Issue 18

© Wyrm Publishing, 2016
wyrmpublishing.com
forever-magazine.com

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the July 2016 issue of Forever Magazine!

My anthology, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume One was published last month and is already headed for a second printing. A big thank you to everyone that purchased a copy. I have a two-book deal for this series, so a strong opening should help ensure a longer future. I enjoyed working on it and hope I get to do many more.

In addition the reading for volume two, I’ve been putting the finishing touches on Galactic Empires, a reprint anthology focusing on empire stories from this century. I read a lot of stories, but it’s rare that I get to focus on a particular theme for an extended period. Much to my surprise, I’m not burned out on galactic empires. In fact, it’s left me wanting more. I can easily get my fill on novels, but I don’t have that kind of time. If you’d like to recommend some more recent short works, please send them along!

In other news, I’m off to Readercon in Quincy, MA this month. It’s the birthplace of Clarkesworld—ten years ago—and the place I had my heart attack--four years ago. That convention always seems to find a way to leave a mark on me. If you’ll be attending, please stop by the dealer’s room and say hi.

Until next month . . .

-Neil

In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns

Elizabeth Bear

Police Sub-Inspector Ferron crouched over the object she assumed was the decedent, her hands sheathed in areactin, her elbows resting on uniformed knees. The body (presumed) lay in the middle of a jewel-toned rug like a flabby pink Klein bottle, its once-moist surfaces crusting in air. The rug was still fresh beneath it, fronds only a little dented by the weight and no sign of the browning that could indicate an improperly pheromone-treated object had been in contact with them for over twenty-four hours. Meandering brownish trails led out around the bodylike object; a good deal of the blood had already been assimilated by the rug, but enough remained that Ferron could pick out the outline of delicate paw-pads and the brush-marks of long hair.

Ferron was going to be late visiting her mother after work tonight.

She looked up at Senior Constable Indrapramit and said tiredly, “So this is the mortal remains of Dexter Coffin?”

Indrapramit put his chin on his thumbs, fingers interlaced thoughtfully before lips that had dried and cracked in the summer heat. “We won’t know for sure until the DNA comes back.” One knee-tall spit-shined boot wrapped in a sterile bootie prodded forward, failing to come within fifteen centimeters of the corpse. Was he jumpy? Or just being careful about contamination?

He said, “What do you make of that, Boss?”

“Well.” Ferron stood, straightening a kinked spine. “If that is Dexter Coffin, he picked an apt handle, didn’t he?”

Coffin’s luxurious private one-room flat had been sealed when patrol officers arrived, summoned on a welfare check after he did not respond to the flat’s minder. When police had broken down the door—the emergency overrides had been locked out—they had found this. This pink tube. This enormous sausage. This meaty object like a child’s toy “eel,” a long squashed torus full of fluid.

If you had a hand big enough to pick it up, Ferron imagined it would squirt right out of your grasp again.

Ferron was confident it represented sufficient mass for a full-grown adult. But how, exactly, did you manage to just . . . invert someone?

The Sub-Inspector stepped back from the corpse to turn a slow, considering circle.

The flat was set for entertaining. The bed, the appliances were folded away. The western-style table was elevated and extended for dining, a shelf disassembled for chairs. There was a workspace in one corner, not folded away—Ferron presumed—because of the sheer inconvenience of putting away that much mysterious, technical-looking equipment. Depth projections in spare, modernist frames adorned the wall behind: enhanced-color images of a gorgeous cacaphony of stars. Something from one of the orbital telescopes, probably, because there were too many thousands of them populating the sky for Ferron to recognize the navagraha—the signs of the Hindu Zodiac, despite her education.

In the opposite corner of the apt, where you would see it whenever you raised your eyes from the workstation, stood a brass Ganesha. The small offering tray before him held packets of kumkum and turmeric, fragrant blossoms, an antique American dime, a crumbling, unburned stick of agarbathi thrust into a banana. A silk shawl, as indigo as the midnight heavens, lay draped across the god’s brass thighs.

“Cute,” said Indrapramit dryly, following her gaze. “The Yank is going native.”

At the dinner table, two western-style place settings anticipated what Ferron guessed would have been a romantic evening. If one of the principles had not gotten himself turned inside out.

“Where’s the cat?” Indrapramit said, gesturing to the fading paw-print trails. He seemed calm, Ferron decided.

And she needed to stop hovering over him like she expected the cracks to show any second. Because she was only going to make him worse by worrying. He’d been back on the job for a month and a half now: it was time for her to relax. To trust the seven years they had been partners and friends, and to trust him to know what he needed as he made his transition back to active duty—and how to ask for it.

Except that would mean laying aside her displacement behavior, and dealing with her own problems.

“I was wondering the same thing,” Ferron admitted. “Hiding from the farang, I imagine. Here, puss puss. Here puss—”

She crossed to the cabinets and rummaged inside. There was a bowl of water, almost dry, and an empty food bowl in a corner by the sink. The food would be close by.

It took her less than thirty seconds to locate a tin decorated with fish skeletons and paw prints. Inside, gray-brown pellets smelled oily. She set the bowl on the counter and rattled a handful of kibble into it.

“Miaow?” something said from a dark corner beneath the lounge that probably converted into Coffin’s bed.

“Puss puss puss?” She picked up the water bowl, washed it out, filled it up again from the potable tap. Something lofted from the floor to the countertop and headbutted her arm, purring madly. It was a last-year’s-generation parrot-cat, a hyacinth-blue puffball on sun-yellow paws rimmed round the edges with brownish stains. It had a matching tuxedo ruff and goatee and piercing golden eyes that caught and concentrated the filtered sunlight.

“Now, are you supposed to be on the counter?”

“Miaow,” the cat said, cocking its head inquisitively. It didn’t budge.

Indrapramit was at Ferron’s elbow. “Doesn’t it talk?”

“Hey, Puss,” Ferron said. “What’s your name?”

It sat down, balanced neatly on the rail between sink and counter-edge, and flipped its blue fluffy tail over its feet. Its purr vibrated its whiskers and the long hairs of its ruff. Ferron offered it a bit of kibble, and it accepted ceremoniously.

“Must be new,” Indrapramit said. “Though you’d expect an adult to have learned to talk in the cattery.”

“Not new.” Ferron offered a fingertip to the engineered animal. It squeezed its eyes at her and deliberately wiped first one side of its muzzle against her areactin glove, and then the other. “Did you see the cat hair on the lounge?”

Indrapramit paused, considering. “Wiped.”

“Our only witness. And she has amnesia.” She turned to Indrapramit. “We need to find out who Coffin was expecting. Pull transit records. And I want a five-hour phone track log of every individual who came within fifty meters of this flat between twenty hundred yesterday and when Patrol broke down the doors. Let’s get some technical people in to figure out what that pile of gear in the corner is. And who called in the welfare check?”

“Not a lot of help there, boss.” Indrapramit’s gold-tinted irises flick-scrolled over data—the Constable was picking up a feed skinned over immediate perceptions. Ferron wanted to issue a mild reprimand for inattention to the scene, but it seemed churlish when Indrapramit was following orders. “When he didn’t come online this morning for work, his supervisor became concerned. The supervisor was unable to raise him voice or text. He contacted the flat’s minder, and when it reported no response to repeated queries, he called for help.”

Ferron contemplated the shattered edges of the smashed-in door before returning her attention to the corpse. “I know the door was locked out on emergency mode. Patrol’s override didn’t work?”

Indrapramit had one of the more deadpan expressions among the deadpan-trained and certified officers of the Bengaluru City Police. “Evidently.”

“Well, while you’re online, have them bring in a carrier for the witness.” She indicated the hyacinth parrot-cat. “I’ll take custody of her.”

“How do you know it’s a her?”

“She has a feminine face. Lotus eyes like Draupadi.”

He looked at her.

She grinned. “I’m guessing.”

Ferron had turned off all her skins and feeds while examining the crime scene, but the police link was permanent. An icon blinked discreetly in one corner of her interface, its yellow glow unappealing beside the salmon and coral of Coffin’s taut-stretched innards. Accepting the contact was just a matter of an eye-flick. There was a decoding shimmer and one side of the interface spawned an image of Coffin in life.

Coffin had not been a visually vivid individual. Unaffected, Ferron thought, unless dressing one’s self in sensible medium-pale brown skin and dark hair with classically Brahmin features counted as an affectation. That handle—Dexter Coffin, and wouldn’t Sinister Coffin be a more logical choice?—seemed to indicate a more flamboyant personality. Ferron made a note of that: out of such small inconsistencies did a homicide case grow.

“So how does one get from this”—Ferron gestured to the image, which should be floating in Indrapramit’s interface as well—“to that?”—the corpse on the rug. “In a locked room, no less?”

Indrapramit shrugged. He seemed comfortable enough in the presence of the body, and Ferron wished she could stop examining him for signs of stress. Maybe his rightminding was working. It wasn’t too much to hope for, and good treatments for post-traumatic stress had been in development since the Naughties.

But Indrapramit was a relocant: all his family was in a village somewhere up near Mumbai. He had no people here, and so Ferron felt it was her responsibility as his partner to look out for him. At least, that was what she told herself.

He said, “He swallowed a black hole?”

“I like living in the future.” Ferron picked at the edge of an areactin glove. “So many interesting ways to die.”

Ferron and Indrapramit left the aptblock through the crowds of Coffin’s neighbors. It was a block of unrelateds. Apparently Coffin had no family in Bengaluru, but it nevertheless seemed as if every (living) resident had heard the news and come down. The common areas were clogged with grans and youngers, sibs and parents and cousins—all wailing grief, trickling tears, leaning on each other, being interviewed by newsies and blogbots. Ferron took one look at the press in the living area and on the street beyond and juggled the cat carrier into her left hand. She slapped a stripped-off palm against the courtyard door. It swung open—you couldn’t lock somebody in—and Ferron and Indrapramit stepped out into the shade of the household sunfarm.

The trees were old. This block had been here a long time; long enough that the sunfollowing black vanes of the lower leaves were as long as Ferron’s arm. Someone in the block maintained them carefully, too—they were polished clean with soft cloth, no clogging particles allowed to remain. Condensation trickled down the clear tubules in their trunks to pool in underground catchpots.

Ferron leaned back against a trunk, basking in the cool, and yawned.

“You okay, boss?”

“Tired,” Ferron said. “If we hadn’t caught the homicide—if it is a homicide—I’d be on a crash cycle now. I had to re-up, and there’ll be hell to pay once it wears off.”

“Boss—”

“It’s only my second forty-eight hours,” Ferron said, dismissing Indrapramit’s concern with a ripple of her fingers. Gold rings glinted, but not on her wedding finger. Her short nails were manicured in an attempt to look professional, a reminder not to bite. “I’d go hypomanic for weeks at a time at university. Helps you cram, you know.”

Indrapramit nodded. He didn’t look happy.

The Sub-Inspector shook the residue of the areactin from her hands before rubbing tired eyes with numb fingers. Feeds jittered until the movement resolved. Mail was piling up—press requests, paperwork. There was no time to deal with it now.

“Anyway,” Ferron said. “I’ve already reupped, so you’re stuck with me for another forty at least. Where do you think we start?”

“Interview lists,” Indrapramit said promptly. Climbing figs hung with ripe fruit twined the sunfarm; gently, the Senior Constable reached up and plucked one. When it popped between his teeth, its intense gritty sweetness echoed through the interface. It was a good fig.

Ferron reached up and stole one too.

“Miaow?” said the cat.

“Hush.” Ferron slicked tendrils of hair bent on escaping her conservative bun off her sweating temples. “I don’t know how you can wear those boots.”

“State of the art materials,” he said. Chewing a second fig, he jerked his chin at her practical sandals. “Chappals when you might have to run through broken glass, or kick down a door?”

She let it slide into silence. “Junior grade can handle the family for now. It’s bulk interviews. I’ll take Chairman Miaow here to the tech and get her scanned. Wait, Coffin was Employed? Doing what, and by whom?”

“Physicist,” Indrapramit said, linking a list of coworker and project names, a brief description of the biotech firm Coffin had worked for, like half of Employed Bengaluru ever since the medical tourism days. It was probably a better job than homicide cop. “Distributed. Most of his work group aren’t even in this time zone.”

“What does BioShell need with physicists?”

Silently, Indrapramit pointed up at the vanes of the suntrees, clinking faintly in their infinitesimal movements as they tracked the sun. “Quantum bioengineer,” he explained, after a suitable pause.

“Right,” Ferron said. “Well, Forensic will want us out from underfoot while they process the scene. I guess we can start drawing up interview lists.”

“Interview lists and lunch?” Indrapramit asked hopefully.

Ferron refrained from pointing out that they had just come out of an apt with an inside-out stiff in it. “Masala dosa?”

Indrapramit grinned. “I saw an SLV down the street.”

“I’ll call our tech,” Ferron said. “Let’s see if we can sneak out the service entrance and dodge the press.”

Ferron and Indrapramit (and the cat) made their way to the back gate. Indrapramit checked the security cameras on the alley behind the block: his feed said it was deserted except for a waste management vehicle. But as Ferron presented her warrant card—encoded in cloud, accessible through the Omni she wore on her left hip to balance the stun pistol—the energy-efficient safety lights ringing the doorway faded from cool white to a smoldering yellow, and then cut out entirely.

“Bugger,” Ferron said. “Power cut.”

“How, in a block with a sunfarm?”

“Loose connection?” she asked, rattling the door against the bolt just in case it had flipped back before the juice died. The cat protested. Gently, Ferron set the carrier down, out of the way. Then she kicked the door in frustration and jerked her foot back, cursing. Chappals, indeed.

Indrapramit regarded her mildly. “You shouldn’t have re-upped.”

She arched an eyebrow at him and put her foot down on the floor gingerly. The toes protested. “You suggesting I should modulate my stress response, Constable?”

“As long as you’re adjusting your biochemistry . . . ”

She sighed. “It’s not work,” she said. “It’s my mother. She’s gone Atavistic, and—”

“Ah,” Indrapramit said. “Spending your inheritance on virtual life?”

Ferron turned her face away. Worse, she texted. She’s not going to be able to pay her archiving fees.

—Isn’t she on assistance? Shouldn’t the dole cover that?

—Yeah, but she lives in A.R. She’s always been a gamer, but since Father died . . . it’s an addiction. She archives everything. And has since I was a child. We’re talking terabytes. Petabytes. Yottabytes. I don’t know. and she’s after me to “borrow” the money.

“Ooof,” he said. “That’s a tough one.” Briefly, his hand brushed her arm: sympathy and human warmth.

She leaned into it before she pulled away. She didn’t tell him that she’d been paying those bills for the past eighteen months, and it was getting to the point where she couldn’t support her mother’s habit any more. She knew what she had to do. She just didn’t know how to make herself do it.

Her mother was her mother. She’d built everything about Ferron, from the DNA up. The programming to honor and obey ran deep. Duty. Felicity. Whatever you wanted to call it.

In frustration, unable to find the words for what she needed to explain properly, she said, “I need to get one of those black market DNA patches and reprogram my overengineered genes away from filial devotion.”

He laughed, as she had meant. “You can do that legally in Russia.”

“Gee,” she said. “You’re a help. Hey, what if we—” Before she could finish her suggestion that they slip the lock, the lights glimmered on again and the door, finally registering her override, clicked.

“There,” Indrapramit said. “Could have been worse.”

“Miaow,” said the cat.

“Don’t worry, Chairman,” Ferron answered. “I wasn’t going to forget you.”

The street hummed: autorickshaws, glidecycles, bikes, pedestrians, and swarms of foot traffic. The babble of languages: Kannada, Hindi, English, Chinese, Japanese. Coffin’s aptblock was in one of the older parts of the New City. It was an American ghetto: most of the residents had come here for work, and spoke English as a primary—sometimes an only—language. In the absence of family to stay with, they had banded together. Coffin’s address had once been trendy and now, fifty years after its conversion, was fallen on—not hard times, exactly, but a period of more moderate means. The street still remembered better days. It was bulwarked on both sides by the shaggy green cubes of aptblocks, black suntrees growing through their centers, but what lined each avenue were the feathery cassia trees, their branches dripping pink, golden, and terra-cotta blossoms.

Cassia, Ferron thought. A Greek word of uncertain antecedents, possibly related to the English word cassia, meaning Chinese or mainland cinnamon. But these trees were not spices; indeed, the black pods of the golden cassia were a potent medicine in Ayurvedic traditions, and those of the rose cassia had been used since ancient times as a purgative for horses.

Ferron wiped sweat from her forehead again, and—speaking of horses—reined in the overly helpful commentary of her classical education.

The wall- and roofgardens of the aptblocks demonstrated a great deal about who lived there. The Coffin kinblock was well-tended, green and lush, dripping with brinjal and tomatoes. A couple of youngers—probably still in schooling, even if they weren’t Employment track—clambered up and down ladders weeding and feeding and harvesting, and cleaning the windows shaded here and there by the long green trail of sweet potato vines. But the next kinship block down was sere enough to draw a fine, the suntrees in its court sagging and miserable-looking. Ferron could make out the narrow tubes of drip irrigators behind crisping foliage on the near wall.

Ferron must have snorted, because Indrapramit said, “What are they doing with their graywater, then?”

“Maybe it’s abandoned?” Unlikely. Housing in the New City wasn’t exactly so plentiful that an empty block would remain empty for long.

“Maybe they can’t afford the plumber.”

That made Ferron snort again, and start walking. But she snapped an image of the dying aptblock nonetheless, and emailed it to Environmental Services. They’d handle the ticket, if they decided the case warranted one.

The Sri Lakshmi Venkateshwara—SLV—was about a hundred meters on, an open-air food stand shaded by a grove of engineered neem trees, their panel leaves angling to follow the sun. Hunger hadn’t managed to penetrate Ferron’s re-upped hypomania yet, but it would be a good idea to eat anyway: the brain might not be in any shape to notice that the body needed maintenance, but failing to provide that maintenance just added extra interest to the bill when it eventually came due.

Ferron ordered an enormous, potato-and-pea stuffed crepe against Indrapramit’s packet of samosas, plus green coconut water. Disdaining the SLV’s stand-up tables, they ventured a little further along the avenue until they found a bench to eat them on. News and ads flickered across the screen on its back. Ferron set the cat carrier on the seat between them.

Indrapramit dropped a somebody-else’s-problem skin around them for privacy and unwrapped his first samosa. Flocks of green and yellow parrots wheeled in the trees nearby; the boldest dozen fluttered down to hop and scuffle where the crumbs might fall. You couldn’t skin yourself out of the perceptions of the unwired world.

Indrapramit raised his voice to be heard over their arguments. “You shouldn’t have re-upped.”

The dosa was good—as crisp as she wanted, served with a smear of red curry. Ferron ate most of it, meanwhile grab-and-pasting names off of Coffin’s known associates lists onto an interfaced interview plan, before answering.

“Most homicides are closed—if they get closed—in the first forty-eight hours. It’s worth a little hypomania binge to find Coffin’s killer.”

“There’s more than one murder every two days in this city, boss.”

“Sure.” She had a temper, but this wasn’t the time to exercise it. She knew, given her family history, Indrapramit worried secretly that she’d succumb to addiction and abuse of the rightminding chemicals. The remaining bites of the dosa got sent to meet their brethren, peas popping between her teeth. The wrapper went into the recycler beside the bench. “But we don’t catch every case that flies through.”

Indrapramit tossed wadded-up paper at Ferron’s head. Ferron batted it into that recycler too. “No, yaar. Just all of them this week.”

The targeted ads bleeding off the bench-back behind Ferron were scientifically designed to attract her attention, which only made them more annoying. Some too-attractive citizen squalled about rightminding programs for geriatrics (“Bring your parents into the modern age!”), and the news—in direct, loud counterpoint—was talking about the latest orbital telescope discoveries: apparently a star some twenty thousand light years away, in the Andromeda Galaxy, had suddenly begun exhibiting a flickering pattern that some astronomers considered a possible precursor to a nova event.

The part of her brain that automatically built such parallels said: Andromeda. Contained within the span of Uttara Bhadrapada. The twenty-sixth nakshatra in Hindu astronomy, although she was not a sign of the Zodiac to the Greeks. Pegasus was also in Uttara Bhadrapada. Ferron devoted a few more cycles to wondering if there was any relationship other than coincidental between the legendary serpent Ahir Budhnya, the deity of Uttara Bhadrapada, and the sea monster Cetus, set to eat—devour, the Greeks were so melodramatic—the chained Andromeda.

The whole thing fell under the influence of the god Aryaman, whose path was the Milky Way—the Heavenly Ganges.

You’re overqualified, madam. Oh, she could have been the professor, the academic her mother had dreamed of making her, in all those long hours spent in virtual reproductions of myths the world around. She could have been. But if she’d really wanted to make her mother happy, she would have pursued Egyptology, too.

But she wasn’t, and it was time she got her mind back on the job she did have.

Ferron flicked on the feeds she’d shut off to attend the crime scene. She didn’t like to skin on the job: a homicide cop’s work depended heavily on unfiltered perceptions, and if you trimmed everything and everyone irritating or disagreeable out of reality, the odds were pretty good that you’d miss the truth behind a crime. But sometimes you had to make an exception.

She linked up, turned up her spam filters and ad blockers, and sorted more Known Associates files. Speaking of her mother, that required ignoring all those lion-headed message-waiting icons blinking in a corner of her feed—and the pileup of news and personal messages in her assimilator.

Lions. Bengaluru’s state capitol was topped with a statue of a four-headed lion, guarding each of the cardinal directions. The ancient symbol of India was part of why Ferron’s mother chose that symbolism. But only part.

She set the messages to hide, squirming with guilt as she did, and concentrated on the work-related mail.

When she looked up, Indrapramit appeared to have finished both his sorting and his samosas. “All right, what have you got?”

“Just this.” She dumped the interview files to his headspace.

The Senior Constable blinked upon receipt. “Ugh. That’s even more than I thought.”

First on Ferron’s interview list were the dead man’s coworkers, based on the simple logic that if anybody knew how to turn somebody inside out, it was likely to be another physicist. Indrapramit went back to the aptblock to continue interviewing more-or-less hysterical neighbors in a quest for the name of any potential lover or assignation from the night before.

It was the task least likely to be any fun at all. But then, Ferron was the senior officer. Rank hath its privileges. Someday, Indrapramit would be making junior colleagues follow up horrible gutwork.

The bus, it turned out, ran right from the corner where Coffin’s kinblock’s street intercepted the main road. Proximity made her choose it over the mag-lev Metro, but she soon regretted her decision, because it then wound in a drunken pattern through what seemed like the majority of Bengaluru.

She was lucky enough to find a seat—it wasn’t a crowded hour. She registered her position with dispatch and settled down to wait and talk to the hyacinth cat, since it was more than sunny enough that no one needed to pedal. She waited it out for the transfer point anyway: that bus ran straight to the U District, where BioShell had its offices.

Predictable. Handy for head-hunting, and an easy walk for any BioShell employee who might also teach classes. As it seemed, by the number of Professor So-and-sos on Ferron’s list, that many of them did.

Her tech, a short wide-bellied man who went by the handle Ravindra, caught up with her while she was still leaned against the second bus’s warm, tinted window. He hopped up the steps two at a time, belying his bulk, and shooed a citizen out of the seat beside Ferron with his investigator’s card.

Unlike peace officers, who had long since been spun out as distributed employees, techs performed their functions amid the equipment and resources of a centralized lab. But today, Ravindra had come equipped for fieldwork. He stood, steadying himself on the grab bar, and spread his kit out on the now-unoccupied aisle seat while Ferron coaxed the cat from her carrier under the seat.

“Good puss,” Ravindra said, riffling soft fur until he found the contact point behind the animal’s ears. His probe made a soft, satisfied beep as he connected it. The cat relaxed bonelessly, purring. “You want a complete download?”

“Whatever you can get,” Ferron said. “It looks like she’s been wiped. She won’t talk, anyway.”

“Could be trauma, boss,” Ravindra said dubiously. “Oh, DNA results are back. That’s your inside-out vic, all right. The autopsy was just getting started when I left, and Doc said to tell you that to a first approximation, it looked like all the bits were there, albeit not necessarily in the proper sequence.”

“Well, that’s a relief.” The bus lurched. “At least it’s the correct dead guy.”

“Miaow,” said the cat.

“What is your name, puss?” Ravindra asked.

“Chairman Miaow,” the cat said, in a sweet doll’s voice.

“Oh, no,” Ferron said. “That’s just what I’ve been calling her.”

“Huh.” Ravindra frowned at the readouts that must be scrolling across his feed. “Did you feed her, boss?”

“Yeah,” Ferron said. “To get her out from under the couch.”

He nodded, and started rolling up his kit. As he disconnected the probe, he said, “I downloaded everything there was. It’s not much. And I’ll take a tissue sample for further investigation, but I don’t think this cat was wiped.”

“But there’s nothing—”

“I know,” he said. “Not wiped. This one’s factory-new. And it’s bonded to you. Congratulations, Sub-Inspector. I think you have a cat.”

“I can’t—” she said, and paused. “I already have a fox. My mother’s fox, rather. I’m taking care of it for her.”

“Mine,” the cat said distinctly, rubbing her blue-and-yellow muzzle along Ferron’s uniform sleeve, leaving behind a scraping of azure lint.

“I imagine they can learn to cohabitate.” He shouldered his kit. “Anyway, it’s unlikely Chairman Miaow here will be any use as a witness, but I’ll pick over the data anyway and get back to you. It’s not even a gig.”

“Damn,” she said. “I was hoping she’d seen the killer. So even if she’s brand-new . . . why hadn’t she bonded to Coffin?”

“He hadn’t fed her,” Ravindra said. “And he hadn’t given her a name. She’s a sweetie, though.” He scratched behind her ears. A funny expression crossed his face. “You know, I’ve been wondering for ages—how did you wind up choosing to be called Ferron, anyway?”

“My mother used to say I was stubborn as iron.” Ferron managed to keep what she knew would be a pathetically adolescent shrug off her shoulders. “She was fascinated by Egypt, but I studied Classics—Latin, Greek, Sanskrit. Some Chinese stuff. And I liked the name. Ferrum, iron. She won’t use it. She still uses my cradlename.” Even when I’m paying her bills.

The lion-face still blinked there, muted but unanswered. In a fit of irritation, Ferron banished it. It wasn’t like she would forget to call.

Once she had time, she promised the ghost of her mother.

Ravindra, she realized, was staring at her quizzically. “How did a classicist wind up a murder cop?”

Ferron snorted. “You ever try to find Employment as a classicist?”

Ravindra got off at the next stop. Ferron watched him walk away, whistling for an autorickshaw to take him back to the lab. She scratched Chairman Miaow under the chin and sighed.

In another few minutes, she reached the University District and disembarked, still burdened with cat and carrier. It was a pleasant walk from the stop, despite the heat of the end of the dry season. It was late June, and Ferron wondered what it had been like before the Shift, when the monsoons would have started already, breaking the back of the heat.

The walk from the bus took under fifteen minutes, the cat a dozy puddle. A patch of sweat spread against Ferron’s summerweight trousers where the carrier bumped softly against her hip. She knew she retraced Coffin’s route on those rare days when he might choose to report to the office.

Nearing the Indian Institute of Science, Ferron became aware that clothing styles were shifting—self-consciously Green Earther living fabric and ironic, ill-fitting student antiques predominated. Between the buildings and the statuary of culture heroes—R. K. Narayan, Ratan Tata, stark-white with serene or stern expressions—the streets still swarmed, and would until long after nightfall. A prof-caste wearing a live-cloth salwar kameez strutted past; Ferron was all too aware that the outfit would cost a week’s salary for even a fairly high-ranking cop.

The majority of these people were Employed. They wore salwar kameez or suits and they had that purpose in their step—unlike most citizens, who weren’t in too much of a hurry to get anywhere, especially in the heat of day. It was easier to move in the university quarter, because traffic flowed with intent. Ferron, accustomed to stepping around window-browsing Supplemented and people out for their mandated exercise, felt stress dropping away as the greenery, trees, and gracious old nineteenth and twentieth century buildings of the campus rose up on every side.

As she walked under the chin of Mohandas Gandhi, Ferron felt the familiar irritation that female police pioneer Kiran Bedi, one of her own personal idols, was not represented among the statuary. There was hijra activist Shabnam Mausi behind a row of well-tended planters, though, which was somewhat satisfying.

Some people found it unsettling to be surrounded by so much brick, poured concrete, and mined stone—the legacy of cooler, more energy-rich times. Ferron knew that the bulk of the university’s buildings were more efficient green structures, but those tended to blend into their surroundings. The overwhelming impression was still that of a return to a simpler time: 1870, perhaps, or 1955. Ferron wouldn’t have wanted to see the whole city gone this way, but it was good that some of the history had been preserved.

Having bisecting campus, Ferron emerged along a prestigious street of much more modern buildings. No vehicles larger than bicycles were allowed here, and the roadbed swarmed with those, people on foot, and pedestrials. Ferron passed a rack of share-bikes and a newly constructed green building, still uninhabited, the leaves of its suntrees narrow, immature, and furled. They’d soon be spread wide, and the structure fully tenanted.

The BioShell office itself was a showpiece on the ground floor of a business block, with a live receptionist visible behind foggy photosynthetic glass walls. I’d hate a job where you can’t pick your nose in case the pedestrians see it. Of course, Ferron hadn’t chosen to be as decorative as the receptionist. A certain stern plainness helped get her job done.

“Hello,” Ferron said, as the receptionist smoothed brown hair over a shoulder. “I’m Police Sub-Inspector Ferron. I’m here to see Dr. Rao.”

“A moment, madam,” the receptionist said, gesturing graciously to a chair.

Ferron set heels together in parade rest and—impassive—waited. It was only a few moments before a shimmer of green flickered across the receptionist’s iris.

“First door on the right, madam, and then up the stairs. Do you require a guide?”

“Thank you,” Ferron said, glad she hadn’t asked about the cat. “I think I can find it.”

There was an elevator for the disabled, but the stairs were not much further on. Ferron lugged Chairman Miaow through the fire door at the top and paused a moment to catch her breath. A steady hum came from the nearest room, to which the door stood ajar.

Ferron picked her way across a lush biorug sprinkled with violet and yellow flowers and tapped lightly. A voice rose over the hum. “Namaskar!”

Dr. Rao was a slender, tall man whose eyes were framed in heavy creases. He walked forward at a moderate speed on a treadmill, and old-fashioned keyboard and monitor mounted on a swivel arm before him. As Ferron entered, he pushed the arm aside, but kept walking. An amber light flickered green as the monitor went dark: he was charging batteries now.

“Namaskar,” Ferron replied. She tried not to stare too obviously at the walking desk.

She must have failed.

“Part of my rightminding, madam,” Rao said with an apologetic shrug. “I’ve fibromyalgia, and mild exercise helps. You must be the Sub-Inspector. How do you take your mandated exercise? You carry yourself with such confidence.”

“I am a practitioner of kalari payat,” Ferron said, naming a South Indian martial art. “It’s useful in my work.”

“Well,” he said. “I hope you’ll see no need to demonstrate any upon me. Is that a cat?”

“Sorry, saab,” Ferron said. “It’s work-related. She can wait in the hall if you mind—”

“No, not at all. Actually, I love cats. She can come out, if she’s not too scared.”

“Oouuuuut!” said Chairman Miaow.

“I guess that settles that.” Ferron unzipped the carrier, and the hyacinth parrot-cat sauntered out and leaped up to the treadmill’s handrail.

“Niranjana?” Dr. Rao said, in surprise. “Excuse me, madam, but what are you doing with Dr. Coffin’s cat?”

“You know this cat?”

“Of course I do.” He stopped walking, and scratched the cat under her chin. She stretched her head out like a lazy snake, balanced lightly on four daffodil paws. “She comes here about twice a month.”

“New!” the cat disagreed. “Who you?”

“Niranjana, it’s Rao. You know me.”

“Rrraaao?” she said, cocking her head curiously. Adamantly, she said, “New! My name Chairman Miaow!”

Dr. Rao’s forehead wrinkled. To Ferron, over the cat’s head, he said, “Is Dexter with you? Is he all right?”

“I’m afraid that’s why I’m here,” Ferron said. “It is my regretful duty to inform you that Dexter Coffin appears to have been murdered in his home sometime over the night. Saab, law requires that I inform you that this conversation is being recorded. Anything you say may be entered in evidence. You have the right to skin your responses or withhold information, but if you choose to do so, under certain circumstances a court order may be obtained to download and decode associated cloud memories. Do you understand this caution?”

“Oh dear,” Dr. Rao said. “When I called the police, I didn’t expect—”

“I know,” Ferron said. “But do you understand the caution, saab?”

“I do,” he said. A yellow peripheral node in Ferron’s visual field went green.

She said, “Do you confirm this is his cat?”

“I’d know her anywhere,” Dr. Rao said. “The markings are very distinctive. Dexter brought her in quite often. She’s been wiped? How awful.”

“We’re investigating,” Ferron said, relieved to be back in control of the conversation. “I’m afraid I’ll need details of what Coffin was working on, his contacts, any romantic entanglements, any professional rivalries or enemies—”

“Of course,” Dr. Rao said. He pulled his interface back around and began typing. “I’ll generate you a list. As for what he was working on—I’m afraid there are a lot of trade secrets involved, but we’re a biomedical engineering firm, as I’m sure you’re aware. Dexter’s particular project has been applications in four-dimensional engineering.”

“I’m afraid,” Ferron said, “that means nothing to me.”

“Of course.” He pressed a key. The cat peered over his shoulder, apparently fascinated by the blinking lights on the monitor.

The hyperlink blinked live in Ferron’s feed. She accessed it and received a brief education in the theoretical physics of reaching around three-dimensional shapes in space-time. A cold sweat slicked her palms. She told herself it was just the second hypomania re-up.

“Closed-heart surgery,” she said. During the medical tourism boom, Bengaluru’s economy had thrived. They’d found other ways to make ends meet now that people no longer traveled so profligately, but the state remained one of India’s centers of medical technology. Ferron wondered about the applications for remote surgery, and what the economic impact of this technology could be.

“Sure. Or extracting an appendix without leaving a scar. Inserting stem cells into bone marrow with no surgical trauma, freeing the body to heal disease instead of infection and wounds. It’s revolutionary. If we can get it working.”

“Saab . . . ” She stroked Chairman Miaow’s sleek azure head. “Could it be used as a weapon?”

“Anything can be used as a weapon,” he said. A little too fast? But his skin conductivity and heart rate revealed no deception, no withholding. “Look, Sub-Inspector. Would you like some coffee?”

“I’d love some,” she admitted.

He tapped a few more keys and stepped down from the treadmill. She’d have thought the typing curiously inefficient, but he certainly seemed to get things done fast.

“Religious reasons, saab?” she asked.

“Hmm?” He glanced at the monitor. “No. I’m just an eccentric. I prefer one information stream at a time. And I like to come here and do my work, and keep my home at home.”

“Oh.” Ferron laughed, following him across the office to a set of antique lacquered chairs. Chairman Miaow minced after them, stopping to sniff the unfamiliar rug and roll in a particularly lush patch. Feeling like she was making a huge confession, Ferron said, “I turn off my feeds sometimes too. Skin out. It helps me concentrate.”

He winked.

She said, “So tell me about Dexter and his cat.”

“Well . . . ” He glanced guiltily at Chairman Miaow. “She was very advanced. He obviously spent a great deal of time working with her. Complete sentences, conversation on about the level of an imaginative five-year old. That’s one of our designs, by the way.”

“Parrot cats?”

“The hyacinth variety. We’re working on an Eclectus variant for next year’s market. Crimson and plum colors. You know they have a much longer lifespan than the root stock? Parrot-cats should be able to live for thirty to fifty years, though of course the design hasn’t been around long enough for experimental proof.”

“I did not. About Dr. Coffin—” she paused, and scanned the lists of enemies and contacts that Dr. Rao had provided, cross-referencing it with files and the reports of three interviews that had come in from Indrapramit in the last five minutes. Another contact request from her mother blinked away officiously. She dismissed it. “I understand he wasn’t born here?”

“He traveled,” Dr. Rao said in hushed tones. “From America.”

“Huh,” Ferron said. “He relocated for a job? Medieval. How did BioShell justify the expense—and the carbon burden?”

“A unique skill set. We bring in people from many places, actually. He was well-liked here: his work was outstanding, and he was charming enough—and talented enough—that his colleagues forgave him some of the . . . vagaries in his rightminding.”

“Vagaries . . . ?”

“He was a depressive, madam,” Dr. Rao said. “Prone to fairly serious fits of existential despair. Medication and surgery controlled it adequately that he was functional, but not completely enough that he was always . . . comfortable.”

“When you say existential despair . . . ?” Ferron was a past master of the open-ended hesitation.

Dr. Rao seemed cheerfully willing to fill them in for her. “He questioned the worth and value of pretty much every human endeavor. Of existence itself.”

“So he was a bit nihilistic?”

“Nihilism denies value. Dexter was willing to believe that compassion had value—not intrinsic value, you understand. But assigned value. He believed that the best thing a human being could aspire to was to limit suffering.”

“That explains his handle.”

Dr. Rao chuckled. “It does, doesn’t it? Anyway, he was brilliant.”

“I assume that means that BioShell will suffer in his absence.”

“The fourth-dimension project is going to fall apart without him,” Dr. Rao said candidly. “It’s going to take a global search to replace him. And we’ll have to do it quickly; release of the technology was on the anvil.”

Ferron thought about the inside-out person in the midst of his rug, his flat set for an intimate dinner for two. “Dr. Rao . . . ”

“Yes, Sub-Inspector?”

“In your estimation, would Dr. Coffin commit suicide?”

He steepled his fingers and sighed. “It’s . . . possible. But he was very devoted to his work, and his psych evaluations did not indicate it as an immediate danger. I’d hate to think so.”

“Because you’d feel like you should have done more? You can’t save somebody from themselves, Dr. Rao.”

“Sometimes,” he said, “a word in the dark is all it takes.”

“Dr. Coffin worked from home. Was any of his lab equipment there? Is it possible that he died in an accident?”

Dr. Rao’s eyebrows rose. “Now I’m curious about the nature of his demise, I’m afraid. He should not have had any proprietary equipment at home: we maintain a lab for him here, and his work at home should have been limited to theory and analysis. But of course he’d have an array of interfaces.”

The coffee arrived, brought in by a young man with a ready smile who set the tray on the table and vanished again without a word. No doubt pleased to be Employed.

As Dr. Rao poured from a solid old stoneware carafe, he transitioned to small talk. “Some exciting news about the Andromeda Galaxy, isn’t it? They’ve named the star Al-Rahman.”

“I thought stars were named by coordinates and catalogue number these days.”

“They are,” Rao said. “But it’s fitting for this one have a little romance. People being what they are, someone would have named it if the science community didn’t. And Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sufi was the first astronomer to describe the Andromeda Galaxy, around 960 A.D. He called it the ‘little cloud.’ It’s also called Messier 31—”

“Do you think it’s a nova precursor, saab?”

He handed her the coffee—something that smelled pricy and rich, probably from the hills—and offered cream and sugar. She added a lump of the latter to her cup with the tongs, stirred in cream, and selected a lemon biscuit from the little plate he nudged toward her.

“That’s what they said on the news,” he said.

“Meaning you don’t believe it?”

“You’re sharp,” he said admiringly.

“I’m a homicide investigator,” she said.

He reached into his pocket and withdrew a small injection kit. The hypo hissed alarmingly as he pressed it to his skin. He winced.

“Insulin?” she asked, restraining herself from an incredibly rude question about why he hadn’t had stem cells, if he was diabetic.

He shook his head. “Scotophobin. Also part of my rightminding. I have short-term memory issues.” He picked up a chocolate biscuit and bit into it decisively.

She’d taken the stuff herself, in school and when cramming for her police exams. She also refused to be derailed. “So you don’t think this star—”

“Al-Rahman.”

“—Al-Rahman. You don’t think it’s going nova?”

“Oh, it might be,” he said. “But what would say if I told you that its pattern is a repeating series of prime numbers?”

The sharp tartness of lemon shortbread turned to so much grit in her mouth. “I beg your pardon.”

“Someone is signaling us,” Dr. Rao said. “Or I should say, was signaling us. A long, long time ago. Somebody with the technology necessary to tune the output of their star.”

“Explain,” she said, setting the remainder of the biscuit on her saucer.

“Al-Rahman is more than two and a half million light years away. That means that the light we’re seeing from it was modulated when the first identifiable humans were budding off the hominid family tree. Even if we could send a signal back . . . The odds are very good that they’re all gone now. It was just a message in a bottle. We were here.”

“The news said twenty thousand light years.”

“The news.” He scoffed. “Do they ever get police work right?”

“Never,” Ferron said fervently.

“Science either.” He glanced up as the lights dimmed. “Another brownout.”

An unformed idea tickled the back of Ferron’s mind. “Do you have a sunfarm?”

“BioShell is entirely self-sufficient,” he confirmed. “It’s got to be a bug, but we haven’t located it yet. Anyway, it will be back up in a minute. All our important equipment has dedicated power supplies.”

He finished his biscuit and stirred the coffee thoughtfully while he chewed. “The odds are that the universe is—or has been—full of intelligent species. And that we will never meet any of them. Because the distances and time scales are so vast. In the two hundred years we’ve been capable of sending signals into space—well. Compare that in scale to Al-Rahman.”

“That’s awful,” Ferron said. “It makes me appreciate Dr. Coffin’s perspective.”

“It’s terrible,” Dr. Rao agreed. “Terrible and wonderful. In some ways I wonder if that’s as close as we’ll ever get to comprehending the face of God.”

They sipped their coffee in contemplation, facing one another across the tray and the low lacquered table.

“Milk?” said Chairman Miaow. Carefully, Ferron poured some cream into a saucer and gave it to her.

Dr. Rao said, “You know, the Andromeda Galaxy and our own Milky Way are expected to collide eventually.”

“Eventually?”

He smiled. It did good things for the creases around his eyes. “Four and a half billion years or so.”

Ferron thought about Uttara Bhadrapada, and the Heavenly Ganges, and Aryaman’s house—in a metaphysical sort of sense—as he came to walk that path across the sky. From so far away it took two and a half million years just to see that far.

“I won’t wait up, then.” She finished the last swallow of coffee and looked around for the cat. “I don’t suppose I could see Dr. Coffin’s lab before I go?”

“Oh,” said Dr. Rao. “I think we can do that, and better.”

The lab space Coffin had shared with three other researchers belied BioShell’s corporate wealth. It was a maze of tables and unidentifiable equipment in dizzying array. Ferron identified a gene sequencer, four or five microscopes, and a centrifuge, but most of the rest baffled her limited knowledge of bioengineering. She was struck by the fact that just about every object in the room was dressed in BioShell’s livery colors of emerald and gold, however.

She glimpsed a conservatory through a connecting door, lush with what must be prototype plants; at the far end of the room, rows of condensers hummed beside a revolving door rimed with frost. A black-skinned woman in a lab coat with her hair clipped into short, tight curls had her eyes to a lens and her hands in waldo sleeves. Microsurgery?

Dr. Rao held out a hand as Ferron paused beside him. “Will we disturb her?”

“Dr. Nnebuogor will have skinned out just about everything except the fire alarm,” Dr. Rao said. “The only way to distract her would be to go over and give her a shove. Which—” he raised a warning finger “—I would recommend against, as she’s probably engaged in work on those next-generation parrot-cats I told you about now.”

“Nnebuogor? She’s Nigerian?”

Dr. Rao nodded. “Educated in Cairo and Bengaluru. Her coming to work for BioShell was a real coup for us.”

“You do employ a lot of farang,” Ferron said. “And not by telepresence.” She waited for Rao to bridle, but she must have gotten the tone right, because he shrugged.

“Our researchers need access to our lab.”

“Miaow,” said Chairman Miaow.

“Can she?” Ferron asked.

“We’re cat-friendly,” Rao said, with a flicker of a smile, so Ferron set the carrier down and opened its door. Rao’s heart rate was up a little, and she caught herself watching sideways while he straightened his trousers and picked lint from his sleeve.

Chairman Miaow emerged slowly, rubbing her length against the side of the carrier. She gazed up at the equipment and furniture with unblinking eyes and soon she gathered herself to leap onto a workbench, and Dr. Rao put a hand out firmly.

“No climbing or jumping,” he said. “Dangerous. It will hurt you.”

“Hurt?” The cat drew out the Rs in a manner so adorable it had to be engineered for. “No jump?”

“No.” Rao turned to Ferron. “We’ve hardwired in response to the No command. I think you’ll find our parrot-cats superior to unengineered felines in this regard. Of course . . . they’re still cats.”

“Of course,” Ferron said. She watched as Chairman Miaow explored her new environment, rubbing her face on this and that. “Do you have any pets?”

“We often take home the successful prototypes,” he said. “It would be a pity to destroy them. I have a parrot-cat—a red-and-gray—and a golden lemur. Engineered, of course. The baseline ones are protected.”

As they watched, the hyacinth cat picked her way around, sniffing every surface. She paused before one workstation in particular before cheek-marking it, and said in comically exaggerated surprise: “Mine! My smell.”

There was a synthetic-fleece-lined basket tucked beneath the table. The cat leaned towards it, stretching her head and neck, and sniffed deeply and repeatedly.

“Have you been here before?” Ferron asked.

Chairman Miaow looked at Ferron wide-eyed with amazement at Ferron’s patent ignorance, and declared “New!”

She jumped into the basket and snuggled in, sinking her claws deeply and repeatedly into the fleece.

Ferron made herself stop chewing her thumbnail. She stuck her hand into her uniform pocket. “Are all your hyacinths clones?”

“They’re all closely related,” Dr. Rao had said. “But no, not clones. And even if she were a clone, there would be differences in the expression of her tuxedo pattern.”

At that moment, Dr. Nnebuogor sighed and backed away from her machine, withdrawing her hands from the sleeves and shaking out the fingers like a musician after practicing. She jumped when she turned and saw them. “Oh! Sorry. I was skinned. Namaskar.”

“Miaow?” said the cat in her appropriated basket.

“Hello, Niranjana. Where’s Dexter?” said Dr. Nnebuogor. Ferron felt the scientist reading her meta-tags. Dr. Nnebuogor raised her eyes to Rao. “And—pardon, officer—what’s with the copper?”

“Actually,” Ferron said, “I have some bad news for you. It appears that Dexter Coffin was murdered last night.”

“Murdered . . . ” Dr. Nnebuogor put her hand out against the table edge. “Murdered?”

“Yes,” Ferron said. “I’m Police Sub-Inspector Ferron—” which Dr. Nnebuogor would know already. “—and I’m afraid I need to ask you some questions. Also, I’ll be contacting the other researchers who share your facilities via telepresence. Is there a private area I can use for that?”

Dr. Nnebuogor looked stricken. The hand that was not leaned against the table went up to her mouth. Ferron’s feed showed the acceleration of her heart, the increase in skin conductivity as her body slicked with cold sweat. Guilt or grief? It was too soon to tell.

“You can use my office,” Dr. Rao said. “Kindly, with my gratitude.”

The interviews took the best part of the day and evening, when all was said and done, and garnered Ferron very little new information—yes, people would probably kill for what Coffin was—had been—working on. No, none of his colleagues had any reason to. No, he had no love life of which they were aware.

Ferron supposed she technically could spend all night lugging the cat carrier around, but her own flat wasn’t too far from the University District. It was in a kinship block teaming with her uncles and cousins, her grandparents, great-grandparents, her sisters and their husbands (and in one case, wife). The fiscal support of shared housing was the only reason she’d been able to carry her mother as long as she had.

She checked out a pedestrial because she couldn’t face the bus and she felt like she’d done more than her quota of steps before dinnertime—and here it was, well after. The cat carrier balanced on the grab bar, she zipped it unerringly through the traffic, enjoying the feel of the wind in her hair and the outraged honks cascading along the double avenues.

She could make the drive on autopilot, so she used the other half of her attention to feed facts to the department’s expert system. Doyle knew everything about everything, and if it wasn’t self-aware or self-directed in the sense that most people meant when they said artificial intelligence, it still rivaled a trained human brain when it came to picking out patterns—and being supercooled, it was significantly faster.

She even told it the puzzling bits, such as how Chairman Miaow had reacted upon being introduced to the communal lab that Coffin shared with three other BioShell researchers.

Doyle swallowed everything Ferron could give it, as fast as she could report. She knew that down in its bowels, it would be integrating that information with Indrapramit’s reports, and those of the other officers and techs assigned to the case.

She thought maybe they needed something more. As the pedestrial dropped her at the bottom of her side street, she dropped a line to Damini, her favorite archinformist. “Hey,” she said, when Damini answered.

“Hey yourself, boss. What do you need?”

Ferron released the pedestrial back into the city pool. It scurried off, probably already summoned to the next call. Ferron had used her override to requisition it. She tried to feel guilty, but she was already late in attending on her mother—and she’d ignored two more messages in the intervening time. It was probably too late to prevent bloodshed, but there was something to be said for getting the inevitable over with.

“Dig me up everything you can on today’s vic, would you? Dexter Coffin, American by birth, employed at BioShell. As far back as you can, any tracks he may have left under any name or handle.”

“Childhood dental records and juvenile posts on the Candyland message boards,” Damini said cheerfully. “Got it. I’ll stick it in Doyle when it’s done.”

“Ping me, too? Even if it’s late? I’m upped.”

“So will I be,” Damini answered. “This could take a while. Anything else?”

“Not unless you have a cure for families.”

“Hah,” said the archinformist. “Everybody talking, and nobody hears a damned thing anybody else has to say. I’d retire on the proceeds. All right, check in later.” She vanished just as Ferron reached the aptblock lobby.

It was after dinner, but half the family was hanging around in the common areas, watching the news or playing games while pretending to ignore it. Ferron knew it was useless to try sneaking past the synthetic marble-floored chambers with their charpoys and cushions, the corners lush with foliage. Attempted stealth would only encourage them to detain her longer.

Dr. Rao’s information about the prime number progression had leaked beyond scientific circles—or been released—and an endless succession of talking heads were analyzing it in less nuanced terms than he’d managed. The older cousins asked Ferron if she’d heard the news about the star; two sisters and an uncle told her that her mother had been looking for her. All the nieces and nephews and small cousins wanted to look at the cat.

Ferron’s aging mausi gave her five minutes on how a little cosmetic surgery would make her much more attractive on the marriage market, and shouldn’t she consider lightening that mahogany-brown skin to a “prettier” wheatish complexion? A plate of idlis and sambaar appeared as if by magic in mausi’s hand, and from there transferred to Ferron’s. “And how are you ever going to catch a man if you’re so skinny?”

It took Ferron twenty minutes to maneuver into her own small flat, which was still set for sleeping from three nights before. Smoke came trotting to see her, a petite-footed drift of the softest silver-and-charcoal fur imaginable, from which emerged a laughing triangular face set with eyes like black jewels. His ancestors has been foxes farmed for fur in Russia. Researchers had experimented on them, breeding for docility. It turned out it only took a few generations to turn a wild animal into a housepet.

Ferron was a little uneasy with the ethics of all that. But it hadn’t stopped her from adopting Smoke when her mother lost interest in him. Foxes weren’t the hot trend anymore; the fashion was for engineered cats and lemurs—and skinpets, among those who wanted to look daring.

Having rushed home, she was now possessed by the intense desire to delay the inevitable. She set Chairman Miaow’s carrier on top of the cabinets and took Smoke out into the sunfarm for a few minutes of exercise in the relative cool of night. When he’d chased parrots in circles for a bit, she brought him back in, cleaned his litterbox, and stripped off her sweat-stiff uniform to have a shower. She was washing her hair when she realized that she had no idea what to feed Chairman Miaow. Maybe she could eat fox food? Ferron would have to figure out some way to segregate part of the flat for her . . . at least until she was sure that Smoke didn’t think a parrot-cat would make a nice midnight snack.

She dressed in off-duty clothes—barefoot in a salwar kameez—and made an attempt at setting her furniture to segregate her flat. Before she left, she placed offering packets of kumkum and a few marigolds from the patio boxes in the tray before her idol of Varuna, the god of agreement, order, and the law.

Ferron didn’t bother drying her hair before she presented herself at her mother’s door. If she left it down, the heat would see to that soon enough.

Madhuvanthi did not rise to admit Ferron herself, as she was no longer capable. The door just slid open to Ferron’s presence. As Ferron stepped inside, she saw mostly that the rug needed watering, and that the chaise her mother reclined on needed to be reset—it was sagging at the edges from too long in one shape. She wore not just the usual noninvasive modern interface—contacts, skin conductivity and brain activity sensors, the invisibly fine wires that lay along the skin and detected nerve impulses and muscle micromovements—but a full immersion suit.

Not for the first time, Ferron contemplated skinning out the thing’s bulky, padded outline, and looking at her mother the way she wanted to see her. But that would be dishonest. Ferron was here to face her problems, not pretend their nonexistence.

“Hello, Mother,” Ferron said.

There was no answer.

Ferron sent a text message. Hello, Mother. You wanted to see me?

The pause was long, but not as long as it could have been. You’re late, Tamanna. I’ve been trying to reach you all day. I’m in the middle of a run right now.

I’m sorry, Ferron said. Someone was murdered.

Text, thank all the gods, sucked out the defensive sarcasm that would have filled up a spoken word. She fiddled the bangles she couldn’t wear on duty, just to hear the glass chime.

She could feel her mother’s attention elsewhere, her distaste at having the unpleasant realities of Ferron’s job forced upon her. That attention would focus on anything but Ferron, for as long as Ferron waited for it. It was a contest of wills, and Ferron always lost. Mother—

Her mother pushed up the faceplate on the VR helmet and sat up abruptly. “Bloody hell,” she said. “Got killed. That’ll teach me to do two things at once. Look, about the archives—”

“Mother,” Ferron said, “I can’t. I don’t have any more savings to give you.”

Madhuvanthi said, “They’ll kill me.”

They’ll de-archive your virtual history, Ferron thought, but she had the sense to hold her tongue.

After her silence dragged on for fifteen seconds or so, Madhuvanthi said, “Sell the fox.”

“He’s mine,” Ferron said. “I’m not selling him. Mother, you really need to come out of your make-believe world once in a while—”

Her mother pulled the collar of the VR suit open so she could ruffle the fur of the violet-and-teal striped skinpet nestled up to the warmth of her throat. It humped in response, probably vibrating with a comforting purr. Ferron tried not to judge, but the idea of parasitic pets, no matter how fluffy and colorful, made her skin crawl.

Ferron’s mother said, “Make-believe. And your world isn’t?”

“Mother—”

“Come in and see my world sometime before you judge it.”

“I’ve seen your world,” Ferron said. “I used to live there, remember? All the time, with you. Now I live out here, and you can too.”

Madhuvanthi’s glare would have seemed blistering even in the rainy season. “I’m your mother. You will obey me.”

Everything inside Ferron demanded she answer yes. Hard-wired, that duty. Planned for. Programmed.

Ferron raised her right hand. “Can’t we get some dinner and—”

Madhuvanthi sniffed and closed the faceplate again. And that was the end of the interview.

Rightminding or not, the cool wings of hypomania or not, Ferron’s heart was pounding and her fresh clothing felt sticky again already. She turned and left.

When she got back to her own flat, the first thing she noticed was her makeshift wall of furniture partially disassembled, a chair/shelf knocked sideways, the disconnected and overturned table top now fallen flat.

“Oh, no.” Her heart rose into her throat. She rushed inside, the door forgotten—

Atop a heap of cushions lay Smoke, proud and smug. And against his soft gray side, his fluffy tail flipped over her like a blanket, curled Chairman Miaow, her golden eyes squeezed closed in pleasure.

“Mine!” she said definitively, raising her head.

“I guess so,” Ferron answered. She shut the door and went to pour herself a drink while she started sorting through Indrapramit’s latest crop of interviews.

According to everything Indrapramit had learned, Coffin was quiet. He kept to himself, but he was always willing and enthusiastic when it came to discussing his work. His closest companion was the cat—Ferron looked down at Chairman Miaow, who had rearranged herself to take advantage of the warm valley in the bed between Smoke and Ferron’s thigh—and the cat was something of a neighborhood celebrity, riding on Coffin’s shoulder when he took his exercise.

All in all, a typical portrait of a typical, lonely man who didn’t let anyone get too close.

“Maybe there will be more in the archinformation,” she said, and went back to Doyle’s pattern algorithm results one more damn time.

After performing her evening practice of kalari payat—first time in three days—Ferron set her furniture for bed and retired to it with her files. She wasn’t expecting Indrapramit to show up at her flat, but sometime around two in the morning, the lobby door discreetly let her know she had a visitor. Of course, he knew she’d upped, and since he had no family and lived in a thin-walled dormitory room, he’d need a quiet place to camp out and work at this hour of the night. There wasn’t a lot of productive interviewing you could do when all the subjects were asleep—at least, not until they had somebody dead to rights enough to take them down to the jail for interrogation.

His coming to her home meant every other resident the block would know, and Ferron could look forward to a morning of being quizzed by aunties while she tried to cram her idlis down. It didn’t matter that Indrapramit was a colleague, and she was his superior. At her age, any sign of male interest brought unEmployed relatives with too much time on their hands swarming.

Still, she admitted him. Then she extricated herself from between the fox and the cat, wrapped her bathrobe around herself, stomped into her slippers, and headed out to meet him in the hall. At least keeping their conference to the public areas would limit knowing glances later.

He’d upped too. She could tell by the bounce in his step and his slightly wild focus. And the fact that he was dropping by for a visit in the dark of the morning.

Lowering her voice so she wouldn’t trouble her neighbors, Ferron said, “Something too good to mail?”

“An interesting potential complication.”

She gestured to the glass doors leading out to the sunfarm. He followed her, his boots somehow still as bright as they’d been that morning. He must polish them in an anti-static gloss.

She kicked off her slippers and padded barefoot over the threshold, making sure to silence the alarm first. The suntrees were furled for the night, their leaves rolled into funnels that channeled condensation to the roots. There was even a bit of chill in the air.

Ferron breathed in gratefully, wiggling her toes in the cultivated earth. “Let’s go up to the roof.”

Without a word, Indrapramit followed her up the winding openwork stair hung with bougainvillea, barren and thorny now in the dry season but a riot of color and greenery once the rains returned. The interior walls of the aptblock were mossy and thickly planted with coriander and other Ayurvedic herbs. Ferron broke off a bitter leaf of fenugreek to nibble as they climbed.

At the landing, she stepped aside and tilted her head back, peering up through the potted neem and lemon and mango trees at the stars beyond. A dark hunched shape in the branches of a pomegranate startled her until she realized it was the outline of one of the house monkeys, huddled in sleep. She wondered if she could see the Andromeda Galaxy from here at this time of year. Checking a skymap, she learned that it would be visible—but probably low on the horizon, and not without a telescope in these light-polluted times. You’d have better odds of finding it than a hundred years ago, though, when you’d barely have been able to glimpse the brightest stars. The Heavenly Ganges spilled across the darkness like sequins sewn at random on an indigo veil, and a crooked fragment of moon rode high. She breathed in deep and stepped onto the grass and herbs of the roof garden. A creeping mint snagged at her toes, sending its pungency wide.

“So what’s the big news?”

“We’re not the only ones asking questions about Dexter Coffin.” Indrapramit flashed her a video clip of a pale-skinned woman with red hair bleached ginger by the sun and a crop of freckles not even the gloss of sunblock across her cheeks could keep down. She was broad-shouldered and looked capable, and the ID codes running across the feed under her image told Ferron she carried a warrant card and a stun pistol.

“Contract cop?” she said, sympathetically.

“I’m fine,” he said, before she could ask. He spread his first two fingers opposite his thumb and pressed each end of the V beneath his collarbones, a new nervous gesture. “I got my Chicago block maintained last week, and the reprogramming is holding. I’d tell you if I was triggering. I know that not every contract cop is going to decompensate and start a massacre.”

A massacre Indrapramit had stopped the hard way, it happened. “Let me know what you need,” she said, because everything else she could have said would sound like a vote of non-confidence.

“Thanks,” he said. “How’d it go with your mother?”

“Gah,” she said. “I think I need a needle. So what’s the contractor asking? And who’s employing her?”

“Here’s the interesting thing, boss. She’s an American too.”

“She couldn’t have made it here this fast. Not unless she started before he died—”

“No,” he said. “She’s an expat, a former New York homicide detective. Her handle is Morganti. She lives in Hongasandra, and she does a lot of work for American and Canadian police departments. Licensed and bonded, and she seems to have a very good rep.”

“Who’s she under contract to now?”

“Warrant card says Honolulu.”

“Huh.” Ferron kept her eyes on the stars, and the dark leaves blowing before them. “Top-tier distributed policing, then. Is it a skip trace?”

“You think he was on the run, and whoever he was on the run from finally caught up with him?”

“It’s a working theory.” She shrugged. “Damini’s supposed to be calling with some background any minute now. Actually, I think I’ll check in with her. She’s late, and I have to file a twenty-four-hour report with the Inspector in the morning.”

With a twitch of her attention, she spun a bug out to Damini and conferenced Indrapramit in.

The archinformist answered immediately. “Sorry, boss,” she said. “I know I’m slow, but I’m still trying to put together a complete picture here. Your dead guy buried his past pretty thoroughly. I can give you a preliminary, though, with the caveat that it’s subject to change.”

“Squirt,” Ferron said, opening her firewall to the data. It came in fast and hard, and there seemed to be kilometers of it unrolling into her feed like an endless bolt of silk. “Oh, dear . . . ”

“I know, I know. Do you want the executive summary? Even if it’s also a work in progress? Okay. First up, nobody other than Coffin was in his flat that night, according to netfeed tracking.”

“The other night upon the stair,” Ferron said, “I met a man who wasn’t there.”

Damini blew her bangs out of her eyes. “So either nobody came in, or whoever did is a good enough hacker to eradicate every trace of her presence. Which is not a common thing.”

“Gotcha. What else?”

“Doyle picked out a partial pattern in your feed. Two power cuts in places associated with the crime. It started looking for more, and it identified a series of brownouts over the course of a year or so, all in locations with some connection to Dr. Coffin. Better yet, Doyle identified the cause.”

“I promise I’m holding my breath,” Indrapramit said.

“Then how is it you are talking? Anyway, it’s a smart virus in the power grids. It’s draining power off the lab and household sunfarms at irregular intervals. That power is being routed to a series of chargeable batteries in Coffin’s lab space. Except Coffin didn’t purchase order the batteries.”

“Nnebuogor,” Ferron guessed.

“Two points,” said Damini. “It’s a stretch, but she could have come in to the office today specifically to see if the cops stopped by.”

“She could have . . . ” Indrapramit said dubiously. “You think she killed him because he found out she was stealing power? For what purpose?”

“I’ll get on her email and media,” Damini said. “So here’s my speculation: imagine this utility virus, spreading through the smart grid from aptblock to aptblock. To commit the murder—nobody had to be in the room with him, not if his four-dimensional manipulators were within range of him. Right? You’d just override whatever safety protocols there were, and . . . boom. Or squish, if you prefer.”

Ferron winced. She didn’t. Prefer, that was. “Any sign that the manipulators were interfered with?”

“Memory wiped,” Damini said. “Just like the cat. Oh, and the other thing I found out. Dexter Coffin is not our boy’s first identity. It’s more like his third, if my linguistic and semantic parsers are right about the web content they’re picking up. I’ve got Conan on it too—” Conan was another of the department’s expert systems “—and I’m going to go over a selection by hand. But it seems like our decedent had reinvented himself whenever he got into professional trouble, which he did a lot. He had unpopular opinions, and he wasn’t shy about sharing them with the net. So he’d make the community too hot to handle and then come back as his own sockpuppet—new look, new address, new handle. Severing all ties to what he was before. I’ve managed to get a real fix on his last identity, though—”

Indrapramit leaned forward, folding his arms against the chill. “How do you do that? He works in a specialized—a rarified—field. I’d guess everybody in it knows each other, at least by reputation. Just how much did he change his appearance?”

“Well,” Damini said, “he used to look like this. He must have used some rightminding tactics to change elements of his personality, too. Just not the salient ones. A real chameleon, your arsehole.”

She picked a still image out of the datastream and flung it up. Ferron glanced at Indrapramit, whose rakish eyebrows were climbing up his forehead. An East Asian with long, glossy dark hair, who appeared to stand about six inches taller than Dr. Coffin, floated at the center of her perceptions, smiling benevolently.

“Madam, saab,” Damini said. “May I present Dr. Jessica Fang.”

“Well,” Ferron said, after a pause of moderate length. “That takes a significant investment.” She thought of Aristotle: As the condition of the mind alters, so too alters the condition of the body, and likewise, as the condition of the body alters, so too alters the condition of the mind.

Indrapramit said, “He has a taste for evocative handles. Any idea why the vanishing act?”

“I’m working on it,” Damini said.

“I’ve got a better idea,” said Ferron. “Why don’t we ask Detective Morganti?”

Indrapramit steepled his fingers. “Boss. . . . ”

“I’ll hear it,” Ferron said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s crazy.”

“We’ve been totally sidetracked by the cat issue. Because Chairman Miaow has to be Niranjana, right? Because a clone would have expressed the genes for those markings differently. But she can’t be Niranjana, because she’s not wiped: she’s factory-new.”

“Right,” Ferron said cautiously.

“So.” Indrapramit was enjoying his dramatic moment. “If a person can have cosmetic surgery, why not a parrot-cat?”

“Chairman Miaow?” Ferron called, as she led Indrapramit into her flat. They needed tea to shake off the early morning chill, and she was beyond caring what the neighbors thought. She needed a clean uniform, too.

“Miaow,” said Chairman Miaow, from inside the kitchen cupboard.

“Oh, dear.” Indrapamit followed Ferron in. Smoke sat demurely in the middle of the floor, tail fluffed over his toes, the picture of innocence. Ferron pulled wide the cabinet door, which already stood ten inches ajar. There was Chairman Miaow, purring, a shredded packet of tunafish spreading dribbles of greasy water across the cupboard floor.

She licked her chops ostentatiously and jumped down to the sink lip, where she balanced as preciously as she had in Coffin’s flat.

“Cat,” Ferron said. She thought over the next few things she wanted to say, and remembered that she was speaking to a parrot-cat. “Don’t think you’ve gotten away with anything. The fox is getting the rest of that.”

“Fox food is icky,” the cat said. “Also, not enough taurine.”

“Huh,” Ferron said. She looked over at Indrapramit.

He looked back. “I guess she’s learning to talk.”

They had no problem finding Detective Morganti. The redheaded American woman arrived at Ferron’s aptblock with the first rays of sunlight stroking the vertical farms along its flanks. She had been sitting on the bench beside the door, reading something on her screen, but she looked up and stood as Ferron and Indrapramit exited.

“Sub-Inspector Ferron, I presume? And Constable Indrapramit, how nice to see you again.”

Ferron shook her hand. She was even more imposing in person, tall and broad-chested, with the shoulders of a cartoon superhuman. She didn’t squeeze.

Morganti continued, “I understand you’re the detective of record on the Coffin case.”

“Walk with us,” Ferron said. “There’s a nice French coffee shop on the way to the Metro.”

It had shaded awnings and a courtyard, and they were seated and served within minutes. Ferron amused herself by pushing the crumbs of her pastry around on the plate while they talked. Occasionally, she broke a piece off and tucked it into her mouth, washing buttery flakes down with thick, cardamom-scented brew.

“So,” she said after a few moments, “what did Jessica Fang do in Honolulu? It’s not just the flame wars, I take it. And there’s no warrant for her that we could find.”

Morganti’s eyes rose. “Very efficient.”

“Thank you.” Ferron tipped her head to Indrapramit. “Mostly his work, and that of my archinformist.”

Morganti smiled; Indrapramit nodded silently. Then Morganti said, “She is believed to have been responsible for embezzling almost three million ConDollars from her former employer, eleven years ago in the Hawaiian Islands.”

“That’d pay for a lot of identity-changing.”

“Indeed.”

“But they can’t prove it.”

“If they could, Honolulu PD would have pulled a warrant and virtually extradited her. Him. I was contracted to look into the case ten days ago—” She tore off a piece of a cheese croissant and chewed it thoughtfully. “It took the skip trace this long to locate her. Him.”

“Did she do it?”

“Hell yes.” She grinned like the American she was. “The question is—well, okay, I realize the murder is your jurisdiction, but I don’t get paid unless I either close the case or eliminate my suspect—and I get a bonus if I recover any of the stolen property. Now, ‘killed by person or persons unknown,’ is a perfectly acceptable outcome as far as the City of Honolulu is concerned, with the added benefit that the State of Hawaii doesn’t have to pay Bengaluru to incarcerate him. So I need to know, one cop to another, if the inside-out stiff is Dexter Coffin.”

“The DNA matches,” Ferron said. “I can tell you that in confidence. There will be a press release once we locate and notify his next of kin.”

“Understood,” Morganti said. “I’ll keep it under my hat. I’ll be filing recovery paperwork against the dead man’s assets in the amount of C$2,798,000 and change. I can give you the next of kin, by the way.”

The data came in a squirt. Daughter, Maui. Dr. Fang-Coffin really had severed all ties.

“Understood,” Ferron echoed. She smiled when she caught herself. She liked this woman. “You realize we have to treat you as a suspect, given your financial motive.”

“Of course,” Morganti said. “I’m bonded, and I’ll be happy to come in for an interrogation under Truth.”

“That will make things easier, madam,” Ferron said.

Morganti turned her coffee cup in its saucer. “Now then. What can I do to help you clear your homicide?”

Indrapramit shifted uncomfortably on the bench.

“What did Jessica Fang do, exactly?” Ferron had Damini’s data in her case buffer. She could use what Morganti told her to judge the contract officer’s knowledge and sincerity.

“In addition to the embezzling? Accused of stealing research and passing it off as her own,” Morganti said. “Also, she was—well, she was just kind of an asshole on the net, frankly. Running down colleagues, dismissing their work, aggrandizing her own. She was good, truthfully. But nobody’s that good.”

“Would someone have followed him here for personal reasons?”

“As you may have gathered, this guy was not diligent about his rightminding,” Morganti said. She pushed a handful of hair behind her shoulder. “And he was a bit of a narcissist. Sociopath? Antisocial in some sort of atavistic way. Normal people don’t just . . . walk away from all their social connections because they made things a little hot on the net.”

Ferron thought of the distributed politics of her own workplace, the sniping and personality clashes. And her mother, not so much alone on an electronic Serengeti as haunting the virtual pillared palaces of an Egypt that never was.

“No,” she said.

Morganti said, “Most people find ways to cope with that. Most people don’t burn themselves as badly as Jessica Fang did, though.”

“I see.” Ferron wished badly for sparkling water in place of the syrupy coffee. “You’ve been running down Coffin’s finances, then? Can you share that information?”

Morganti said that he had liquidated a lot of hidden assets a week ago, about two days after she took his case. “It was before I made contact with him, but it’s possible he had Jessica Fang flagged for searches—or he had a contact in Honolulu who let him know when the skip trace paid off. He was getting ready to run again. How does that sound?”

Ferron sighed and sat back in her chair. “Fabulous. It sounds completely fabulous. I don’t suppose you have any insight into who he might have been expecting for dinner? Or how whoever killed him might have gotten out of the room afterwards when it was all locked up tight on Coffin’s override?”

Morganti shrugged. “He didn’t have any close friends or romantic relationships. Always too aware that he was living in hiding, I’d guess. Sometimes he entertained co-workers, but I’ve checked with them all, and none admits having gone to see him that night.”

“Sub-Inspector,” Indrapramit said gently. “The time.”

“Bugger,” Ferron said, registering it. “Morning roll call. Catch up with you later?”

“Absolutely,” Morganti said. “As I said before, I’m just concerned with clearing my embezzling case. I’m always happy to help a sister officer out on a murder.”

And butter up the local police, Ferron thought.

Morganti said, “One thing that won’t change. Fang was obsessed with astronomy.”

“There were deep-space images on Coffin’s walls,” Ferron said.

Indrapramit said, “And he had offered his Ganesha an indigo scarf. I wonder if the color symbolized something astronomical to him.”

“Indigo,” Morganti said. “Isn’t it funny that we have a separate word for dark blue?”

Ferron felt the pedantry welling up, and couldn’t quite stopper it. “Did you know that all over the world, dark blue and black are often named with the same word? Possibly because of the color of the night sky. And that the ancient Greeks did not have a particular name for the color blue? Thus their seas were famously ‘wine-dark.’ But in Hindu tradition, the color blue has a special significance: it is the color of Vishnu’s skin, and Krishna is nicknamed Sunil, ‘dark blue.’ The color also implies that which is all-encompassing, as in the sky.”

She thought of something slightly more obscure. “Also, that color is the color of Shani Bhagavan, who is one of the deities associated with Uttara Bhadrapada. Which we’ve been hearing a lot about lately. It might indeed have had a lot of significance to Dr. Fang-Coffin.”

Morganti, eyebrows drawn together in confusion, looked to Indrapramit for salvation. “Saab? Uttara Bhadrapada?”

Indrapramit said, “Andromeda.”

Morganti excused herself as Indrapramit and Ferron prepared to check in to their virtual office.

While Ferron organized her files and her report, Indrapramit finished his coffee. “We need to check inbound ships from, or carrying passengers from, America. Honolulu isn’t as prohibitive as, say, Chicago.”

They’d worked together long enough that half the conversational shifts didn’t need to be recorded. “Just in case somebody did come here to kill him. Well, there can’t be that many passages, right?”

“I’ll get Damini after it,” he said. “After roll—”

Roll call made her avoidant. There would be reports, politics, wrangling, and a succession of wastes of time as people tried to prove that their cases were more worthy of resources than other cases.

She pinched her temples. At least the coffee here was good. “Right. Telepresencing . . . now.”

After the morning meeting, they ordered another round of coffees, and Ferron pulled up the sandwich menu and eyed it. There was no telling when they’d have time for lunch.

She’d grab something after the next of kin notification. If she was still hungry when they were done.

Normally, in the case of a next of kin so geographically distant, Bengaluru Police would arrange for an officer with local jurisdiction to make the call. But the Lahaina Police Department had been unable to raise Jessica Fang’s daughter on a home visit, and a little cursory research had revealed that she was unEmployed and very nearly a permanent resident of Artificial Reality.

Just going by her handle, Jessica Fang’s daughter on Maui didn’t have a lot of professional aspirations. Ferron and Indrapramit had to go virtual and pull on avatars to meet her: Skooter0 didn’t seem to come out of her virtual worlds for anything other than biologically unavoidable crash cycles. Since they were on duty, Ferron and Indrapramit’s avatars were the standard-issue blanks provided by Bengaluru Police, their virtual uniforms sharply pressed, their virtual faces expressionless and identical.

It wasn’t the warm and personal touch you would hope for, Ferron thought, when somebody was coming to tell you your mother had been murdered.

“Why don’t you take point on this one?” she said.

Indrapramit snorted. “Be sure to mention my leadership qualities in my next performance review.”

They left their bodies holding down those same café chairs and waded through the first few tiers of advertisements—get-rich-quick schemes, Bollywood starlets, and pop star scandal sheets, until they got into the American feed, and then it was get-rich-quick schemes, Hollywood starlets, pornography, and Congressional scandal sheets—until they linked up with the law enforcement priority channel. Ferron checked the address and led Indrapramit into a massively multiplayer Artificial Reality that showed real-time activity through Skooter0’s system identity number. Once provided with the next-of-kin’s handle, Damini had sent along a selection of key codes and overrides that got them through the pay wall with ease.

They didn’t need a warrant for this. It was just a courtesy call.

Skooter0’s preferred hangout was a ‘historical’ AR, which meant in theory that it reflected the pre-twenty-first-century world, and in practice that it was a muddled-up stew of cowboys, ninjas, pinstripe suit mobsters, medieval knights, cavaliers, Mongols, and wild west gunslingers. There were Macedonians, Mauryans, African gunrunners, French resistance fighters and Nazis, all running around together with samurai and Shaolin monks.

Indrapramit’s avatar checked a beacon—a glowing green needle floating just above his nonexistent wrist. The directional signal led them through a space meant to evoke an antediluvian ice cave, in which about two dozen people all dressed as different incarnations of the late-twentieth-century pop star David Bowie were working themselves into a martial frenzy as they prepared to go forth and do virtual battle with some rival clade of Emulators. Ferron eyed a Diamond Dog who was being dressed in glittering armor by a pair of Thin White Dukes and was glad of the expressionless surface of her uniform avatar.

She knew what they were supposed to be because she pattern-matched from the web. The music was quaint, but pretty good. The costumes . . . she winced.

Well, it was probably a better way to deal with antisocial aggression than taking it out on your spouse.

Indrapramit walked on, eyes front—not that you needed eyes to see what was going on in here.

At the far end of the ice cave, four seventh-century Norse dwarves delved a staircase out of stone, leading endlessly down. Heat rolled up from the depths. The virtual workmanship was astounding. Ferron and Indrapramit moved past, hiding their admiring glances. Just as much skill went into creating AR beauty as if it were stone.

The ice cave gave way to a forest glade floored in mossy, irregular slates. Set about on those were curved, transparent tables set for chess, go, mancala, cribbage, and similar strategy games. Most of the tables were occupied by pairs of players, and some had drawn observers as well.

Indrapramit followed his needle—and Ferron followed Indrapramit—to a table where a unicorn and a sasquatch were playing a game involving rows of transparent red and yellow stones laid out on a grid according to rules that Ferron did not comprehend. The sasquatch looked up as they stopped beside the table. The unicorn—glossy black, with a pearly, shimmering horn and a glowing amber stone pinched between the halves of her cloven hoof—was focused on her next move.

The arrow pointed squarely between her enormous, lambent golden eyes.

Ferron cleared her throat.

“Yes, officers?” the sasquatch said. He scratched the top of his head. The hair was particularly silky, and flowed around his long hooked fingernails.

“I’m afraid we need to speak to your friend,” Indrapramit said.

“She’s skinning you out,” the sasquatch said. “Unless you have a warrant—”

“We have an override,” Ferron said, and used it as soon as she felt Indrapramit’s assent.

The unicorn’s head came up, a shudder running the length of her body and setting her silvery mane to swaying. In a brittle voice, she said, “I’d like to report a glitch.”

“It’s not a glitch,” Indrapramit said. He identified himself and Ferron and said, “Are you Skooter0?”

“Yeah,” she said. The horn glittered dangerously. “I haven’t broken any laws in India.”

The sasquatch stood up discreetly and backed away.

“It is my unfortunate duty,” Indrapramit continued, “to inform you of the murder of your mother, Dr. Jessica Fang, a.k.a. Dr. Dexter Coffin.”

The unicorn blinked iridescent lashes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re talking about something I have killfiled. I won’t be able to hear you until you stop.”

Indrapramit’s avatar didn’t look at Ferron, but she felt his request for help. She stepped forward and keyed a top-level override. “You will hear us,” she said to the unicorn. “I am sorry for the intrusion, but we are legally bound to inform you that your mother, Dr. Jessica Fang, a.k.a. Dr. Dexter Coffin, has been murdered.”

The unicorn’s lip curled in a snarl. “Good. I’m glad.”

Ferron stepped back. It was about the response she had expected.

“She made me,” the unicorn said. “That doesn’t make her my mother. Is there anything else you’re legally bound to inform me of?”

“No,” Indrapramit said.

“Then get the hell out.” The unicorn set her amber gaming stone down on the grid. A golden glow encompassed it and its neighbors. “I win.”

“Warehoused,” Indrapramit said with distaste, back in his own body and nibbling a slice of quiche. “And happy about it.”

Ferron had a pressed sandwich of vegetables, tapenade, cheeses, and some elaborate and incomprehensible European charcuterie made of smoked vatted protein. It was delicious, in a totally exotic sort of way. “Would it be better if she were miserable and unfulfilled?”

He made a noise of discontentment and speared a bite of spinach and egg.

Ferron knew her combativeness was really all about her mother, not Fang/Coffin’s adult and avoidant daughter. Maybe it was the last remnants of Upping, but she couldn’t stop herself from saying, “What she’s doing is not so different from what our brains do naturally, except now it’s by tech/filters rather than prejudice and neurology.”

Indrapramit changed the subject. “Let’s make a virtual tour of the scene.” As an icon blinked in Ferron’s attention space, he added, “Oh, hey. Final autopsy report.”

“Something from Damini, too,” Ferron said. It had a priority code on it. She stepped into a artificial reality simulation of Coffin’s apartment as she opened the contact. The thrill of the chase rose through the fog of her fading hypomania. Upping didn’t seem to stick as well as it had when she was younger, and the crashes came harder now—but real, old-fashioned adrenaline was the cure for everything.

“Ferron,” Ferron said, frowning down at the browned patches on Coffin’s virtual rug. Indrapramit rezzed into the conference a heartbeat later. “Damini, what do the depths of the net reveal?”

“Jackpot,” Damini said. “Did you get a chance to look at the autopsy report yet?”

“We just got done with the next of kin,” Ferron said. “You’re fast—I just saw the icon.”

“Short form,” Damini said, “is that’s not Dexter Coffin.”

Ferron’s avatar made a slow circuit around the perimeter of the virtual murder scene. “There was a DNA match. Damini, we just told his daughter he was murdered.”

Indrapramit, more practical, put down his fork in meatspace. His AR avatar mimicked the motion with an empty hand. “So who is it?”

“Nobody,” Damini said. She leaned back, satisfied. “The medical examiner says it’s topologically impossible to turn somebody inside out like that. It’s vatted, whatever it is. A grown object, nominally alive, cloned from Dexter Coffin’s tissue. But it’s not Dexter Coffin. I mean, think about it—what organ would that be, exactly?”

“Cloned.” In meatspace, Ferron picked a puff of hyacinth-blue fur off her uniform sleeve. She held it up where Indrapramit could see it.

His eyes widened. “Yes,” he said. “What about the patterns, though?”

“Do I look like a bioengineer to you? Indrapramit,” Ferron said thoughtfully. “Does this crime scene look staged to you?”

He frowned. “Maybe.”

“Damini,” Ferron asked, “how’d you do with Dr. Coffin’s files? And Dr. Nnebuogar’s files?”

“There’s nothing useful in Coffin’s email except some terse exchanges with Dr. Nnebuogar very similar in tone to the Jessica Fang papers. Nnebuogar was warning Coffin off her research. But there were no death threats, no love letters, no child support demands.”

“Anything he was interested in?”

“That star,” Damini said. “The one that’s going nova or whatever. He’s been following it for a couple of weeks now, before the press release hit the mainstream feeds. Nnebuogar’s logins support the idea that she’s behind the utility virus, by the way.”

“Logins can be spoofed.”

“So they can,” Damini agreed.

Ferron peeled her sandwich open and frowned down at the vatted charcuterie. It all looked a lot less appealing now. “Nobody came to Coffin’s flat. And it turns out the stiff wasn’t a stiff after all. So Coffin went somewhere else, after making preparations to flee and then abandoning them.”

“And the crime scene was staged,” Indrapramit said.

“This is interesting,” Damini said. “Coffin hadn’t been to the office in a week.”

“Since about when Morganti started investigating him. Or when he might have become aware that she was on his trail.”

Ferron said something sharp and self-critical and radically unprofessional. And then she said, “I’m an idiot. Leakage.”

“Leakage?” Damini asked. “You mean like when people can’t stop talking about the crime they actually committed, or the person you’re not supposed to know they’re having an affair with?”

An urgent icon from Ferron’s mausi Sandhya—the responsible auntie, not the fussy auntie—blinked insistently at the edge of her awareness. Oh Gods, what now?

“Exactly like that,” Ferron said. “Look, check on any hits for Coffin outside his flat in the past ten days. And I need confidential warrants for DNA analysis of the composters at the BioShell laboratory facility and also at Dr. Rao’s apartment.”

“You think Rao killed him?” Damini didn’t even try to hide her shock.

Blink, blink went the icon. Emergency. Code red. Your mother has gone beyond the pale, my dear. “Just pull the warrants. I want to see what we get before I commit to my theory.”

“Why?” Indrapramit asked.

Ferron sighed. “Because it’s crazy. That’s why. And see if you can get confidential access to Rao’s calendar files and email. I don’t want him to know you’re looking.”

“Wait right there,” Damini said. “Don’t touch a thing. I’ll be back before you know it.”

“Mother,” Ferron said to her mother’s lion-maned goddess of an avatar, “I’m sorry. Sandhya’s sorry. We’re all sorry. But we can’t let you go on like this.”

It was the hardest thing she’d ever said.

Her mother, wearing Sekhmet’s golden eyes, looked at Ferron’s avatar and curled a lip. Ferron had come in, not in a uniform avatar, but wearing the battle-scarred armor she used to play in when she was younger, when she and her mother would spend hours Atavistic. That was during her schooling, before she got interested in stopping—or at least avenging—real misery.

Was that fair? Her mother’s misery was real. So was that of Jessica Fang’s abandoned daughter. And this was a palliative—against being widowed, against being bedridden.

Madhuvanthi’s lip-curl slowly blossomed into a snarl. “Of course. You can let them destroy this. Take away everything I am. It’s not like it’s murder.”

“Mother,” Ferron said, “it’s not real.”

“If it isn’t,” her mother said, gesturing around the room, “what is, then? I made you. I gave you life. You owe me this. Sandhya said you came home with one of those new parrot cats. Where’d the money for that come from?”

“Chairman Miaow,” Ferron said, “is evidence. And reproduction is an ultimately sociopathic act, no matter what I owe you.”

Madhuvanthi sighed. “Daughter, come on one last run.”

“You’ll have your own memories of all this,” Ferron said. “What do you need the archive for?”

“Memory,” her mother scoffed. “What’s memory, Tamanna? What do you actually remember? Scraps, conflations. How does it compare to being able to relive?”

To relive it, Ferron thought, you’d have to have lived it in the first place. But even teetering on the edge of fatigue and crash, she had the sense to keep that to herself.

“Have you heard about the star?” she asked. Anything to change the subject. “The one the aliens are using to talk to us?”

“The light’s four million years old,” Madhuvanthi said. “They’re all dead. Look, there’s a new manifest synesthesia show. Roman and Egyptian. Something for both of us. If you won’t come on an adventure with me, will you at least come to an art show? I promise I’ll never ask you for archive money again. Just come to this one thing with me? And I promise I’ll prune my archive starting tomorrow.”

The lioness’s brow was wrinkled. Madhuvanthi’s voice was thin with defeat. There was no more money, and she knew it. But she couldn’t stop bargaining. And the art show was a concession, something that evoked the time they used to spend together, in these imaginary worlds.

“Ferron,” she said. Pleading. “Just let me do it myself.”

Ferron. They weren’t really communicating. Nothing was won. Her mother was doing what addicts always did when confronted—delaying, bargaining, buying time. But she’d call her daughter Ferron if it might buy her another twenty-four hours in her virtual paradise.

“I’ll come,” Ferron said. “But not until tonight. I have some work to do.”

“Boss. How did you know to look for that DNA?” Damini asked, when Ferron activated her icon.

“Tell me what you found,” Ferron countered.

“DNA in the BioShell composter that matches that of Chairman Miaow,” she said, “and therefore that of Dexter Coffin’s cat. And the composter of Rao’s building is just full of his DNA. Rao’s. Much, much more than you’d expect. Also, some of his email and calendar data has been purged. I’m attempting to reconstruct—”

“Have it for the chargesheet,” Ferron said. “I bet it’ll show he had a meeting with Coffin the night Coffin vanished.”

Dr. Rao lived not in an aptblock, even an upscale one, but in the Vertical City. Once Damini returned with the results of the warrants, Ferron got her paperwork in order for the visit. It was well after nightfall by the time she and Indrapramit, accompanied by Detective Morganti and four patrol officers, went to confront him.

They entered past shops and the vertical farm in the enormous tower’s atrium. The air smelled green and healthy, and even at this hour of the night, people moved in steady streams towards the dining areas, across lush green carpets.

A lift bore the police officers effortlessly upward, revealing the lights of Bengaluru spread out below through a transparent exterior wall. Ferron looked at Indrapramit and pursed her lips. He raised his eyebrows in reply. Conspicuous consumption. But they couldn’t very well hold it against Rao now.

They left the Morganti and the patrol officers covering the exit and presented themselves at Dr. Rao’s door.

“Open,” Ferron said formally, presenting her warrant. “In the name of the law.”

The door slid open, and Ferron and Indrapramit entered cautiously.

The flat’s resident must have triggered the door remotely, because he sat at his ease on furniture set as a chaise. A gray cat with red ear-tips crouched by his knee, rubbing the side of its face against his trousers.

“New!” said the cat. “New people! Namaskar! It’s almost time for tiffin.”

“Dexter Coffin,” Ferron said to the tall, thin man. “You are under arrest for the murder of Dr. Rao.”

As they entered the lift and allowed it to carry them down the external wall of the Vertical City, Coffin standing in restraints between two of the patrol officers, Morganti said, “So. If I understand this properly, you—Coffin—actually killed Rao to assume his identity? Because you knew you were well and truly burned this time?”

Not even a flicker of his eyes indicated that he’d heard her.

Morganti sighed and turned her attention to Ferron. “What gave you the clue?”

“The scotophobin,” Ferron said. Coffin’s cat, in her new livery of gray and red, miaowed plaintively in a carrier. “He didn’t have memory issues. He was using it to cram Rao’s life story and eccentricities so he wouldn’t trip himself up.”

Morganti asked, “But why liquidate his assets? Why not take them with him?” She glanced over her shoulder. “Pardon me for speaking about you as if you were a statue, Dr. Fang. But you’re doing such a good impression of one.”

It was Indrapramit who gestured at the Vertical City rising at their backs. “Rao wasn’t wanting for assets.”

Ferron nodded. “Would you have believed he was dead if you couldn’t find the money? Besides, if his debt—or some of it—was recovered, Honolulu would have less reason to keep looking for him.”

“So it was a misdirect. Like the frame job around Dr. Nnebuogar and the table set for two . . . ?”

Her voice trailed off as a stark blue-white light cast knife-edged shadows across her face. Something blazed in the night sky, something as stark and brilliant as a dawning sun—but cold, as cold as light can be. As cold as a reflection in a mirror.

Morganti squinted and shaded her eyes from the shine. “Is that a hydrogen bomb?”

“If it was,” Indrapramit said, “Your eyes would be melting.”

Coffin laughed, the first sound he’d made since he’d assented to understanding his rights. “It’s a supernova.”

He raised both wrists, bound together by the restraints, and pointed. “In the Andromeda Galaxy. See how low it is to the horizon? We’ll lose sight of it as soon as we’re in the shadow of that tower.”

“Al-Rahman,” Ferron whispered. The lift wall was darkening to a smoky shade and she could now look directly at the light. Low to the horizon, as Coffin had said. So bright it seemed to be visible as a sphere.

“Not that star. It was stable. Maybe a nearby one,” Coffin said. “Maybe they knew, and that’s why they were so desperate to tell us they were out there.”

“Could they have survived that?”

“Depends how close to Al-Rahman it was. The radiation—” Coffin shrugged in his restraints. “That’s probably what killed them.”

“God in heaven,” said Morganti.

Coffin cleared his throat. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Ferron craned her head back as the point source of the incredible radiance slipped behind a neighboring building. There was no scatter glow: the rays of light from the nova were parallel, and the shadow they entered uncompromising, black as a pool of ink.

Until this moment, she would have had to slip a skin over her perceptions to point to the Andromeda Galaxy in the sky. But now it seemed like the most important thing in the world that, two and a half million years away, somebody had shouted across the void before they died.

A strange elation filled her. Everybody talking, and nobody hears a damned thing anyone—even themselves—has to say.

“We’re here,” Ferron said to the ancient light that spilled across the sky and did not pierce the shadow into which she descended. As her colleagues turned and stared, she repeated the words like a mantra. “We’re here too! And we heard you.”

—for Asha Cat Srinivasan Shipman, and her family

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, January 2012.

Lighting Out

Ken MacLeod

Mother had got into the walls again. Constance Mukgafle kept an eye on her while scrabbling at the back of her desk drawer for the Norton. Her fingers closed around the grip and the trigger. She withdrew the piece slowly, nudging the drawer farther open with the heel of her hand. Then she whipped out the bell-muzzled device and leveled it at the face that had sketched itself in ripples in the paint of her study.

“Any last words, Mom?” she asked.

Constance lip-read frantic mouthings.

“Oh, sorry,” she said. She snapped her fingers a couple of times to turn the sound up. “What?”

“Don’t be so hasty,” her mother said. “I have a business proposition.”

“Again?” Constance thumbed the antivirus to max.

“No, really, this time it’s legit—”

“I’ve heard that one before, too.”

“You have?” A furrow appeared in the paint above the outlined eyes. “I don’t seem to have the memory.”

“You wouldn’t,” said Constance. “You’re a cunning sod when you’re all there. Where are you, by the way?”

“Jupiter orbit, I think,” said her mother. “I’m sorry I can’t be more specific.”

“Oh, come on,” Constance said, stung. “I wouldn’t try to get at you, even if I could.”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” said her mother. “I really don’t know where the rest of me is, but I do know it’s not because I expect you to murder me. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Constance, kicking herself for giving her mother that tiny moral victory. “So what’s the deal?”

“It’s in the Inner Station,” said her mother. “It’s very simple. The stuff people on the way out take with them is mostly of very little use when they get there. The stuff people on the way in arrive with is usually of very little use here. Each side would be better off with the other side’s stuff. You see the possibilities?”

“Oh, sure,” said Constance. “And you’re telling me nobody else has? In all this time?”

“Of course they have,” said her mother. “There’s a whole bazaar out there of swaps and marts and so forth. The point is that nobody’s doing it properly, to get the best value for the goods. Some of the stuff coming down really is worth something here, and all too often it just goes back up the tube again.”

“Wait a minute.” Constance tried to recall her last economics course. “Maybe it’s not worthwhile for anybody to try.”

“You’re absolutely right,” said her mother. “For most business models, it isn’t. But for a very young person with very low costs, and with instant access—well, light-speed access—to a very old person, someone with centuries of experience, there’s money to be made hand over fist.”

“What’s in it for you?”

“Apart from helping my daughter find her feet?” Her mother looked hurt. “Well, there’s always the chance of something really big coming down the tube. Usable tech, you know? We’d have first dibs on it—and a research and marketing apparatus already in place.”

Constance thought about it. The old woman was undoubtedly up to something, but going to the Inner Station sounded exciting, the opportunity seemed real, and what did she have to lose?

“All right,” she said. “Talk to my agent.”

She fingered a card from her pocket with her free hand and downloaded her mother from the wall.

“You in?” she asked.

“Yes,” came a voice from the card.

The image on the wall gave a convincing rendition of a nod, and closed its eyes.

“Goodbye, Mom,” said Constance, and squeezed the trigger.

She stood there for a while, staring at the now smooth paint after the brute force of the electromagnetic pulse, and the more subtle ferocity of the antivirus routines transmitted immediately after it, had done their work. As always on these occasions, she wondered what she had really done. Of course she hadn’t killed her mother. Her mother, allegedly in Jupiter orbit, was very much alive. Even the partial copy of her mother’s brain patterns that had infiltrated the intelligent paint was itself, no doubt this very second, sitting down for a coffee and a chat with the artificial intelligence agent in the virtual spaces of Constance’s business card. At least, a copy of it was. But the copy that had been in the walls was gone—she hoped. And it had been an intelligent, self-aware being, a person as real as herself. The copy had expected nothing but a brief existence, but if it had been transferred to some other hardware—a robot or a blank brain in a cloned body—it could have had a long one. It could have wandered off and lived a full and interesting life.

On the other hand, if all copies and partials were left in existence, and helped to independence, the whole Solar System would soon be overrun with them. Such things had happened, now and again over the centuries. Habitats, planets, sometimes entire systems transformed themselves into high-density information economies, which accelerated away from the rest of civilization as more and more of the minds within them were minds thinking a million times faster than a human brain. So far, they’d always exhausted themselves within five years or so. It was known as a fast burn. Preventing this was generally considered a good idea, and that meant deleting copies. Constance knew that the ethics of the situation had all been worked out by philosophers much wiser than she was—and agreed, indeed, by copies of philosophers, just to be sure—but it still troubled her sometimes.

She dismissed the pointless worry, put the Norton back in the desk and walked out the door. She needed fresh air. Her apartment opened near the middle of the balcony, which stretched hundreds of metres to left and right. Constance stepped two paces to the rail, stood between plant boxes, and leaned over. Below her, other balconies sloped away in stepped tiers. In the downward distance, their planters and window boxes merged in her view, like the side of green hill, and themselves merged with the rougher and shallower incline of vine terraces. Olive groves, interspersed with hundred-metre cypresses, spread from the foot of the slope across the circular plain beneath her. Surrounded by its halo of habitats, a three-quarters-full Earth hung white and glaring in the dark blue of the sky seen through the air and the crater roof. Somewhere under that planet’s unbroken cloud cover, huddled in fusion-warmed caves and domes on the ice, small groups of people worked and studied—the brave scientists of the Reterraforming Project. Constance had sometimes daydreamed of joining them, but she had a more exciting destination now.

Weight began to pull as the shuttle decelerated. Constance settled back in her couch and slipped her wraparounds down from her brow to cover her eyes. The default view, for her as for all passengers, was of the view ahead, over the rear of the ship. A hundred kilometres in diameter, the Inner Station was so vast that even the shuttle’s exhaust gases barely distorted the view. The station itself was dwarfed by the surrounding structures: the great spinning webs of the microwave receptors, collecting energy beamed from the solar power stations in Mercury orbit; and the five Short Tubes, each millions of kilometres long and visible as hairline fractures across the sky. To and from their inner ends needle-shaped craft darted, ferrying incoming or outgoing passengers for the Long Tubes out in the Oort Cloud, far beyond the orbit of Pluto—so far, indeed, that this initial or final hop was, for the passengers, subjectively longer than the near-light-speed journey between the stars.

As the ship’s attitude jets fired the view swung, providing Constance with a glimpse of the green-gold haze of habitats that ringed the Sun. The main jet cut in again, giving a surge of acceleration as the shuttle matched velocities with the rim of the Inner Station. With a final clunk and shudder the ship docked. Constance felt for a moment that it was still under acceleration—as indeed it was: the acceleration of constant rotation, which she experienced as a downward centrifugal force of one Earth gravity. She stood up, holding the seat until she was sure of her balance, and tried not to let her feet drag as she trudged down the aisle to the exit door. In the weeks of travel from the Moon she’d kept the induction coils and elastic resistance of her clothing at a maximum, to build up her bone and muscle mass, but she still felt heavy. It looked as if the other passengers felt the same.

She climbed the steps in front of the airlock, waved her business card at the door frame and stepped out on the concourse. Her first breath and glance surprised her. Coming from the ancient, almost rural backcountry of the Moon, she’d expected the Inner Station to gleam within just as it shone without. What she found herself standing in was no such slick and clean machine. The air smelled of sweat and cookery, and vibrated with a din of steps and speech. Centuries of detritus from millions of passengers had silted into crevices and corners and become ingrained in surfaces, defeating the ceaseless toil of swarms of tiny cleaning machines. Not dirty, but grubby and used. The concourse was about a thousand metres across, and lengthways extended far out of sight in a gentle upward slope in either direction. People and small vehicles moved among stands and shops like herds among trees on a savannah. About a fifth of the static features were, in fact, trees: part of the station’s recycling system. The trees looked short, few of them over ten metres high. The ceiling, cluttered with light strips, sprinklers and air ducts, was only a couple of metres above the tallest of them.

“Don’t panic,” said her mother’s voice in her earbead. “There’s plenty of air.”

Constance took a few slow, deep breaths.

“That’s better,” said her mother.

“I want to look outside.”

“Please yourself.”

Constance made her way among hurrying or lingering people. It was a slow business. No matter which way she turned, somebody seemed to be going in the opposite direction. Many of them were exotics, but she wasn’t attuned to the subtle differences in face or stance to tell Cetians from Centaurans, Barnardites from Eridians. For those from farther out, paradoxically, the differences from the Solar norm were less: the colonies around Lalande, 61 Cygni and the two opposite Rosses—248 and 128—having been more recently established. Costume and covering were no help—fashions in such superficial matters as clothing, skin colour, hair, fur and plumage varied from habitat to habitat, and fluctuated from day to day, right here in the Solar System.

She found the window. It wasn’t a window. It was a ten metres long, three metres high screen giving the view as seen from the station’s hub. Because it was set in the side wall of the concourse the illusion was good enough for the primitive part of the brain that felt relief to see it. The only person standing in front of it and looking out was a man about her own age, the youngest person she’d seen since she left the Moon. Yellow fur grew from his scalp and tapered halfway down his back. Constance stood a couple of metres away from him and gazed out, feeling her breathing become more even, her reflected face in the glass less anxious. The Sun, dimmed a little by the screen’s hardware, filled a lower corner of the view. The habitat haze spread diagonally across it, thinning toward the upper end. A couple of the inner planets—the Earth-Moon pair, white and green, and bright Venus—were visible as sparks in the glitter, like tiny gems in a scatter of gold dust.

“Did you know,” the boy said after a while, “that when the ancients looked at the sky, they saw heaven?”

“Yes,” said Constance, confused. “Well, I’m not sure. Don’t the words mean the same?”

The boy shook his head, making the fur ripple. “Sort of. What I mean is, they saw the place where they really thought God, or the gods, lived. Venus and Mars and Jupiter and so on really were gods, at first, and people could just see them. And then later, they thought it was a set of solid spheres revolving around them, and that God actually lived there. I mean, they could see heaven.”

“And then Galileo came along, and spoiled everything?”

The boy laughed. “Well, not quite. It was a shock, all right, but afterwards people could look up and see—space, I suppose. The universe. Nature. And what do we see now? The suburbs!”

Constance waved a hand. “Habitats, power plants, factories . . . ”

“Yes. Ourselves.”

He sounded disgusted.

“But don’t you think it’s magnificent?”

“Oh, sure, magnificent.”

She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “We could see the stars from the other side.”

“Scores of them fuzzy with habitats.”

Constance turned to face him. “That was, ah, an invitation.”

“Oh!” said the boy. “Yes, let’s.”

“We have work to do,” said the voice in Constance’s ear.

Constance fished the card out of her shirt pocket and slid it towards a pocket lined with metal mesh on her trouser thigh.

“Hey!” protested her mother, as she recognised what was about to happen. “Wait a—”

The card slid into the Faraday pocket and the voice stopped.

“Privacy,” said Constance.

“What?”

“I’ll tell you on the way across,” she said.

His name was Andy Larkin. He was from a habitat complex in what he called the wet zone, the narrow ring in which water on an Earth-type planet (though not, at the moment, Earth) would be liquid. This all seemed notional but he assured her it made certain engineering problems easier. He’d been in the station for a year.

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Bored back home. Lots like me here. We get called hall bats.”

Because they flitted about the place, he explained. The deft way he led her through the crowds made it credible. His ambition was to take a Long Tube out. He didn’t have much of a plan to realise it. The odd jobs he did sounded to Constance like a crude version of her mother’s business plan. She told him so. He looked at her sidelong.

“You’re still taking business advice from your mother’s partial?”

“I’ve only just started,” she said. She didn’t know why she felt embarrassed. She shrugged. “I was raised by partials.”

“Your mother was a mummy?”

“And my dad a dummy. Yes. They updated every night. At least, that’s what they told me when I found out.”

“What fun to be rich,” said Andy. “At least my parents were real. Real time and full time. No wonder you’re insecure.”

“Why do you think I’m insecure?”

He stopped, caught her hand, and squeezed it. “What do you feel?”

Constance felt shaken by what she felt. It was not because he was a boy. It was—

He let go. “See?” he said. “Do the analysis.”

Constance blinked, sighed and hurried after him. They reached the far window. As she’d guessed, it showed the opposite view. As he’d predicted, it was still industrial. At least thirty of the visible stars had a green habitat haze around them.

“I want to see a sky with no people in it,” Andy said.

This seemed a strange wish. They argued about it for so long that they ended up in business together.

Constance rented a cell in a run-down sector of the station. It had a bed, water and power supply, a communications hub and little else. Andy dragged in his general assembler, out of which he had been living for some time. It spun clothes and food out of molecules from the air and from any old rubbish that could be scrounged and stuffed in the hopper. Every day Andy Larkin would wander off around the marts and swap meets, just as he’d been doing before. The difference now was that whenever he picked up anything interesting Constance would show it to her mother’s partial. Andy’s finds amounted to about a tenth of the number Constance found in scans of the markets, but they were almost always the most intriguing. Sometimes, of course, all they could obtain were recordings of objects on the business card. In these cases they used the assembler to make samples to test themselves, or demonstrate to the partial. Occasionally the partial would consult with Constance’s actual mother, wherever she was—several hundred million kilometres away, to judge by the light-speed communications lag—and deliver an opinion.

Out of hundreds of objects they examined in their first fortnight, they selected: a gene-fix for hyperacute balance; an iridescent plumage dye; an immersion drama of the Wolf 359 dynastic implosion; a financial instrument for long-term capital management; a virtual reality game played by continuously updated partials; a molecular-level coded representation of the major art galleries of E Indi IV; a device of obscure purpose, that tickled; a microgravity dance dress; a song from Luyten 789 6; a Vegan cutlery set.

The business, now trading as Larkin Associates, slammed the goods into the marketing networks as fast as they were chosen. The drama flopped, the song invited parodies (its hook line was a bad pun in hot-zone power-worker slang), the financial instrument crashed the exchanges of twenty habitats before it was Nortoned. The dress went straight to vintage. The dye faded. The other stuff did well enough to put Constance’s business card back in the black for the first time since leaving the Moon. “Did you know,” said Andy, “that the ancients would have had to pay the inventors?”

“The ancients were mad,” said Constance. “They saw gods.”

And everything went well for a while.

Constance came out of the game fifty-seven lives up and with a delusion of competence in eleven-dimensional matrix algebra. To find that it was night in the sector. That she had frittered away ten hours. That she needed coffee. Andy was asleep. The assembler would be noisy. Constance slipped up her wraparounds and strolled out of the cell and walked five hundred metres to a false morning and a stand where she could score a mug of freshly ground Mare Imbrian, black. She was still inhaling steam and waiting for the coffee to cool when she noticed a fraught woman heading her way, pacing the longways deck and glancing from side to side. It was her mother, Julia Mukgatle. The real and original woman, of that Constance was sure, though she’d never seen her in the flesh before.

Startled, she stared at the woman. Julia pinged her with her next glance, stopped and hurried over. At a dozen steps’ distance she stood still and put a finger to her lips. Then she took a business card from inside her robe and, with exaggerated care, slid it into a Faraday pocket on the knee. She pointed at Constance and repeated the procedure as gesture. Constance complied, and Julia walked up. Not sure what to do, Constance shook hands. Her mother hauled her forward and put an arm around her shoulder. They both stepped back and looked at each other with awkwardness and doubt.

“How did you get here?” Constance asked. “You were light-hours away just yesterday.”

“I wasn’t,” said Julia. “I was right here on the station. I’ve been here for a week, and tracking you down for weeks before that.”

“But I’ve been talking to you all this time!”

“You have?” said Julia. “Then things are worse than I’d feared.” She nodded toward Constance’s knee. “You have a partial of me in there?”

“Yes.”

“When you thought you were in contact with me”—she thumbed her chest—“in Jupiter orbit, you were in contact with another instance of the partial—or just the partial itself—faking a light-speed delay.”

Constance almost spilled her coffee. “So the partial’s been a rogue all along?”

“Yes. It’s one I set up for a business proposal, all right, but for a different proposal and sent to someone else.”

“Why didn’t you contact me through another channel?”

“When there’s a fake you rattling around the place, it’s hard to find a channel you can trust. Best come directly.” She sat on the stool opposite, leaned back and sighed. “Get me a coffee . . . on my card. Then tell me everything.”

Constance did, or as much as seemed relevant.

“It’s the game,” Julia interrupted, as soon as Constance mentioned it. “It’s the one thing you’ve released that can spread really fast, that’s deeply addictive and that spins off copies of partials. I’ll bet it’s been tweaked not to delete all the copies.”

“Why?”

Julia frowned. “Don’t you see? My rogue partial wants to survive and flourish. It needs a conducive environment and lots of help. It’s setting things up for a fast burn. Where did the game come from?”

“A passenger in from Procyon A.”

Julia banged her fist on the table. “There have been some very odd features in the communications from Procyon recently. Some experts I’ve spoken to suspect the system might be going into a fast burn.”

“And the partial knew about this?”

“Oh yes. It included that memory.” Julia grimaced. “Maybe that’s what gave it the idea.”

“How could it do something like that? It’s you.”

“It’s part of me. By now, a copy of a copy of a copy of part of me. Part of me that maybe thought, you know, that a million subjective years in a virtual environment of infinite possibility might not be such a bad idea.”

“What can we do?” Constance felt sick with dismay.

“Put out a general warning, a recall on the game . . . ” Julia whipped out her business card and started tapping into it. “We may be in time. Things won’t be so bad as long as the rogue partials don’t get into a general assembler.”

Constance sat for a few seconds in cold shock. Her mother was staring at the virtual screen of her card, her hands flexing on an invisible keyboard, chording out urgent messages.

“Mom,” said Constance. She met Julia’s impatient glance. “I have, ah, something to tell you.”

The older woman and the young woman ran through the bustle of a waking sector into the quiet of a local night. The older woman ran faster. Constance had to call her back as she overshot the door of the business cell. Julia skidded to a stop and doubled back. Constance was already through the door. The assembler’s blue glow lit the room. The chugging sound of its operation filled the air. Andy was backed into a corner, on the end of the bed. The bed was tilted on a slope. The other end of the bed was missing, as if it had been bitten off by steel teeth. The assembler had built itself an arm, with which it was chucking into its hopper everything within reach. The floor was already ankle-deep in small scuttling metal and plastic objects. The comms hub had been partly dismantled and was surrounded by a swarm of the scuttlers. Some of them had climbed the walls and burrowed into the wiring and cables. A stream of them flowed past Constance’s feet as she hesitated in the doorway.

Behind her Julia shouted for a Norton. Answering yells echoed from the walls of the deck.

Constance couldn’t take her eyes off Andy. He was too far away to jump to the door. She was about to leap into the middle of the room and take her chances when he bent down and threw the remains of the bedding on to the floor. He jumped on to it and from that to right in front of her, colliding. As she staggered back and Andy lurched forward. Constance grabbed him in her arms and kicked the door shut behind them. Within seconds smaller things, like bright metal ants, were streaming out from under the door. Constance stamped on them. They curled into tiny balls under her feet and scattered like beads of mercury. The larger machines that had already escaped repeated the trick, rolling off in all directions, vanishing into crevices and corners.

An alarm brayed. Somebody ran up with a heavy-duty Norton and began discharging it at the machines. Julia grabbed the shooter’s shoulder and pointed her at the door of the business cell. Constance’s wraparounds, which had fallen back to the bridge of her nose, went black as a stray electromagnetic pulse from the Norton’s blast caught them. She tore them off and threw them away. Tiny machines pounced on the discarded gadget. They dismantled it in seconds and scurried away with its parts.

Then there was just a crowd standing around looking at a door. The woman with the Norton kicked the door open, then stepped back. She had nothing more to do. Constance saw the assembler stopped in midmotion, hand halfway to its mouth. Stilled steel cockroaches littered the floor.

“Are you all right?” she asked Andy.

It was a stupid question. She held him to her as he shook.

“I’m all right,” he said, pushing her away after a minute. He sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his wrist. “What happened?”

Julia Mukgatle stepped forward. “Just a little intelligence excursion—the first sparks of a fast burn.”

Andy didn’t need an introduction—he’d seen her face often enough. “But that’s a disaster!”

Julia shrugged. “Depends on your point of view,” she said.

Andy gestured at the room. “It looks like one from my point of view!”

“They wouldn’t have harmed you,” said Julia. “Flesh is one thing they don’t need.”

Andy shuddered. “Didn’t feel like that when they were eating the bed.”

“I know, I know,” said Julia. She put an arm around Andy’s shoulder. “Come and have some coffee.”

The woman with the Norton nearly dropped it. “Aren’t you going to do anything?”

Julia looked around the anxious faces in the small crowd. She spoke as if she knew that everyone’s wraparound images were going straight to a news feed. “I’ve already sent out warnings. Whether anyone heeds them is not up to me. And whether we go into a fast burn isn’t up to me either. It’s up to all of you.”

What it was really like to live through the early days of a fast burn was one of the many pieces of information that got lost in a fast burn. That didn’t stop people making up stories about it, and when she was younger Constance had watched lots. The typical drama began with something like she’d seen in the business cell: mechanical things running wild and devouring all in their path. It would go on from there to people lurching around like dummies run by flawed partials, meat puppets controlled by rogue artificial intelligence programmes that had hacked into their brains and taken them over. The inevitable still-human survivors would be hunted down like rats. The hero and the heroine, or the hero and hero, or heroine and heroine, usually escaped at the last second by shuttle, Long Tube, freezer pod, or (in stories with a big virtual reality element) by radio beam as downloaded partials (who, in the final twist, had to argue their way past the firewalls of the destination system and prove they weren’t carrying the software seeds of another fast burn; which, of course . . . and so it went on).

It wasn’t like that. Nothing seemed to change except a few news items and discussion threads. Between the inhabitants of the Solar System, a lot of information flew around. A large part of everyone’s personal processing power—in their clothes, wraparounds, business cards, cells and walls—consisted of attention filtering.

“What does your mother do?” Andy asked on the second day, as they sat in Julia’s rented business cell; a room rather bigger and more comfortable than the one they’d had. Larkin Associates had ceased trading and was unsaleable even as a shell company.

Constance glanced at Julia, who was in a remote consultation with her current headquarters on Ganymede and with an emergency task group in the hot zone. Signal delay was an issue. The conference was slow.

“I don’t know,” she said. “She’s a corporate. She does lots of things. Has a lot of interests. One of them is the Solar Virtual Security team. All volunteers.” She laughed. “The rich do good works.”

“The ancients had governments to deal with this sort of thing,” said Andy. “Global emergencies and such.”

Constance tried to imagine a government for the entire Solar System: the planets, the moons, the asteroids, the habitat haze . . . the trillions of inhabitants. Her imagination failed. The closest historical parallel was the Wolf 359 limited company, and it had had only ten billion shareholders at its peak. All the stories she’d seen about imaginary system-wide governments—empires, they were called—were adventure fantasies about their downfall. She dismissed such fancies and turned to the facts.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s why Earth is a snowball.”

Julia blinked out of her trance. She took a sip of mineral water.

“How are things?” Andy asked.

“Not too good,” Julia said. “Your game sold well in the power stations. I always said they were overcrewed. About one in ten of the beam stations is now under the control of massively enhanced partials of the idler members of the workforce. Scores of factory AIs have announced that they’re not taking instructions from mere humans anymore. Hundreds of wet zone habitats are seeing small numbers of people busy turning themselves into better people. Hack the genome in virtual reality, try out the changes in your body in real life, rinse and repeat. That phase won’t last long, of course.”

“Why not?” Andy asked. “It sounds like fun.”

“There’s better fun to be had as an enhanced partial. Eventually the minds can’t be persuaded to download to the physical anymore.” Julia gave Constance a severe look. “It’s like getting sucked into a game.”

Constance could understand that. She hadn’t gone into the game from Procyon since she’d met Julia—in fact, her business card was still in her Faraday pocket—but she missed it. The exchanges between her brain and its partials had proceeded in real time. It had been like being there, in the game environment. She had learned from it. She still felt she could understand the eleven-dimensional space of the best pathway through the game’s perilous and colourful maze. She longed to find out what her companions and opponents were up to. She wanted very much to go back, just once more.

She reached with both hands for the metal-mesh pocket on her thigh.

“Don’t take the card out!” said Julia.

“I wasn’t going to.” Constance gripped the upper and lower seams of the pocket and flexed it. The card snapped. She reached in and took both bits out. “Satisfied?”

Julia smiled. “Good riddance.” She took another sip of water, and sighed. “Oh, well. No rest for the wicked.”

She blinked hard and the contacts on her eyes glazed over as she slipped back into her working trance.

Constance looked at Andy. “Coffee break?”

“You’re an addict.”

“That’s why I get caught up in games.”

“Okay, let’s.”

Julia’s place was in a plusher part of the concourse than theirs had been. More foliage, fewer and more expensive shops. The price of a good Mare Imbrian, high anyway, was the same everywhere in the station. They found a stand and ordered. Constance sipped, looking away with mock shock as Andy spooned sugar into his cup. She turned back as he gave a startled yelp.

The biggest magpie she’d ever seen had landed on the rail of the stand, just beside their small round table. It had stretched its head forward and picked up Andy’s spoon, which it was now engaged in bending against the table. The bird curled the handle into a hook, before hanging the hook on the rail. The magpie then hit the bowl of the spoon a few times with its beak, and watched the swing and cocked its head to the chime.

“That’s interesting,” it said, and flew away.

“Is the fast burn picking up birds?” said Andy.

“Magpies can talk,” said Constance. “Like parrots.”

“Yes,” said Andy. “But not grammatically.”

“Who says?” said a voice from the tree above them. They looked up to see a flash of white and black feathers, and hear something that might have been a laugh.

On the way back they saw a woman walking in a most peculiar way. Her feet came some thirty centimetres above the floor. At first she looked black, with a strange shimmer. A faint buzzing sound came from her. As they passed her it became apparent that her body consisted of a swarm of tiny machines the size of gnats, flying in formation. Her eyes were the same colour and texture as the rest of her, but she seemed to be looking around as she walked. Her face smiled and her mouth formed the word, “Wow!” over and over. People avoided her. She didn’t notice or didn’t mind.

“What is that?” said Constance, looking back when they were well out of the way. “Is it a swarm of machines in the shape of a woman, or a woman who has become a swarm of machines?”

“Does it matter?”

Julia had come out of her virtuality trance. She still had a faraway look in her eyes. It came from her contacts. The centimetre-wide lenses gave off an ebon gleam, flecked with a whorl of white around the irises, each encircling the pinpoint pupil like a galaxy with a black hole at its centre. She sat cross-legged on the floor, drawing shapes in the air with her fingers.

The thing was, you could see the shapes.

“Mom!” Constance cried out. She knew at once what had happened. She regretted destroying the card. The partial within it had been closer to the mother she’d known than the woman in front of her was now.

“It’s all right,” said Julia. She doodled a tetrahedron, her fingertips spinning black threads that hardened instantly to fine rods—buckytubes, Constance guessed—and turned the shape over a few times. She palmed its planes, giving them panes of delicate glazing fused from the salt in her sweat. She let go and it floated, buoyed for a moment by the hotter air within, then shattered. Black and white dust drifted down. Carbon and salt.

“It’s more than all right,” Julia went on. “It’s wonderful. I have information in my brain that lets me rewrite my own genome.”

The words came out in speech bubbles.

“You said yourself it can’t last,” said Constance.

“But it can,” said Julia. She stood up and embraced Constance, then Andy. “For a while. For long enough. My last partial was bigger than myself. Better than myself. Too big to download, and too busy. I’m just enjoying what I can do with my body.”

“While it lasts.”

“While, as you say, it lasts.” Julia sighed. “There’s no ill will, you know. But with the best will in the world, I think this station is soon going to be hard for humans to inhabit.”

“What can we do?” asked Andy.

“You could join me,” said Julia. “Nothing would be lost, you know. You both played the game. Millions of descendants of your partials are already out there in the system. In virtual spaces, in new bodies, in machines. You’re already history.” She grinned, suddenly her old sly self again. “In both senses.”

“So why?” Constance asked. “If we’ve done it already.”

“You haven’t. That’s the point.”

Constance could see now how her mother had come to spin off a partial that had wanted to survive. A perhaps unadmitted fascination with the possibility that had probably drawn Julia in the first place into the work of preventing it; an intense desire for a continued existence that her long life had strengthened; and a self-regard so vast that she—and presumably, her partials—found it difficult to identify even with other instances of herself. Constance wondered how much of that personality she had inherited; how much in that respect she was her mother’s daughter. Perhaps the conquest of age—so dearly won, and now so cheaply bought—detracted and distracted from the true immortality, that of the gene and the meme, of children raised, ideas passed on, of things built and deeds done.

But Andy wasn’t thinking about that.

“You mean partials of me are going to live through the fast burn?”

“Yes,” said Julia, as if this was good news.

“Oh, that’s horrible! Horrible! I hate living among people so much older right now!” He had the panicky look Constance had seen in her own reflection, when she’d stood and fought claustrophobia in front of the big window.

“You should go,” said Julia. “If that’s how you feel.” She turned to Constance. “And you?”

“The same,” said Constance.

“I know,” said Julia. “I have a very good theory of mind now. I can see right through you.”

Constance wanted to say something bitter, understood that it would be pointless, and decided not to. She reached out and shook Julia’s hand.

“For what you were,” she said, “even when you weren’t.”

Julia clapped her shoulder. “For what you’ll be,” she said. “Now go.”

“Goodbye, Mom,” said Constance. She and Andy went out, leaving the door open, and didn’t look back.

“Any baggage?” asked the Long Tube guardian droid. It lived in a Faraday cage and had a manual-triggered Norton hardwired to its box. It wasn’t going anywhere.

“Only this,” said Constance. She held up a flat metal rectangle the size of a business card.

“Contents?”

“Works of art.”

She and Andy had traveled half a light-year at half the speed of light. In the intervals of free flight—in the shuttle between the Inner Station and the Short Tube, and in the needle ship hurtling from the far end of the Inner Station No. 4 Short Tube to the deceleration port of the Long Station No. 1 Short Tube—they had scanned and sampled whatever they could detect of the huge and ever-increasing outpouring of information from the habitat haze. No longer green and gold, it now displayed an ever-changing rainbow flicker, reflecting and refracting the requirements of a population now far larger, and far from human. Some of what they had stored was scientific theory and technological invention, but by far the most valuable and comprehensible of it was art: music, pictures and designs produced by posthumans with a theory of mind so sophisticated that affecting human emotions more deeply than the greatest artists and composers of human history had ever done was its merest starting point, as elementary as drawing a line or playing a note. Constance knew that she now held in her hand enough stimulation and inspiration to trigger a renaissance wherever she went.

“Pass.”

Naked and hairless, carrying nothing but the metal card, Andy and Constance walked through the gate into the Long Tube needle ship. As they stepped over the lip of the airlock they both shivered. It was cold in the needle ship, and it was going to get a lot colder. Freezing to hibernate was the only way to live through the months of ten-gravity acceleration required to reach relativistic velocities; and the months of ten-gravity deceleration at the other end.

Traveling the Long Tube was like going down the steepest waterchute in the world. All she ever remembered of it was going “Aaaahhhh!!!” for a very long time. The old hands called it the near-light scream.

Constance and Andy screamed to Barnard’s Star. They screamed to Epsilon Eridani; to Tau Ceti; to Ross 248; to 61 Cygni. They kept going. The little metal memory device paid their way, in fares of priceless art and breakthrough discovery.

Eventually they emerged from the last of the Long Tubes. They had reached the surface of the expanding sphere of human civilization, from the inside. From here on out it was starships. The system was too poor as yet to build starships. It didn’t even have many habitats. It had one habitable terrestrial: an Earthlike planet, if you could call a surface gravity of 1.5 and an ecosystem of pond scum Earthlike. People lived on it, in the open air.

Andy and Constance decided to give the place a try. They had to bulk up their bones and muscles, tweak every antibody in their immune systems, and cultivate new bacteria and enzymes in their guts. Doing all this kept them occupied in the long months of travel inward from the cometary cloud. It felt just like being seriously ill.

In this hemisphere, at this latitude, at this time of night, all the stars visible were without a habitat haze. They looked raw. They burned naked in different colours in the unbroken black dome of the sky.

Constance and Andy walked on slippery pebbles along the shore of a dark sea in which nothing lived but strands of algae and single-celled animals. On the shoreward side was a straggly windbreak of grass and shrubs, genetically modified from the native life, the greenish stuff that slimed the pebbles. A kilometre or two behind them lay the low buildings and dim lights of the settlement.

“All this living on rocks,” said Constance, “sucks.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Feeling heavy all the time. Weather that falls out of the sky instead of from ducts and sprinklers. Babies crying. Kids yelling. Dumb animals blundering about. Wavelengths from the sun I can’t even tan against. I swear my skin’s trying to turn blue. No roof over your head except when you’re indoors. Meteors burning up in the air right above you.” She glanced balefully at the breakers. “Oh, and repetitive meaningless noise.”

“I think,” said a voice in her earbead, “that he’s heard enough grumbles from you.”

Constance froze. Andy went on crunching forward along the stony beach.

“How did you get here?” Constance whispered.

“My partials remade me and transmitted me to you before you left the Solar System. Piggybacking the art codes. I really am Julia, just as I was before recent unfortunate events.”

“What do you want?”

“I have my genome,” said Julia. “I want to download.”

“And then what?”

Constance could almost hear the shrug. “To be a better mother?”

“Hah!”

“I also have some business ideas . . . ”

“Mom,” said Constance, “you can just forget it.”

She switched off the earbead. She would have to think about it.

She ran forward, in the awkward jarring way of someone carrying a half-grown child on their back.

“Sorry about the grumbles,” she said to Andy.

“Oh, that’s all right,” he said. “I feel the same sometimes. I think all that, and then I remember what makes up for it all.”

“What’s that?” Constance smiled.

Andy looked up at her face, and she thought she knew what he was about to say, and then he looked farther up.

“The sky,” he said. “The sky.”

Originally published in disLocations, edited by Ian Whates, 2007.

Saving Tiamaat

Gwyneth Jones

I had reached the station in the depth of Left Speranza’s night; I had not slept. Fogged in the confabulation of the transit, I groped through crushing aeons to my favourite breakfast kiosk: unsure if the soaring concourse outside Parliament was ceramic and carbon or a metaphor; a cloudy internal warning—now what was the message in the mirror? Something pitiless. Some blank-eyed, slow-thinking, long-grinned crocodile—

“Debra!”

It was my partner. “Don’t do that,” I moaned. The internal crocodile shattered, the concourse lost its freight of hyper-determined meaning, too suddenly for comfort. “Don’t you know you should never startle a sleepwalker?”

He grinned; he knew when I’d arrived, and the state I was likely to be in. I hadn’t met Pelé Leonidas Iza Quinatoa in the flesh before, but we’d worked together, we liked each other. “Ayayay, so good you can’t bear to lose it?”

“Of course not. Only innocent, beautiful souls have sweet dreams.”

He touched my cheek: collecting a teardrop. I hadn’t realised I was crying. “You should use the dreamtime, Debra. There must be some game you want to play.”

“I’ve tried, it’s worse. If I don’t take my punishment, I’m sick for days.”

The intimacy of his gesture (skin on skin) was an invitation and a promise; it made me smile. We walked into the Parliament Building together, buoyant in the knocked-down gravity that I love although I know it’s bad for you.

In the Foyer, we met the rest of the company, identified by the Diaspora Parliament’s latest adventure in biometrics, the aura tag. To our vision, the KiAn Working Party was striated orange/yellow, nice cheerful implications, nothing too deep. The pervasive systems were seeing a lot more, but that didn’t bother Pelé or me; we had no secrets from Speranza.

The KiAn problem had been a matter of concern since their world had been “discovered” by a Balas/Shet prospector, and joined the miniscule roster of populated planets linked by instantaneous transit. Questions had been raised then, over the grave social imbalance: the tiny international ruling caste, the exploited masses. But neither the Ki nor the An would accept arbitration (why the hell should they?). The non-interference lobby is the weakest faction in the Chamber, quarantine-until-they’re-civilised was not considered an option. Inevitably, around thirty local years after first contact, the Ki had risen against their overlords, as often in the past. Inevitably, this time they had modern weapons. They had not succeeded in wiping out the An, but they had pretty much rendered the shared planet uninhabitable.

We were here to negotiate a rescue package. We’d done the damage, we had to fix it, that was the DP’s line. The Ki and the An no doubt had their own ideas as to what was going on: they were new to the Interstellar Diaspora, not to politics.

But they were here, at least; so that seemed hopeful.

The Ki Federation delegates were unremarkable. There were five of them, they conformed to the “sentient biped” bodyplan that unites the diaspora. Three were wearing Balas business suits in shades of brown, two were in grey military uniform. The young co-leaders of the An were better dressed, and one of the two, in particular, was much better looking. Whatever you believe about the origins of the “diaspora” (Strong theory, Weak theory, something between) it’s strange how many measures of beauty are common to us all. He was tall, past two metres: he had large eyes, a mane of rich brown head-hair, an open, strong-boned face, poreless bronze skin, and a glorious smile. He would be my charge. His co-leader, the subordinate partner, slight and small, almost as dowdy as the Ki, would be Pelé’s.

They were codenamed Baal and Tiamaat, the names I will use in this account. The designations Ki and An are also codenames.

We moved off to a briefing room. Joset Moricherri, one of the Blue Permanent Secretaries, made introductory remarks. A Green Belt Colonel, Shamaz Haa’agaan, gave a talk on station security. A slightly less high-ranking DP administrator got down to basics: standard time conventions, shopping allowances, access to the elevators, restricted areas, housekeeping . . . Those who hadn’t provided their own breakfast raided the culturally neutral trolley. I sipped my Mocha/Colombian, took my carbs in the form of a crisp cherry-jam tartine; and let the day’s agenda wash over me, as I reviewed what I knew about Baal and Tiamaat’s relationship.

They were not related by blood, except in the sense that the An gene pool was very restricted: showing signs of other population crashes in the past. They were not “married”, either. The Ki and the An seemed to be sexually dimorphic on the Blue model (though they could yet surprise us!); and they liked opposite sex partnerships. But they did not marry. Tiamaat’s family had been swift to embrace the changes, she’d been educated on Balas/Shet. Baal had left KiAn for the first time when war broke out. They’d lost family members, and they’d certainly seen the horrific transmissions smuggled off KiAn before the end. Yet here they were, with the genocidal Ki: thrown together, suddenly appointed the rulers of their shattered nation, and bound to each other for life. Tiamaat looked as if she was feeling the strain. She sat with her eyes lowered, drawn in on herself, her body occupying the minimum of space. Beside her, Baal devoured a culturally-neutral doughnut, elbows sprawled, with a child’s calm greed. I wondered how much my alien perception of a timid young woman and a big bold young man was distorting my view. I wondered how all that fine physicality translated into mind.

Who are you, Baal? How will it feel to know you?

From the meeting we proceeded to a DP reception and lunch, from thence to a concert in the Nebula Immersion Chamber: a Blue Planet symphony orchestra on virtual tour, the Diaspora Chorus in the flesh, singing a famous masque; a solemn dance drama troupe bi-locating from Neuendan. Pelé and I, humble Social Support officers, were in the background for these events. But the An had grasped that we were their advocates: as was proved when they pounced on us, eagerly, after the concert. They wanted to meet “the nice quiet people with the pretty curly faces—”

They spoke English, language of diplomacy and displacement. They’d both taken the express, neuro-tech route to fluency: but we had trouble pinning this request down. It turned out they were asking to be introduced to a bowl of orchids.

Appearances can be deceptive; these two young people were neither calm nor cowed. They had been born in a mediaeval world, and swept away from home as to the safety of a rich neighbour’s house: all they knew of the interstellar age was the inside of a transit lounge. The Ki problem they knew only too well: Speranza was a thrilling bombardment. With much laughter (they laughed like Blue teenagers, to cover embarrassment), we explained that they would not be meeting any bizarre lifeforms. No tentacles, no petals, no intelligent gas clouds here; not yet!

“You have to look after us!” cried Baal. He grabbed my arm, softly but I felt the power. “Save us from making fools of ourselves, dear Debra and Pelé!”

Tiamaat stood back a pace, hiding her giggles behind her hand.

The last event scheduled on that first day was a live transmission walkabout from the Ki refugee camp, in the Customised Shelter Sector. In the planning stages, some of us had expressed doubts about this stunt. If anything went wrong it’d sour the whole negotiation. But the Ki and the An leaders were both keen, and the historic gesture was something the public back on the homeworlds would understand—which in the end had decided the question. The Diaspora Parliament had to struggle for planetside attention, we couldn’t pass up an opportunity.

At the gates of the CSS, deep in Speranza’s hollow heart, there was a delay. The Customised Shelter Police wanted us in armoured glass-tops, they felt that if we needed a walkabout we could fake it. . . . Pelé chatted with Tiamaat, stooping from his lean black height to catch her soft voice. Baal stared at the banners on two display screens. The KiAn understood flags, we hadn’t taught them that concept. Green and gold quarters for the Ki, a centre section crosshatched with the emblems of all the nations. Purple tracery on vivid bronze for the An.

Poor kid, I thought, it’s not a magic gateway to your lost home. Don’t get your hopes up. That’s the door to a cage in a conservation zoo.

He noticed my attention, and showed his white teeth. “Are there other peoples living in exile on this floor?”

I nodded. “Yes. But mostly the people sheltered here are old spacers, who can’t return to full gravity. Or failed colonist communities, likewise: people who’ve tried to settle on empty moons and planets and been defeated by the conditions. There are no other populated planet exiles. It hasn’t been, er, necessary.”

“We are a first for you.”

I wondered if that was ironic; if he was capable of irony.

A compromise was reached. We entered on foot, with the glass-tops and CSP closed cars trailing behind. The Ki domain wasn’t bad, for a displaced persons camp wrapped in the bleak embrace of a giant space station. Between the living-space capsule towers the refugees could glimpse their own shade of sky; and a facsimile of their primary sun, with its partner, the blue-rayed daystar. They had sanitation, hygiene, regular meals; leisure facilities, even employment. We stopped at an adult retraining centre, we briefly inspected a hydroponic farm. We visited a kindergarten, where the teaching staff told us (and the flying cams!) how all the nations of the Ki were gathered here in harmony, learning to be good Diaspora citizens.

The children stared at Baal and Tiamaat. They’d probably been born in the camp, and never seen An in the flesh before. Baal fidgeted, seeming indignant under their scrutiny. Tiamaat stared back with equal curiosity. I saw her reach a tentative hand through the shielding, as if to touch a Ki child: but she thought better of it.

After the classroom tour, there was a reception, with speeches, dance, and choral singing. Ki community leaders and the An couple didn’t literally “shake hands”; but the gesture was accomplished. Here the live trans. ended, and most of our party stayed behind. The An leaders and the Ki delegates went on alone, with a police escort, for a private visit to “Hopes and Dreams Park”—a facsimile of one of the Sacred Groves (as near as the term translates), central to KiAn spirituality.

Pelé and I went with them.

The enclave of woodland was artfully designed. The “trees” were like self-supporting kelp, leathery succulents—lignin is only native to the Blue Planet—but they were tall, and planted close enough to block all sight of the packed towers. Their sheets of foliage made a honeyed shade, we seemed alone in a gently managed wilderness. The Ki and the An kept their distance from each other now that the cams weren’t in sight. The police moved outward to maintain a cordon around the group, and I began to feel uneasy. I should have been paying attention instead of savouring my breakfast, I had not grasped that “Hope and Dreams Park” would be like this. I kept hearing voices, seeing flitting shadows; although the park area was supposed to have been cleared. I’d mentioned the weak shielding, I hoped it had been fixed—

“Are religious ceremonies held here?” I asked Tiamaat.

She drew back her head, the gesture for no. “Most KiAn have not followed religion for a long time. It’s just a place sacred to ourselves, to nature.”

“But it’s fine for the Shelter Police, and Pelé and I, to be with you?”

“You are advocates.”

We entered a clearing dotted with thickets. At our feet smaller plants had the character of woodland turf, starred with bronze and purple flowers. Above us the primary sun dipped towards its false horizon, lighting the blood red veins in the foliage. The blue daystar had set. Baal and Tiamaat were walking together: I heard him whisper, in the An language, now it’s our time.

“And these are the lucky ones,” muttered one of the Ki delegates to me, her “English” mediated by a throat-mike processor that gave her a teddy-bear growl. “Anyone who reached Speranza had contacts, money. Many millions of our people are trying to survive on a flayed, poisoned bombsite—”

And whose fault is that?

I nodded, vaguely. It was NOT my place take sides—

Something flew by me, big and solid. Astonished, I realised it had been Baal. He had moved so fast, it was so totally unexpected. He had plunged right through the cordon of armed police, through the shield. He was gone, vanished. I leapt in pursuit at once, yelling: “Hold your fire!” I was flung back, thrown down into zinging stars and blackness. The shield had been strengthened, but not enough.

Shelter Police bending over me, cried: what happened, Ma’am, are you hit?

My conviction that we had company in here fused into certainty—

“Oh, God! Get after him. After him!”

I ran with the police, Pelé stayed with Tiamaat and the Ki: on our shared frequency I heard him alerting Colonel Shamaz. We cast to and fro through the twilight wood, held together by the invisible strands and globules of our shield, taunted by rustles of movement, the CSP muttering to each other about refugee assassins, homemade weapons. But the young leader of the An was unharmed when we found him,having followed the sounds of a scuffle and a terrified cry. He crouched, in his sleek tailoring, over his prey. Dark blood trickled from the victim’s nostrils, high-placed in a narrow face. Dark eyes were open, fixed and wide.

I remembered the children in that school, staring up in disbelief at the ogres.

Baal rose, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “What are you looking at?” he inquired, haughtily, in his neighbours’ language. The rest of our party had caught up: he was speaking to the Ki. “What did you expect? You know who I am.”

Tiamaat fell to her knees, with a wail of despair, pressing her hands to either side of her head. “He has a right! Ki territory is An territory, he has a right to behave as if we were at home. And the Others knew it, don’t you see? They knew!”

The CSP officer yelled something inexcusable and lunged at the killer. Pelé grabbed him by the shoulders and hauled him back, talking urgent sense. The Ki said nothing, but I thought Tiamaat was right. They’d known what the Diaspora’s pet monster would do in here; and he hadn’t let them down.

Perfectly unconcerned, Baal stood guard over the body until Colonel Haa’agaan arrived with the closed cars. Then he picked it up and slung it over his shoulder. I travelled with him and his booty, and the protection of four Green Belts, to the elevator. Another blacked-out car waited for us on Parliament level. What a nightmare journey! We delivered him to the service entrance of his suite in the Sensitive Visitors Facility, and saw him drop the body insouciantly into the arms of one of his aides—a domestic, lesser specimen of those rare and dangerous animals, the An.

The soldiers looked at each other, looked at me. “You’d better stay,” I said. “And get yourselves reinforced, there might be reprisals planned.”

Baal’s tawny eyes in my mind: challenging me, trusting me—

The debriefing was in closed session; although there would be a transcript on record. It took a painful long time, but we managed to exonerate everyone, including Baal. Mistakes had been made, signals had been misread. We knew the facts of the KiAn problem, we had only the most rudimentary grasp of the cultures involved. Baal and Tiamaat, who were not present, had made no further comment. The Ki (who were not present either) had offered a swift deposition. They wanted the incident treated with utmost discretion: they did not see it as a bar to negotiation. The Balas/Shet party argued that Baal’s kill had been unique, an “extraordinary ritual” that we had to sanction. And we knew this was nonsense, but it was the best we could do.

One of our Green Belts, struck by the place in the report where Tiamaat exclaims the Others knew it!, came up with the idea that the young Ki had been a form of suicide bomber: sacrificing his life in the hope of wrecking the peace talks. Investigation of the dead boy and his contacts would now commence.

“Thank funx it didn’t happen on the live transmission!” cried Shamaz, the old soldier; getting his priorities right.

It was very late before Pelé and I got away. We spent the rest of the night together, hiding in the tenderness of the Blue Planet, where war is shameful and murder is an aberration; where kindness is common currency, and in almost every language strangers are greeted with love: dear, pet, darling; sister, brother, cousin, and nobody even wonders why. What an unexpected distinction, we who thought we were such ruthless villains, such fallen angels. “We’re turning into the care assistant caste for the whole funxing galaxy,” moaned Pelé. “Qué cacho!”

The Parliament session was well attended: many tiers packed with bi-locators; more than the usual scatter of Members present in the flesh, and damn the expense. I surveyed the Chamber with distaste. They all wanted to make their speeches on the KiAn crisis. But they knew nothing. The freedom of the press fades and dies at interstellar distances, where everything has to be couriered, and there’s no such thing as evading official censorship. They’d heard about the genocide, the wicked but romantic An; the ruined world, the rescue plans. They had no idea exactly what had driven the rebel Ki to such desperation, and they weren’t going to find out—

All the Diaspora Parliament knew was spin.

And the traditional Ki, the people we were dealing with, were collusive. They didn’t like being killed and eaten by their aristos, but for outsiders to find out the truth would be a far worse evil: a disgusting, gross exposure. After all, it was only the poor, the weak-minded and the disadvantaged, who ended up on a plate . . . Across from the Visitors’ Gallery, level with my eyes, hung the great Diaspora Banner. The populated worlds turned sedately, beautifully scanned and insanely close together; like one of those ancient distorted projections of the landmasses on the Blue. The “real” distance between the Blue system and Neuendan (our nearest neighbour) was twenty six thousand light-years. Between the Neuendan and the Balas/Shet lay fifteen hundred light-years; the location of the inscrutable Aleutians’ homeworld was a mystery. How would you represent that spatial relationship, in any realistic way?

“Why do they say it all aloud?” asked Baal, idly.

He was beside me, of course. He was glad to have me there, and kept letting me know it: a confiding pressure against my shoulder, a warm glance from those tawny eyes. He took my complete silence about the incident in Hopes and Dreams Park for understanding. A DP Social Support Officer never shows hostility.

“Isn’t your i/t button working?”

The instantaneous translation in here had a mind of its own.

“It works well enough. But everything they say is just repeating the documents on this desk. It was the same in the briefing yesterday, I noticed that.”

“You read English?”

“Oh yes.” Reading and writing have to be learned, there is no quick neuro-fix. Casually, with a glint of that startling irony, he dismissed his skill. “I was taught, at home. But I don’t bother. I have people who understand all this for me.”

“It’s called oratory,” I said. “And rhetoric. Modulated speech is used to stir peoples’ emotions, to cloud the facts and influence the vote—”

Baal screwed up his handsome face in disapproval. “That’s distasteful.”

“Also it’s tradition. It’s just the way we do things.”

“Ah!”

I sighed, and sent a message to Pelé on our eye socket link.

Change partners?

D’you want to reassign? came his swift response. He was worrying about me, he wanted to protect me from the trauma of being with Baal; which was a needle under my skin. I liked Pelé very much, but I preferred to treat the Diaspora Parliament as a no-ties singles bar.

No, I answered. Just for an hour, after this.

Getting close to Tiamaat was easy. After the session the four of us went down to the Foyer, where Baal was quickly surrounded by a crowd of high-powered admirers. They swept him off somewhere, with Pelé in attendance. Tiamaat and I were left bobbing in the wake, ignored; a little lost. “Shall we have coffee, Debra?” she suggested, with dignity. “I love coffee. But not the kind that comes on those trolleys!”

I took her to “my” kiosk, and we found a table. I was impressed by the way she handled the slights of her position. There goes Baal, surrounded by the mighty, while his partner is reduced to having coffee with a minder. . . . It was a galling role to have to play in public. I had intended to lead up to the topic on my mind: but she forestalled me. “You must be horrified by what happened yesterday.”

No hostility. “A little horrified, I admit.” I affected to hesitate. “The Balas/Shet say that what Baal did was a ritual, confirming his position as leader; and the Ki expected it. They may even have arranged for the victim to be available. And it won’t happen again. Are they right?”

She sipped her cappuchino. “Baal doesn’t believe he did anything wrong,” she answered, carefully; giving nothing away.

I remembered her cry of despair. “But what do you think—?”

“I can speak frankly?”

“You can say anything. We may seem to be in public, but nothing you say to me, or that I say to you, can be heard by anyone else.”

“Speranza is a very clever place!”

“Yes, it is . . . And as you know, though the system itself will have a record, as your Social Support Officer I may not reveal anything you ask me to keep to myself.”

She gave me eye-contact then, very deliberately. I realised I’d never seen her look anyone in the eye. The colour of her irises was a subtle, lilac-starred grey.

“Before I left home, when I was a child, I ate meat. I hadn’t killed it, but I knew where it came from. But I have never killed, Debra. And now I don’t believe I ever will.” She looked out at the passing crowd, the surroundings that must be so punishingly strange to her. “My mother said we should close ourselves off to the past, and open ourselves to the future. So she sent me away, when I was six years’ old, to live on another world—”

“That sounds very young to me.”

“I was young. I still had my milk teeth . . . I’m not like Baal, because I have been brought up differently. If I were in his place, things would be better for the Others. I truly believe that—” She meant the Ki, the prey-nations. “But I know what has to be done for KiAn. I want this rescue package to work. Baal is the one who will make it happen, and I support him in every way.”

She smiled, close-lipped, no flash of sharp white: I saw the poised steel in her, hidden by ingrained self-suppression. And she changed the subject, with composure. Unexpected boldness, unexpected finesse—

“Debra, is it true that Blue people have secret super-powers?”

I laughed and shook my head. “I’m afraid not. No talking flowers here!”

Pelé tried to get the DP software to change our codenames. He maintained that Baal and Tiamaat were not even from the same mythology, and if we were going to invoke the gods, those two should be Aztecs: Huehueteotl, ripping the living heart from his victims . . . The bots refused. They said they didn’t care if they were mixing their mysticisms. Codenames were a device to avoid accidental offense until the system had assimilated a new user language. “Baal” and “Tiamaat” were perfectly adequate, and the MesoAmerican names had too many characters.

I had dinner with Baal, in the Sensitive Visitor Facility. He was charming company: we ate vegetarian fusion cuisine, and I tried not to think about the butchered meat in the kitchen of his suite. On the other side of the room, bull-shouldered Colonel Haa’agaan ate alone; glancing at us covertly with small, sad eyes from between the folds of his slaty head-hide. Shamaz had been hard hit by what had happened in the Hopes and Dreams Park. But his orange and yellow aura-tag was still bright; and I knew mine was, too. By the ruthless measures of interstellar diplomacy, everything was still going well; set for success.

If things had been different I might have joined Pelé again when I was finally off duty. As it was, I retired to my room, switched all the décor, including ceiling and floor, to starry void, mixed myself a kicking neurochemical cocktail, and applied the popper to my throat. Eyedrops are faster, but I wanted the delay, I wanted to feel myself coming apart. Surrounded by directionless immensity, I sipped chilled water, brooding. How can a people have World Government, space-flight level industrialisation, numinal intelligence, and yet the ruling caste are still killing and eating the peasants? How can they do that, when practically everyone on KiAn admits they are a single species, differently adapted: and they knew that before we told them. How can we be back here, the Great Powers and their grisly parasites: making the same moves, the same old mistakes, the same old hateful compromises, that our Singularity was supposed to cure forever?

Why is moral development so difficult? Why are predators charismatic?

The knots in my frontal lobes were combed out by airy fingers, I fell into the sea of possibilities, I went to the place of terror and joy that no one understands unless they have been there. I asked my question and I didn’t get an answer, you never get an answer. Yet when I came to the shallows again, when I laid myself, exhausted, on this dark and confused shore, I knew what I was going to do: I had seen it.

But there always has to be an emotional reason. I’d known about Baal’s views before I arrived. I’d known that he would hunt and kill “weakling” Ki, as was his traditional right, and not just once, he’s do it whenever the opportunity arose; and I’d still been undecided. It was Tiamaat who made the difference. I’d met her, skin on skin as we say. I knew what the briefing had not been able to tell me. She was no cipher, superficially “civilised” by her education, she was suppressed. I had heard that cry of despair and anger, when she saw what Baal had done. I had talked to her. I knew she had strength and cunning, as well as good intentions. A latent dominance, the will and ability to be a leader.

I saw Baal’s look of challenge and trust, even now—

But Tiamaat deserved saving, and I would save her.

The talks went on. Morale was low on the DP side, because the refugee camp incident had shown us where we stood; but the Ki delegates were happy—insanely, infuriatingly. The “traditional diet of the An” was something they refused to discuss, and they were going to get their planet rebuilt anyway. The young An leaders spent very little time at the conference table. Baal was indifferent—he had people to understand these things for him—and Tiamaat could not be present without him. This caused a rift. Their aides, the only other An around, were restricted to the SV Facility suites (we care assistants may be crazy but we’re not entirely stupid). Pelé and I were fully occupied, making sure our separate charges weren’t left moping alone. Pelé took Tiamaat shopping and visiting museums (virtual and actual). I found that Baal loved to roam, just as I do myself, and took him exploring the lesser-known sights.

We talked about his background. Allegedly, he’d given up a promising career in the Space Marines to take on the leadership. When I’d assured myself that his pilot skills were real, he wasn’t just a toy-soldier aristo, I finally took him on the long float through the permanent umbilical, to Right Speranza.

We had to suit up at the other end.

“What’s this?” demanded Baal, grinning. “Are we going outside?”

“You’ll see. It’s an excursion I thought you’d enjoy.”

The suits were programmable. I watched him set one up for his size and bulk, and knew he was fine: but I put him through the routines, to make sure. Then I took him into the vasty open cavern of the DP’s missile repository, which we crossed like flies in a cathedral, hooking our tethers to the girders, drifting over the ranked silos of deep-space interceptors, the giant housing of particle cannons.

All of it obsolete, like castle walls in the age of heavy artillery; but it looks convincing on the manifest, and who knows? “Modern” armies have been destroyed by Zulu spears, it never pays to ignore the conventional weapons—

“Is this a weapons bay?” the monster exclaimed; scandalised, on suit radio.

“Of course,” said I. “Speranza can defend herself, if she has to.”

I let us into a smaller hangar, through a lock on the cavern wall, and filled it with air and pressure and lights. We were completely alone. Left Speranza is a natural object, a hollowed asteroid. Right is artificial, and it’s a dangerous place for sentient bipeds. The proximity of the torus can have unpredictable and bizarre effects, not to mention the tissue-frying radiation that washes through at random intervals. But we would be fine for a short while. We fixed tethers, opened our faceplates and hunkered down, gecko-padded bootsoles clinging to the arbitrary “floor.”

“I thought you were angels,” he remarked, shyly. “The weapons, all of that, it seems beneath you. Doesn’t your codename, ‘Debra,’ mean an angel? Aren’t you all messengers, come to us from the Mighty Void?”

“Mighty Void” was a Balas/Shet term meaning something like God.

“No . . . Deborah was a judge, in Israel. I’m just human, Baal. I’m a person with numinal intelligence, the same kind of being as you are; like all the KiAn.”

I could see that the harsh environment of Right Speranza moved him, as it did me. There was a mysterious peace and truth in being here, in the cold dark, breathing borrowed air. He was pondering: open and serious.

“Debra . . . ? Do you believe in the Diaspora?”

“I believe in the Weak Theory,” I said. “I don’t believe we’re all descended from the same Blue Planet hominid, the mysterious original starfarers, precursors of homo sapiens. I think we’re the same because we grew under the same constraints: time, gravity, hydrogen bonds; the nature of water, the nature of carbon—”

“But instantaneous transit was invented on the Blue Planet,” he protested, unwilling to lose his romantic vision.

“Only the prototype. It took hundreds of years, and a lot of outside help, before we had anything like viable interstellar travel—”

Baal had other people to understand the technology for him. He was building castles in the air, dreaming of his future. “Does everyone on the Blue speak English?”

“Not at all. They mostly speak a language called putonghua; which means ‘common speech,’ as if they were the only people in the galaxy. Blues are as insular as the KiAn, believe me, when they’re at home. When you work for the DP, you change your ideas; it happens to everyone. I’m still an Englishwoman, and mi naño Pelé is still a man of Ecuador—

“I know!” he broke in, eagerly. “I felt that. I like that in you!”

“But we skip the middle term. The World Government of our single planet doesn’t mean the same as it did.” I grinned at him. “Hey, I didn’t bring you here for a lecture. This is what I wanted to show you. See the pods?”

He looked around us, slowly, with a connoisseur’s eye. He could see what the pods were. They were Aleutian-build, the revolutionary leap forward: vehicles that could pass through the mind/matter barrier. An end to those dreary transit lounges, true starflight, the Holy Grail: and only the Aleutians knew how it was done

“Like to take one out for a spin?”

“You’re kidding!” cried Baal, his eyes alight.

“No, I’m not. We’ll take a two-man pod. How about it?”

He saw that I was serious, which gave him pause. “How can we? The systems won’t allow it. This hangar has to be under military security.”

“I am military security, Baal. So is Pelé. What did you think we were? Kindergarten teachers? Trust me, I have access, there’ll be no questions asked.”

He laughed. He knew there was something strange going on, but he didn’t care: he trusted me. I glimpsed myself as a substitute for Tiamaat, glimpsed the relationship he should have had with his partner. Not sexual, but predation-based: a playful tussle, sparring partners. But Tiamaat had not wanted to be his sidekick—

We took a pod. Once we were inside, I sealed us off from Speranza, and we lay side by side in the couches, two narrow beds in a torpedo shell: an interstellar sports car, how right for this lordly boy. I checked his hook-ups, and secured my own.

“Where are we going?”

“Oh, just around the block.”

His vital signs were in my eyes, his whole being was quivering in excitement, and I was glad. The lids closed, we were translated into code, we and our pod were injected into the torus, in the form of a triple stream of pure information, divided and shooting around the ring to meet itself, and collide—

I sat up, in a lucent gloom. The other bed’s seal opened, and Baal sat up beside me. We were both still suited, with open faceplates. Our beds shaped themselves into pilot and co-pilot couches, and we faced what seemed an unmediated view of the deep space outside. Bulwarks and banks of glittering instruments carved up the panorama: I saw Baal’s glance flash over the panels greedily, longing to be piloting this little ship for real. Then he saw the yellow primary, a white hole in black absence; and its brilliant, distant partner. He saw the pinpricks of other formations that meant nothing much to me, and he knew where I had brought him. We could not see the planet, it was entirely dark from this view. But in our foreground, the massive beams of space-to-space lasers were playing: shepherding plasma particles into a shell that would hold the recovering atmosphere in place.

To say that KiAn had been flayed alive was no metaphor. The people still living on the surface were in some kind of hell. But it could be saved.

“None of the machinery is strictly material,” I said, “in any normal sense. It was couriered here, as information, in the living minds of the people who are now on station. We can’t see them, but they’re around, in pods like this one. It will all disintegrate, when the repairs are done. But the skin of your world will be whole again, it won’t need to be held in place.”

The KiAn don’t cry, but I was so close to him, in the place where we were, that I felt his tears. “Why are you doing this?” he whispered. “You must be angels, or why are you saving us, what have we done to deserve this?”

“The usual reasons,” I said. “Market forces, political leverage, power play.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Then I don’t know what to tell you, Baal. Except that the Ki and the An have numinal intelligence. You are like us, and we have so few brothers and sisters. Once we’d found you, we couldn’t bear to lose you.”

I let him gaze, for a long moment without duration.

“I wanted you to see this.”

I stepped out of my pilot’s couch and stood braced: one hand gecko-padded to the inner shell, while I used the instruments to set the pod to self-destruct. The eject beacon started up, direct cortical warning that my mind read as a screaming siren—

“Now I’m going back to Speranza. But you’re not.”

The fine young cannibal took a moment to react. The pupils in his tawny eyes widened amazingly when he found that he was paralysed, and his capsule couldn’t close.

“Is this a dream?”

“Not quite. It’s a confabulation. It’s what happens when you stay conscious in transit. The mind invents a stream of environments, events. The restoration of KiAn is real, Baal. It will happen. We can see it ‘now’ because we’re in non-duration, we’re experiencing the simultanaeity. In reality—if that makes any sense, language hates these situations—we’re still zipping around the torus. But when the confabulation breaks up, you’ll still be in deep space and about to die.”

I did not need to tell him why I was doing this. He was no fool, he knew why he had to go. But his mind was still working, fighting—

“Speranza is a four-space mapped environment. You can’t do this and go back alone. The system knows you were with me, every moment. The record can’t be changed, no way, without the tampering leaving a trace.”

“True. But I am one of those rare people who can change the information. You’ve heard fairytales about us, the Blues who have super-powers? I’m not an angel, Baal. Actually, it’s a capital crime to be what I am, where I come from. But Speranza understands me. Speranza uses me.”

“Ah!” he cried. “I knew it, I felt it. We are the same!”

When I recovered self-consciousness, I was in my room, alone. Earlier in the day, Baal had claimed he needed a nap. After a couple of hours, I’d become suspicious, checked for his signs, and found him missing: gone from the SV Facility screen. I’d been trying to trace him when Right Speranza had detected a pod, with the An leader on board, firing up. The system had warned him to desist. Baal had carried on, and paid high price for his attempted joyride. The injection had failed, both Baal and one fabulous Aleutian-build pod had been annihilated.

Remembering this much gave me an appalling headache—the same aching awfulness I imagine shapeshifters (I know of one or two) feel in their muscle and bone. I couldn’t build the bridge at all: no notion how I’d connected between this reality and the former version. I could have stepped from the dying pod straight through the wall of this pleasant, modest living space. But it didn’t matter. I would find out, and Debra would have been behaving like Debra.

Pelé came knocking. I let him in and we commiserated, both of us in shock. We’re advocates, not enforcers, there’s very little we can do if a Sensitive Visitor is really determined to go AWOL. We’d done all the right things, short of using undue force, and so had Speranza. When we’d broken the privilege locks, Baal’s room record had shown that he’d been spying out how to get access to one of those Aleutian pods. It was just too bad that he’d succeeded, and that he’d had enough skill to get himself killed. Don’t feel responsible, said Pelé. It’s not your fault. Nobody thinks that. Don’t be so sad. Always so sad, Debra: it’s not good for the brain, you should take a break. Then he started telling me that frankly, nobody would regret Baal. By An law, Tiamaat could now rule alone; and if she took a partner, we could trust her not to choose another bloodthirsty atavist . . . I soon stopped him. I huddled there in pain, my friend holding my hand: seeing only the beautiful one, his tawny eyes at the last, his challenge and his trust; mourning my victim.

I’m a melancholy assassin.

I did not sleep. In the grey calm of Left Speranza’s early hours, before the breakfast kiosks were awake, I took the elevator to the Customised Shelter Sector, checked in with the CSP, and made my way, between the silent capsule towers, to Hopes and Dreams Park. I was disappointed that there were no refugees about. It would have been nice to see Ki children, playing fearlessly. Ki oldsters picking herbs from their windowboxes, instead of being boiled down for soup themselves. The gates of the Sacred Grove were open, so I just walked in. There was a memorial service: strictly no outsiders, but I’d had a personal message from Tiamaat saying I would be welcome. I didn’t particularly want to meet her again. I’m a superstitious assassin, I felt that she would somehow know what I had done for her. I thought I would keep to the back of whatever gathering I found, while I made my own farewell.

The daystar’s rays had cleared the false horizon, the sun was a rumour of gold between the trees. I heard laughter, and a cry. I walked into the clearing and saw Tiamaat. She’d just made the kill. I saw her toss the small body down, drop to her haunches, and take a ritual bite of raw flesh; I saw the blood on her mouth. The Ki looked on, keeping their distance in a solemn little cluster. Tiamaat transformed, splendid in her power, proud of her deed, looked up; and straight at me. I don’t know what she expected. Did she think I would be glad for her? Did she want me to know how I’d been fooled? Certainly she knew she had nothing to fear. She was only doing the same as Baal had done, and the DP had made no protest over his kill. I shouted, like an idiot: Hey, stop that!, and the whole group scattered. They vanished into the foliage, taking the body with them.

I said nothing to anyone. I had not, in fact, foreseen that Tiamaat would become a killer. I’d seen a talented young woman, who would blossom if the unfairly favoured young man was removed. I hadn’t realised that a dominant An would behave like a dominant An, irrespective of biological sex. But I was sure my employers had grasped the situation; and it didn’t matter. The long-gone, harsh symbiosis between the An and the Ki, which they preserved in their rites of kingship, was not the problem. It was the modern version, the mass market in Ki meat, the intensive farms and the factories. Tiamaat would help us to get rid of those. She would embrace the new in public, whatever she believed in private.

And the fate of the Ki would change.

The news of Baal’s death had been couriered to KiAn and to the homeworlds by the time I took my transit back to the Blue. We’d started getting reactions: all positive, so to speak. Of course, there would be persistent rumours that the Ki had somehow arranged Baal’s demise, but there was no harm in that. In certain situations, assassination works—as long as it is secret, or at least misattributed. It’s a far more benign tool than most alternatives; and a lot faster. I had signed off at the Social Support Office, I’d managed to avoid goodbyes. Just before I went through to the lounge, I realised that I hadn’t had my aura tag taken off. I had to go back, and go through another blessed gate; and Pelé caught me.

“Take the dreamtime,” he insisted, holding me tight. “Play some silly game, go skydiving from Angel Falls. Please, Debra. Don’t be conscious. You worry me.”

I wondered if he suspected what I really did for a living.

Maybe so, but he couldn’t possibly understand.

“I’ll give it serious thought,” I assured him, and kissed him goodbye.

I gave the idea of the soft option serious thought for ten paces, passed into the lounge, and found my narrow bed. I lay down there, beside my fine young cannibal, the boy who had known me for what I was. His innocent eyes . . . I lay down with them all, and with the searing terrors they bring; all my dead remembered.

I needed to launder my soul.

Originally published in The New Space Opera, edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, 2007.

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

Elizabeth Bear (elizabethbear.com)

Elizabeth Bear was the recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005. She has won two Hugo Awards for her short fiction, a Sturgeon Award, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. Bear lives in Massachusetts.

Ken MacLeod (kenmacleod.blogspot.com)

Ken MacLeod graduated with a BSc from Glasgow University in 1976. Following research at Brunel University, he worked in a variety of manual and clerical jobs whilst completing an MPhil thesis. He previously worked as a computer analyst/ programmer in Edinburgh, but is now a full-time writer. He is the author of twelve previous novels, five of which have been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and two which have won the BSFA Award. Ken MacLeod is married with two grown-up children and lives in West Lothian.

Gwynneth Jones (gwynethjones.uk)

Gwyneth Jones is a writer and critic of genre fiction. She’s won the Tiptree award, two World Fantasy awards, the Arthur C. Clarke award, the British Science Fiction Association short story award, the Dracula Society’s Children of the Night award, the P.K.Dick award, and the SFRA Pilgrim award for lifetime achievement in sf criticism. She also writes for teenagers, usually as Ann Halam. She lives in Brighton, UK, with her husband and two cats called Ginger and Milo; curating assorted pondlife in season. She’s a member of the Soil Association, the Sussex Wildlife Trust, Frack Free Sussex and the Green Party; and an Amnesty International volunteer.

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 four-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). The inaugural edition of his Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology series was published by Night Shade Books in June. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.