—I don’t care. I have no use for it, and no next of kin.”

The perimeter detail snickered at something Gluis said, and I studiously ignored them. E. C. Cotton interested me more. There was something decidedly odd about her, something beyond the fact that she was simultaneously alive and dead, like some kind of Schrödinger experiment.

Her own body lay before her, tangling her timeline in ways that boggled the mind and subtly unravelled her insouciance. Confronted with the dire certainty of her death, her self-control was predictably less than perfect. Instead of fear or grief, however, I sensed excitement. Anticipation. Challenge.

“I want you to know I’m sorry,” Supervisor Nemke was saying in a sober voice.

Cotton didn’t shrug aside the hand Nemke had placed on her upper arm. “Thank you. I’m glad you called me here. If I’d never known—”

A cry of alarm cut her off. Our heads turned. The security detail had bunched as one around a fallen figure. Red blood splashed between outstretched fingers. The sight was shocking, even at a fatal crime scene. Cries for help drew people from all directions.

Nemke pushed into the huddle. I followed, almost slipping in a crimson pool that spreading fast as I approached. Cotton was beside me, her face ashen.

The body at our feet was bruised and burst like an over-ripe fruit. His features were barely recognizable as male. I averted my eyes, keen both to isolate the cause of his death and to hide my revulsion,. What had killed him was not immediately apparent. If it struck again—

“Good god,” Nemke said. She had bent down and wiped the gore from the dead man’s name badge, revealing his identity.

Rudi Gluis.

I felt as though I had been punched in the gut. Just a second ago, Gluis had been within meters of me, mocking me, and now he was dead, killed by persons or forces unknown. The universe rarely dispenses such immediate and well-deserved justice, so I was forced to look elsewhere for an explanation.

The thought formed in my mind the very moment someone put it into words.

“The Director.”

Others took up the rumour, passing it from mouth to ear like a curse.

My heart beat even more rapidly, if that was possible. At long last I had witnessed the work of the mine’s most deadly inhabitant.

The list of anomalies attributed to the Geviran mines grows longer every day of my infiltration. To the staffing irregularities, the outrageous energy imbalance, the curious mineral flows, and the problems with keeping any coherent kind of calendar, we can now add a corpse whose very existence ties time in a Gordian knot.

Of them all, however, the Director is of the most immediate import to those who live here, reminding all of their fragile position between toil and terrible fate.

I have already collated the rumours circulating regarding its activities, many of them borne out by records purloined from the security mainframe. The pertinent points, as they returned to me at that moment, are that the Director appears rarely in the upper levels of the mine, but does so with increasing frequency as one proceeds deeper. It comes invisibly, leaving no physical record of its existence. It strikes between image frames like a ghost, killing or kidnapping its victims with chilling ease—as it killed Gluis, while his comrades laughed at my expense. The Director’s victims share no obvious connections or traits. The bodies of those taken have never been found. Its weapons and methodologies are unknown and perhaps unknowable. Its very presence is anathema to reason—yet it stays, and humanity lives alongside it, willing to accept its toll in exchange for the riches the mines bring.

The Gevirans know as little about the Director’s origins as the Guild. If it is otherwise, they are careful to keep such knowledge from me. That lack of knowledge only makes their fear far greater. Panic is concealed beneath a veil of civilization, but the slightest twitch sets it free. One has only to see the wildness in their eyes each time the Director strikes to know how delicate the pretence is. Even I, a stranger to their world and set apart from their troubles, was briefly swept up in the moment. It could have taken any of us, I thought. It could have taken me.

Nemke woke the entire sector and called in reinforcements from outside. E. C. Cotton’s cryptic corpse was forgotten along with the woman herself during the post mortem examination of Gluis’s wounds, and in that time she slipped our attention. We were all shaken, even I who had liked Gluis not at all and been strongly disliked in return. I am abashed to admit, Master Catterson, that more than an hour passed before I thought to ask after Cotton’s whereabouts.

“I let her go,” Nemke said.

“You did what?”

“Why wouldn’t I? I know her; we all know her. She worked here for a period, before you arrived. Looking for someone, I think, but didn’t find him, so she moved on.”

I could barely conceal my dismay. The Director had struck for the first time in my presence just moments after E. C. Cotton arrived. Was it too much to speculate that the two things were connected? That she was the key to this confluence of mysteries was a possibility I could not ignore.

“Where did she go?”

“Topside. She had that look they all get, when they’ve been searching down deep—”

“I mean just now. Did she go back up?”

“I presume so. It’s none of our business what she does. People handle things like this differently. Some go off the rails, but she seemed—Donaldan, where are you going? We need you here!”

I had turned my back on her and was pushing through the secure perimeter. Her cries fell behind me. I ignored, too, her subsequent requests to return to duty. Let her think I was running out of weakness, or perhaps fear, using Cotton as an excuse to flee from the Director’s handiwork. I knew otherwise.

First I called at security HQ, where I uploaded Cotton’s personnel records into my memory dump. Even at a quick glance, they seemed inauthentic. Her full name, true or otherwise, was listed as Emmaline Celeste Cotton, and details were sketchy prior to her arrival on this level. She was 34 years old, the same approximate age as her corpse—a fact that only exacerbated the puzzle. If the body was genuine—as it appeared to be—and some twist in time had delivered it to her in advance of her actual demise, why was she unconcerned about the small amount of time remaining to her? The haste with which she had hurried off struck me as at odds with human nature—unless the body had already told her everything she needed to know, and set her off on errands unknown.

I downloaded the audiovisual record of the body’s placement, intending to analyze this later, since surely the means of its arrival in our jurisdiction would provide a clue. Once I had that data, I traced Cotton’s movements through the mine to determine where she had got to. Hoping against hope that she had not already reached the surface, I followed her recorded image along its path through this habitat to the next. She was heading for the elevators in sector eight.

By then I was on the move too, not stopping to fabricate an explanation for the staff at HQ. If they wondered why I was disobeying Supervisor Nemke’s orders, they said nothing. These were bridges, I decided, that I could mend on my return, for at that moment, my orders were clear: to follow the mystery for the glory of the Great Ship and the Guild. It would be a lie of omission not to add that being shamed by my pratfall in front of my erstwhile colleagues was also an incentive.

E. C. Cotton had already left the elevator cluster by the time I arrived. With utmost haste, I determined which shaft she had taken. To my surprise, she had not gone up at all, but down—down the sole shaft connecting the upper levels to the lower. Wherever she was heading, it wasn’t back to the surface.

I commandeered the next carriage from a gaggle of young miners heading coreward to pursue their fortunes. It was imperative that I be able to think without their distracting babble. As the carriage disengaged from the habitats, I felt a clear sense of vertigo, even though the floor beneath my feet was absolutely steady. My first visit to the lower levels wasn’t supposed to be like this. I hoped that the rumours I have been gathering for you, Master Catterson, would prepare me for what lay ahead.

The drop lasted several minutes. In that time, I reviewed the audiovisual record. The container had not been in position as recently as a day earlier, so I jumped forward in increments of one hour to a point where it was extant, and then scrolled back. People came and went, going about the business of the mine. Some of them I recognized; others wore full-body fieldsuits with semi-opaque pressure masks covering their faces. It was one such who placed the container for Officer Gluis to discover 13 hours later, so I knew my hope of an easy answer was ill-conceived.

The captured image was of a slender male displaying no identification, physical or electronic. His fieldsuit was different to the ones worn by miners on that level, but not so different as to attract attention. Moving calmly into view from the camera’s left, he slid the container into position and made certain it was secure, then walked just as casually out of the frame. As he disappeared, I caught a faint profile of his face through the semi-transparent mask. It was barely a glimpse, but something about it struck me as familiar. I cannot say what, exactly, and I analyze the records now with increasing perplexity. There is barely a hint of cheek and nothing more than an outline of a nose. I wonder if I am reaching at something that does not exist. How could I know the face of this mysterious man? What are the odds against such a happenstance? Nevertheless, I present the blurry image to you, Master, in the hope that you will decipher what I cannot.

The carriage moved beneath me, the first sensation I had registered during the journey. A short time later, the doors opened. I stepped out into a very different space. Instead of cramped, dimly-lit corridors and an ever-present tang of recycled air, this level was bright to my eyes. I squinted for a moment, noting white walls, vaulted ceilings, and gleaming observation blisters set into the floor, smelling people instead of industry, and taking stock of those nearby as best I could. There were miners, officials in unfamiliar blue uniforms, and even a child walking hand-in-hand with an adult. (A child! I could barely believe my eyes. What madman would bring an infant into a mine?) Standing not four meters from me, gazing down through one of the bulging blisters, was the woman I sought.

Emmaline Celeste Cotton looked up as I approached, and said, “I wasn’t expecting you.”

I had no answer for her, not immediately. My attention was caught by the downward view through the blister. It showed an endless sea of lava upon which bobbed islands of semi-molten stone. Green flames licked and danced like djinns, dodged by graceful flitter-craft and ignored by sturdier extraction platforms. The habitat in which I stood hung not 100 meters above the hellish ocean, but the floor was hardly warm, and the ambient temperature perfectly comfortable. Were the environmental controls to fail, I had no doubt that we would be burned to ash in a second.

No one but Cotton and I so much as glanced through the blisters. To them, I supposed, the view was commonplace. The human mind learns to accept all manner of wonder, if it is presented every day. The same goes for horror, as the miners’ coexistence with the Director proves beyond doubt.

With some effort, I brought my attention to the matter at hand. “You were expecting someone.”

She nodded. Her eyes were light brown, I noted for the first time, and they hid a calculating mind. “Why are you here, Donaldan Lough?”

“You left a crime scene, your own body—”

“The truth, now. You’re not like the others. Why are you the only one to come after me, and not them?”

You will comprehend, Master, the care with which I chose my next words.

“None of the others seem to give a damn. You saw them. To Gluis, your body was nothing but a joke to frighten newbies—and look what happened to him. Nemke’s well-meaning but a plodder. No one’s asking the questions that need to be answered.”

“So you’re curious.”

“I am curious,” I said, “to know why you are going down rather than up, to your death rather than away from it.”

She examined me as closely as I was examining her. What she saw helped her come to a decision. Although I was not privy to her reasoning, I believe I conveyed only muddled trustworthiness, and that was sufficient.

“I’m not going any further down,” she said. “I’m going sideways.”

“To where? There’s only one entrance to the mines.”

“Look behind you, Donnie Boy.”

I did as she instructed, half-anticipating that she would strike me or attempt to flee the moment my back was turned. She did neither.

Set into the wall behind me I saw the entrance to the elevator shaft down which I had just descended. The gaggle of miners I had disenfranchised emerged from it at that moment, casting me dark looks but finding the observation blisters entirely more interesting. What I had not noticed—distracted in a similar fashion—was a second entrance next to the first, identical in design but with no matching counterpart on the level above.

I crossed to it in a dozen easy strides. (It occurred to me later that I had felt lighter on this level, but that is only to be expected so much closer to the center of the planet.) The door did not open for me, despite my security credentials, and displayed no information regarding its destination.

“Where does this lead?” I confronted Cotton right there, in front of the closed sliding doors. “Tell me.”

“I already did. Sideways.” She raised an empty hand. “If you like, I’ll show you.”

I tripped over the thought that she wanted to take my hand, as a lover might. Then I realized that she wished only to communicate via the receptors in her skin, the same receptors by which she had accessed her corpse’s memory dump.

I tightened my firewalls and raised my hand in return.

The moment our fingers touched, three strings of alphanumeric symbols appeared in my mind.

rmei68q9ve42izms7tj

5ek38eoqwjup40dwgg5

TRELAYNE

They meant nothing to me.

“To get through that door,” she said, “you need access codes. I had one, but it was cancelled nine weeks ago. I’ve been stuck here ever since.”

The implication was simple enough to follow: these 19-digit strings were examples of the codes she needed. “Where did you get these from?”

“My body,” she said, with a defiant smile. “The dump was erased, but only because I wiped it clean.”

“You lied, then. Why?”

“Isn’t a better question for the moment: why two access codes?”

“That’s why you expected someone to meet you here, but didn’t know who.”

“Exactly. But you’re not Trelayne,” she said, “unless you too have a secret.”

I withdrew my hand, keeping my expression carefully neutral. “Trelayne is a person?”

“A very important person, Don. The most important person in the mines. Some say he’s a thousand years old and lives in a fortress at the center of everything. Others say he’s just a legend, and he never existed at all. Either way, remember those questions you had? Find Trelayne and you’ll have your answers.”

“He’s the person you’re looking for,” I said, remembering with a flash of inspiration what Supervisor Nemke had said about her unsuccessful search.

“Yes.” Her stare was a challenge. “And now I have two access codes to set me on my way again. Are you coming with me or not?”

It was not an easy decision, Master Catterson. If I rejected her offer, I could return to my post beneath Supervisor Nemke and resume my patient exploration of Gevira’s mysteries, aided by her slow but considerate attempts to educate me in the ways of the mines.

Or I could travel with Cotton to a whole new section of the mine—the existence of which I had never suspected just one level up—and pursue the man she said could tell me everything I had ever wanted to know. The opportunity promised untold revelations. It hinted at mysteries we had barely suspected. How could I decline her offer?

I did not. For the Great Ship and the Guild, I resolved to keep following the mystery wherever it led, no matter how many bridges I left burning behind me.

Cotton entered the access codes electronically. The panels slide open, allowing us entry into a carriage identical to the one I had just left. They shut behind us, and with no sensation of motion at all we were underway.

My interrogation of her began almost immediately.

“The view back there,” I said. “That doesn’t look like any mine I’ve ever seen before.”

“What do you think is going on here, exactly?”

I told her what I had learned during my covert surveillance: that the deeper levels harness the resources of Gevira’s lower mantle and core, using the temperature differential between it and the Polar Regions to power the enterprize. That is the official story, anyway. You and I know this to be only partly true, Master, but I did not comprehend until that moment that she knew as well.

“Yeah, it’s bullshit,” she said. “The mine is a net energy exporter degrees of magnitude higher than even an optimistic estimate. And the elements it extracts from the mantle don’t display the expected isotopic proportions. Core-mining can’t possibly be the whole story.”

I asked her for her theory, but she didn’t answer.

“Perhaps twists in causality are a side-effect,” I prompted her, thinking of her abandoned corpse.

“Of what? The kind of concentrated mass-energy you’d need to create a loop in time would suck Gevira into a black hole. I haven’t stumbled over any of those lately. Have you?”

“It’s impossible to define the characteristics of a technology we know nothing about.”

“True.”

“Particularly if that technology is of alien origin.”

“ROTH? Here?”

I asked her to define the term.

“Races Other Than Human, Don. Where have you been living?”

I was tempted to say: far from here. But the urge to put her in her place was controllable.

“The possibility of an alien artifact cannot be ignored,” I said, frostily. “I believe that the Director is protecting it.”

“There’s something odd going on, that’s for sure, but I don’t think that little green men on Gevira are the answer. Most people assume there’s a secret society running things behind the scenes. Those they like, they take. Those they don’t like, they kill. Occam would find that more acceptable.”

Her superior attitude was a constant irritation, but no secret is safe with a braggart. It emerges of its own accord, eventually. I decided to suffer in exchange for the information she promised.

“Have you ever heard of Terminus?” she asked.

For the second time that day, I experienced vertigo. “No.”

“The Structure?”

“No.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know, Donaldan Lough. Stick with me. I’ll do my best to keep you out of trouble.”

“What kind of trouble are you anticipating?”

“How should I know?” Her façade cracked. “The only thing I’m sure of is that when this knot in time unwinds, I’m going to be dead.”

“We must all die, one way or another.”

“And curiosity kills the cat. I’d be careful if I were you, Donnie Boy. This is my problem. You don’t want to be tied to me when I go down.”

“You didn’t seem to consider that much of a problem before.”

“Yeah, well, maybe it’s just sinking in. Maybe I’m starting to feel the full weight of my mortality.” Her chest rose and fell. “You ask too many questions. Do you know that?”

The floor jolted beneath us, signalling our arrival at a new section of the mine. Cotton took up a position in front of the door. I stood to her right, expecting to see a habitat very much like the one in which I lived. There was no reason to believe otherwise.

The doors slid open, revealing armed guards, two militaristic checkpoints, and a queue of miners in unfamiliar fieldsuits waiting to be processed. Low rectangular windows in the checkpoint barriers offered a glimpse of the what lay beyond them, but it was not easy to examine those vistas at a casual glance, not from my position. The air stank of intimidation and fear, putting my nerves on edge. My right hand flexed, aching for the grip of a Guild blaster.

“Let me do the talking,” said Cotton, leading the way out of the elevator. “You should be okay; you have Geviran ID. But around here it never pays to be—”

A bark of anger cut her off in mid-sentence. Heads turned, including ours, towards a sudden disturbance near the checkpoints. My first thought was that someone had attempted to force their way through the blockade, but a spreading ripple of alarm and shock told me that something more serious was afoot. Anger became alarm. The sideways shuffling of people waiting in line took on an urgent Brownian motion while some tried to get closer to the source of the problem and others tried just as insistently to get away. Individual voices rose up out of a growing hubbub. Two familiar words stood out more clearly than any others.

The Director.

“Stay back,” Cotton said, pressing me against the doors behind me. They had closed. Three more entrances stood to our right, also shut. She inched us towards them. “Don’t do anything until I tell you.”

I let her take charge of the situation. We were significantly outnumbered, and I had no choice but to place my faith in her greater knowledge of the situation. Not until the guards noticed us, the latest arrivals, and raised their weapons to target us did I begin to be seriously concerned.

Cotton presented her ID and shouted something. I don’t know what. The words are lost in the growing chaos captured in memory dump. Her protestations didn’t have the intended effect.

A ring of armed soldiers pressed towards us, pushing bystanders out of the way. What did they think we had done? Killed or kidnapped a bystander ourselves and stuck around to witness the effect?

I understood their terror, though. One of their own had been struck down by the Director. Explanations were required. A superstitious need for answers and scapegoats had to be addressed.

I tensed, readying myself to fight. We were unarmed and had nowhere to run. If we were lucky, I remember thinking, we might only end up in a cell. If we were unlucky…

Behind us, one of the entrances slid open. Cotton grabbed my upper arm so tightly it hurt and pulled me inside. I had no sensible reason to resist.

The doors closed barely in time. Pounding fists echoed from the far side for a second, then were gone.

Cotton’s breathing was loud but I suspect mine was louder.

“That could’ve gone better,” she said, letting go of my arm and flicking her dark fringe out of her eyes.

“Was that the kind of trouble you were expecting?

“No. I’ve never seen the Director so active.” The look in her eyes told me that I had correctly surmised the reason behind our rapid retreat. “And no, I don’t know where we’re going. Somewhere safe, I hope.”

“Safe from the Director or from goons like them?”

“Both.” Then she laughed. “The stupid thing is, they were never going to shoot me. I was killed by my own choice, not by a bullet.”

“That fact offers me little comfort, Cotton.”

“Call me E. C.”

I avoided this attempt at intimacy by taking the opportunity to review the AV data stored in my memory dump. You have that data, Master Catterson. You will witness as I did the tense situation prevalent in that level of the mine. Why it should be so, I have not yet learned. Perhaps that level contains conditions hostile to human life, or minerals—even ruins!—considered valuable by the Geviran government. Perhaps this level is the source of the mine’s paradoxical profligacy. For now, it remains unfathomed. The images in my memory dump—of brilliant sparks spraying in an arc against an entirely metal backdrop—offer no illumination at all.

With that inglorious beginning, our circuitous odyssey through the mines commenced. I will not burden you with torturous details of our headlong flight, Master, and neither will I attempt to convey the horror of it: the tense anticipation for the doors to open, the growing certainty that the Director would strike wherever we appeared, and the terrible fear that the codes would stop working, thereby rendering us unable to flee from such near-misses.

After hastily eluding the armed forces of the Militaristic Zone (as I have come to think of it), Cotton and I escaped to another level of the mine an unknown distance from our starting point. It was to all appearances a gentler place than the last, one bedecked with vines and plants and smelling sweetly of fresh oxygen. I had time enough to take in the vistas offered by its elegant observation deck before tragedy struck a third time that day. A woman screamed a man’s name not ten meters from where I stood, prompting bedlam all around us. The man was dead, killed by the Director. An influx of bystanders could do nothing to save him or to relieve the horror of the woman who had witnessed the attack. I imagined the body, bloodied and battered as Gluis’s had been, and was glad we had been no closer.

Cotton decreed that we should move again.

“Keep your eyes on me,” she said as she used our access codes to open another door.

“Why?”

“The Director can only take someone while they’re not being observed.”

“Do you think we’re its targets?”

“Who else, Don? Three attacks in as many hours. We’re the only common denominators.”

I could accept her reasoning, but for one flaw. “You’re not afraid of bullets, but you run from the Director. Why is that?”

“Time’s in knots. I’m not ruling out anything I can’t see.”

That was a fair point. Given the awesome subtlety of its art, who was to say the Director could not reach into her mind and trigger the chemical cascade that would leave her dead? That fate was no more suicide than a bullet, but it could look the same.

The “Greenhouse” Zone was followed by another, chosen at random from the five routes available to us. Cotton was relying on fate to guide her, or else she possessed a means of navigating the unfolding mines that I have not guessed.

Barely had the doors opened when cries alerted us once more to the presence of our deadly traveling companion.

I did as instructed and kept Cotton within plain sight. She, I am pleased to note, did the same for me. We stayed barely long enough to taste the air and capture several seconds of data, revealing that this level was a very different place to any I had visited before or since, with long-limbed servomechanisms passing a greenish material of unknown constitution endlessly between them. I dubbed it the Jade Zone.

There followed the Dark, the Underwater, and the Antiquated Zones, all visited only briefl, all distinct in a variety of ways. It is quite impossible to capture the variety I glimpsed at each of our destinations. All I can do is attach the images I recorded for you and my fellow Guildsmen to pore over. I am certain that you will reach the same conclusion as I.

We know from our own history that human civilization has existed on Gevira for approximately 300 years. It is a homogenous culture founded on egalitarian principles different to ours, but not inimically so. The Great Ships of the Guild have been trading with Gevira for at least half of its colonized history, but until now we have had no suspicion of the wealth and diversity lying beneath its surface. A veritable maze of mine shafts and levels exist here—and perhaps existed here long before humanity arrived in force to claim the planet. Could aliens have built these spaces, these wonderful contrivances, and then abandoned them? In the light of recent events, I do believe that it is possible. How else could such a subterranean labyrinth ever have been built—and populated—with no one noticing? And no wonder its population is so much larger than the official figures recorded on the surface! The miners might have been breeding down here for generations, creating their own odd pockets of society, disconnected from worlds above, perhaps even from each other.

The Superior Zone. The Electric Zone. The Loud Zone. I was soon hard-stretched to find adjectives. Across these transits we might have covered hundreds, even thousands of kilometers, in any number of directions. There was no way of telling one point within the planet from the next. I am just one Guildsman, alone in this enucleate enigma and finding myself increasingly at a loss.

We came at last to a level empty of all life, apart from our own. I feared for a moment that the Director had snatched everyone away a bare instant before the doors opened, but that was soon revealed to be unfounded: this level has been abandoned for some time, judging by the staleness of the air. When we stepped out the only entrance on that level, we were greeted by flat echoes off unadorned walls. Our feet kicked up dust with every step. Shadowy windows revealed nothing of the level beyond this dim entrance hall, which was vaulted and gloomy like a tomb. There was power—piped in, I presume, along the shaft we had followed—but little else.

“I do not know this place,” Cotton said, visibly sagging with exhaustion but not yet relief. That we were alone meant that the Director could attack no one else but us.

We did nothing for some time, standing together in the silent hall, watching each other and waiting for the Director to strike. If it tried to take both of us at once, would our combined perceptions offer any protection at all? We could only wait and hope. I don’t know if Cotton prayed. Me, I offered my faith up to the Great Ship and the parent world far away, in the hope that my life would not be so meaninglessly squandered.

Nothing happened. The eye of the Director passed over us, it seems. Perhaps it is toying with us. Perhaps it enjoyed watching us run far and wide, and has temporarily retracted its malevolent claw just as we steeled ourselves in resignation for its deathly touch.

How many people have died or been taken in our wake is impossible to know. Dozens, probably. If Cotton’s theory is correct, we are responsible for every innocent lost this day. There is comfort in the thought that we ourselves have survived, but it is bitterly cold.

Resigned, temporarily, to running no more, Cotton and I have agreed to rest in this lifeless space. I volunteered to keep watch while she, exhausted, sleeps. She has no way of knowing if I will be there when she wakes. I could run away, or be snatched by the Director during her slumber. The latter is entirely possible, by the strange illogic of this world, but sleep she must. In the last day, she has traveled from topside to view her own corpse, fled with a stranger through far-flung sections of the mine, and found herself in this desolate, empty hall. In its relative calm we will both seek what ease there is to find.

For my own part, I have taken the opportunity to prepare this account. Master Catterson, I urge you to consider carefully everything I have revealed to you, and to respond forthwith. It has been too long since I last took direct counsel from you, and I fear that I have become lost in more ways than one. Here I am, led far off my chosen course by a guide who may not be completely reliable, and whom I must avoid trusting any more than sense dictates.

You have my data, Master Catterson. Study it and advise me how best to proceed.

I await your orders with some anxiety, in fear of wandering forever.

(There ends, Master Catterson, my first account since leaving the post you assigned me. I have altered not a word, trusting in my first impressions and the conveyance thereof—and in your open-mindedness too, for what is to come necessarily colors what came before. A new light is about to shine, one that will provide a second, more pertinent interpretation of everything I have shared with you thus far.)

<Second Account>

While Cotton slept, I explored as much of this Dead Zone as I dared, monitoring with all my senses for sudden drops in pressure, radiation spikes, biological interference, and any other potentially lethal signs. Without knowing what had caused the evacuation of its miners, the care I took was unparalleled. It would not do to escape the Director only to fall in some pointless accident. Until Cotton was either dead or somehow spared her unavoidable fate, I was bound to pursue the mystery and the answers she promised.

The shape of the empty habitat was a tube, spiralling like a strand of DNA on its side through the planet’s subduction zones. I surmised from an examination of its inert engines that ferriferous minerals had been mined here a decade or so earlier. The crusted furnaces were cold, abandoned rather than chopped up and returned to the surface. I walked along corridors and through barracks that retained not the slightest trace of their former inhabitants. There were neither bodies nor physical effects. It was as though such traces had been erased along with their existence.

I thought yearningly of my cell in the Great Ship. The memory of the closeness of my fellow Guildsmen succors me in these echoing spaces. How alien this place is to us! How strange that people choose to live here, deep underground, where the furthest one can see is measured in meters. No wonder even the topsiders don’t understand the miners, let alone we who come from spaces surface dwellers in turn could barely grasp. They are mad, all of them—and the madness of the mines, I am coming to believe, is extremely contagious.

Ultimately I decided that the level had simply been mined out. Its tidy emptiness spoke of an orderly withdrawal, not a rout. There were, however, several instances of graffiti left by the last of the miners and by those like Cotton and I, who had stumbled across the level by chance. Perhaps it was one of these latter wanderers who wrote in vulgar tone of the Director’s parentage. Perhaps one of the miners scrawled the message of love and longing to an absent partner that I found in an empty bedroom. I could not decide who had been responsible for the endless series of bullseyes encircling a boardroom, where the level’s manager might have pondered the difficult decision to leave.

While reading one of the strangest pieces—an ode in charcoal to stars apparently glimpsed in the deepest levels of the mine—a metaphor, surely—I heard the sound of a door hissing open.

My heart jumped into my throat. Fearing that Cotton had woken and taken the opportunity to abandon her clueless companion, I retraced my steps at full-tilt to the entrance hall.

I arrived to find Cotton lying on her side with her fieldsuit sealed right up to her throat, exactly as I had left her, with an unknown man looking down at her sleeping form. It must have been he who had entered via the sliding portal that stood behind him. His footsteps were distinct in the dust, larger than either of ours and spaced well apart.

I skidded to a halt in the dust opposite him. His gaze shifted to me, with something of Cotton in its cool regard. I was momentarily nonplussed at both his presence and size. He wore a sturdy black fieldsuit and carried a pack, and displayed no ID.

“You’re with her, I presume,” he said.

“I am. Who are you and what are you doing here?”

“I’m with Terminus. Aren’t you?”

At the sound of our voices, Cotton stirred. Her eyes flickered open. She stared blankly up at us until the scales fell away. The retrograde trajectory of her recollection was played out nakedly across her face. The abandoned level; the Director; her own corpse. I understood that part of her had thought she might never awake from that slumber.

Both of us went to offer her a hand, and she took the largest, that of the new arrival.

“Huw Kindred,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“I was going to ask you the same question, Emma.” He set her on her feet and brushed dust gently from her cheek. “The Director carved a trail right across the Structure. I never thought to find you at its end.”

“That’s not the half of it.”

“I bet. Want to tell me what’s going on?”

“Later. Got any food? I’ve been running on internals for a week.”

“Sure.” Kindred shrugged off his pack and reached inside. My stomach grumbled as he handed Cotton a silver packet. Our eyes briefly met. His were ocean blue.

“Who’s this guy?” Kindred asked. “I mentioned Terminus and he looked as blank as a fish.”

“Donaldan Lough,” she said around a mouthful of the concentrate he had given her. “He’s a Geviran.”

“Never thought I’d see you running with a native. How’d that come about?”

She frowned as though struggling to recollect a dream: her wiped memory dump; the codes; our hurried flight. I wondered if it always took her this long to wake up. “It’s a long story. Later.”

I temporarily put aside my curiosity regarding the mysterious Terminus, just as I let them accept the mistaken assumption about my origins. Kindred seemed to swallow it easily enough. We shook hands. Still wary of this stranger in our midst, I responded to his offer of food with a simple negative. He nodded and re-sealed the pack.

“How long’s it been, Emma? The last time I saw you was in Margelise, I think, almost a year ago.”

“Just a month for me.” Sudden fright struck her. “You’re not safe, Huw. We’re marked. The Director is following us, and it’ll take you if you stay around.”

He shrugged. “I’ve been here—how long? Minutes now and nothing’s happened. I’ll take my chances if you’ll keep your eyes on me. Okay?”

Kindred looked to us for agreement, and I nodded automatically. Whoever he was, Cotton knew and trusted him. For my part, I was coming to view him as a possible source of information about the wider expanses of the mine. Thus far, Cotton had been reticent on almost every point I wished to explore.

“We shouldn’t stay here, though,” said Kindred. “I’m not the only one following that trail.”

“Not sideways,” she said, looking haunted and harried at the thought of going. “I’m not putting anyone else at risk by heading somewhere populated. There’s just the one door. I’m sure we’d get a fine reception back the way we came.”

“Deeper, then. There might be another exit. At the very worst, we can hide in the lower levels until the fuss dies down.”

He put his suggestion to her in easy tones, as though considering a walk through a hydropark.

She took a deep shuddering breath, and looked down at her feet.

“Yes,” she said. “You’re right.”

“I found an elevator cluster not far from here,” I informed them. “If the shafts are clear, we should be able to get them working.”

“Are you going to come with us, Don?” she said, looking at me with her cool brown eyes. “You don’t have to, you know. You can step away and go home any time you want.”

If only it was that easy, I thought. Home was further away than she could possibly imagine.

Follow the mystery.

“Let’s go, then,” she said. “It’s just us, Huw. We didn’t bring anything. If Don and I had known how far we were going, we would’ve packed, eh?”

I could not help but echo her smile. “Lunch, at least.”

She tossed me the remains of her concentrate bar, and this time, gratefully, I accepted.

I led them through the empty corridors to where I had found several inert freight carriages, thick with dust and cobwebs. Spiders are rare in the mines but not unknown. Many forms of life have crept down from the surface, and most have evolved resistance to the usual forms of pest control. In this abandoned level, nature was claiming a new home. As well as webs, I had seen a dead cockroach, a line of ants, and several patches of mould. In a century, I fantasized, it might be completely overgrown.

Kindred proved a dab hand at reviving old equipment. Whether rousing inactive chips or goading static programs into action, he worked calmly and coolly, issuing instructions to either Cotton or myself, whoever happened to be nearest when need arose. The three of us soon had a sizeable chunk of the abandoned level functioning again. Lights blazed; air stirred; electrons flowed.

The mouth of one of the giant freight elevators opened with a cadaverous sigh. Cotton and I stepped inside. Kindred followed a moment later, after instructing the machines to resume their dormancy the moment we were safely at the bottom. He also swept the floor clean of footprints behind us. The trail would end there, in that cold and empty ruin.

“Does this place have a name?” Cotton asked him as the elevator shuddered and began to descend.

“Samagrinig,” he said.

“Never heard of it. I recognized Iesia and Baskaba as we passed through, but we were running blind most of the way. There wasn’t time to consult the charts.”

The names meant nothing to me, but I didn’t interrupt the conversation to interrogate them. I hoped to learn simply by letting them talk.

“Word reached me in Panaion,” Kindred said. “I was in the middle of something, but I couldn’t resist. The trail was close, and still warm. Hot, even. Most people were running from it, but you know that’s not my way.”

“Huw’s notorious,” Cotton said to me with prideful tones. “We don’t have tornados down here, obviously, but he’d be chasing them if we did. It’s a miracle he hasn’t been sucked up yet.”

He shrugged off her concern. “I’m in no more danger than anyone else. Less, probably. Statistically speaking, the chances of the Director striking twice in one place are minimal. Once satiated, it moves on. You’re more likely to be hit anywhere other than where the ground is still smoking.”

“Don here thinks it’s protecting the mine’s alien origins.”

“He might be right.”

“He might be wrong, too.”

“We’re all wrong until proven otherwise.” Kindred granted me a conspiratorial wink.

“Any word of Trelayne?” she asked him.

“Still obsessed, I see.”

“Now more than ever.”

“Well, as it happens,” he said, “I was on Panaion for just that very reason. But come on, kid. You haven’t told me what you’re doing here yet.”

“It’s all connected, Huw. One thing leads to the other.”

With a groan and a shudder, the elevator ground to a halt. Kindred stood at the fore of the carriage, waiting for the heavy metal doors to divide, but Cotton and I hadn’t forgotten the lessons we’d learned during our headlong flight. We waited well back until we were sure what lay beyond.

The opening doors revealed nothing but blackness. Kindred produced a torch from his pack and snapped it on. Stepping out of the pool of light spilling from the carriage, he blazed the way for us, pacing out a rectangular narthex more than ten meters square, lined with blocky, functional control panels. All were inactive until he prodded them into life.

I stepped out with Cotton and breathed deeply of thick, dry air. A distant subsonic rumble through the floor and walls made itself felt in my bones. Not until Kindred once again brought the machines to life did I realize its source.

First came lights, flickering like tiny eyes all across the control boards, then a whir as two panels on opposite walls slid up into the ceiling, revealing windows to the mine-face beyond. Floodlights flared somewhere above us, shining powerfully into a hellish landscape, one where heavy gases roiled and tore at exposed rock. I stepped back, reminded of footage I had seen of worlds in the grip of a runaway greenhouse effect. Subjected to crushing pressure, powerful acids, and soaring temperatures, the surfaces of such planets are flatly inhospitable to human life. Somehow, in the belly of Gevira, such a place existed—and thus I perceived why this level had been abandoned. Something must have gone wrong, I told myself. An industrial accident must have created this vile cocktail, or else a misguided exploratory probe had found a pocket of primordial fumes, preserved in a toxic bubble since the world’s creation. Rather than clean it up, the manager of the level had ordered it contained and the facility abandoned. Given the extensive reach of the Geviran excavations, there had undoubtedly been greener pastures elsewhere.

So I told myself as I stared out into that foul, turbulent soup. Half-visible through the murk, frozen in attitudes of abandonment, giant diggers crouched over great rents in the rock, waiting for the command to resume their labor. Despite their Brobdignagian size, I was amazed they hadn’t corroded away to nothing—as my own certainties were to corrode in due course.

But I am leaping ahead of myself—something that becomes harder to avoid, the deeper one gets in the mines. By this point in our journey, I had no idea how deep I actually was. My heaviness had changed several times during the previous day, so much so that I had begun to ignore what every member of the Guild knows instinctively from birth: one’s mass, and the ability to determine from apparent fluctuations in weight the strength of a gravitational field.

A door led from the narthex into the level’s maze of airlocks and workstations, but the three of us made no immediate move to explore further. The tortured view had captured us, and the rumbling of the wind challenged us to speak only that which was most profound. It came as no surprise, then, when Cotton broke the silence to tell Kindred of her fate.

“I’m going to die, Huw. That’s where all this starts and ends.”

Kindred turned to face her, worry openly displayed on his face. “How do you know that?”

“I saw my own corpse. Don showed it to me. There were two access codes in its memory dump.”

“That’s why he’s along for the ride, then.” His ready sympathy was for me, now. “I thought you two were—”

“No,” she said, before I too could disabuse him of the notion. “But he’s important, I think. Everything is. It has to be. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. I’d be hiding under a bunk somewhere, keeping my head down. Or in a rundown dive, drinking myself to death.”

“That would be in character.”

“Don’t joke with me, Huw. This is serious.”

“Of course it is. I’m sorry.”

“You need to know something,” she said. “You both do. About the body.”

“It’s a fake?” I asked, startled by the way hope suddenly leapt at the thought.

“No, Don. It’s real. But it’s not random; it’s not the kind of thing the mine throws up sometimes, for no reason at all. It’s a message.”

Kindred’s mighty brows bunched into a frown. “From whom?”

“From me.”

He folded his arms and shook his head. “Don’t joke with me, Emma. Not about this.”

“I’m serious, Huw. If you let me explain—”

“No. I don’t want to hear it.”

“I do,” said I. “We may not understand it, but I think she’s telling the truth.”

She wasn’t the only one. I could see that mortality was hanging heavily on her, but the excitement I had seen earlier was also present. The certainty of her death was not entirely a millstone.

She smiled with a mixture of gratitude and grief. “It takes a newbie to cut through the crap, sometimes. Forget the mines, Huw: we tie ourselves in knots, and then we have no idea how to untangle them. That’s us, Huw, and that’s me, and that’s how it’s always going to end. We live by the sword. We know what’s coming.”

The light was brightest in her corner of the control room. A halo seemed to surround her form, drawing the eye irresistibly to her. Even Kindred couldn’t look away forever.

“Tell me,” he said, his voice surprisingly soft from such a large frame.

“I’ve been chasing Trelayne and his answers half my life,” she said. “I’ve followed clues from one side of the mine to the other. It’s consumed my every thought as long as I’ve known you. Like the freehold miners, few of my seams pay out. Fool’s gold and quartz are all I ever seem to find. But I know the mother lode is out there somewhere, and there are only two ways I’m ever going to stop looking for Trelayne and his answers. One is if the search kills me first. The other is if it doesn’t.

“The moment I saw my body, I knew it had finally come down to one or the other. When I checked the memory dump, I knew exactly which one.”

I thought I saw Kindred wince, but his face was too deep in shadow to be sure of it.

I simply stared at her in amazement. Two access codes and a name: that was all it took to send her hell-bent through the mines, trusting in the Möbius strip of time to lead her along the path her future self had already followed—the future self who for some presently unknown reason had sent her own body back to herself, both as a clue and in order to complete the loop.

“My own corpse,” she said, “is proof that I’ve found—that I will find—the mother load. Trelayne, answers, everything. After so many dead ends and disappointments, it takes a clue like that to convince me, and I’ll follow it without question, wherever it takes me. I die, but I die complete. That’s why I’m here. That’s why—” She stopped and pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth. She swallowed twice, then dropped her hand, continued: “That’s why, Huw, I need you to tell me everything you learned on Panaion.”

“No.” Kindred shook his head. “Don’t ask me to do that.”

“I have to, and you will tell me.”

“No!” He paced one circuit around the control room, glaring at her as he passed.

“In a sense, you’ve already done it.”

“Never.”

One slab-like fist punched at the switches he had brought to life. The door leading from the narthex deeper into the level hissed open. Stale air rolled over us all, but that wasn’t enough to prevent Kindred stalking off into the darkness, away from Cotton and her demands.

“Huw!”

He ignored her. His bear-like shoulders were bunched and tight. The doors slid shut behind him, and Cotton sagged.

I thought that I should offer her something, but I knew not what. Reassurance? Space? I was unwillingly embroiled in their shared history, when all I desired were answers.

Looking back on it now, on her entreaty and Kindred’s brooding frustration, I suppose she felt the same.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s okay.”

“We had—Huw and I had one of those things that is never really alive but never really dies either.”

“You don’t need to explain.”

“I guess I did warn you,” she said, “about getting tangled up in this.”

“You did, and I’m still here.” I essayed a weak smile. “So are you, if that gives you any reason to be hopeful.”

She returned the smile. “Of what?”

“I’m not sure.”

The only sound for a long time was the howling of the acrid wind.

Seeking to occupy my mind with more than just idle introspection, I followed an instinct. If Cotton’s bizarre story about sending her own body back as a message were true, it wasn’t entirely true. She hadn’t mentioned an accomplice, and I knew she had at least one. Calling up the image of the man who had placed her body in its final resting place, I studied it with fresh eyes. Again the hint of familiarity in that cheekbone and nose. Comparing the figure against Kindred’s, however, proved fruitless. Not only was Kindred’s face an entirely different structure, but his physical form was considerably larger. There was no possible way the two could be said to match. Thus I dismissed that theory, plausible though it had initially seemed.

I had other threads to follow. Restless and chilled, I began to pace around the control room as Kindred had done.

“Tell me about Terminus,” I said.

She looked up with red eyes, caught momentarily off-guard. “About what?”

“You know what, Cotton. You mentioned it moments before we were almost shot, and your friend brought it up twice. He asked me if I was with Terminus. Should I feel left out of something?”

“No,” she said, leaning her hip against one of the control panels, folding her arms and crossing her legs. She couldn’t have looked more defensive if she tried. “Terminus is an organization—an affiliation might be better—that stretches right across the mines. People don’t join so much as become absorbed into it. If you ask enough questions, maybe even answer a few, and if you survive long enough, you’ll eventually find yourself hooked up to it.”

“So Kindred is part of Terminus,” I said, “and so are you.”

“Yes—but don’t look at me like that. I’m not a spy, skulking and thieving from your friends back home. I was just passing through, looking for answers. Trelayne’s trail had gone cold. It helps, sometimes, to flail about at random.”

“Who do you report to?”

“No one. That is, no boss or anyone like that. I talk to other agents when the opportunity arises; there are channels for passing information back and forth; sometimes, although very rarely, we’ll leak something to the public, if we think it’s in their best interest.”

“So if you knew what the Director was, you wouldn’t keep it a secret.”

“I don’t see why we would. Terminus exists to find out who built the mines and how they managed it—a living architect would be the Holy Grail for most of us—but making the mines safer for everyone is the most important thing of all. I’d trade a proper map for that, at the moment.”

“Are you suggesting that the mines haven’t been completely charted yet?”

“It’s a big job.”

“But you’ve been at it for hundreds of years. Gevira must be riddled through like Emmental cheese!”

She laughed. “Donaldan Lough, you are such a newb. Where do you think we are right now? Not Gevira, surely.”

“Where else would we be?”

“You heard Huw. We’re on Samagrinig, and that could be halfway across the universe from where we started.”

“Very funny.”

“I’m serious. What do you think that is outside the windows?”

I ceased my pacing, a familiar sense of anger and humiliation swelling like cancer in my breast. This new mockery revealed her to be no better than Officer Gluis, a fact made all the worse by our joint endurance of the previous day’s crises. The very moment one of her compatriots joined us, thus forming a bloc—if a fractious one—against my minority of one, she expelled me from her confidence and would throw my lot, no doubt, among the mine’s other newbies.

Is that how she saw me, I wondered—as fodder for the Geviran mines, as mere sport for the Director?

“Don’t play me for a fool, Cotton. I’m not the naïf you take me to be.”

“I’m not taking you for anything. I’m just telling you the way it is.”

“That we’ve traveled from one world to another by—by elevator? Next you’ll propose that the Director is an invisible white rabbit or that we should ask directions from the Queen of Hearts!”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Her anger was rapidly becoming the equal of mine. “You said no one was asking the questions that need to be answered. Well, maybe it’s because, like you, they don’t like answers. The first thing everyone in Terminus does is the math. It tells you that the mine contains enough people to fill a dozen planets. The mine exports sufficient energy to light up a solar system. The mass of every mineral extracted comes to several Jovian worlds. Where do you think all that comes from? From a tiny backwater world like Gevira? You can say that the numbers are lying, but deep down you’ll know that it’s really you, lying to yourself, and the sooner you accept it, the happier and crazier you’ll be.”

“Like you?”

“Damn straight like me. Do you have a better solution?”

We stood nose to nose, yelling at each other. My fury was so great that the cover I had carefully maintained seemed an irrelevant thing beside the impulse to prove to this woman that there was more to the world than the mines and her obsession. Far across the gulfs of space glittering civilizations reached, connected by the Great Ship Fleets and the Guild to which I myself belonged. It has taken millennia to establish and unimaginable efforts to maintain. My ache to impress upon her the impossibility of a network such as the one she described—in which those empty gulfs could be crossed in a matter of moments, with no more effort than the pushing of a button—could not be measured.

Somehow I subsumed that impulse. I thought of you, Master Catterson, and the ranks of Guildsmen depending on my steadfastness. I would not betray my vows solely to impress a madwoman, no matter what revelations she promised. Such a promise was tainted, anyway, if this proposition was a taste of that to come.

“The only solution I have,” I said in level tones, “is to retrace our steps and return to the surface. Once we’re out of the mines, we and the people around us will be safe from the Director. We’ll have time to examine your theory with clinical dispassion and see where it leads us. We won’t need to cower like criminals in the dark, lending credence to propositions we would never entertain in the clear daylight. What do you say?”

“I can’t leave here until I find Trelayne,” she said firmly. “He has all the answers I need.”

“What if he turns out to be nothing but a rumour? You’ll have wasted your final hours chasing the ghost of hope.”

“It’s no more a ghost than I am. Look at me. You’ve seen my corpse. I’ve told you what it means. How much more proof do I need?”

“That aliens learned how to connect worlds by tissue paper and a bit of pluck? A lot more proof than your word on it, I’m afraid.”

“What about Huw and all of Terminus? What about the evidence of your senses?” She turned away with palms pressed to her forehead as though containing a migraine. “Oh, Don, you can’t possibly be so ignorant about everything!”

“Indeed he can’t, Emma,” said Huw Kindred from behind me. “Don’t say any more. I think he’s heard quite enough.”

I turned to find Kindred standing in the entrance we had come through with a compact firearm in his hand. He must have looped around through the empty level and returned to the elevator cluster via a corridor we had not noticed. That, however, was the least of my present concerns. The firearm was pointed directly at me. It looked tiny, like a toy, but I was convinced of its lethality.

“What is the meaning of this?” I spluttered.

“Just step away from her, flyboy, and don’t make any sudden moves. That’s it. Put your hands above your head. Now, do you want to tell her where you’re from or shall I?”

It’s no exaggeration to say that every muscle in my body went rigid.

“Have you gone completely insane, Huw?” Cotton went to put herself between us, but Kindred’s hefty forearm pushed her back.

“I was thinking, Emma,” he said, “about what you told me. Your corpse, the deal you made with yourself, the information you want from me. I had just about decided to give in to you, when it came to me. None of this is real. It’s a fake, like this guy suggested.” The gun shifted to indicate me, then returned once more to target the center of my chest. “Only he’s the one behind it. It’s a trick, Emma, and you fell for it.”

My thoughts moved at lightning speed. I was ready for either fight or flight the very moment an opportunity presented itself.

“It’s not a trick,” I said.

“Shut up.”

“Are you going to tell me to shut up too, Huw?” Cotton stared up at him with a pained look on her face. “I can tell the difference. He’s not lying. Why would he? What’s he got to gain?”

“Everything,” said Kindred, eying me with intense animosity along the gun’s sights. “He’s a spacer.”

Her gaze darted to me, then back to Kindred. “What?”

“Ask yourself, Emma. Why does he seem so ignorant? He’s not just a newbie; he’s after everything we’ve learned about the mines for bosses elsewhere. That’s why he’s hitched up with you. He wants answers and he doesn’t care how he gets them. You and your obsession would have given him everything he wanted, if I hadn’t come along to stop you.”

“No,” she said. The blue sky of her certainty was beginning to cloud over with doubt. “I’m not that gullible.”

“Really? Remember that time you tunneled a mile into a volcano just because someone had told you Trelayne had left a memory dump there? You almost died, and for what?”

“Nothing, but this is different.”

“Sure it is. Not satisfied with all the stars, the spacers want what we’ve got too.” His lips tightened and I braced myself for the gun to fire. “What flag do you fly under, star man? Whose picture do you salute each morning?”

I would never tell him. “You’ve made a mistake, Kindred. I’m not who you think I am.”

“Don’t,” he snarled. “You’re all the same. You and your fucking empires. You can’t keep your noses out of the Structure. You’re vermin.”

That struck a nerve. “And what are you? This place—whatever it is—it’s amazing, but you no more than occupy it. You’re squatters, that’s all. Humanity has become rats in the walls.”

“The Director, Huw,” Cotton persisted, defending my lie without knowing it. “It chased us. How could he fake that?”

“Coincidence. Or some spacer trick.”

“Now you sound paranoid.”

“Do I?”

They were shouting at each other now. “It’s my decision, Huw. Put the gun down—”

“You’re crazy to trust this astronaut!”

“—put the gun down and tell me what I need to know.”

“I’m not going to let you kill yourself!”

They were as distracted as they were ever going to get. Turning sideways to present a smaller target, I moved suddenly to my left. Kindred’s gun arm went to follow me but collided with Cotton, putting his aim off. He fired anyway, and the discharge was deafeningly loud. I ducked automatically, unharmed, and ran.

Ran through the door he had come through, heading not for the exit—the doors would take too long to open—but for the route I suspected he had followed. He had left the portal ajar, and I threw myself headlong into the darkness on the other side. Two shots followed me, but Kindred’s aim was poor. I was fast and desperate where he was big and conflicted. My lead was the only advantage I had. I was determined to keep it as long as I could.

My eyes adjusted to the darkness, picking out faint edges in infrared and the flaming patches where Kindred had walked. I stuck to those footprints to throw him off even though it slowed me down. Two sharp turns put walls between me and the door, so when his voice boomed out at me at least I knew I wouldn’t be shot in the back.

“Come here, sky boy. You can’t hide forever!”

No, I answered to myself, but I can loop around to the control room and hope to get out the exit before either of you catch up.

“Don’t run, Don.” Cotton’s voice from further away, and falling behind. “It looks bad if you won’t even try to explain.”

“What’s to explain, Emma? He’s a rocket jockey, and he’s not getting his hands on the mines.”

Kindred was hard on my heels. Switching back to visible light, I saw torchlight dancing at the periphery of my vision. I realised then that I had made a mistake. Kindred wasn’t relying on infra-red, so my heat-signature was irrelevant. Putting on a burst of speed, I managed to gain an extra second or two, dodging and weaving down corridors and rooms that had not seen human life for a decade or more. My internal compass—still working even if my gravity-sense was addled—told me that I had looped almost completely around and was already returning to the control room. I had to act soon or hand myself over to Kindred.

A T-junction loomed out of the darkness. His footsteps went left, so I ducked right and pressed myself flat against the wall, suppressing every audible breath. My heart pounded in time with his approach. The thudding of his feet sounded as loud as thunder.

My slavish pursuit of his path had lulled him into believing that I would turn left. Timing my move for the moment he reached the junction, I struck up and out with my left elbow. The blow carried my entire weight plus his considerable momentum, and struck him hard between the eyes. His head snapped back while the rest of his body kept moving. Loosened from his fingers, the torch continued forward into the wall. Darkness descended with a smash.

All was momentarily a confusion of limbs and senses. The glare of the torch had blinded me to the entire spectrum of frequencies and the impact jarred my body, making me feel as though I’d been hit by a pile-driver. I staggered away, nursing my shoulder and blinking in confusion. Behind me, I could hear Kindred struggling to cling to consciousness, which in itself was amazing. His skull must have been made of rock! Then he fell silent, either giving up the fight or becoming alert enough to realize that the sound was giving away his location. I was still seeing stars, but I turned and readied myself to do battle with him in the way I had been trained.

Something moved in the air. Something impossible to define and completely without sound, but I knew beyond certainty that it had come and gone. I blinked and tuned my ears to their highest sensitivity. Nothing apart from my heartbeat and shallow breathing. Kindred was making no noise at all. I felt forward with my left foot, seeking his inert body. Nothing. My left hand patted the wall on that side through a blur of musculoskeletal pain. There was the intersection. My feet crunched on broken glass: the torch. Here, then, was where Kindred must have fallen.

He wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere. My eyes cleared and the glowing pool of warmth where he had briefly lain became visible, but no more than that. Kindred had vanished into thin air, as though he had never existed.

A sequence of terrible logic unspooled in my mind.

In the dark, for a moment, silent and unseen by my dazzled eyes, no one had been observing him.

In that moment, the Director had struck.

I took a deep, sobbing breath and backed away from the volume of space he had occupied, as though distance alone would spare me the same fate.

A glowing shape appeared behind me—humanoid, burning hot. I spun, moaning in fear and raised my hands in an impotent gesture. All my training counted for naught in that moment. I am ashamed to say, Master Catterson, that I was completely unmanned.

“Huw? Huw, is that you?”

It was Cotton, of course. My horror had been so great that I didn’t hear the footsteps approaching and failed to recognize her silhouette. My fear had magnified that glowing shape until it seemed monstrously large.

“He’s gone,” I forced out.

She rushed forward, eyes seeing me standing over the pool of heat where Kindred had fallen. “No.” Her mind performed the kind of mathematics she had urged me to perform, earlier. “No!” Not realizing yet that I had only witnessed Kindred’s demise, not killed him myself, and seeing me reaching for her in turn, she assumed the worst and lashed out.

I cannot say, Master Catterson, what my precise intentions were, in that dark hour. I can only say that I was taken by surprise, and so Cotton succeeded where Kindred had failed. The blow caught me in the left temple. Stars flared again, and I dropped to my knees. The last things I experienced before blackness engulfed me were Cotton’s glowing shape looming over me, and the raw, anguished sound of her scream.

I woke an hour later on my right side in the control room with my wrists and ankles securely tied. I ached all over, and my mouth was desperately dry, but for the moment I was glad that Cotton had not slit my throat and left me for dead. She must have dragged me there herself, over some considerable time. I am small, like all my brothers in the Guild, but not light.

Her voice came from somewhere behind me.

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

I wrenched myself to a sitting position and twisted on my buttocks to face her. She was crouched in a corner with Kindred’s pistol on her lap. Its size was a better match for her petite hands. That it wasn’t yet pointed at me I took to be another good sign.

The question, though, was not.

“Is what true?”

She rolled her eyes. “That you’re a spacer—astronaut, sky boy, rocket jockey, whatever.”

“We were all spacers once, Cotton.”

“Just give me a straight answer.” Tears eased freely from eyes as though from a surfeit of grief. She wasn’t weeping, but I perceived that she had been. “Under the circumstances, I think you owe me that.”

“If you’ll be straight with me in return,” I said, “regarding the mines.”

“You must be kidding.”

“Put yourself in my shoes. If you were about to be shot, wouldn’t you want to know the truth?”

The muscles of her jaw clenched. Her mouth twisted into an ugly line.

“All right,” she said. “You go first.”

I took a moment to compose my thoughts. The reasoning behind my offer was simple. Whatever she told me, I could transmit that information to you, Master Catterson. The broadcast would only take a second and be undetectable to her, so at least my death at her hands would not be for nothing.

But breaking my vows did not come easily. My heart quailed at the very thought of telling the truth, no matter the circumstances.

“The Guild of the Great Ships,” I began, slowly at first. “That’s who I work for. And yes, I was sent here to investigate the mines. But if you think about it, I haven’t really lied to you. I just asked questions. You assumed on your own that I was a newbie, along with everyone else.”

“Stop,” she said. “Stop talking now.”

The gun was in her hand and I was close enough that even her shaky aim couldn’t miss. But I didn’t obey.

“I was born in orbit above a world called Alfvén IV. It shines like a diamond at its poles, but the temperate regions are green, so green it hurts your eyes to look at it. My name was given to me by my hub-mothers, who raised me until I turned five and commenced training to be a Guildsman. I was one of 20 new recruits. We all looked alike. That we were clones was never hidden from us, not from the moment of our births. I was proud to be like my brothers, and we never mixed each other up. I knew we were all different on the inside. We all dreamed the same thing, in our own ways: of boarding one of the Great Ships and voyaging to the stars ourselves. That was our destiny. There we would find our true home.”

Her tears dried up, but my words did not. I told her everything, Master Catterson: of my graduation to full service and my first missions with the Guild; of promotion through the ranks and individual training in your capable hands; of the gradual accumulation of data concerning Gevira and the mission to ascertain the facts behind them; of being specifically chosen by you to infiltrate the mine and relay what I found there. I told her (as I tell you now) that I felt safe revealing so much to her because I knew that in the short time remaining to her she was unlikely to pursue the matter with what higher authorities existed in the mines. Let the spacers visit and explore, I told her. What harm can come of it? We are scientists, not conquerors. It is the very nature of the mines to make people curious. Perhaps we can find answers that others before us have not.

Last of all, I admitted that I would feel duty bound to communicate any discovery concerning new means of traversing interstellar space. If the shape of the mine was as she said, why should it be hoarded and not shared by all? What possible reason would stay my lips, were I to survive beyond the next ten minutes?

“How confident do you feel on that score?” she asked.

“I’m afraid I can’t read your thoughts.” I struggled to find a comfortable position on the hard, cold floor. My left side still ached from my collision with Kindred, and my temple throbbed with a bloody heat. Keeping both arms behind my back was proving increasingly painful. “Would you care to share them with me?”

She avoided meeting my gaze directly. “Well, I was telling the truth about the mines, which puts us in a bit of a bind. I don’t want to shoot you in cold blood, but I’m not convinced I shouldn’t.”

“Do you think Kindred would have?”

That made her look at me again.

“It’s possible,” she said, “although I think he was angrier at me than you.”

“I think so too. I’m sure he wasn’t going to tell you about Trelayne.”

“Say we’re no worse off and I really will shoot you now.”

“As you wish. Do I need to point out that while I might have been a fake—”

“My body was definitely real. That had occurred to me, Donnie Boy—or whatever your name is.”

“It’s as you know it. I swear.”

She stared at me for a long while, and I was content with that. I wanted her attending to me as the person in whose company she had run from Gevira, not building up the courage to shoot someone she had redefined as an enemy combatant.

“If I let you go,” she said, “are you going to follow me to Trelayne?”

“No,” I promised her, “but I will come with you if you ask me to.”

She bowed her head, and I wondered if it was because she was weeping again. Her shoulders shook, and although she made no easily distinguished sound, it did appear to me that she was in distress.

When she looked up, however, I saw that it was in fact silent laughter that gripped her.

“You’ve got a fucking nerve,” she said. But she did come over and release my hands and feet from their bindings, so I felt I had no grounds on which to argue that particular point.

The first thing I did upon my release was assuage my thirst with water provisioned from Kindred’s pack. Fortunately, he had left it behind before barreling off in pursuit of me. Cotton has charge of it—if I want something, I have to ask—but by tacit agreement it seems that we won’t be parting in Samagrinig, as she now calls this level, so his abandoned resources are fair game. Unless she changes her mind, I will be going at least as far Panaion, the place Kindred went to pursue his mysterious lead. From there, the map is blank.

Therefore, Master Catterson, the second thing I have done is prepare this account for you. Cotton says that we are far from Gevira, not without conviction, and if that is true then my earlier reasoning is tragically flawed. If the mines truly are scattered across numerous far-flung worlds, this document might never reach you. My mission should be to return to a point where the relays to the Great Ship will pick up my packets and convey them to you.

I am, however, yet to be wholly convinced. I need evidence before committing myself solely to that belief. For all I know, Terminus is a counter-insurgency group designed to seed misinformation in the minds of those seeking the truth. Until I have proof that I am not the one being misled, I will operate on the assumption that nothing has changed, and the relay drones on Gevira will detect any transmission I dispatch and pass it on to you.

I send these words to you, therefore, in the hope that a reply will be swift on their heels. Your advice is sorely needed, Master Catterson, by this Guildsman far out of his depth.

(Thus concludes my second transmission since meeting the Terminus agent E. C. Cotton. Everything that follows is taken from notes compiled during our subsequent expedition and transcripts of pertinent conversations.)

<Third Account: Aide-Mémoires>

Kindred secreted his charts and other data in memory wire woven into his pack’s hardy fabric. Cotton knew where to look and how to access the data thanks to her familiarity with him and his methods. I am building up a picture of him as a rugged idealist, an academic born into the body of a giant. For all his violent outrage, aimed at me and spacers in general, I am certain that he was no trained fighter. I am reassured, therefore, that Terminus is not necessarily a paramilitary group devoted to defending the mines from incursion.

The chart reveals that 17 levels lie between us and Panaion. (I refuse to refer to them as “planets.” Levels or zones they will remain until I can be convinced otherwise. The truth of the mines, if such it is, must take time to sink in.) Cotton pores over the complicated map for an hour, seeking a shorter route. Her tension grows as the futility of the exercise becomes increasingly certain. Seventeen is the minimum, so seventeen it must be.

The knowledge weighs heavily on me too. Seventeen times will the Director strike before we reach our destination—and who knows what will happen there, when we attempt to stay?

But there is no turning back. My mission, until I am told otherwise, is to follow the mystery, and if Trelayne truly has the answers I seek, then there is no other clear course open to me.

The pool of heat where Kindred fell must have long dissipated into the ambient chill, but it burns in my mind still, like a ghost. I fear it will haunt me forever.

We are both exhausted, physically and emotionally. When we set out, we switch off the lights behind us and return the control room to its endless slumber.

The freight elevator seems to take forever. During our ascent, Cotton begins to explain her perception of the mine’s topology, sketching crudely with her toe on the dusty floor as she does so.

“It helps to think of it in terms of horizontal and vertical, even though the topology is obviously much more complicated than that.

“There are two different sorts of shafts, too: those that move ordinarily through space, and those that cut through it. The ordinary sorts are no different to those in any mine, connecting faces drilled horizontally out of the earth. All the shafts leading down from the surface of Gevira are this sort.”

“We call the second sort transcendents because they cut through multidimensional space. Either end of the shaft can be literally anywhere—on the other side of the same planet, or on the other side of the universe. It’s hard to tell, because it takes so long to connect the dots by conventional means.

“You probably haven’t realized it, but we’ve been using transcendents ever since we left Gevira. Every time you use an access code, that’s how you’re travelling.”

“Now, transcendents are usually charted horizontally because it makes sense to think of them that way. But they can move vertically too. A vertical sequence of ordinary and transcendent shafts is called a stack.”

“Calling them stacks is more than just a convention. To each there’s a top—always a planetary surface like the one on Gevira, a different planet for each stack—and there’s also a bottom. The bottoms are—well, they’re much harder to describe. But what you get is always the same, broadly speaking.”

I press her to elaborate, but she insists that seeing is the only way to believe it.

The freight elevator chooses this moment to arrive, and she scrubs out the sketch with the sole of her shoe.

My mind is left in a tangle of horizontals and verticals, shafts and stacks, ordinaries and transcendents. Could any of this be true? That she seems wholly convinced of it is no proof at all. My feelings on the matter remain sharply divided.

When I ask her how big the mine is, she is similarly evasive.

“We call it the Structure,” she concludes as we summon the carriage to take us elsewhere.

I recognize the name from one of our earliest conversations. It seems as good as any.

Our first port of call is the last we traversed on the way to the level called Samagrinig. The Director has already killed there in our wake, and we brace ourselves for a repeat when we emerge from the transcendent shaft.

None occurs. We stand blinking in the light of this vibrant space, surrounded by people untouched by the menace of our very existence, and I am momentarily filled with the urge never to move again.

But Cotton has the map, and the imperative to continue is irresistible. Not daring to speak, we step into the next shaft and wait breathlessly for our arrival. By voicing the hope that the curse has been lifted we fear bringing it back down upon us again. That is patently absurd, of course, but cannot be helped.

The dashing of that unvoiced hope makes us feel all the worse. As we step into the second port of 17, cries and alarms break out almost immediately. A woman has been killed, crushed with inexplicable force by something unseen even as she nestled in her lover’s arms. He was spared.

Cotton and I exchange guilty looks. Can any knowledge be worth this?

To that question, we both know the answer.

Hurriedly, she uses the access codes to summon the next carriage.

Cotton recites the names as we travel from one to the next.

 . . . Emkemi, Idris, Taftefiah . . .

With each transfer, the list grows one name shorter. Soon we know the last dozen off by heart, but the recitation continues. It is a mantra composed of meaningless syllables that expunge from our minds all other consideration.

 . . . Chanoch, Tantemy, Dynamis . . .

We are no longer thinking creatures. We are electrons caught in a wire, moons tidally locked in a shared orbit, entangled particles without self-determination or morality. We have no care for anything beyond that list of names for, temporarily, that is all that exists for us.

 . . . Itmon, Sarha-Olam, Yeshaya . . .

The human race becomes an abstract concept in which all distinctions are blurred. Spacers, miners, Terminus agents, individuals—all are meaningless. What are one or two deaths on such a large canvass? How can we be blamed for the screams and panic? We are just dots on a line, dots moving slowly from one abstract to another.

 . . . Panaion.

<Third Account: Fragment>

Writing this account from what seems a place of sanctuary, at least for the time being, I look back on our arrival with no small amount of chagrin. This is the level where Huw Kindred had come seeking information on Trelayne. (Cotton is pursuing that information while I compose this portion of my account and prepare myself for what lies ahead.) It seemed unreasonable to expect that we would find what we needed immediately, so the two of us were prepared for a slaughter on a grand scale before we could move on.

On that score we were to be relieved, but not after a moment’s panic on seeing an entrance hall filled with hundreds of people. Conveyances in their dozens whirred along maglev tracks and even through the air above us. The hall was huge, nearly 50 meters high. A reverberating hum filled the space, created spontaneously by so many people speaking at once.

So great was the throng that the Director’s first and only act was not noticed for some minutes. The absence of one solitary person among so many only came to light when his luggage was found unattended in a niche, from which a nearby stall-owner reported seeing him enter but not exit. Security guards were called but no tumult erupted. The scene was investigated, the luggage impounded, and that was the sum of it.

Cotton and I waited five minutes for the Director to strike again. When no one else was afflicted by a visitation from the mine’s deadly apparition, it dawned on us that the threat had passed.

“Could it be so easy solved?” I asked as we moved away from the elevator cluster from which we had emerged and blended into the crowd.

“Things rarely are,” she said, “but I’ll take this one if it’s going.”

The moment I had stepped from the carriage I knew that the stack called Panaion was different from the others we had visited. That impression was confirmed as we explored its buttressed halls and vine-covered thoroughfares. Tens of thousands of people live here in quarters that seem palatial by Geviran standards. (I say “Geviran” now, master, simply out of convenience. My null hypothesis remains that we are ensconced within that planetary body and have never left it.) Its air is rich with the exhalations of life and industry, both of which thrive under a moderate gravity allowing considerable feats of engineering and endurance. Citizens wave from terraces to passers-by far below. Hawkers call and chant in a melange of languages and pidgins. Musicians play. There are children in abundance, and schools to educate them in both science and the arts, as practised by those who live in the mines.

Cotton and I walked wide-eyed for an hour, seeking the residence Huw Kindred had occupied while in Panaion. The rooms had already been let out, for which I was secretly glad, but we found others nearby. Cotton paid with Kindred’s credit, and a shadow passed over her delicate features. When the transaction was concluded, she locked herself in her suite and left me to my own devices. It never seemed to cross her mind that I might wander away and never come back.

I did wander, aimlessly and in unrelieved amazement at the size of the habitat. It truly was an underground city, and any actual mining that took place was kept at a distant remove. I imagined generations of miners and their contraptions hollowing out this vast space, then leaving it to their descendants to inherit and make into anything they desired. The machines dug for riches while a more gentle life blossomed in their wake.

When I returned to the rooms, Cotton was waiting for me.

“From here on, it’s guesswork,” she said. “Huw is—was—a creature of habit. He’ll have left dumps for himself and other Terminus agents to find. But they won’t be lying around in the open. I’ve been poring over the maps of Panaion, looking for the kind of places that would appeal to him. I’ve found three. The information we need could be in any of them, or none of them.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s find out.”

“No,” she said, putting a hand on my chest. “I’m doing this alone. You’ve got somewhere else to be.”

I braced myself for an argument. To have come this far, to have risked so much, and to be turned away was unacceptable.

“I mean down, space boy,” she quickly corrected me. “You need to see the bottom for yourself or else you’ll never accept anything Trelayne says about the Structure. I’ve given up on you taking me at my word.”

Whatever she thinks is waiting in the lower levels of the Panaion stack, I could only agree to undertake this side-mission. To refuse would sound like closed-mindedness, or even cowardice, and if I did indeed learn more about the nature of the mines along the way, all the better.

Cotton divided Kindred’s supply of concentrates in two and shrugged the pack back onto her shoulders.

“Just don’t stay down there too long,” she warned me before we took our leave of each other. “It might be months before you come back here—or you might return before we arrived, which would be really messy.”

She meant it as a joke, but I didn’t laugh.

We parted without shaking hands or embracing. I watched her blend into the crowds of Panaion with only a mild apprehension. She had Kindred’s charts in the pack, so if she failed to return I would be set adrift.

I reassured myself that I could always ascend to the top of the stack and—if my theory was correct—simply travel across country to the entrance I had originally used. Or scouts from the Great Ship could be summoned and return me to you, Master Catterson. It unnerved me slightly that her wild speculations were infectious enough to rouse my anxiety on this score, but I suppressed all negative emotions and returned to my quarters to plan my exploration of Panaion. The truth will out. Of that I am completely certain.

I leave in an hour.

<Third Account: Aide-Mémoires>

Panaion possesses eleven levels. Our rooms are in the sixth. I have created this partial map from interviewing those queuing alongside me for a carriage leading to the seventh level. Their testimonies conflict, and not one of them has visited the deepest level. I am informed that an access code is needed, as though it were a horizontal transcendent. I can only hope that the one Cotton provided me will work.

minerals

machinery and maintenance

habitat

minerals

hydrocarbons (?)

habitat (our rooms)

minerals

gas extraction

diamonds (?)

fusion

(bottom—unknown)

Every miner I ask denies knowing the name “Gevira,” except for one who referred to it as a backwater he had passed through some years back. I did not feel compelled to disavow him of that notion.

At last I am properly underway. The seventh level proves to be little different to anything I have seen before, only on a larger scale. The air is thick with particulate matter—the dust and microscopic debris inevitably produced as after-effect of mineral extraction—and many of the miners wear filtration masks to preserve their lungs. Distant pounding speaks to massive earthworks underway no great distance from here. Occasionally the earth literally moves beneath my feet.

The eighth level is cleaner, and home to a particular breed of miner. More chemist than engineer, they wear white fieldsuits that cover them from head to foot, rendering their sex unknown. I stand out among them, and feel that I am being stared at.

Before proceeding to the next level, I am compulsorily required to change my own clothing. The outfit I am given is preposterously thick and as heavy as lead. No one questions my decision to proceed, but I am given no encouragement to do so, either. There is a hardness to the silence of those around me. They do not answer my questions. All I receive are terse instructions sufficient to prepare me for my ongoing descent. Why these men and women have rejected conversation is unknown to me.

With trepidation, I confess, I step into the elevator shaft and continue downward.

The ninth level creaks like an aging sea-vessel. Its corridors are dark and cramped, and sparsely populated. No one greets me on my arrival. Only after stumbling around for some minutes do I find anyone at all: a dull-eyed technician who takes me without a word to what passes for an observation deck. There is nothing visible through the smoke-blackened porthole, and I soon desist peering through it. My guide has gone. I am left alone in the groaning habitat. The thick, sterile air is difficult breathe, and gravity seems impossibly to have increased, making my heavy suit even more burdensome. I resolve to leave, and set about searching for the next shaft.

The bottoms are, Cotton told me, well, they’re much harder to describe.

At last I begin to understand why. I also understand the reticence of the miners who occupy these deep, inhuman spaces. Language cannot convey what our senses seem to be showing us. I say “seem” because I have yet to fully verify these impressions. The few facts at my disposal do suggest certain interpretations, but it would be irresponsible of me to offer them, colored in any way by the stranger theories that have occurred to me. Like Cotton’s, they are almost too wild to be born.

The eighth level processes and purifies noble gases in quantities unheard of in any terrestrial mine. Of this I am certain. The Guild only manages such productivity by grazing the turbulent atmosphere of a gas giant. They could be extracted terrestrially, theoretically, but then . . .

Diamonds are among the anomalous minerals exported en masse by the mines. They can be mined from hard rock via declines and stopes, but I saw nothing like that on the ninth level. Only now, as I stand in awe amid the plasma channels of the tenth level, does it occur to me that diamonds can also be found in the hearts of brown dwarfs.

Again, the Panaion stack could be a statistical fluke, except . . .

The tenth and penultimate level, if my eyes are to believed, extracts energy from the convection of superheated gases in the belly of a small star.

Words have failed me. All I have is raw data to convey the wonders to be found in these mysterious mines. Images and such will have to suffice.

If this is the tenth level, what lies at the very bottom of the stack? What is that Cotton so adamantly insisted I should see? What phenomenon is replicated from stack to stack, in principle if not in detail?

My access codes work.

I descend to the final level alone, as I have traveled these last two legs. Previously, I have been accompanied by miners heading down for shifts or on their own personal excursions. Some chattered about mundane things; others stood in silence, wrapped in their thoughts and avoiding others’ eyes. The Director has not struck since my arrival in Panaion, but I see the fear of it in their eyes. The deeper you go, the closer death stands to everyone. That was the wisdom whispered on Gevira—which I once dismissed as superstition—and it is writ large down here. Humans are transient. Perhaps humanity is transient too. Whoever—whatever—built these mind-bending spaces, the shock and awe of it defeats individual thought.

The eleventh level—the bottom of the Panaion stack—is a transparent dome just five meters wide fixed to the surface of an angular, rocky body, most likely an asteroid, tumbling with dizzying rapidity in the gulfs of space. I stand in that bubble of air and look up, fighting tears and vertigo, not knowing until this moment just how much I have missed the stars. These are no metaphor; they are as real I am. And I am a creature of the void, not the subterranean depths. I was born and raised to take stock of infinity. The minutiae of the mines almost made me forget it.

Despite this, I can only take so much of asteroid’s incessant rotation. Closing my eyes, I call up blurry snapshots of the starscape and seek to identify my location. None of the constellations match those around Gevira. My stomach sinks, and I broaden my search. There is a band of stars in one section of the sky, perhaps a glimpse of a galactic band. I focus my search on that stellar artifact and seek a match in the Guild’s extensive archives.

There is none. This sky is more than just anomalous for its position—purportedly—at the base of a mine. It is unknown to the Guild of the Great Ships.

I remember the ode to stars that I glimpsed in Samagrinig, where Huw Kindred died. That is what every stack has in common. A different sky. A different view of the universe.

I gaze one more time from my alien perspective—alone apart from a small, automated instrument package, scanning and blinking busily to itself—and then I retreat to the transcendent shaft that brought me here. My quest now leads me in entirely the opposite direction.

It takes me two full days to reach the top of the Panaion stack, and once there little more than a minute to ascertain that the stars visible from the planet’s surface don’t match those at the bottom of the mine.

I call for the Great Ship, but there is no answer.

My grand tour of the mines of Panaion have left me more bereft than ever—exactly the effect Cotton intended, I assume.

“You’ve just come out, right?”

The question takes me by surprise. I am being addressed by a grizzled old man leaning against the railing separating the mines from the wider world, cupping a fragrant cigarette in his right hand. My reply takes some time to formulate. It feels like weeks since last I spoke in conversation to anyone.

“Yes,” I say. “There’s a girl—we’re looking for someone.”

He nods and I feel as though I have uttered something completely unsurprising. “You know it’s a one-way trip. If you go back down, I mean. You only get one chance to come out.”

“I don’t believe that,” I say.

He shrugs and draws on his cigarette. “It’s your decision not to.”

I feel an irrational urge to argue with him. “How could it be possible? I didn’t see the Director checking my ticket as I came out.”

“How could any of this be possible?” His cool blue eyes hold me pinned, like a butterfly. “You’ve seen it. You’ve got that look they all have when they come up from the deep. The sooner you stop asking questions, the longer you’ll last. Trust me.” He broke into a cracked smile. “That’s if you’re still going down.”

“I am.” Cotton could be waiting for me even now, and Trelayne holds at least the possibility of answers to the questions I must keep asking. “It’s my duty.”

“Well, then.” He flicks ash away from him and turns his attention back to the night sky.

“Goodbye.”

He didn’t answer, rudely, I thought. I understand only as I enter the mine’s uppermost elevator complex—heading back to fusion arcs and air masquerading as fresh—that I intended that farewell for the stars, and he knew it better than I.

Cotton isn’t in her rooms when I return to the sixth level. She has left no note. I have no choice but to wait for her, using Kindred’s credit to buy food and a change of clothes. My old fieldsuit was left behind in the deeper levels, and the standard fare with which I have been issued is growing uncomfortable. I buy something sturdier, darker in color, almost black. It suits my mood.

I compose three draft accounts but erase them all. What is the point if they will not be received? I am cut off from the Guild for the first time in my life. I am completely alone.

I dream of stars spinning and galaxies tied in knots. My fellow Guildsmen walk past me with no recognition in their faces. I try to call their names, but my voice is stilled. I hear only the moaning of acid wind, and the creaking of bulkheads stressed almost to breaking-point by surging, lava tides.

In the middle of the seventh night she comes to me, letting herself into my quarters with a key I didn’t know she possessed. She says nothing, and I am too sleep-befuddled to stop her getting into bed with me. I am lying on my side, curled like a child, and she fits herself to my curves and angles. She does nothing more than that, at first, and I lie in the silence with my heart pounding, thinking about what this means. I decide that I understand her. I know what her silence means.

Her quest was successful. She knows the way to Trelayne.

I cannot speak for her, but I know I will not return to sleep this night. Answers and death await us. As with all the mysteries of the mines, words are inadequate.

We wake and dress in the morning. She does take her time at it, as I once suspected she might. When we talk, the subject is confined to our disparate adventures, not the events of last night. It was something that simply occurred, neither premeditated nor particularly profound, between two people who have no one else to turn to. On Gevira she said that she has no next of kin, and in the hard light of this morning, I believe her.

“There’s a place Huw spoke of in his memory dump,” she says over a breakfast of concentrates and water. “It’s a legend. I’ve heard of it before, but I never connected it to Trelayne. Someone did, another agent, and it looks like Huw found a location. There’s a chart, anyway. It leads to a place called Naar: a small stack with one entrance. He was planning to go there, once he found a way.”

“What’s so special about this place?”

“It’s protected by the Director,” she says. “Anyone who goes there is killed.”

“And that’s where we’re going?”

“Yes, but you don’t have to—”

“I do. I am.”

We eat in silence for a minute. I think about death-sentences and wonder if I might be signing my own by not turning back. What price a cure for curiosity?

“You were gone ten days,” I say. “A map’s all you’ve got to show for it?”

“Ten days for you. By my calendar, I was been gone around 40 hours.” She smiles at my discomfort. “How was your trip to the bottom?”

“Informative.”

“I bet.”

More silence.

“I’ve been thinking,” she says, “about the Director. The way it follows us. It struck when we met in Gevira, then again every place we went, including Samagrinig, when Huw turned up. When we doubled back, though, it didn’t strike somewhere we’d already been. It wasn’t until we came to a new stack that it killed again.

“Note also that it strikes just once, when we arrive, and then it goes away. That’s what happened here in Panaion. We also know that it will strike, even if we can hold it off for a while. Again, Huw is proof that.”

“That’s true,” I tell her.

“But here’s the thing. When it killed Huw on Samagrinig, it could have taken you or me instead. None of us were looking at each other. We were completely unobserved. But it wasn’t us. It was Huw. What’s so special about us that we were spared?”

That question I can’t answer, but I have another one for her with more immediate ramifications.

“Do you think we can walk into Naar and out again without being killed?

“I do,” she says, and she stares at me as though daring me to argue.

I won’t. There’s no point. We are fishing for facts and theories in an information vacuum. Her guess is at least as good as any I could come up with.

A few seconds is all it takes to break camp. We came here with nothing but Kindred’s pack, and with just as little we leave. I’ve grown no attachment to Panaion and the tiny corner of it I occupied for a week, yet our brief constitutional to the central elevator cluster fills me with a heaviness I cannot dispel.

At the cluster, a delegation awaits us.

“Hello, E. C.,” says a man with a face like squeezed putty and eyes as sharp as needles. “We’ve been waiting for you to show up again.”

A panicky look passes across Cotton’s features. “What do you want?”

“To see you on your way.” His potent gaze shifts to me. “Osred Guyonnet,” he said, proffering his hand. “And you must be Donaldan Luff.”

“That’s ‘Lough’,” I say, ignoring his hand until I know the reason for Cotton’s sudden nervousness.

“There’s no need to be antagonistic,” he says, retracting his hand and addressing Cotton once more. “I only want to help.”

Around us, the cluster hall is slowly emptying as men in light-armored fieldsuits usher commuters and their companions towards the exits.

“We don’t need your help,” Cotton says.

“Oh, I’m not helping you. My concern is for the people you’ll kill if you go stumbling across the Structure as you plan to.” His face angles forward. “You do know about them, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Cotton. “But this is important. You can’t—”

He waves away her protest. “We’re not going to stop you, E. C. Don’t worry about that. We just ask that you tell us where you’re going so we can clear the way ahead of you.”

“That’s sounds reasonable,” I say when Cotton doesn’t immediately respond.

She turns to me. “Osred is a Terminus agent,” she says. “He’s obviously seen the trail we left behind us and connected us to the cause. Anyone with a sharp eye and a bit of persistence could have done it.”

Guyonnet bows his head at the damnably faint praise.

“It’s not his job to direct traffic,” she adds.

“This is true,” he acknowledges, “but at the same time I like to think there’s more to being with Terminus than exploring and taking notes. Saving lives, for instance.”

“What happened to looking for spacers?” Cotton asks, and my heart trips between one beat and the next.

He smiles. “One thing at a time, E. C. I can’t be in two places at once.”

“Unfortunately for me, you chose this one.”

Cotton casts me a cautionary glance, and I know that my secret is safe with her. The relief I feel is profound but tempered by the knowledge that others exist like Kindred who would murder me in a second if my true identity became known.

“I know we’ve had our differences in the past, M. C.—”

“Stop playing the saint,” Cotton tells Guyonnet. “You just want what I know. If the Director is following us, what I know must be important, right?”

“One could be forgiven for supposing that.”

The hall is empty now. I have no doubt that Guyonnet and his agents could prevent us leaving any number of ways. Apart from Kindred’s miniscule pistol we are unarmed, and even the most capable Guildsman would be unlikely to prevail in a six-to-one fight.

Cotton sags and offers her hand. “All right, Guyonnet. But I want your word you will actually clear the way for us. You’re not going to take what I give you and then disappear. Okay?”

“You have my word.”

She and Guyonnet press palms. The data takes a split-second to transfer and not much longer to verify.

“All right.” Guyonnet whistles and his agents converge around us. People begin to rush back into the space. “Have a safe trip. See you at the end of it.”

“Be careful,” I tell him, thinking of what might lie in wait for him in Naar.

“Don’t worry about me, Mister Lough,” he tells me as the doors close between us. “Think only of yourself.”

With that, he and his agents are on their way to Naar, where Trelayne might be hiding and legends speak of death for any who set foot there.

I don’t know how much credit to lend to folklore in a place like this. I just know that Guyonnet will either be dead or not when we arrive—and I am unsure which possibility I like the least.

“We’ll give them a minute,” Cotton said, “just in case he plans to do the right thing for once.”

She fidgets and paces as the seconds count down. She doesn’t speak, but I know what she’s thinking. It’s a race now, a competition, and she may already have lost. Death is not much of a second prize under these circumstances.

My reserves of sympathy are not inexhaustible, however. The trip is going to be a long one, cooped up with that much restless anxiety. I let her needlessly expend her energy and save mine for finding a way to endure.

Our first destination is abandoned. We are the only things moving in the entire space. Although I was expecting it—or at least hoping for it—I am perturbed nonetheless. Guyonnet’s word holds; our travel is guilt-free, inasmuch as we can tell (the Director might still be striking, after all; we are simply not aware of it); but I begin to feel as though we are refugees fleeing through a vast, abandoned subway.

Was this, I wonder, what it was like for the first humans to explore the Structure’s endless, evacuated depths?

After a dozen silent processions from one shaft to the next, the emptiness becomes unbearable.

This time, Cotton is the one who breaks the silence.

“You’d never know it to look at me, but I come from an agrarian community. A small one, too. My mother was a genetic engineer and my father was an artist. They never agreed about anything, but it didn’t seem to matter. Yes, Merraton was a Structure world, but that’s not what this is about. Let me finish, and then you can pump me for information.”

I bow my head, ashamed. She is right. This moment isn’t about the Structure or the knowledge we seek. It is all about her. Life is flashing before her eyes: her birth, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood; her upbringing, education, vocation, and career; her hopes, dreams, nightmares, and failures. It is about her death, too, for we both believe that this is imminent.

She talks, and I do not interrupt. Neither do I record the details for my accounts. I will remember without notes and decide later what I will do with this knowledge. Should I consider it data regarding a Structure inhabitant that might prove valuable in future analysis, or something that should be left to fade along with the rest of her?

I know that even by asking that question I am admitting that my objectivity is compromised. If I cared for advancement, I would remove that detail from my account. But I was born a Guildsman, and I have a duty to disclose everything to my master. If the Structure has corrupted me, then that must be known by my fellows on the Great Ship.

Cotton talks on, and I consider for the first time what I will do when she is gone. Until now I have assumed that I will return either to undercover work or to my former life on the Great Ship. I suspect now that it is too late to walk away unscathed. The Structure’s claws are long and thin, and not always as visible in effect as its most malevolent actor, the Director. I may be a dead man walking and not know yet it.

But then I think of the man who delivers Cotton’s body to its ignominious interment—the haunting familiarity of his half-glimpsed profile—and I wonder. That man is definitely not Huw Kindred. He has the look of a Guild clone.

I know the answer now, and I believe that Cotton has known from the beginning.

I’d be careful if I were you, she told me. You don’t want to be tied to me when I go down.

The words were meaningless to me then, and their utterance changed nothing. It was already too late.

Time’s twisted skein has entangled us both.

Guyonnet’s arrangement sees us all the way to Uvaya, where we will take the last transcendent shaft to Naar, purported home of the mysterious Trelayne. The entrance is the most secure we have encountered to date, with checkpoints and guard posts, and warning signs in multiple languages. The guards have all been dismissed, however, and none of the automated security systems impede our progress. We come to the doors, input our access codes, and step into the carriage.

“This is it,” she says. Her restless energy has crystallized. She is almost glowing with anticipation.

The floor jolts beneath us. I feel the momentary giddiness that always afflicts me during transcendent transfers.

The doors open, and we step through them to our fates.

The Director does not strike us. We are as unafflicted in Naar as anywhere else. But of Guyonnet and his agents there is no sign. No sign at all. Not a single drop of blood; not a scuff mark on the floor. They have disappeared into the air—which thrums with tension, as though an invisible wire as large as a planet has been strained to breaking point.

Our footsteps echo across the flat, empty expanse of Naar’s reception area. There are no windows, no obvious doors, and no signs.

“Hello?” Cotton calls. “Trelayne?”

The sound of her voice falls flatly back to silence.

“Let’s check the walls,” I say, and we conduct a thorough search.

There are three sliding panels hidden almost seamlessly, one in the center of each empty wall. We try the one opposite the shaft through which we entered.

It glides smoothly open, revealing an expanse so large my eyes struggle to comprehend it. We are standing on a balcony overlooking a hollowed-out world. Massive scarring on the interior testifies to the massive earthworks that have occurred here in the past. Spherical light sources, like small, white suns, cast multiple shadows, and hum with barely suppressed energy.

We retreat and take the door to our right. There we find a chamber identical to the one we left, and just as empty.

The third door takes us along a corridor to a closed door. It doesn’t open as we approach, or to our touch. Cotton knocks loudly, three times.

We both jump as it hisses open, revealing a gray-haired man in a loose-fitting uniform with a sheath of paper in one hand. He looks at us in surprise and annoyance through bright green eyes.

“Trelayne?” Cotton asks him.

“Yes, I’m Royce Trelayne,” he says. “What took you so long?”

“Sorry about the mess. I’ve been here a month and it’s taken me that long to unpack. What do you mean, you’re not from the expedition? I ordered a re-supply a week ago and nothing’s come yet.

“No, I’ve not seen anyone else today—or any other day, for that matter. Honeyman and his idiots must still be sorting out the supply lines. I tried telling him that automation is the way to go, but he wouldn’t listen. The crew needs to be kept busy, he said. Morale doesn’t fix itself on its own, you know. Well, I do know that, and I dislike being patronized as much as anyone. Bad enough that he’s wasting resources and valuable time playing tin soldiers; worse that I’m going starve down here if he doesn’t get his act together soon.

“Honeyman? Oh, I should probably call him ‘the Professor General.’ He’s chief engineer and leader of the First Expeditionary Mission to Surya, where we found the mine entrance. You say you didn’t come from there? Well, I suppose I’m not terribly surprised. We though we were blazing new territory, burrowing like Carnarvon and Howard into alien tombs, and what did we get? Mines not tombs, signs of human habitation long before our arrival—and a curse as well, most likely. Makes you think, eh?

“See this thing here. It’s a clock, one of several thousand I’ve scattered through the mines, along with the instrument packs you might have seen at the bottom of the stacks. An army of soldiers would have taken years to make and distribute these things, but my drones accomplished the feat in a matter of a fortnight. The data’s been rolling in for a week. Packets cross the transcendent shafts every time a carriage moves from one end to the other. The packets find their own way through the Structure and recombine here, via that thick cable leading into the wall over there. Isn’t it obvious that I could never have accomplished so much on my own? Even with an army, as I said, it’d take forever. Best to leave the machines to it so I can do all the hard work of contemplation. That’s what humans are best at, you know. Good at thinking; not so good at doing. There’s a block somewhere, an execution failure. Everything we create is flawed, somehow. We thrive despite our ineptitude because the universe despises perfection.

“That more than anything convinces me that the Structure is not alien. Look at it! A sprawling insanity that seems from one angle like a clutch of high-rises connected by walkways, and from another a—well, like nothing we’ve ever built before. The kind of thing our armies might build if we left them to it. In would go our flawed designs, and out would come this madness. Reductio ad absurdum, except in the opposite direction, whatever that is in Latin. Extrapolation beyond all reason. All we do now is ask what its original purpose might have been.

“Yes, I’m sure that’s one of the many answers you’ve come seeking from me, and I’ve thoughts on the matter, of course. The mines do provide valuable resources for the worlds at the top of each stack; there’s no denying that, although it seems a small ambition for something so grand. I wonder if it is a device of some kind—an antenna, perhaps, transmitting vibrations through the temporal ether; or a generator, similar to wires connecting far-flung points of differing electrical potential. It could be a kind of cosmic glue, or conceivably even a weapon. I’m no closer to knowing the Structure’s intended purpose, and I’m the first to attempt a systematic study of it. See where it’s got me?

“Immortal, my arse. That’s just an error of parallax.

“Let me show you one thing I’ve learned. This is an analysis of the clock data I’ve collected from the bottoms of all the stacks. It’s crazy, isn’t it? I can barely look at it sometimes. It gives me bad dreams. Clocks ticking slow; clocks ticking fast—clocks going backwards, even. What does it all boil down to?

“My theory is that the transcendent shafts connect, not just different locations in the spacetime we come from, but locations in different space-times—universes, continuums, branes, whatever you want to call them. The Structure is the web tying all these different points together. The critical thing is that at some, perhaps all, of these locations, the arrow of time points in a different direction. Not just reverse, but left-right or up-down, or directions we can barely guess at. These different arrows of time exert a drag on the Structure as a whole, twisting and stretching the stacks so that there’s no universal time in the web at all any more. It’s all tangled and warped.

“Why? I don’t know. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe it’s part of a grand design we can only guess at. Either way, that’s how I can have been here a month, yet you think I’ve been here forever.

“And you—you tell me you’re tangled in a loop of some kind. That sounds perfectly possible, maybe even likely, given the mess around us. Why ever not? There’s nothing acausal about such loops, nothing acausal at all. They can be navigated—indeed they must be navigated, one way or another. The ravages of information entropy haven’t gobbled you up, so I take that as a proof of concept.

“What this means for the people who live here is a different question. Perhaps it’s nothing especially profound. We go about our lives as we always do, not really noticing any more than is necessary to ensure our day-to-day existence. Perhaps the finest ramification is one that Honeyman and I experienced. We’re among the first wave of explorers to leave Earth, which beyond doubt lacks the capacity to build something like this—but despite this very important fact, humans have somehow beaten us here. If time moved linearly in the Structure, it would have been empty. It wouldn’t even have existed for us to find! Yet everyone who comes to the Structure finds people here ahead of them. Where did they come from? Our future, I suppose. And in their past, they found the same thing. No one got here first. It’s always been inhabited. It always will be. There is no end to it, in time as well as in space. It just continues being. That’s why ‘Terminus’ is a terrible name for this organization you talk about. If there’s no beginning to the mine, there won’t be an end either.

“You know as well as I do that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Such loops and twists come at a cost to the Structure. It’s not infinitely elastic; it can only stretch so far. It must release tension in small ways or else it would’ve snapped long ago. You might have seen something like this in your travels. Timelines truncated, perhaps, or strange sheer effects, particularly near those most afflicted by temporal back-flips.

“Does that ring any bells?

“I see. ‘The Director,’ eh? I suppose to someone without access to my data it might look like an intelligent being at work in the mine. And we—we flawed, we brilliant, we imaginatively blind—we persist in seeing the universe through our human-shaped glasses. We perceive an invisible hand where there is none at all. It’s just the tangled fabric of cause and effect in the Structure adjusting itself, sealing off complicated ends, healing.

“And that other legend you related about me—my fortress of death, which killed the others you say preceded you here. I surmise now that it’s nothing more than another presentation of this same phenomenon. My clocks connect me to many, many conflicting arrows of time, gathered by harmless, unconscious machines and reported to me here, where I observe them. It’s like being surrounded by archers. I have been, unknowingly, caught in a vortex of twisted causality. While I remain connected to the clocks, I myself am safe, but anyone who gets too close will be erased from the Structure’s sum state. Instantly and without reprieve.

“That is a grim realization for someone such as I, who never intended harm to anyone.

“You? Well, if I had to guess I would say that you are protected by virtue of the fact that you are midway through causal loops of your own. You can’t be erased from the Structure here and now because you have actions to perform elsewhere and elsewhen. Your certain fate protects you, even while it guarantees your eventual death.

“And yes, you are most probably a danger to those around you. Perhaps a single loop could be tolerated, but two crossing loops . . . ? Bound to be inimical to the grand design, whatever that is.

“You seem downhearted, and I assure you that I both sympathize and apologize. My friends, I am speculating wildly. There hasn’t been time enough to conduct systematic experiments—or so I have been telling myself these past weeks. Were Honeyman here, he would remind me of the important of the scientific method before coming to any firm conclusions. Physicists like me are plagued by engineers like him. No answers come from idle speculation, just more questions. Of those we have plenty enough already.

“Remember that my theories are open for disproof to one and all. I could be nothing but a mad old hermit obsessed with clocks whose word you’d do best to ignore. Forget my delusions; go back to your lives and enjoy them while you can. You have been successful where so many others have failed, coming this far! And you’ve shown me a thing or two that I’d managed to miss, that’s for sure.

“Honeyman has been silent for an age, or so it seems me. I have missed my old friend, you know. Perhaps it really has been an age. It would be a terrible thing if the arrows of time twisted unfavourably and claimed him before I could tell him all about the execution failure we discovered together—marvellous and terrifying, and exactly the sort of thing he would build if given his head . . . ”

<Third Account: Conclusion>

We left Trelayne staring contemplatively at the thick bunch of cables connecting his workstation to the clocks scattered all across the Structure.

Cotton didn’t speak, for all that I tried to engage her. She had barely said a word through the last half of our interrogation of Trelayne. I had been the one asking questions, guiding the old man through his rambling mix of recollections and speculations. She had withdrawn into herself, and I resisted the impulse to remonstrate with her that this was the culmination of her life’s work. She had said herself that it would complete her, and therefore her disengagement seemed counterproductive.

A moment’s thought would have revealed to me what was going through her mind. But I had my own problems to work through—first and foremost how to convey to you, Master Catterson, all that we had learned. Weapon, accident, or trap? The nature of the mine was no closer to my understanding, even having met Trelayne and listened to all he said.

Of more immediate importance was the revelation that our time-loops were the sole things protecting us from the Structure’s causality-repairing censorship. Once my loop was closed, by putting Cotton in place in Gevira for my former self to examine, what was to stop my being wiped out of existence? Nothing. Cotton, by killing herself and expecting me to finish the job, was effectively killing me too.

That I was distracted at the crucial junction is regrettable but I hope forgivable.

I do not dare believe that events would have unfolded any other way than as they did, as they were always going to, in the end.

When we arrived at Uvaya, a sole Terminus agent was waiting for us.

“Finish it,” he said, removing his pressure mask and tossing it to me.

I caught the mask automatically, struck by how much like a Guildsman this man looked—except for his eyes, which had the far-horizons look of someone who had spent too long deep in the mines.

I had expected Osred Guyonnet.

Instead, he was me.

I felt the Structure flex around me, and I wondered how many timelines were being truncated as we stood in each other’s presence. Who was paying the cost of this strange encounter? Who must have died in order that we might meet?

It was over in a second. Without another word, he turned and walked away. A transcendent shaft opened its portals for him. He stepped inside and was gone.

Cotton gasped and folded awkwardly to the floor.

I was at her side, all thoughts of my self and this strange new development forgotten.

“Cotton, what’s wrong?”

Her pupils were pinpricks and her skin had turned a deathly shade of gray. There was no strength in her hands as they reached for me.

I knew the answer to my question even as I pleaded with her to respond. She must have started the process in the shaft for it to be so advanced now.

“E. C., talk to me!”

“Always going to end here, Donnie Boy.”

“Don’t listen to him. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”‘

“He wasn’t talking to me. We got the answers—”

I leaned in close, barely able to hear her.

“—got the answers we deserved. Tell everyone. You know—I—”

Her last words emerged as little more than a sigh.

“—can’t live—we can’t—”

I cradled her in my arms as the metabolic cascade ran its course. It ruined her mind first, then spread through her nervous system. Her organs succumbed one by one, with lungs and heart failing last of all. I held her tightly, relishing her body’s warmth while it lasted.

The first time I touched her she had been cold, and I knew the last time would be the same, but I did not want to remember her that way.

When the last electrical activity had died away in her brain stem, I laid her flat on the ground, closed her brown eyes, and went about finding a way to transport her to Gevira.

I have reached the conclusion of my account, but not the end of my life. Although that I have a future I am now certain, how long that future will last I cannot know in detail. It may be hours, or months. Years, even. At least I know that despair will not immediately claim me, as it claimed Emmaline Celeste Cotton.

An hour ago, I put her body where it will be discovered by Security Officer Gluis just minutes before his own death. In theory, I suppose, I could have refused to see it through. I remain a creature of free will, despite this cocoon of causality in which I find myself. But the moment I learned the true nature of the mines, I knew I would return to Gevira. I had to get in touch with you, Master Catterson. I am the vanguard of an invasion, as Huw Kindred said, and if I don’t make the results of my observation known someone else is sure to follow. Some other Guildsman will devise similar theories to mine, never knowing just how inadequate his imagination will be.

I have parcelled up my notes—all except Cotton’s precious life story—in the hope of sparing my predecessor both his misconceptions and my fate.

I understand now that that glimpse of my future self—and the surety that I was caught in another loop even before the first closed—is both my insurance and my curse. I cannot die on Gevira when I have a role to play elsewhere, no matter how small. This is my very human attempt to survive the machine of nature, and humanity’s greatest folly. “Execution failure” indeed.

Knots in time bind as well as protect. What would happen if I tried to leave the mines before fulfilling the future ahead of me? What damage could I wreak on spacetime and those around me, upon the Great Ship, upon the Guild, and upon you—teacher, master, and confessor these last few days?

The old man who addressed me on the surface of Panaion was absolutely right when he said that my return to the mines was bound to be a one-way trip.

To him I also spoke of duty, as I have to you, Master Catterson, and to Cotton. I am coming to believe that her final instruction to me is the highest—perhaps the only—form of duty I could consider following now.

“Tell everyone.”

Take this transmission as a warning, if you will. Do not be blinded by the mines’ wonders to the threat it entails. While the potential it offers for the Guild’s expansion appears limitless, at what cost would it come? I have seen it kill many whose lives were devoted to understanding its nature—not just E. C. Cotton, but Huw Kindred and Osred Guyonnet as well. How can we strangers to its halls hope to fare any better?

Although the mines were not designed as a trap, that is what they have undoubtedly become. Any incursion is doomed to failure. Send no more Guildsmen to suffer as I have suffered, through ignorance and pig-headedness, however deservingly.

My bridges are all burned now, but to be condemned to spend the rest of my days here is perhaps not the worst fate imaginable for a man such as I—even if I may wander its labyrinthine halls forever, extolling the truth and being ignored for it. I write this in the hope that the temporal tides have not already flung me up on some future shore, one in which you have abandoned hope of ever hearing from me again. If the suspicion of my demise has become a certainty in some minds, Master Catterson, I ask you to suspend all judgement on that score, if no other.

As you suspected, the citizens of Gevira uncovered something utterly strange and deadly beneath the veneer of their civilisation. Thus ends my account of it. I leave to you the divination of the will of the Guild, and the way forward for the people I once called my own.

Originally published in Godlike Machines, edited by Jonathan Strahan, 2010.

Stone Wall Truth

Caroline M. Yoachim

Njeri sewed the woman together with hairs from a zebra tail. Her deer-bone needle dipped under the woman’s skin and bobbed back out. The contrast of the white seams against her dark skin was striking.

“The center seam makes a straight line,” Njeri told her apprentice, “but the others flow with the natural curves of the body, just as the Enshai River follows the curve of the landscape.”

Odion leaned in to examine her work, his breath warm on the back of her neck. Foolish boy, wasting his attention on her. Njeri set her needle on the table and stood up to stretch. The job was nearly done—she’d repositioned the woman’s organs, reconstructed her muscles, sewn her body back together. Only the face was still open, facial muscles splayed out in all directions from the woman’s skull like an exotic flower in full bloom.

“Why sew them back together, after the wall?” Odion asked. “Why not let them die?”

Njeri sighed. The boy had steady hands and a sharp mind, but his heart was unforgiving. He had been eager to learn about the cutting, about the delicate art of preparing a patient to hang from the wall. What he questioned was the sewing, the part of the work that had drawn Njeri to this calling. She studied the woman on the table—the last surviving grandchild of Radmalende, who had been king when the country was ruled by kings instead of warlords. The two of them had come of age the same spring, and had taken their adulthood rites together. That had been many years ago, but it was hard for Njeri not to think of her childhood friend by name. “You think I should leave her to die?”

“Her bones were black as obsidian.” He traced the center seam with his finger.

Njeri said nothing. She admired the woman for her strength; she hadn’t cried or protested or made excuses. Few women were put on the wall, but this one had faced it as bravely as any man, braver than some. And her shadowself had been like nothing Njeri had ever seen. Dark, of course, but a tightly controlled blackness, an army of ants marching out from her heart and along her bones. A constantly shifting shadow that never rested too long in any one place.

“She made a play for the throne. Killed six Maiwatu guardsmen in the process. Her attack has opened the way for the Upyatu. I heard a rumor today the capitol is still under siege.” Odion masked the worry in his voice, but Njeri knew he was concerned. He had many friends in the upper echelons of the ruling class—it was how he came to be apprenticed to the highest ranking surgeon at the longest stretch of wall.

“There is always unrest in the capitol.” Njeri didn’t add that this woman had a stronger claim to the citrine throne than most. “Besides, it’s not our place to say what people deserve. General Bahtir pays us to take people apart and put them back together, not to judge them.”

Njeri nudged Odion aside. She settled back into her stool, and he went outside to set some water boiling for tea. He didn’t appreciate being pushed away, didn’t understand why she didn’t want him the way he wanted her. She wanted to tell the boy to find someone his own age, someone who liked boys, but Odion wouldn’t listen. Njeri returned to her work. The woman’s jawbone hung slack below her skull, but her mouth still closed around the clear stone that held her mind while Njeri patched her body together. The woman’s eyes stared up at the thatched straw roof, empty, with nothing but bone surrounding them. Flayed open, everyone looked wide-eyed and afraid. Njeri visualized how her muscles should fit together to recreate her strong chin and high cheekbones.

“Ever wonder what you’d look like on the wall?”

Njeri tensed at the interruption, then relaxed. Odion knew better than to startle her while she sewed, but she hadn’t taken up the needle yet. The boy was certainly persistent in seeking her attention. She considered his question. The work she did was good, healing those who came off the wall, but she had her share of secrets, her share of shame. Life demanded dark things sometimes, she didn’t need the wall to tell her that. What would her balance be? She hoped the good in her would be enough to cancel out the darkness, but she could not say for sure.

“I do,” Odion said, finally. “Wonder, I mean. I’ve never seen anyone clean—not on the smaller wall in Zwibe, and not here.”

“True, that.” Njeri picked up her needle, ending the conversation, and began to reconnect the muscles of the woman’s mouth. She stitched the entire face together without taking a break, though by the end her fingers ached.

When the sewing was finished, Njeri made Odion examine her work. It served two purposes. First, it was good for the boy to learn the ritual of checking and rechecking before the patient was restored to consciousness. Ripping out seams already sewn was a tedious process, but a mistake caught now could be corrected. After the mindstone was removed, however, mistakes meant pain and often death. She had to train the boy to be observant, to notice the slightest error. Second, of course, was that Odion’s eyes and hands were fresh—he was more likely to catch a mistake if she’d made one.

Odion ran his fingertips up the seam of the woman’s left arm, then down the seam of her right. His touch was firm enough to feel both the surface seam and the muscles underneath, allowing him to test the depth of the stitches. He tested the woman’s legs, her chest, and finally her face. He didn’t speak as he worked.

“Flawless,” he said. “You never make mistakes.”

“I’m well-practiced now,” Njeri answered, “I made my mistakes before your time.”

She laid her fingers on the cool flesh at the base of the woman’s neck. Odion might be more likely to catch a mistake, but that did not relieve Njeri of her obligation to check her own work. She pressed her fingers along the center seam, sliding her hand between the woman’s breasts and over the gentle rounding of her belly. Her body was softer than Njeri’s, an alluring contrast to the fierceness she had shown in facing the wall. Where Njeri was lean and angular, this woman was feminine and curved. Njeri lost her place and had to backtrack her pattern along the seams.

“Did I miss something?” Odion asked, frowning. He placed his hand over Njeri’s.

“No,” Njeri said. She moved her hand away and finished tracing the seams.

Confident that she had made no errors, Njeri slipped her thumb and index finger into the woman’s mouth, which was dry and cool, preserved in a state of half life. She grasped the mindstone and pulled it free. The woman’s muscles tensed, then relaxed.

Odion held out a cup of hibiscus mint tea, but Njeri waved it away. Too soon. The woman’s eyes were closed, she wasn’t ready to face the world. She remained motionless, as though the stone was still in her mouth. Even her breath was shallow, as though she begrudged the rising and falling of her chest.

Odion shifted his weight from foot to foot, refusing to be still. Patience was not a virtue he possessed. Perhaps the young were never patient. Njeri had not been, when she was Odion’s age. Noticing her attention, Odion thrust the cup forward again. Njeri took it.

The woman’s eyes opened, clear and dark.

“The light of the wall shines upon us and reveals our shadows,” Njeri said. “Its light is the gift of a race long gone from this earth. You have faced the wall and returned. Speak your name and you may go.”

These were the ritual words that Talib had taught her, when she was in training. There was a falseness to them, for no patient was ever ready to leave so soon after being awakened, and none saw their ordeal as a gift. But the speaking of names was good, for it confirmed that the mind had returned from the stone. A name provided continuity between time before the wall and time afterwards.

“Kanika.” Her voice was breathy and weak. Odion pulled her shoulders up and pushed a wedge of bundled straw behind her back so she could sit. Njeri tipped the cup against Kanika’s lips, slowly pouring tea into her mouth. For every sip she swallowed, two spilled down her neck and over her chest. Njeri gave the empty cup to Odion to refill it.

“My son?” Kanika asked. “Bahtir’s men came for my son.”

General Bahtir put only his most powerful enemies on the wall, for fear that if he killed them they would curse him from the Valley of the Dead. A child, even one with royal ancestry, did not pose enough of a threat to be spared.

Odion returned with more tea. “Drink,” he said, pressing the cup into Kanika’s hands. Njeri reached to take it from her, but she clutched the carved wood in her fingers and drained the cup.

“I remember,” she said, “I feel myself open on the wall. Like looking in from the outside.”

Her hands shook. Had there been any tea left, it would have sloshed over the sides. “So much darkness I never knew was there, and my son is dead by now, because I couldn’t protect him. I failed him. You should have killed me. There’s nothing left of me worth saving.”

Njeri took the cup. She wanted to cradle Kanika in her arms and comfort her, but she had to act as a surgeon, not as a friend. She searched for something she could do to ease Kanika’s pain. The stone that had held Kanika’s mind still sat beside her on the table. Rainbows swirled beneath the clear surface of the smooth stone. It was a relic of the Ancients, made from the same glassy material as the wall.

“Here.” Njeri picked up the mindstone and pressed it into Kanika’s hand. “To remind you that there is light inside you too. The colors in this stone are the echoes of your mind.”

“There are not so many stones that we can give them freely,” Odion said. He scowled at Njeri. “You’re treating her differently because she’s a woman, because you knew her before the wall.”

There was truth to that, but Njeri did not retract her offer. Kanika stared into the stone. “So pretty. Light without shadows. I could swallow it, and drift away from my pain.”

“You would have no way to return, if you changed your mind,” Njeri said.

Kanika smiled, but her eyes were sad. “I speak of escape, but that has never been my way, you know that. Holding life at such a distance would be like not living at all, too big a price to pay.”

Odion reached for the mindstone, to take it from her, but she closed her fingers over it.

“I may not be able to use the stone,” she told him, “but I cannot give it up. It is my light, and I carry much darkness.”

Heat rose from the cracked-mud earth. The stars winked in and out of existence at the edge of Njeri’s senses, their light distorted by miles of wavering sky. Beyond the thatched rooftops of the village, rolling hills of dry grass stretched into the darkness. Kanika leaned against Njeri as they walked across the village to the healer’s hut.

“I wish I could go home,” Kanika said. “I want to pull into myself and sleep. I feel like I could sleep forever.”

“Your punishment is ended. You could leave for home tomorrow, if you wished,” Njeri said, but she hoped that Kanika would stay.

“Ended? The wall was the worst, Njeri, but my punishment will last until I die. Anyone who sees my skin will know that I hung on the wall. Do you think people will forgive me? Embrace me into their lives?”

“Any man worth having would want you still,” Njeri said. “Or any woman.”

Njeri couldn’t read Kanika’s expression. Was there interest there?

“You don’t know what it’s like to be up on the wall. The things I saw . . . ” Kanika brought her hand to her heart, digging her fingers into the fabric of her shirt to press against the seams in her skin.

“Dreams from the mindstone. Many of my patients have spoken of such visions.”

“No. There is only truth on the wall,” Kanika said. “I thought, before I went on the wall, that I wouldn’t have shadows. But I was only adding self-deception and arrogance to the list of my flaws.” Her words came in a steady stream, with only the barest pauses for breath. “No one can understand me, not with these scars. Not because of how I look, but because I know my shadowself.”

Kanika fell silent as they approached a cluster of Bahtir’s guardsmen. Normally they patrolled the periphery of the village in pairs, so it was unusual to see them gathered in the road. Several men shook their shields, zebraskins stretched taut over oval frames. Strands of human teeth hung below and rattled as the shields moved. One man ran his fingers over the tigers-eye clasp that held his threadbare orange cloak closed, and another tapped the butt of his spear against the dirt. The guardsmen were on edge tonight.

One of the men stepped forward to stop the women, then recognized Njeri and saw Kanika’s scars. He signaled to the others, and the entire group turned and headed back towards the guardhouse, a large clay-brick building at the outskirts of the village. When they had gone, Kanika pulled out her mindstone. In the moonlight there were no rainbows, only swirls of a silvery blue. “This is what I thought I was. I was so foolish.”

“That is as much a part of you as the shadows are,” Njeri said.

“We all have darkness,” Kanika said.

Njeri had heard this from many of her patients. It was a source of great comfort for them to think that they were not alone in having shadows. Sometimes Njeri wondered if there was truth in their assertion. There was no way to know; the innocent weren’t sentenced to hang on the wall. “You’ve lived your life well, despite your darkness. Doesn’t that give you some comfort?”

“No, don’t you see? We all have darkness. All of us,” Kanika pulled away. “The wall is pointless. You torture people for no purpose.”

Kanika took a few steps, then stumbled. Njeri caught her. Her skin was moist with sweat—heat and exertion were taking their toll. “The wall is about revealing a person’s darkest truth. If they see their darkness, they can fight it. The knowledge can heal them.”

“It destroys them. It destroys me. And you condemn people to this torture.”

“I am the hands that do the work,” Njeri said. “I don’t decide who faces the wall.”

Kanika tried to pull away a second time, but she was too weak. “You pass judgment every time you open someone onto the wall. Don’t pass the responsibility to someone else. We all judge, and we all mete out our punishments. You saw how all the guardsmen fled at the sight of me.”

“Superstitious fools,” Njeri said.

They walked in silence to Durratse’s door. Njeri knew the old healer well, for he had cared for her for several months after her mother died. She watched carefully for his reaction when he opened his door. He hid his revulsion well, but she could see the slight flare of his nostrils, the falseness in his smile. She wondered how she’d failed to notice it with the other patients she’d brought him. Or perhaps he’d been more forgiving of the men.

“We all judge,” Kanika repeated.

Durratse led Kanika inside. It was late, so he did not invite Njeri in. He simply nodded his head and closed the door.

The roughly hewn wood of the door had shrunk with weather and age, and she could still see them through the gaps in the wood. She wanted to argue with Kanika, to defend herself. Kanika insisted on focusing on the worst of the wall, the worst of her, the cutting. Like Odion, she paid no mind to the important work of sewing. She healed people, just as Durratse did, and her patients needed more healing than anyone.

When Njeri went out to stoke her cooking fire shortly after sunrise, the village was bustling with unfamiliar guardsmen. The new arrivals were Upyatu—a tall people, with broad flat feet. She watched them as she boiled plantains for breakfast. They were more boisterous than Bahtir’s men; they spoke in loud voices punctuated with barking laughter. Their heads were covered with elaborate beaded headdresses, and their shields were round and crimson. It could mean only one thing. The capitol had fallen.

Njeri pounded the boiled plantains into mash. It made little difference to her, the struggle for power. One general was replaced by another, but they all wanted the same work done. She wished for peace not out of support for any current ruler, but because in times of war she had to put more people to the wall. She took her mash back to the hut, where Odion was waiting.

“The new general brought two prisoners for the wall,” he said, speaking quickly. “He wants to hang them together.”

Njeri divided the mash into two bowls and topped each one with slices of green mango. How could Odion be excited about such a thing? The Maiwatu were his people. Besides, to put criminals on the wall was one thing, but to leave one there for the time it took to flay a second was cruel. Dissecting them simultaneously, but slowly, would be no better. “Cruelty. Already I dislike the man.”

Odion stirred his mash. “I thought, with two men, I might be charged with opening one of them.”

“We have but one obsidian blade,” Njeri said, “and the new general will want the services of a surgeon, not an apprentice. I will open them, and you will assist, as we have always done.”

A guardsman came to fetch them before they’d finished their morning meal. He was paler even than Odion, with a reddish tint to his skin, like dry dusty earth. Shorter, too, than most Upyatu warriors, and injured. Njeri could just make out the outlines of a bandage beneath the guardsman’s tightly fitted leather tunic.

“General Yafeu commands your presence,” the guardsman’s voice was nasal, and far higher pitched than Njeri expected. Not a man at all, but a woman with her breasts bound. The warrior laughed at Njeri’s surprise. “Call me Zola, and a woman. Bahtir would not allow women in the fight, he wanted them only for his bed. Yafeu is better. With him I can show my strength in both places.”

Zola grinned at Odion, exposing teeth sharpened into points. Her stare had an animal quality to it, something almost predatory. Judging from his reluctance to meet the woman’s stare, Odion did not find her aggression appealing. Njeri didn’t like it either; Zola had a showiness about her that was distinctly off-putting. Not like Kanika’s understated strength.

Njeri took up her obsidian blade, protected in its leather sheath. “The general will set us to work immediately then?”

“In a land where power shifts like flowing water, there is no later. Everything worth doing is worth doing now,” Zola glanced again at Odion, but again he gave her no response. She shrugged and led them to the guardhouse. A pair of goats were tethered outside, undoubtedly part of her payment for serving the new general.

Before they entered, Zola tapped the door three times with one end of her bow, announcing their arrival to those inside. The guardhouse looked the same as it always had. Sleeping bunks lined the walls, and supplies were stacked in neat piles beneath and around the beds. Only the occupants had changed, the Maiwatu guardsmen replaced by the Upyatu.

General Yafeu sat atop a makeshift throne at the back of the room. He was a young man, barely older than Odion, and he had surrounded himself with female guardsmen. His guards were in full uniform, but the general’s chest was bare except for a piece of vibrant yellow citrine that hung on a leather cord. It was carved into the shape of a lion’s head, reminiscent of the decorations on the citrine throne in the capitol. Two other stones hung from his belt, Bahtir’s tiger-eye and the rose quartz of Bahtir’s predecessor. At the base of Yafeu’s throne were two men, bound and gagged. Njeri was unsurprised to see that Bahtir was one of the prisoners. The other was a man she did not recognize.

Zola stood to left side of the general’s throne and whispered something into his ear.

“So you are the Surgeon of Stonewall,” Yafeu said.

“Yes,” she replied, “and this is my apprentice.” She did not bother with her name, or Odion’s, for Yafeu had the look of a man who cared not about such things.

“And the wall will show these men for the evil creatures they are?” Yafeu asked, gesturing at his prisoners and curling his lips as though the very thought of them repulsed him.

“The wall reveals the innermost secrets of our nature,” Njeri replied, “Those placed on the wall can hide nothing.”

Odion stepped forward. “If they have shadow in them, the wall will expose it.”

Njeri resisted the urge to rebuke her apprentice, but only because she didn’t wish to fight in front of the general. It was not his place to speak in this situation, and it diminished Njeri that he would misbehave like this.

General Yafeu laughed. “I like this apprentice of yours. He shows spirit, and a willingness to please.”

Njeri forced herself to nod and smile, even as Yafeu let his gaze linger on her apprentice. The general’s words held the promise of intimacy that Odion had long sought with Njeri, and the boy was lonely enough that he might be swayed by the man’s attention. She would have to be careful.

A guardsman entered without knocking and knelt, with his head bowed, in the center of the room. He was coated in sweat and dirt, and panted as though he had run the entire way from the capitol.

“Go.” Yafeu waved them away. “I will send you the prisoners when I’m finished here, and you can begin your work.”

The wall was three times as tall as Njeri, and thicker than the length of her arm. It stretched twice the length of the village, winding east into the hills like a crystal snake. The morning sun glinted bright off the stones, if they could really be called stones. The wall was made from blocks as clear as glass, irregularly shaped but fit together so seamlessly that there was no need for mortar. According to Talib, the wall had once enclosed the entire nation of the Ancients. The fragments that remained were laid roughly in a circle, with the capitol in the center.

“The stone wall,” Yafeu said. “It’s more impressive than the pitiful fragment in Zwibe. Though neither looks anything like stone.”

Odion showed no reaction to the mention of his home village. Instead, he answered the unasked question in Yafeu’s comment. “They call it the stone wall because people used to throw stones at the condemned while they hung. You can see the cracks where rocks flew wide of their targets.”

“The practice was discarded centuries ago,” Njeri added, before Yafeu got any ideas. “You can see how damaging it was to the wall.”

Njeri did not mention that it also damaged the people that hung on the wall, making it impossible to sew them back together. General Yafeu shrugged, then waved his hand at the guardsmen. The two prisoners were marched out to stand before the wall. Njeri pressed her palm to the forehead of each man in a silent blessing. It was ironic that Bahtir, who had once feared the ghosts of the valley, now received a blessing that asked those same ghosts to protect him.

“Don’t do this,” Bahtir pleaded. She had heard such pleas before, many times, but never from a man who had ordered others onto the wall. The former general had always seemed so brave, but that had been an illusion of his power. Now that he had no power, he had no courage.

Njeri brushed her fingertips against the icy surface of the two mindstones in her pocket. She wondered if she would be brave, in Bahtir’s place. She liked to think that she would be, knowing that the wall revealed only the truth—nothing more and nothing less. Kanika had been brave. The thought of her called back her assertion that Njeri had been wrong to put people on the wall. Did these men deserve such punishment? It wasn’t her place to decide, it couldn’t be. Her job was to cut and to sew.

Odion paced in the periphery of her vision.

She put a mindstone into the mouth of the older man first, and left him on the ground at the base of the wall. She moved on to Bahtir. Two guardsmen held him in place, one gripping each of his arms. She slid the glassy stone between his lips, and the life flowed out of his body. The guardsmen held him against the wall, and she pinned him there, driving shards of amethyst through the nine sacred points—palms and feet, hips and shoulders, and the final point through the nook at the base of his throat. The amethyst penetrated through his flesh, just until the tips touched the wall, and yet the attraction between the lavender shards and the clear stone held Bahtir firmly. His head drooped as though he bowed it in remorse, but once he was opened, smaller amethyst pins would hold the muscles of his face, and his head would no longer hang.

Odion handed her the obsidian blade. Like the wall itself, the blade came from an older time. Mbenu, who made tools for the village, could knap a blade from obsidian, but his tools did not have the power of the Ancients in them. This blade slipped between the cells, and Njeri had learned through many years of training to trace the exact paths that would peel a man open without spilling a drop of blood.

Her first cut sliced only skin, beginning at the top of Bahtir’s forehead and moving down the midline, over his nose, and to his lips. There she paused and traced the outline of his mouth with the blade before picking up the midline once more. Chin neck, chest, groin, all without a drop of blood. The only loss was a strand of his hair that grew exactly on the midline. Sliced away by her blade, it fell to the base of the wall.

She sliced down the inner edge of each leg to the ankle, then drew the blade around to the front of each foot and into a gentle curve to the tip of the middle toe, completing the first vertical sequence. After that came a series of horizontal lines, branching out from the center. One cut along each arm, branching into five lines at the fingers. Evenly spaced cuts along the torso and legs so the skin would lie flat against the wall. Last, a series of lines radiating out from the center of his face, so that it would open like an exploding sun.

Light streamed through his skin. Any darkness on his surface was artificial, a trick of the eyes and not an indication of his being. On the wall, skin of every color let the same amount of light pass through. Njeri passed her blade to Odion and wiped the sweat from her face.

When she looked up, she saw Kanika, standing on the hillside, one face among many watchers. She stood near the top of the hill with the people of Stonewall, all of them staying as far from the wall as possible. The villagers had seen this many times, and attended now only because the general demanded it. A foolish demand, Njeri realized, for even if no one watched, the shame of these men would be forever sewn onto the surface of their skin. No army would follow a sewn general.

Everyone on the hill judged these men. All except Kanika. She was there to judge Njeri, and simply by having begun the flaying, she had failed. Standing at her side, Odion held the obsidian blade lightly, as though it was made of air from the night sky. When she took it from him the weight of it pulled her down towards the earth. She had to ease the burden on her heart; she had to prove that Bahtir deserved this punishment. Instead of moving on to the next man, Njeri stayed with the former general, peeling away the muscles to get down to his bones.

She placed the tip of the blade on Bahtir’s breastbone, and leaned into it with all her weight. His breastbone split in two. She pried his ribcage open and revealed his shadows. They crawled like slugs from the core of his being, leaving trails of black slime behind them. This was her vindication, her proof that the punishment was just—but it was a hollow victory.

Njeri could feel the eyes of every man, woman, and child on the hillside, boring into the back of her neck. They looked at Bahtir, not at her, but she felt as though she was the one whose heart was exposed. She wanted to throw down her blade, or smash it to slivers against the wall.

The sunlight that passed through the wall cast no shadows. Even the stones that were flawed with a spiderweb pattern of cracks—scars from poorly aimed rocks of generations past—even those stones contained no darkness. Those imperfections on the wall simply broke the light into rainbows. It was a mockery of mankind. A mockery of Bahtir, whose shadowed heart was exposed for all to see.

Judging from the sun, it was mid-afternoon now, and a plate of untouched food sat behind her. Odion must have offered it, but she did not remember waving it off. The boy stepped forward and sprinkled water on Bahtir’s body to keep the tissue from drying out. When he finished, he came to her and put his hand on her shoulder. He could see that she was suffering, and Njeri knew he would gladly take over her task.

The second man lay unconscious in the dirt, his mind still locked away in stone. He was older, his hair a pale gray, almost white in the bright glare of the wall. Njeri could see the outline of his bones; he was underfed, or ill, or both. Njeri didn’t know the man’s name.

Two guardsmen held his limp body against the wall and Njeri pinned him into place. She raised her blade, holding it at the man’s head, at the starting point for the series of incisions she had made a hundred times before. It didn’t matter that the man was old. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know who he was or what he had done. She had opened Kanika, she could do this.

“Do you tire?” Odion whispered when the pause grew too long. “I can bear this burden for you.”

Njeri could not pass the blade to her apprentice, not at this moment, not in this way. Not even if the boy was ready, which Njeri doubted. This was a decision she had to make, to cut or not to cut. If she couldn’t open this man, it meant that Kanika had been right—that in thinking it was not her place to pass judgment, she had been judging just the same. The blade quivered in her hand, and a droplet of blood appeared on the man’s forehead.

“Give me the blade,” Odion said, holding out his hand.

“No,” Njeri said. This was her duty, and had been for many years. She could not escape from this, not now, not ever. To fail in her duty would be an act against General Yafeu. She could feel his gaze boring into her from the hillside, waiting, judging, finding her wanting.

“What is the delay?” General Yafeu called out. “Your task is not yet finished, woman.”

“Who is this man?” Njeri asked. “What is his crime?”

“That is no business of yours.” Yafeu’s voice held amusement. He found this entertaining. Like a circus act, or a play. This was the man who Njeri had trusted to pass judgment. If she had believed herself unfit to decide the fate of others, surely this man was worse. Which made Njeri worse for having accepted his orders.

Njeri couldn’t do it. She couldn’t open this man that she didn’t even know. She tore an amethyst pin out of his hand and reached for the one in his shoulder. Guardsmen rushed in to restrain her, and she put up no fight. The obsidian blade was taken from her.

“Open him,” Yafeu said, speaking to Odion.

“No!” Njeri cried. “Please, let him go.”

“At last, a statement with conviction.” Yafeu smiled. “Will you take his place, then? Do you believe so strongly in this man that you would face the wall instead of him?”

Njeri knew her motives weren’t pure. She wanted to save the man, yes, but not for his sake. She wanted to save him to make up for all the times she’d cut people open blindly. She wanted to make amends for opening Kanika without even asking of her crime. But surely it was better to do the right thing for the wrong reason than to not do it at all.

Odion stood before her. His eyes brimmed with tears. He had wanted to prove himself today, but not this way. Even with all his impatience and ambition, he still loved her. There was hope for him yet.

“Yes,” Njeri said. “I will take the man’s place.”

“Pin her up,” the general ordered. “Boy, you can gut them both.”

Njeri managed two steps toward Yafeu before the guardsmen closed in and restrained her. “It could kill him. Especially at the hands of the inexperienced.”

“You had your chance to do it, and if the boy kills him, the ghost will curse him, not me,” Yafeu said. “I can’t let an enemy go free.”

Njeri turned to Odion. “Open me first. I can stand to lose a few drops of blood, and you will do better with the old man if your hands are practiced with the blade.”

“I don’t have a mindstone,” he said. His whole body shook, and he reeked with the sweat of fear. “We only brought two mindstones.”

The general would not be pleased. She wondered if he would order her opened without the stone. That way would surely mean death.

“Take this one.” It was Kanika, her voice soft and close. In her hand was the mindstone that had held her mind, the one Njeri had given her to keep. The guardsmen moved to encircle her, but backed away at the sight of her scars. She was a ghost, a curse, a plague. Njeri couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed it before, the punishment that continued after the wall.

“I will be there when you wake. We can face the world together,” Kanika said. She brushed her hand against Njeri’s cheek.

“Touching,” General Yafeu said, “but it’s time for you to go back to the hill. Unless you’d like another turn on the wall? I don’t think anyone has ever faced it twice.”

Kanika kissed Njeri’s forehead, exactly on the spot that Odion would begin the first incision. She lingered a moment more, then walked past General Yafeau and up to the top of the hill. Odion stepped forward. It hurt the boy to see Njeri with someone else, sharing the intimacy that he himself longed for.

“You and I will share a different bond, Odion,” she told him.

He nodded, and his jaw clenched as he prepared for what he must do. For a moment she feared he would refuse this duty, as she had done. It would anger Yafeu if he had to take his second prisoner to a lesser fragment of wall, and it would mean death for her and Odion—they had no claim to the citrine throne, their blood wasn’t powerful enough for Yafeu to fear their ghosts. She held her mouth open and waited.

Odion pressed the mindstone between her lips, and she closed her eyes and swallowed herself.

The stone became her body. She sensed its boundaries, smooth and round. Her mind swirled restlessly inside. It felt like something was missing. She was indigo-blue. Perhaps green was missing? She searched and found flickering flecks of green, like emerald rain in her river of blue. She found red and yellow and purple. All her colors were here, but something was fundamentally wrong with this existence.

She pressed against the boundaries of her stone, and discovered thousands of tiny windows. Speckles of color were stuck to the edges of each opening. She tasted one of the windows, and the flavor of otherness repulsed her. She withdrew to the center of her stone, checking her threads of red and yellow, her flecks of green, her river of blue. She was intact.

Her churning nature sent her out to her boundaries once more, and she tasted each of the windows in turn. She began to develop favorite spots, flavors she returned to again and again. Her extremities oozed out through those windows, the ones that tasted best, and her strands of rainbow-self brought images from beyond the stone.

The first was Odion. The boy held the obsidian blade in his right hand, and a bundle of muscle tissue in his left. The tissue belonged to Njeri. The name came without the sense of self that she knew ought to accompany it. Njeri was a painting of a memory, hanging on the wall. Njeri was the body, and she was the stone, and yet they were the same.

Odion flayed Njeri open. Tiny beads of blood leaked out from misplaced seams and poorly detached muscles. The tip of the blade tore into her and isolated every thread of her being. Odion cut Njeri’s body apart, and every slice he made burned her in the space between her colors.

Odion plunged the blade into Njeri’s breastbone and pried her ribcage open. She burned like a white-hot flame, a blaze too strong for her river of blue to extinguish. Ragged black canyons stretched out from Njeri’s heart like festering wounds. Her colors recoiled from the darkness. Odion misted the body with water. The searing fire of pain died to glowing embers. He was finished, and he disappeared from her senses.

She stretched her colors towards the darkness. That was what was missing inside the stone. Her colors dimmed with the setting sun, but even as her red and yellow shifted into lavender and silver, there was no shadow. She reached into the dark canyons and tried to latch onto them, to pull the blackness out. Instead, the shadow pulled her inward, down through the center of Njeri’s heart, and into the wall itself.

Bahtir was beside her. The cuts she had inflicted on his flesh drew her further out of herself, closer to her patient and deeper into the wall. Echoes of Bahtir’s shadowself seeped out from his body and writhed in the cracks between the giant stones of the wall. She felt his flesh, still hanging, but he stayed inside his mindstone.

Someone new appeared. She recognized the woman by her shadow. Kanika. Tendrils of red and gold and green seeped out from Kanika’s mindstone, but they wandered aimlessly, without direction or purpose. Kanika had stretched out from her stone and seen visions on the wall, just as she had claimed, but the wall did not guide Kanika backwards. The wall did not pull everyone as it pulled her. She wanted to stay with Kanika, but the wall carried her away.

She moved backwards through time. She felt every cut of every man and every woman she’d ever flayed open, and still the torture did not end. Talib’s final patients were next, the ones that she had watched to learn his trade. Then people she didn’t know, stretching back before she was born, before Talib was born. The knowledge that passed from teacher to student across the generations bound them all together as surely as if they’d shared blood. She was tied to the surgeons, and that bound her to their patients.

An infant appeared on the wall. Black threads grew out from his heart like mold, and covered the insides of his ribs. His blackness barely moved, it was a constant, steady thing. She did not know if it was greed or fear or rage. Perhaps it was something she had no name for, because a shadow grew within her people before they had the words to name it. She felt the infant’s agony twice over—the searing heat of the blade that cut him open, and the anguish in her heart at learning that even the innocent held shadows.

Soon after that, she came to the earliest days of her people, when watchers threw stones at those who hung helpless on the wall. Each blow crushed her colors, smashing them together into a muddy brown.

Then, nothing.

She had seen all that the wall had to show her. She waited for Odion to return, to take her down. She sensed that in her distant present, Odion was taking the men down from the wall. The men, but not Njeri. He could not bear to heal her, after having seen her darkness.

The wall rebuilt itself.

Tiny fragments merged together to form a perfect ring of glassy stone. It happened so fast that she had no way to know what had destroyed the wall. All she knew was that it was whole now. The vastness of it made her feel small, a tiny raindrop of color in an ocean of stone and light.

Two Ancients touched the wall, and she felt them as though they touched her skin. It was the end of their time, and the knowledge of that fact filled them with sadness. She waited for the surgeon, the last true surgeon, but then she realized that each of the Ancients that touched the wall also held an obsidian blade. Moving in perfect synchrony, each Ancient sliced open the other. They controlled the blades in a way she did not understand, and even after they were opened, they continued to cut each other. The surgeon and the patient, the judger and the judged—in the time of the Ancients, both went together to the wall.

Like them, she knew both ends of the obsidian blade.

Odion appeared before her.

Not yet, she pleaded. They were almost done. She wanted to see the Ancients, to see if they had blackness. Odion began to take her down, removing the amethyst pins one by one as guardsmen held her in place. Her colors pulled back into her heart and towards her mindstone. With just one hand still pinned against the wall, she could not see the Ancients, but she could feel them, and what they did here was not punishment, it was not judgment. For them, the wall was love. The Ancients did not hide their shadows—not from each other and not from the wall. And in the moment of their union, when they lay open to each other, they drew knowledge from the wall. They absorbed the history of their people, the wisdom of countless generations.

She caught fleeting images of cities a thousand times larger than the capitol, and weapons that could scar the earth itself, and ships of glassy stone that sailed not on water but in space. Her river of blue wept in undulating strands of turquoise at the beauty and the horror of their past.

Njeri’s hand came free of the wall, and the connection was broken.

She watched from the mindstone as two guardsmen placed Njeri on a stretcher. They moved the body to a table, and Odion spent hours stitching it together, stopping once to sleep. The boy made two mistakes, and had to tear out the seams and start again. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter how long it took, or even if he never woke Njeri at all. She had been wrong about the wall, wrong about the blackness. They had taken something beautiful, and sullied it with their imperfections.

Odion checked every seam seven times, then reached into Njeri’s mouth. His touch shattered the boundaries of the stone. Her colors whirled outward, searching for structure. She dissipated into the space around her, traveling down her tendrils into Njeri’s body—her body—the form she had lived in all her life. The shape of the body was wrong, like a shell that was too big.

Her eyes wouldn’t open. Her body was desiccated and weak, and she couldn’t stretch tendrils into the world beyond. She longed for her colors, for the fullness of history within the wall, for the knowledge of the ancients. After such vivid truth, the drab reality of life seemed false.

Strong hands pressed against her back, and her body bent at the waist. She felt so brittle she feared the action would snap her in two. Something warm pressed against her lips. The world was out there, acting on her, shaping her body, inflicting this warmth. The heat spread down from her lips, over her skin and down her throat. It smelled of mint. Tea. Odion was giving her tea.

She wished she could open her eyes.

“The light of the wall shines upon us and reveals our shadows,” Odion said. “Its light is a gift, from a race long gone from this earth. You have faced the wall and returned. Speak your name . . . ”

Njeri heard the words. She heard the boy falter, and waited for the rest. And you may go, she thought, prompting him to finish. But she found comfort in the pause. Comfort in knowing that Odion still did not want to let her go.

“Speak your name, and you may go,” Odion whispered.

Njeri opened her mouth, but no words came.

“Oh, Njeri,” Odion said, breaking with tradition and speaking her name before she had spoken it herself. “I would have sewed you sooner but the general forbade it. He insisted I start with Bahtir. But I didn’t check him. Not a single seam. I was too impatient to get to you. Then, after Bahtir died, a soldier stood guard while I sewed the second man, watching work she didn’t even understand to make sure I didn’t unleash another vengeful ghost . . . Oh, please don’t die. Please come back.”

She heard the desperation in his voice, but how could she go back to the world, after what she had done? She had ruined so many lives, on a wall that wasn’t meant to be used that way at all. Time passed, and more tea flowed over her. She passed through several cycles, the warmth of the tea followed each time by Odion’s words. She could not speak.

Kanika’s voice came from across the room. “You can’t hide forever, Njeri. Speak your name and come back to us.”

She was right. Njeri couldn’t hide. She had seen what no one else knew, the true nature of the wall. If she did not wake, no one would know what she had discovered, and the wrong would continue. The Ancients did not hide their shadows, they learned from both their darkness and their light.

Njeri opened her eyes and spoke her name.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 2010.

Sleeping Dogs

Joe Haldeman

The cab took my eyeprint and the door swung open. I was glad to get out. No driver to care how rough the ride was, on a road that wouldn’t even be called a road on Earth. The place had gone downhill in the thirty years I’d been away.

Low gravity and low oxygen. My heart was going too fast. I stood for a moment, concentrating, and brought it down to a hundred, then ninety. The air had more sulfur sting than I remembered. It seemed a lot warmer than I remembered that summer, too, but then if I could remember it all I wouldn’t have to be here. My missing finger throbbed.

Six identical buildings on the block, half-cylinders of stained pale green plastic. I walked up the dirt path to number 3: Offworld Affairs and Confederación Liaison. I almost ran into the door when it didn’t open. Pushed and pulled and it reluctantly let me inside.

It was a little cooler and less sulfurous. I went to the second door on the right, Travel Documents and Permissions, and went in.

“You don’t knock on Earth?” A cadaverous tall man, skin too white and hair too black.

“Actually, no,” I said, “not public buildings. But I apologize for my ignorance.”

He looked at a monitor built into his desk. “You would be Flann Spivey, from Japan on Earth. You don’t look Japanese.”

“I’m Irish,” I said. “I work for a Japanese company, Ichiban Imaging.”

He touched a word on the screen. “Means number one. Best, or first?”

“Both, I think.”

“Papers.” I laid out two passports and a folder of travel documents. He spent several minutes inspecting them carefully. Then he slipped them into a primitive scanning machine, which flipped through them one by one, page by page.

He finally handed them back. “When you were here twenty-nine Earth years ago, there were only eight countries on Seca, representing two competing powers. Now there are 79 countries, two of them offplanet, in a political situation that’s . . . impossible to describe simply. Most of the other 78 countries are more comfortable than Spaceport. Nicer.”

“So I was told. I’m not here for comfort, though.” There weren’t many planets where they put their spaceports in nice places.

He nodded slowly as he selected two forms from a drawer. “So what does a ‘thanatopic counselor’ do?”

“I prepare people for dying.” For living completely, actually, before they leave.

“Curious.” He smiled. “It pays well?”

“Adequately.”

He handed me the forms. “I’ve never seen a poor person come through that door. Take these down the hall to Immunization.”

“I’ve had all the shots.”

“All that the Confederación requires. Seca has a couple of special tests for returning veterans. Of the Consolidation War.”

“Of course. The nanobiota. But I was tested before they let me return to Earth.”

He shrugged. “Rules. What do you tell them?”

“Tell?”

“The people who are going to die. We just sort of let it catch up with us. Avoid it as long as possible, but . . . ”

“That’s a way.” I took the forms. “Not the only way.”

I had the door partly open when he cleared his throat. “Dr. Spivey? If you don’t have any plans, I would be pleased to have midmeal with you.”

Interesting. “Sure. I don’t know how long this will take . . . ”

“Ten minims, fifteen. I’ll call us a floater, so we don’t have to endure the road.”

The blood and saliva samples took less time than filling out the forms. When I went back outside, the floater was humming down and Braz Nitian was watching it land from the walkway.

It was a fast two-minute hop to the center of town, the last thirty seconds disconcerting free fall. The place he’d chosen was Kaffee Rembrandt, a rough-hewn place with a low ceiling and guttering oil lamps in pursuit of a 16th-century ambience, somewhat diluted by the fact that the dozens of Rembrandt reproductions glowed with apparently sourceless illumination.

A busty waitress in period flounce showed us to a small table, dwarfed by a large self-portrait of the artist posed as “Prodigal Son with a Whore.”

I’d never seen an actual flagon, a metal container with a hinged top. It appeared to hold enough wine to support a meal and some conversation.

I ordered a plate of braised vegetables, following conservative dietary advice—the odd proteins in Seca’s animals and fish might lay me low with a xeno-allergy. Among the things I didn’t remember about my previous time here was whether our rations had included any native flesh or fish. But even if I’d safely eaten them thirty years ago, the Hartford doctor said, I could have a protein allergy now, since an older digestive system might not completely break down those alien proteins into safe amino acids.

Braz had gone to college on Earth, UCLA, an expensive proposition that obligated him to work for the government for ten years (which would be fourteen Earth years). He had degrees in mathematics and macroeconomics, neither of which he used in his office job. He taught three nights a week and wrote papers that nine or ten people read and disagreed with.

“So how did you become a thanatopic counselor? Something you always wanted to be when you grew up?”

“Yeah, after cowboy and pirate.”

He smiled. “I never saw a cowboy on Earth.”

“Pirates tracked them down and made them walk the plank. Actually, I was an accountant when I joined the military, and then started out in pre-med after I was discharged, but switched over to psychology and moved into studying veterans.”

“Natural enough. Know thyself.”

“Literally.” Find thyself, I thought. “You get a lot of us coming through?”

“Well, not so many, not from Earth or other foreign planets. Being a veteran doesn’t correlate well with wealth.”

“That’s for sure.” And a trip from Earth to Seca and back costs as much as a big house.

“I imagine that treating veterans doesn’t generate a lot of money, either.” Eyebrows lifting.

“A life of crime does.” I smiled and he laughed politely. “But most of the veterans I do see are well off. Almost nobody with a normal life span needs my services. They’re mostly for people who’ve lived some centuries, and you couldn’t do that without wealth.”

“They get tired of life?”

“Not the way you or I could become tired of a game, or a relationship. It’s something deeper than running out of novelty. People with that little imagination don’t need me. They can stop existing for the price of a bullet or a rope—or a painless prescription, where I come from.”

“Not legal here,” he said neutrally.

“I know. I’m not enthusiastic about it, myself.”

“You’d have more customers?”

I shrugged. “You never know.” The waitress brought us our first plates, grilled fungi on a stick for me. Braz had a bowl of small animals with tails, deep-fried. Finger food; you hold them by the tail and dip them into a pungent yellow sauce.

It was much better than I’d expected; the fungi were threaded onto a stick of some aromatic wood like laurel; she brought a small glass of a lavender-colored drink, tasting like dry sherry, to go with them.

“So it’s not about getting bored?” he asked. “That’s how you normally see it. In books, on the cube . . . ”

“Maybe the reality isn’t dramatic enough. Or too complicated to tell as a simple drama.

“You live a few hundred years, at least on Earth, you slowly leave your native culture behind. You’re an immortal—culturally true if not literally—and your non-immortal friends and family and business associates die off. The longer you live, the deeper you go into the immortal community.”

“There must be some nonconformists.”

“‘Mavericks,’ the cowboys used to say.”

“Before the pirates did them in.”

“Right. There aren’t many mavericks past their first century of life extension. The people you grew up with are either fellow immortals or dead. Together, the survivors form a society that’s unusually cohesive. So when someone decides to leave, decides to stop living, the arrangements are complex and may involve hundreds of people.

“That’s where I come in, the practical part of my job: I’m a kind of overall estate manager. They all have significant wealth; few have any living relatives closer than great-great-grandchildren.”

“You help them split up their fortunes?”

“It’s more interesting than that. The custom for centuries has been to put together a legacy, so called, that is a complex and personal aesthetic expression. To simply die, and let the lawyers sort it out, would trivialize your life as well as your death. It’s my job to make sure that the legacy is a meaningful and permanent extension of the person’s life.

“Sometimes a physical monument is involved; more often a financial one, through endowments and sponsorships. Which is what brings me here.”

Our main courses came; Braz had a kind of eel, bright green with black antennae, apparently raw, but my braised vegetables were reassuringly familiar.

“So one of your clients is financing something here on Seca?”

“Financing me, actually. It’s partly a gift; we get along well. But it’s part of a pattern of similar bequests to non-immortals, to give us back lost memories.”

“How lost?”

“It was a military program, to counteract the stress of combat. They called the drug aqualethe. Have you heard of it?”

He shook his head. “Water of what?”

“It’s a linguistic mangling, or mingling. Latin and Greek. Lethe was a river in Hell; a spirit drank from it to forget his old life, so he could be reincarnated.

“A pretty accurate name. It basically disconnects your long-term memory as a way of diverting combat stress, so-called post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“It worked?”

“Too well. I spent eight months here as a soldier, when I was in my early twenties. I don’t remember anything specific between the voyage here and the voyage back.”

“It was a horrible war. Short but harsh. Maybe you don’t want the memory back. ‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ we say here.”

“We say that, too. But for me . . . well, you could say it’s a professional handicap. Though actually it goes deeper.

“Part of what I do with my clients is a mix of meditation and dialogue. I try to help them form a coherent tapestry of their lives, the good and the bad, as a basic grounding for their legacy. The fact that I could never do that for myself hinders me as a counselor. Especially when the client, like this one, had his own combat experiences to deal with.”

“He’s, um, dead now?”

“Oh, no. Like many of them, he’s in no particular hurry. He just wants to be ready.”

“How old is he?”

“Three hundred and ninety Earth years. Aiming for four centuries, he thinks.”

Braz sawed away at his eel and looked thoughtful. “I can’t imagine. I mean, I sort of understand when a normal man gets so old he gives up. Their hold on life becomes weak, and they let go. But your man is presumably fit and sane.”

“More than I, I think.”

“So why four hundred years rather than five? Or three? Why not try for a thousand? That’s what I would do, if I were that rich.”

“So would I. At least that’s how I feel now. My patron says he felt that way when he was mortal. But he can’t really articulate what happened to slowly change his attitude.

“He says it would be like trying to explain married love to a babe just learning to talk. The babe thinks it knows what love is, and can apply the word to its own circumstances. But it doesn’t have the vocabulary or life experience to approach the larger meaning.”

“An odd comparison, marriage,” he said, delicately separating the black antennae from the head. “You can become unmarried. But not undead.”

“The babe wouldn’t know about divorce. Maybe there is a level of analogy there.”

“We don’t know what death is?”

“Perhaps not as well as they.”

I liked Braz and needed to hire a guide; he had some leave coming and could use the side income. His Spanish was good, and that was rare on Secas; they spoke a kind of patchwork of Portuguese and English. If I’d studied it thirty years before, I’d retained none.

The therapy to counteract aqualethe was a mixture of brain chemistry and environment. Simply put, the long-term memories were not destroyed by aqualethe, but the connection to them had been weakened. There was a regimen of twenty pills I had to take twice daily, and I had to take them in surroundings that would jog my memory.

That meant going back to some ugly territory.

There were no direct flights to Serraro, the mountainous desert where my platoon had been sent to deal with a situation now buried in secrecy, perhaps shame. We could get within a hundred kilometers of it, an oasis town called Console Verde. I made arrangements to rent a general-purpose vehicle there, a jépe.

After Braz and I made those arrangements, I got a note from some Chief of Internal Security saying that my activities were of questionable legality, and I should report to his office at 0900 tomorrow to defend my actions. We were in the airport, fortunately, when I got the message, and we jumped on a flight that was leaving in twenty minutes, paying cash. Impossible on Earth.

I told Braz I would buy us a couple of changes of clothing and such at the Oasis, and we got on the jet with nothing but our papers, my medications, and the clothes on our backs—and my purse, providentially stuffed with the paper notes they use instead of plastic. (I’d learned that the exchange rate was much better on Earth, and was carrying half a year’s salary in those notes.)

The flight wasn’t even suborbital, and took four hours to go about a tenth of the planet’s circumference. We slept most of the way; it didn’t take me twenty minutes to tell him everything I had been able to find out about that two-thirds year that was taken from me.

Serraro is not exactly a bastion of freedom of information under the best of circumstances, and that was a period in their history that many would just as soon forget.

It was not a poor country. The desert was rich in the rare earths that interstellar jumps required. There had been lots of small mines around the countryside (no farms) and only one city of any size. That was Novo B, short for Novo Brasil, and it was still not the safest spot in the Confederación. Not on our itinerary.

My platoon had begun its work in Console Verde as part of a force of one thousand. When we returned to that oasis, there were barely six hundred of us left. But the country had been “unified.” Where there had been 78 mines there now was one, Preciosa, and no one wanted to talk about how that happened.

The official history says that the consolidation of those 78 mines was a model of self-determinism, the independent miners banding together for strength and bargaining power. There was some resistance, even some outlaw guerilla action. But the authorities—I among them, evidently—got things under control in less than a year.

Travel and residence records had all been destroyed by a powerful explosion blamed on the guerillas, but in the next census, Serarro had lost thirty-five percent of its population. Perhaps they walked away.

We stood out as foreigners in our business suits; most men who were not in uniform wore a plain loose white robe. I went immediately into a shop next to the airport and bought two of them, and two sidearms. Braz hadn’t fired a pistol in years, but he had to agree he would look conspicuous here without one.

We stood out anyway, pale and tall. The men here were all sunburned and most wore long braided black hair. Our presence couldn’t be kept secret; I wondered how long it would be before that Chief of Internal Security caught up with me. I was hoping it was just routine harassment, and they wouldn’t follow us here.

There was only one room at the small inn, but Braz didn’t mind sharing. In fact, he suggested we pass the time with sex, which caught me off guard. I told him men don’t routinely do that on Earth, at least not the place and time I came from. He accepted that with a nod.

I asked the innkeeper whether the town had a library, and he said no, but I could try the schoolhouse on the other side of town. Braz was napping, so I left a note and took off on my own, confident in my ability to turn right and go to the end of the road.

Although I’d been many places on Earth, the only time I’d been in space was that eight-month tour here. So I kept my eyes open for “alien” details.

Seca had a Drake index of 0.95, which by rule of thumb meant that only five percent of it was more harsh than the worst the Earth had to offer. The equatorial desert, I supposed. We were in what would have been a temperate latitude on Earth, and I was sweating freely in the dry heat.

The people here were only five generations away from Earth, but some genetic drift was apparent. No more profound than you would find on some islands and other isolated communities on Earth. But I didn’t see a single blonde or red-head in the short, solidly built population here.

The men wore scowls as well as guns. The women, brighter colors and a neutral distant expression.

Some of the men, mostly younger, wore a dagger as well as a sidearm. I wondered whether there was some kind of code duello that I would have to watch out for. Probably not wearing a dagger would protect you from that.

Aside from a pawn shop, with three balls, and a tavern with bright signs announcing berbesa and bino, most of the shops were not identified. I supposed that in a small isolated town, everybody knew where everything was.

Two men stopped together, blocking the sidewalk. One of them touched his pistol and said something incomprehensible, loudly.

“From Earth,” I said, in unexcited Confederación Spanish. Soy de la Tierra.” They looked at each other and went by me. I tried to ignore the crawling feeling in the middle of my back.

I reflected on my lack of soldierly instincts. Should I have touched my gun as well? Probably not. If they’d started shooting, what should I do? Hurl my 60-year-old body to the ground, roll over with the pistol in my hand, and aim for the chest?

“Two in the chest, then one in the head,” I remembered from crime drama. But I didn’t remember anything that basic from having been a soldier. My training on Earth had mainly been calisthenics and harassment. Endless hours of parade-ground drill. Weapons training would come later, they said. The only thing “later” meant to me was months later, slowly regaining my identity on the trip back to Earth.

By the time I’d gotten off the ship, I seemed to have all my memories back through basic training, and the lift ride up to the troop carrier. We had 1.5-gee acceleration to the Oort portal, but somewhere along there I lost my memory, and didn’t get it back till the return trip. Then they dropped me on Earth—me and the other survivors—with a big check and a leather case full of medals. Plus a smaller check, every month, for my lost finger.

I knew I was approaching the school by the small tide of children running in my direction, about fifty of them, ranging from seven or eight to about twelve, in Earth years.

The school house was small, three or four rooms. A grey-bearded man, unarmed, stepped out and I hailed him. We established that we had English in common and I asked whether the school had a library. He said yes, and it would be open for two hours yet. “Mostly children’s books, of course. What are you interested in?”

“History,” I said. “Recent. The Consolidation War.”

“Ah. Follow me.” He led me through a dusty playground, to the rear of the school. “You were a Confederación soldier?’

“I guess that’s obvious.”

He paused with his hand on the doorknob. “You know to be careful?” I said I did. “Don’t go out at night alone. Your size is like a beacon.” He opened the door and said, “Suela? A traveler is looking for a history book.”

The room was high-ceilinged and cool, with thick stone walls and plenty of light from the uniform glow of the ceiling. An elderly woman with white hair taking paper books from a cart and re-shelving them.

“Pardon my poor English,” she said, with an accent better than mine. “But what do you want in a paper book that you can’t as easily download?”

“I was curious to see what children are taught about the Consolidation War.”

“The same truth as everyone,” she said with a wry expression, and stepped over to another shelf. “Here . . . ” she read titles, “this is the only one in English. I can’t let you take it away, but you’re welcome to read it here.”

I thanked her and took the book to an adult-sized table and chair at the other end of the room. Most of the study area was scaled down. A girl of seven or eight stared at me.

I didn’t know, really, what I expected to find in the book. It had four pages on the Consolidation and Preciosa, and in broad outline there was not much surprising. A coalition of mines decided that the Confederación wasn’t paying enough for dysprosium, and they got most of the others to go along with the scheme of hiding the stuff and holding out for a fair price—what the book called profiteering and restraint of trade. Preciosa was the biggest mine, and they made a separate deal with the Confederación, guaranteeing a low price, freezing all their competitors out. Which led to war.

Seca—actually Preciosa—asked for support from the Confederación, and the war became interstellar.

The book said that most of the war took place far from population centers, in the bleak high desert where the mines were. Here.

It struck me that I hadn’t noticed many old buildings, older than about thirty years. I remembered a quote from a twentieth-century American war: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

The elderly librarian sat down across from me. She had a soft voice. “You were here as a soldier. But you don’t remember anything about it.”

“That’s true. That’s exactly it.”

“There are those of us who do remember.”

I pushed the book a couple of inches toward her. “Is any of this true?”

She turned the book around and scanned the pages it was open to, and shook her head with a grim smile. “Even children know better. What do you think the Confederacíón is?”

I thought for a moment. “At one level, it’s a loose federation of 48 or 49 planets with a charter protecting the rights of humans and non-humans, and with trade rules that encourage fairness and transparency. At another level, it’s the Hartford Corporation, the wealthiest enterprise in human history. Which can do anything it wants, presumably.”

“And on a personal level? What is it to you?”

“It’s an organization that gave me a job when jobs were scarce. Security specialist. Although I wasn’t a ‘specialist’ in any sense of the word. A generalist, so called.”

“A mercenary.”

“Not so called. Nothing immoral or illegal.”

“But they took your memory of it away. So it could have been either, or both.”

“Could have been,” I admitted. “I’m going to find out. Do you know about the therapy that counteracts aqualethe?”

“No . . . it gives you your memories back?”

“So they say. I’m going to drive down into Serarro tomorrow, and see what happens. You take the pills in the place you want to remember.”

“Do me a favor,” she said, sliding the book back, “and yourself, perhaps. Take the pills here, too.”

“I will. We had a headquarters here. I must have at least passed through.”

“Look for me in the crowd, welcoming you. You were all so exotic and handsome. I was a girl, just ten.”

Ten here would be fourteen on Earth. This old lady was younger than me. No juve treatments. “I don’t think the memories will be that detailed. I’ll look for you, though.”

She patted my hand and smiled. “You do that.”

Braz was still sleeping when I got back to the inn. Six time zones to adjust to; might as well let him sleep. My body was still on meaningless starship time, but I’ve never had much trouble adjusting. My counseling job is a constant whirl of time zones.

I quietly slipped into the other bunk and put some Handel in my earbuds to drown out his snoring.

The inn didn’t have any vegetables for breakfast, so I had a couple of eggs that I hoped had come from a bird, and a large dry flavorless cracker. Our jepé arrived at 8:30 and I went out to pay the substantial deposit and inspect it. Guaranteed bulletproof except for the windows, nice to know.

I took the first leg of driving, since I’d be taking the memory drug later, and the label had the sensible advice Do Not Operate Machinery While Hallucinating. Words to live by.

The city, such as it was, didn’t dwindle off into suburbs. It’s an oasis, and where the green stopped, the houses stopped.

I drove very cautiously at first. My car in LA is restricted to autopilot, and it had been several years since I was last behind a steering wheel. A little exhilarating.

After about thirty kilometers, the road suddenly got very rough. Braz suggested that we’d left the state of Console Verde and had entered Pretorocha, whose tax base wouldn’t pay for a shovel. I gave the wheel to him after a slow hour, when we got to the first pile of tailings. Time to take the first twenty pills.

I didn’t really know what to expect. I knew the unsupervised use of the aqualethe remedy was discouraged, because some people had extreme reactions. I’d given Braz an emergency poke of sedative to administer to me if I really lost control.

Rubble and craters. Black grit over everything. Building ruins that hadn’t weathered much; this place didn’t have much weather. Hot and dry in the summer, slightly less hot and more dry in the winter. We drove around and around and absolutely nothing happened. After two hours, the minimum wait, I swallowed another twenty.

Pretorocha was where they said I’d lost my finger, and it was where the most Confederación casualties had been recorded. Was it possible that the drug just didn’t work on me?

What was more likely, if I properly understood the literature, was one of two things: one, the place had changed so much that my recovering memory didn’t pick up any specifics; two, that I’d never actually been here.

That second didn’t seem possible. I’d left a finger here, and the Confederacíon verified that; it had been paying for the lost digit for thirty years.

The first explanation? Pictures of the battle looked about as bleak as this blasted landscape. Maybe I was missing something basic, like a smell or the summer heat. But the literature said the drug required visual stimuli.

“Maybe it doesn’t work as well on some as on others,” Braz said. “Or maybe you got a bad batch. How long do we keep driving around?”

I had six tubes of pills left. The drug was in my system for sure: cold sweat, shortness of breath, ocular pressure. “Hell, I guess we’ve seen enough. Take a pee break and head back.”

Standing by the side of the road there, under the low hot sun, urinating into black ash, somehow I knew for certain that I’d never been there before. A hellish place like this would burn itself into your subconscious.

But aqualethe was strong. Maybe too strong for the remedy to counter.

I took the wheel for the trip back to Console Verde. The air-conditioning had only two settings, frigid and off. We agreed to turn it off and open the non-bulletproof windows to the waning heat.

There was a kind of lunar beauty to the place. That would have made an impression on me back then. When I was still a poet. An odd thing to remember. Something did happen that year to end that. Maybe I lost it with the music, with the finger.

When the road got better I let Braz take over. I was out of practice with traffic, and they drove on the wrong side of the road anyhow.

The feeling hit me when the first buildings rose up out of the rock. My throat. Not like choking; a gentler pressure, like tightening a necktie.

Everything shimmered and glowed. This was where I’d been. This side of the city.

“Braz . . . it’s happening. Go slow.” He pulled over to the left and I heard warning lights go click-click-click.

“You weren’t . . . down there at all? You were here?”

“I don’t know! Maybe. I don’t know.” It was coming on stronger and stronger. Like seeing double, but with all your body. “Get into the right lane.” It was getting hard to see, a brilliant fog. “What is that big building?”

“Doesn’t have a name,” he said. “Confederación sigil over the parking lot.”

“Go there . . . go there . . . I’m losing it, Braz.”

“Maybe you’re finding it.”

The car was fading around me, and I seemed to drift forward and up. Through the wall of the building. Down a corridor. Through a closed door. Into an office.

I was sitting there, a young me. Coal black beard, neatly trimmed. Dress uniform. All my fingers.

Most of the wall behind me was taken up by a glowing spreadsheet. I knew what it represented.

Two long tables flanked my work station. They were covered with old ledgers and folders full of paper correspondence and records.

My job was to steal the planet from its rightful owners—but not the whole planet. Just the TREO rights, Total Rare Earth Oxides.

There was not much else on the planet of any commercial interest to the Confederación. When they found a tachyon nexus, they went off in search of dysprosium nearby, necessary for getting back to where you came from, or continuing farther out. Automated probes had found a convenient source in a mercurian planet close to the nexus star Poucoyellow. But after a few thousand pioneers had staked homestead claims on Seca, someone stumbled on a mother lode of dysprosium and other rare earths in the sterile hell of Serarro.

It was the most concentrated source of dysprosium ever found, on any planet, easily a thousand times the output of Earth’s mines.

The natives knew what they had their hands on, and they were cagey. They quietly passed a law that required all mineral rights to be deeded on paper; no electronic record. For years, 78 mines sold two percent of the dysprosium they dug up, and stockpiled the rest—as much as the Confederación could muster from two dozen other planets. Once they had hoarded enough, they could absolutely corner the market.

But they only had one customer.

Routine satellite mapping gave them away; the gamma ray signature of monazite-allenite stuck out like a flag. The Confederación deduced what was going on, and trained a few people like me to go in and remedy the situation, along with enough soldiers to supply the fog of war.

While the economy was going crazy, dealing with war, I was quietly buying up small shares in the rare earth mines, through hundreds of fictitious proxies.

When we had voting control of 51% of the planet’s dysprosium, and thus its price, the soldiers did an about-face and went home, first stopping at the infirmary for a shot of aqualethe.

I was a problem, evidently. Aqualethe erased the memory of trauma, but I hadn’t experienced any. All I had done was push numbers around, and occasionally forge signatures.

So one day three big men wearing black hoods kicked in my door and took me to a basement somewhere. They beat me monotonously for hours, wearing thick gloves, not breaking bones or rupturing organs. I was blindfolded and handcuffed, sealed up in a universe of constant pain.

Then they took off the blindfold and handcuffs and those three men held my arm and hand while a fourth used heavy bolt-cutters to snip off the ring finger of my left hand, making sure I watched. Then they dressed the stump and gave me a shot.

I woke up approaching Earth, with medals and money and no memory. And one less finger.

Woke again on my bunk at the inn. Braz sitting there with a carafe of melán, what they had at the inn instead of coffee. “Are you coming to?” he said quietly. “I helped you up the stairs.” Dawn light at the window. “It was pretty bad?”

“It was . . . not what I expected.” I levered myself upright and accepted a cup. “I wasn’t really a soldier. In uniform, but just a clerk. Or a con man.” I sketched out the story for him.

“So they actually chopped off your finger? I mean, beat you senseless and then snipped it off?”

I squeezed the short stump gingerly. “So the drug would work.

“I played guitar, before. So I spent a year or so working out alternative fingerings, formations, without the third finger. Didn’t really work.”

I took a sip. It was like kava, a bitter alkaloid. “So I changed careers.”

“You were going to be a singer?”

“No. Classical guitar. So I went back to university instead, pre-med and then psychology and philosophy. Got an easy doctorate in Generalist Studies. And became this modern version of the boatman, ferryman . . . Charon—the one who takes people to the other side.”

“So what are you going to do? With the truth.”

“Spread it around, I guess. Make people mad.”

He rocked back in his chair. “Who?”

“What do you mean? Everybody.”

“Everybody?” He shook his head. “Your story’s interesting, and your part in it is dramatic and sad, but there’s not a bit of it that would surprise anyone over the age of twenty. Everyone knows what the war was really about.

“It’s even more cynical and manipulative than I thought, but you know? That won’t make people mad. When it’s the government, especially the Confederación, people just nod and say, ‘more of the same.’”

“Same old, we say. Same old shit.”

“They settled death and damage claims generously; rebuilt the town. And it was half a lifetime ago, our lifetimes. Only the old remember, and most of them don’t care anymore.”

That shouldn’t have surprised me; I’ve been too close to it. Too close to my own loss, small compared to others’.

I sipped at the horrible stuff and put it back down. “I should do something. I can’t just sit on this.”

“But you can. Maybe you should.”

I made a dismissive gesture and he leaned forward and continued with force. “Look, Spivey. I’m not just a backsystem hick—or I am, but I’m a hick with a rusty doctorate in macroeconomics—and you’re not seeing or thinking clearly. About the war and the Confederación. Let the drugs dry out before you do something that you might regret.”

“That’s pretty dramatic.”

“Well, the situation you’re in is melodramatic! You want to go back to Earth and say you have proof that the Confederación used you to subvert the will of a planet, to the tune of more than a thousand dead and a trillion hartfords of real estate, then tortured and mutilated you in order to blank out your memory of it?”

“Well? That’s what happened.”

He got up. “You think about it for awhile. Think about the next thing that’s going to happen.” He left and closed the door quietly behind him.

I didn’t have to think too long. He was right.

Before I came to Seca, of course I searched every resource for verifiable information about the war. That there was so little should have set off an alarm in my head.

It’s a wonderful thing to be able to travel from star to star, collecting exotic memories. But you have no choice of carrier. To take your memories back to Earth, you have to rely on the Confederación.

And if those memories are unpleasant, or just inconvenient . . . they can fix that for you.

Over and over.

Originally published in Gateways, edited by Elizabeth Anne Hull, 2010.

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

Sean Williams (twinmakerbooks.com)

#1 New York Times bestselling Sean Williams lives with his family in Adelaide, South Australia. He’s written some books—over forty at last count—including the Philip K. Dick-nominated Saturn Returns, several Star Wars novels, Troubletwisters series with Garth Nix, and the popular Twinmaker series.

Caroline M. Yoachim (carolineyoachim.com)

Caroline M. Yoachim lives in Seattle and loves cold cloudy weather. She is the author of dozens of short stories, appearing in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, and Lightspeed, among other places. Her debut short story collection is coming out with Fairwood Press in 2016.

Joe Haldeman (www.joehaldeman.com)

Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Joe Haldeman took a B.S. degree in physics and astronomy from the University of Maryland, and did postgraduate work in mathematics and computer science. But his plans for a career in science were cut short by the U.S. Army, which sent him to Vietnam in 1968 as a combat engineer. Seriously wounded in action, Haldeman returned home in 1969 and began to write. By 1976, he had garnered both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award for his famous novel The Forever War, one of the landmark books of the '70s. He has since won four more Hugo Awards, another four Nebula Awards, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for his novel Camouflage, the SFWA Grandmaster Award, and has been inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. His other books include a mainstream novel, War Year, the SF novels Mindbridge, All My Sins Remembered, Worlds, Worlds Apart, Worlds Enough and Time, Buying Time, The Hemingway Hoax, Tools of the Trade, The Coming, 1969, Old Twentieth, The Accidental Time-Machine, Marsbound, and Starbound. His short work has been gathered in the collections Infinite Dreams, Dealing in Futures, Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds, None So Blind, A Separate War and Other Stories, and an omnibus of fiction and non-fiction, War Stories. His most recent books are a novel, Work Done for Hire, and a big retrospective collection, The Best of Joe Haldeman. Haldeman lives part of the year in Boston, where he teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the rest of the year in Florida, where he and his wife, Gay, make their home.

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.