Issue 20

© Wyrm Publishing, 2016
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forever-magazine.com

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the September 2016 issue of Forever Magazine!

It seems like it’s been no time since I had to write one of these. Well over a week later, I’m still recovering from Worldcon in Kansas City. I don’t think I’ve ever been so busy at a convention. I was heavily scheduled on panels, had a signing, a couple of scheduled dinners, and a few award ceremonies to attend. Speaking of those, I lost the Hugo for Editor Short Form again, but had my best showing, coming in third behind Ellen Datlow and Sheila Williams. Can’t complain about that. Besides, earlier in the week, I received the Chesley Award for Best Art Director and “Cat Pictures Please” by Naomi Kritzer from Clarkesworld took the Hugo for Best Short Story.

After all that excitement, I think I’ll be taking it easy this month and staying home. I have some anthologies to catch up on a new update to Destiny coming soon. Maybe we can even get to the beach one last time this season.

Until next month . . .

-Neil

The Chief Designer

Andy Duncan

In the moving, thoughtful, powerful novella that follows, he takes us back to the Soviet Union in the days just after World War II for a glimpse of the kind of secret history that doesn’t get told in schoolbooks—a penetrating, fact-based look into the strange life and stranger destiny of a man whose life changed the history of the twentieth century, and perhaps the history of the future, forever.

I. KOLYMA LABOR CAMP, SOMETIME DURING WORLD WAR II

“Korolev.”

D 327 did not look around. He was busy. His joints grated together, his ligaments groaned as he lifted the pickax over his head—a motion as fast as he could manage, yet so terribly slow, slower even than the last time, which had been slower in turn than the time before that; then he released his breath and with it the tension, and the will, so that his arms fell forward and allowed the tip of the pick to glance across the jagged face of the wall. A few greasy-black chips pattered his shoes. The fall of the pick almost balanced in joy the inevitable ordeal of lifting, but not quite, so D 327’s misery accumulated in minute increments like the drift of slag in which he stood ankle-deep. He knew that none of the other workers, spaced five paces apart down the length of the tunnel, were faring any better. They had been ordered to dig for gold, but he knew this tunnel held no gold; this tunnel was the antithesis of gold; the gold had been pried from its workers’ teeth and chased from their dreams; and his pick was as soft and blunt as a thumb. He raised it again, and tried to lose count of how many times he had done so.

“Korolev.”

D 327 tried to focus his attention not on the lift and fall, lift and fall of his triple burden, arm and pick and arm, but on the slight added weight in his right jacket pocket—an imagined weight, really, so coarse and mostly air was the bit of bread he had palmed from poor Vasily’s plate at midday. Vasily had collapsed at just the right time. Later, and Vasily would have used that crust to swipe even the shine of food from the tin plate, would have thrust it into his mouth with his last dying breath. Sooner, and the guard would have noticed the remaining food and snatched it away. Guards starved less quickly in the Kolyma than the prisoners, but all starved. A dozen times D 327 had come deliriously close to eating his prize, but each time he had refrained. Many of his fellow prisoners had forgotten how to savor, but he had not. After supper would be best: Just before sleep, as he lay with his face to the barracks wall, the unchewed food in his mouth would add warmth and flavor to oblivion.

“Korolev.”

The voice was cold and clear and patient, an electronic pulse against the rasps, clinks, drips, and scuttles of the tunnel. What word, in this hole, could bear such repetition? Only a name, like God, or Stalin.

“Korolev.”

I heard that name often at the Institute, D 327 thought. Often in my presence others said that name. A response was expected, assumed; was only just. Down fell the pick, clatter and flake; he turned, half afraid of seeing nothing in the light of his carbide lamp.

Instead he faced an infinitude of stars.

“Come down from your orbit, Comrade Korolev. Come down to Earth, that a mere mortal may speak with you.”

The stars were printed on a sheet of glossy paper: a page. A hand turned the page, to a cutaway diagram of a tapered cylinder like a plump bullet. Inside its shell flowed rivers of arrows. At that moment, more clearly even than he remembered his own name, Sergei Korolev remembered another’s.

“Tsiolkovsky,” he said.

“Your memory is excellent, Comrade Korolev.” The man who had held the open book before Korolev’s face reversed it and examined it himself. He wore a full-dress officer’s uniform, and two soldiers flanked him. “Exploration of Cosmic Space with Reactive Devices, by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Published 1903. And did the czar recognize his genius? Fah! If not for the Workers’ Revolution, he would have died of old age still wiping the snot of schoolboys in Kaluga.” He sighed. “How often we visionaries labor without recognition, without thanks.”

“It is a shame, Citizen General. I am sad for you.”

The officer snapped the book shut one-handed. In the dim light of Korolev’s helmet gleamed the brim of the officer’s cap, the golden eagle’s wings, and the rifle barrels of the soldiers on each side. “You flatter me, Korolev. I am only an engineer like yourself. And henceforth you may call me Comrade Shandarin, as you would have before your crimes were exposed and punished.” He surveyed the meager rubble beneath Korolev’s feet. “Your service here is done. From today you serve the Motherland in other ways. You will join me in my work.”

Korolev was not attentive. Just as the mere sight of food could flood his mouth with saliva and his stomach with growling, raging juices, the glimpse of Tsiolkovsky’s diagrams had released a torrent of images, facts, numerals, terms, all familiar and yet deliciously new. Apogee and perigee. Trajectory and throttle. Elevation and azimuth. Velocities and propellants and thrust. He was trying to savor all this, and this man Shandarin was distracting him. “And what work is that—Comrade?”

Shandarin laughed, a series of sharp detonations in the tunnel. “Why, what a question. The work your Motherland trained you to do, of course. Do you think your skills as a gold miner are in demand?” He reached into his brass-buttoned coat (and one part of Korolev, eternally cold in his thin and tattered parka, noted how the coat retained the smooth, unwrinkled drape of great comfort and thickness and weight) and pulled out a folded sheaf of papers that he handed to Korolev. “The chief problem,” he said, as Korolev exulted in the glorious feel of paper, “is distance, of course. The German rockets have a range of hundreds of kilometers, but are thousands of kilometers possible? Not all the Motherland’s enemies are her neighbors. The V-2 achieves altitudes greater than eighty kilometers, more than sixteen times the height of your GIRD-X; our new rockets must fly even higher than the Germans’.” Korolev leafed through the papers. His blisters smeared the charts and graphs no matter how much care he took. Shandarin continued: “So our rockets must somehow better the Germans’ twenty-five thousand kilograms of thrust, and by a wide margin at that. This requires drastic innovations in metallurgy or design, if not both—Comrade, are you listening?”

Korolev had turned one of the charts on its side, so that the rocket’s arc swept not from right to left, but upward in a languid, powerful semicircle, as if bound for …

His thumb left a red star in its path.

“I am listening,” Korolev said, “and so is everyone else.” He was aware of fewer noises, fewer motions, from the other miners, and some of the Institute’s concern for security had returned to him, along with an echo of his voice of command. “In my day,” Korolev continued, “such talk was classified.”

Shandarin shrugged, grinned. “I am speaking only to you, Comrade,” he said. He inclined his head backward, toward the soldiers, and said, “We may speak freely before cretins,” then flicked a gloved finger toward the miners, “and even more so before dead men.” He slid a page from Korolev’s hands and held it up for all to see, turned completely around, waved the sheet a little so that it fluttered. No miner met his gaze. He turned back to Korolev. “Shall we go?” He feigned a shiver. “I am not so used to the cold as you.”

In 1933, after the GIRD-X triumph, after the vodka and the toasts and the ritual congratulations from Comrade Stalin (delivered in great haste by a nearsighted bureaucrat who looked as if he expected rockets to roar out of the doorways at any moment), Korolev and his mentor Tsander, who would die so soon thereafter, had left their joyous colleagues downstairs and taken their celebration aloft, clambered onto the steep, icy rooftop of the Moscow office building that housed the State Reaction Scientific Research Institute. To hell with the vodka; they toasted each other, and the rocket, and the city, and the planet, with a smuggled and hoarded bottle of French champagne.

“To the moon!”

“To the sun!”

“To Mars!”

They ate caviar and crabmeat and smoked herring, smacked like gourmands and sailed the empty cans into orbit over the frozen streets of the capital. Never, not even in the Kolyma, had Korolev so relished a meal.

He remembered all this, and much more, as he sat beside Shandarin in the sledge that hissed away from the snow-covered entrance of Mine Seventeen. He burned to examine the papers, but they could wait. He folded them and tucked them into his worn and patched jacket, through which he almost could have read them had he wanted to. As Shandarin regarded him in silence, he pulled the crust of bread from his pocket and began nibbling it with obvious relish, as if it were the finest delicacy plucked from the ovens of the Romanovs. He settled back, closed his eyes, and in eating the bread relived the bursting tang of the caviar, the transcendent release of the launch, the blanketing embrace of the night sky that no longer danced beyond reach. In this way he communed with his former self, who dropped gently down from the rooftop of the Institute and joined him, ready to resume their great work, and the sledge shot across the snow as if propelled by yearning and fire.

II. BAIKONUR COSMODROME, SEPTEMBER 1957

Awakened by the commingled howls of all the souls in Hell, a startled Evgeny Aksyonov lifted the curtain of this compartment window and looked out onto a circus. Loping alongside the train was a parallel train of camels, a dozen or more of the gangling beasts, their fencepost teeth bared as they yelped and brayed and groaned, lips curled in great ropy sneers. Bulging gray sacks jogged at their flanks, and swaying atop each mount was a swarthy, bearded rider in flowing robes, with a snarl to rival that of his camel.

So this is Kazakhstan, thought Aksyonov, who before this trip never had been farther east than the outskirts of Moscow, the home of a maiden aunt who baked fine tarts. He breathed the choking dust and coughed with enthusiasm; he was too young to be uncomfortable. One of the camel drivers noticed him gawking, grinned, and raised a shaggy fist in a gesture so rude that Aksyonov hastily dropped the curtain and sat back, fingering his own suddenly inadequate beard. He rummaged in his canvas bag for the worn copy of Perelman’s Interplanetary Travels , which he opened at random and began to read, though he could have recited the passage with his eyes closed. He soon nodded off again, and in his dreams he was a magnificent bronze fighter of the desert, who brandished a scimitar to defy the rockets that split the sky.

No conductor, no fellow passenger disturbed his sleep, for Evgeny Aksyonov was bound for a place that did not officially exist, to meet a man who officially had no name. Access to such non-places and non-people was strictly regulated, and so Aksyonov was the only passenger aboard the train.

“Come,” the soldier on the platform said, after he peered from Aksyonov’s face to his photo and back again just enough to make Aksyonov nervous. “The Chief Designer expects you.”

For fifteen minutes or more, he drove Aksyonov along a freshly paved highway so wide and straight it seemed inevitable, past a series of construction sites where the hollow outlines of immense buildings rose from pits and heaps of dirt. Gangs of workers swarmed about. Atop one pile of earth, three armed soldiers kept watch: the men swinging picks below must be zeks, political prisoners, the Motherland’s most menial laborers. A gleaming rail spur crossed and recrossed the road, and Aksyonov began to brace himself for each intersection, because the driver did not slow down. Some completed buildings looked like administrative offices, others like army barracks. Behind one barracks were more inviting dwellings, a half-dozen yurts. A couple of Kazakh men were in the process of rolling a seventh into place, as if it were a great hide-covered hoop.

The driver abandoned Askyonov without speech or ceremony at the concrete lip of a kilometer-wide pit. Aksyonov looked down sixty meters along the steep causeway that would channel the rocket blasts. He shivered and retreated from the edge of the launch pad, a tremendous concrete shelf hundreds of meters square. No amount of rocket research would make him fond of heights. Above him soared three empty gantries, thirty-meter talons that would close on the rocket and hold it fast until liftoff.

Hundreds of workers dashed about the pad. Some drove small electric carts, some clambered along scaffolds that reached into the tips of the gantries and the depths of the pit. Among them were many Kazakh men, distinguishable even at a distance by their felt skullcaps. Amid all this activity, Aksyonov tried to look as knowledgeable and useful as possible while he guarded his luggage and felt homesick.

As he considered getting out his book, he was jolted nearly off his feet by a voice that boomed and echoed from everywhere: to left, to right, the pit, the sky.

“Testing. Testing. One two three. Tsiolkovsky Tsiolkovsky Tsiolkovsky.”

Then came several prolonged and deafening blasts, like gusts into a microphone. Aksyonov clapped his hands over his ears. No one else in the whole anthill took any visible notice of the racket.

“Hello. Hello. Hello.” The words rolled across the concrete in waves and rattled Aksyonov to the bone. “Can you hear me? Eh? Hello? I’m asking you—you there with the beard. Yes, you, the one doing no work. Can you hear me?”

Aksyonov released his ears and looked about the launch pad. Unsure where to direct his response, he waved both hands high above his head.

“Good,” the voice said. “Wait there. I’ll be right up—” The next words were swallowed in a spasm of rattling coughs that echoed off the sides of the pit and seemed to well up from the earth itself. Aksyonov covered his ears again. In mid-cough, the amplification stopped, and all that fearsome reverberation contracted to a single small voice that hacked and cleared its throat far across the concrete pad.

Aksyonov turned to see a man step out of an elevator set into one of the support pillars. The man walked toward Aksyonov, swabbed his mouth with a handkerchief: heavy-set, fiftyish, with low, thick eyebrows and a brilliant gaze. He wore an overcoat, though the day was warm for autumn.

“You are Aksyonov,” he said, hand extended. He said it as if he had reviewed a list of names in the elevator, and had selected just the right one for the job; if he had said Dyomin or Pilyugin or Molotov, Aksyonov would have answered to it just as readily, then and forever. “My name is Sergei Korolev,” the older man continued, “but you are unlikely to hear that name again. Here I am only the Chief Designer, or the Chief. Welcome to Baikonur Cosmodrome.”

Aksyonov made a little bow, just more than a nod. He had rehearsed his opening and was quite proud of it. “I am honored to meet the man who designed the first Soviet rocket.”

“And I am honored to meet the designer of our future ones,” Korolev replied. “In collaboration, of course. Space is a collaborative effort, like a nation, or a cathedral. Come with me, please,” he added over his shoulder, for he already was well on his way across the pad. Aksyonov grabbed his bags and scrambled to catch up.

“I regret that I have no time to give you a tour of the facility, nor a proper interview. Can you recognize a lie when you hear one? What I just told you was a lie. Truthfully, I do not regret it at all, for I am glad finally to be busy with this launch of the Fellow Traveler—you read the brief I sent you, yes? Yes. Instead of the usual formalities, you will accompany me on all my rounds in the coming week, from this moment. Will this be satisfactory?”

“Very much so, Comrade Korolev. Er, Comrade Chief.”

“Simply Chief will do. Hello, Abish, you mad Kazakh, please keep it out of the pit, will you?” he cried to a waving, grinning man who whizzed past in an electric cart. “You come from the Academy with the highest recommendations, Comrade Aksyonov. So high that you actually had a choice of postings, and choice is a rare thing in this new century. Tell me, why did you choose Baikonur? Do you nurse some abiding love for sand?”

“Primarily, Comrade—er, Chief—I came here to work with you.” He awaited some response, got none, and went on. “Also, Comrade Shandarin’s design group involves—well, let us say much more conventional applications of rocketry? Your work at Baikonur, what little I could learn of it, seemed much more interesting.”

“I understand,” the Chief said. He led the way down a metal spiral staircase that clamored at every step. “Comrade Shandarin is like the old Chinaman, who lobs arrows of flying fire at the Mongols. The firepower is greater and greater, but still the Mongols keep coming.” At the foot of the reverberating stairs, he turned back and stared at Aksyonov’s luggage. “What in the hell are all these things you carry around with you?”

Aksyonov stopped. “Ah, just some . . . just my luggage, Chief.” The older man’s gaze was unreadable. “My clothes, and books . . . and some personal items . . . ” He faltered.

After some thought, the Chief grunted in mingled assent and surprise and said, “Books are useful.” Turning to the parking lot, he swept one arm back toward the launch pad. “Consider this a personal item, too.”

As the two men approached, a large soldier bounded from a car, threw open the back door, and stood at attention. In one hand he held a book, his place marked with an index finger.

“Thank you, Oleg,” the Chief said, and followed Aksyonov in. “Oleg here is reading his way through all the major published works on rocketry and interplanetary travel. What do you think of the Goddard, Oleg?”

“Very interesting, Chief,” the soldier said, as he cranked the ignition. Aksyonov studied the man’s thick, shaven neck.

“It is a directed reading,” the Chief continued. He pulled a slide rule and a slim notebook from his coat. The shadows of the gantries swept across his face as the car circled the parking lot. “If I must live with an armed escort, I will at least be able to converse civilly with him.”

“Would you like to converse now, Chief?” the driver asked.

“No, thank you,” said the Chief. His fingers danced across the numbers as Aksyonov looked out the back window at the receding claws of the pad.

III. BAIKONUR COSMODROME, 4 OCTOBER 1957

“Ten.”

Ten seconds to go, and no work left to be done. Wonderful, wonderful. Korolev stretched out his legs beneath the scarred wooden desk, pulled the microphone forward, and relaxed as he counted down to zero.

“Nine.”

A hundred meters away from this steel-encased concrete bunker, Korolev’s voice must be booming across the launch pad. Only the topmost fifteen meters of Old Number Seven would be visible above the icy white fog vented from its liquid-oxygen tanks. Korolev had watched it through every periscope, from every angle, until his cheeks ached from squinting. Now he attempted to watch nothing. His subordinates glanced up from their consoles and radar screens sweaty and white-lipped, like men ridden by nightmares. Let them worry. It was part of the learning experience. Korolev was done with worries—for eight more seconds, anyway. Then the next trial would begin, but in the meantime he would savor his triumph like a crust of bread.

“Eight.”

Just weeks before, Comrade Khrushchev had given the go-ahead for an orbital satellite launch—a launch that would impress the world (so he said) with the fearsome might of the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile. Ha! As if Washington were as easy to reach as orbit. The Party Chairman had played right into the Chief Designer’s hands.

“Seven.”

Granted, Old Number Seven was a remarkable design achievement. Twelve small steering rockets and four strap-on boosters surrounded a central core with twenty separate thrust chambers. The metallurgists, wringing their hands, had told Korolev that his project was doomed, that any single rocket of Soviet make would shatter well before it reached four hundred and fifty thousand kilograms of thrust. Very well, Korolev said: How about two dozen, three dozen smaller rockets clustered together? The union is greater than the individual; was this not the essence of Communism?

“Six.”

For hours, Khrushchev and the members of the Politburo, who knew as much about rocketry as any equivalent number of camels, had scampered about the launch pad like Siberian peasants on the loose in Red Square. They wanted to touch everything, like children; Korolev had to be stern with them. And they asked childish questions: How much does it weigh? How fast does it go? How high will it fly? The answers made them even more excited, and Khrushchev was the most excited of all. “This is a great work you do, Comrade Korolev!” he kept saying. The man’s cigar ashes were everywhere, and Korolev had not seen his favorite tea glass since.

“Five.”

Comrade Shandarin’s objections, though they went unheeded at the Kremlin, were sound. What good was an ICBM that took hours to fuel and launch? One so large that it could be moved only by railway? One that could not maneuver itself to its target, but had to be guided by human controllers on the ground? Worst of all, from Shandarin’s standpoint, only the northeastern corner of the United States had anything to fear from Old Number Seven. “Comrade,” he intoned, “there are precious few military targets in Maine.” The restless old Chinaman could hear the Mongols laughing.

“Four.”

Just a week before, young Aksyonov, at the close of a routine meeting, had loitered about with the constipated expression that signified an important question welling up inside. “Chief, I am confused,” the young man said. “The field marshal keeps referring to Old Number Seven as a ballistic missile. Perhaps I am wrong, Chief, but—is Old Number Seven not a rather inefficient design for a ballistic missile?”

“Three.”

Korolev had beamed at the young man, leaned forward and said, “I do not think that a fair assessment, Comrade Aksyonov. I think it would be more accurate to call Old Number Seven a shitty design for a ballistic missile.”

“Two.”

“But,” Korolev continued, “it will make a marvelous booster rocket to send men into space.”

“One.

“Ignition!”

And so a new star blossomed in the Central Asian desert and rose into the heavens, and even over the thunderous roar of the rockets the others in the command bunker heard the Chief as he threw his head back and laughed.

IV. STEPPES NORTH OF BAIKONUR, FEBRUARY 1961

Aksyonov stood beside the Chief, their elbows touching, twin binoculars raised. An eagle wheeled across Aksyonov’s portion of sky, and he instinctively turned his head to keep it in view, then caught himself and swung back to focus on the orange parachute as it grew larger and larger—though not quite so large as expected.

Aksyonov lowered his binoculars and checked his map, but the Chief needed no confirmation. “Our peacock has flown off course,” he muttered, and rapped twice on the roof of the cab.

The truck roared forward, jolted along the frozen ruts of the dirt lane, and the swaying engineers in the back held on as best they could. Across the vast fields to right and left, toy-sized trucks and ambulances raced alongside. A flock of far-distant sheep surged away from an oncoming truck; the wind carried the honks and bleats for kilometers. Streams of vehicles converged on the drifting orange blossom that was Pyotr Dolgov.

The Chief was on good terms with each of the prospective cosmonauts at Star City, knew their names and families and hobbies and histories, knew in fact everything in their dossiers (and KGB dossiers omitted nothing). The Chief had selected these men from thousands of candidates, in consultation with Khrushchev and, seemingly, half the Politburo; and despite all this, Aksyonov was convinced that the Chief never liked Pyotr Dolgov.

The cosmonaut would sit in the commons for hours waxing his absurd mustache and bragging to everyone about his sexual exploits and his skydiving expertise. “More than five hundred jumps, my friends, and not so much as a sprained ankle. You see this little pocket volume of Lenin? I collect them, just to have something to read on the way down. After the chute is open, there is nothing else to do, you see? Eventually I will have read all the great man’s works between earth and sky! How many scholars can say as much?” And so on and so on, as the other cosmonauts hooted and jeered throughout. The Chief, shambling through the commons with a fresh sheaf of problems under his arm, would glare at him, and say nothing.

Yet Dolgov was the obvious man to test the East’s ejection system, and such a test must be done without delay, if what the Chief read in the KGB reports, and in Life magazine, were to be believed. Woe indeed, that long, dry, cold spring, if the Chief caught someone taking a break to smoke a cigarette or place an idle telephone call or, worst of all, take a nap. “Do the Americans and the Germans shirk their jobs, down there in the tropics?” he would yell, waving the latest publicity photographs of the seven toothy spacemen. (The Americans surely would send the first dentist into space.) The Chief found this strange, perpetually sunny launch site, this Cape Canaveral Florida, a locale as exotic as Mars or the moon; to him it was always “down there in the tropics.” So Dolgov was hustled through his training, and the final test was scheduled for late February.

The experiment was simple. Dolgov, suited up, was strapped into a prototype ejection seat inside a full-size mock-up of the East craft. Then the mock-up was carried aloft in the cargo bay of one of the big Antonov transports. Thousands of meters above the steppes, the capsule was shoved without ceremony out the back of the plane. Once clear, Dolgov pressed the “eject” button. Very simple. Also lunatic, but the schedule at Baikonur Cosmodrome made generous allowances for lunacy.

Dolgov had summed up the procedure: “You feed me to the plane, and the plane shits me back out!”

The Chief had winced, and then nodded his head.

The Chief’s truck was not the first to arrive that afternoon. A gaggle of engineers all tried to climb over the tailgate together, and the Chief, impatient, gestured for Aksyonov to help him over the side. The rippling parachute danced sideways, but was anchored by the prone figure on the ground.

A pale soldier with a rifle jogged up to the Chief and said: “It’s bad, Comrade Designer. Perhaps you should wait for the—” The Chief, of course, was already past, and Aksyonov checked his stride a bit so as not to outpace the Chief.

Dolgov lay on his back, arms and legs sprawled as no living man would willingly lie. His helmet, its faceplate shattered, rested at a crazy angle on his shoulders yet still was bolted to the suit.

The Chief stared down at the body and said, “We are fools before men and before God.”

Doctors arrived, circling somewhat to maintain a respectful distance from the Chief, and confirmed the obvious: Dolgov’s neck was broken. He had done no reading on the way down.

“His helmet must have struck the hatch upon ejection,” Aksyonov said, for he felt he should say something. “He knew the risks,” he added.

“Not as well as you, my friend, and certainly not as well as I.” The Chief’s voice was deceptively quiet. By now dozens of others had gathered. They looked sick, ashen, aghast, but the Chief’s face was taut with fury. Slow and gentle in his rage, he knelt on the frozen ground, reached past the doctors, grasped Dolgov’s outflung hands, and folded the arms across the orange chest so that Dolgov seemed to grasp the chest straps of his parachute.

“Better that way,” the Chief grunted.

He turned and walked back toward the truck, into the cold wind, Aksyonov close behind. As he walked, the Chief pulled from his bulky jacket his notebook and a ball-point pen, shook the pen to get it going (it was of East German make), and began to write, pen plowing across the page, line after line. As he wrote, the Chief stepped over gullies and around rocks without stumbling or looking up. A marmot scampered across his path, practically underfoot. The Chief kept writing.

At the end of the lane, where the earth was permanently churned by the wide turns of tractors, the pale soldier had found a use for his rifle: He held it up horizontally, like a cattle gate, to keep three shriveled peasant women at bay. As the Chief approached, the eldest called: “What is wrong, Comrade? What’s all the fuss?”

The Chief replied as he passed, without looking up or ceasing to write: “I just broke a young man’s neck, Madam, with a slide rule and the stroke of a pen.”

The old woman instantly crossed herself, then realized her error and clapped her hands to her face; but Aksyonov and his Chief could not care less, and the soldier was intent on the romping parachute, as rapt and wide-eyed as a child.

V. BAIKONUR COSMODROME, 12 APRIL 1961

Frustrated with merely adjusting and rearranging his stubborn pillow, Aksyonov began, shortly past one A.M., to give it a sound thrashing. He pummelled it with his fists, butted it with his head, and slung it into the corner. Aksyonov sat up, sighed, and amused himself for a few minutes by twisting locks of his hair into intricate braids with his left thumb and forefinger, then yanking them free with his right hand. “I am insane,” he said aloud. He threw back the bedcovers and swung his bare feet onto the never-warm wooden floor of the cottage.

The snores droning through the hallway suggested Aksyonov was alone in his sleeplessness. Trousers, shoes, jacket, cap; he imagined they were the bright orange flight suit, the asphalt spreader’s boots, the leaden bubble of the helmet. He made final adjustments to this fancy (to be sure of the oxygen-nitrogen mix) before he stepped boldly onto the back porch, arms raised in triumph, to claim the concrete walkway and the dusty shrubbery in the name of World Socialism.

Shaking his head at his foolishness—an option young Gagarin, suited up, alas would not have—Aksyonov strolled into the yard. He briefly mistook, for the thousandth time, the horizonal glow of the launch pad for the dawn of a new day. Aksyonov felt his internal compass corkscrew wildly. He closed his eyes and gulped the chill air, hoped to flood himself with calm, but instead thought of a rocket sucking subzero broth from a hose.

Across the garden, a light burned in the kitchen window of the Chief’s equally nondescript cottage. Aksyonov walked toward it, since he had nowhere else to walk, and as he neared he became absurdly furtive, stepping with great care, raising his knees high like a prancing colt in zero gravity. He crept into the bushes alongside the house and peered over the sill. As a child, Aksyonov had longed to be a spy; he enjoyed, for example, covertly watching his secretly Orthodox grandfather in prayer. One day he gave himself away with a loud borscht-fed belch, infuriated his grandfather, and launched a family crisis . . . but the Chief, he saw, was just reading.

The harsh fluorescent light accented the frostbite scars on the Chief’s face—a sign, too, of his weariness. As usual, his right hand supported his chin; his left index finger guided his eyes across and down the page of his notebook. At his elbow were a plate of cheese curds and a full glass of tea from which no steam rose. The Chief turned the page, read, turned another. Nothing worth watching; why, then, was Aksyonov so fascinated? Why did he feel such comfort, knowing the Chief Designer sat up late in a lighted kitchen, reading? The Chief’s finger moved as methodically as his pen, line after line after—he looked up, not toward the window but toward the back door, and Aksyonov ducked beneath the sill. He heard the scrape of a chair, and heavy footsteps. A wedge of light sliced across the grass.

The Chief whispered: “Gagarin? Hsst! Hello?”

After a pause, as Aksyonov held his breath, the Chief peered around the corner of the house at his assistant crouched in the shrubbery.

“Ah, it’s you,” the Chief said. “Good. Now perhaps I can get some work done, in this winter resort for narcoleptics.”

Aksyonov was brushing leaves and twigs from his sleeves, trying to formulate an explanation to himself that also would pass muster with the Chief, when his superior reappeared. He strode from the house with the notebook under his right arm as his left arm fought for position inside his bulky jacket, which he wore outdoors in all weathers; Aksyonov figured it weighed at least as much as a flight suit. “Now then,” the Chief said, and shepherded Aksyonov across the yard by the elbow. “Let us suppose, for the sake of argument and for our sanity, that all goes well in the morning. Gagarin goes up, he orbits, he comes down, he talks to Khrushchev, he talks to his mama, he is the good Russian boy, yes? Yes. Fine. All well and good. Still he is just Spam in a can.”

“Spam, Chief?”

The Chief waved his hand. “An American delicacy packed in cans, like caviar. I have read too much Life, perhaps. Stop interrupting. I mean that if good Russian boys like Gagarin are ever to orbit anything other than the Earth, they will need a craft better than that hollowed-out Fellow Traveler over there. They will need to be able to maneuver, to rendezvous with each other, to dock, and so on. Now interrupt me. What modular structure for this new craft, this Union craft, best would combine the strengths of our current craft with the terrible necessities of . . . ”

For more than an hour the two men tromped across the yard, sometimes talked simultaneously and sometimes not at all, sometimes walked shoulder to shoulder and sometimes stalked each other like duelists, and they snatched diagrams from the air, and chopped them in the grass, and bickered and fought and hated one another and reconciled and embraced and bickered again, all beneath a brilliant starry sky at which they did not even glance; and when they tired, having solved nothing and having discovered about a dozen fresh impossibilities to be somehow faced and broken, they collapsed onto the back porch steps in giddy triumph and elation, and then Aksyonov said, “This is not my cottage.”

The Chief looked around. “Nor mine,” he said.

Heaped about the porch were bouquets, mostly frugal carnations, brought the previous day, in wave after wave, by dimpled envoys of the Young Communists League.

“This is Gagarin’s cottage,” Aksyonov whispered. The windows were dark. In the absolute silence: a faint snore.

“At seven last evening I marched over here and ordered him to go to bed and get a good night’s sleep,” the Chief murmured, eyes wide, “and he has the nerve to do exactly that.” He heaved himself off the steps, rubbed the small of his back, stooped and raked the dirt with his hands. “Help me,” he whispered, and began to load his pockets with pebbles.

Aksyonov dropped to hands and knees. “You’re right, Chief. Why should we stay up all night, and do all his worrying for him?” He added, under his breath: “The bastard.”

Incredibly, there was Gagarin, out cold, his outline visible in the darkened room thanks to the radium dial of the bedside clock. The two engineers danced back a few paces from the cosmonaut’s window and began peppering the pane with handfuls of shot. Was the man deaf, or made of stone—a peasant boy already gone to monument? Ah, there’s the light. Crouched behind Gagarin’s complementary black government sedan, which he could drive from the middle of nowhere to the edge of nowhere and back again, his tormentors watched the young hero of the Motherland raise the sash, poke out his head, look around.

Gagarin whispered: “Chief?”

No reply, and so the sash came down, and the light went off. The two ruffians stood up, turned solemnly to each other, and began to sputter and fizz with suppressed laughter. Aksyonov drew in a deep breath, and the Chief said, with quiet gravity: “As I prepared to leave the cottage, Gagarin said he had two last questions for me. One, was it not true that he could take a couple of personal items aboard, up to about two hundred grams? Yes, I told him, of course, perhaps a photograph or the like. Then, he made a request. Do you know what that boy wanted to carry into orbit tomorrow? Can you imagine? One of my writing pens.”

“Did you give him one?”

The Chief’s face spasmed. “Go to bed, Aksyonov,” he said.

Aksyonov did, and behind him the Chief Designer leaned on the government-issue sedan and gazed at Yuri Gagarin’s darkened bedroom window.

VI. SUNRISE ONE, 12 OCTOBER 1964

A planet rolled aside to reveal a star, and was itself revealed, lighted as if from within: storm systems roiled; mountain snowfields sparkled; a checkerboard of collective farms wheeled past the window, proof from space that Communism had changed the Earth. Orbital sunrise was the spectacle of a lifetime, yet Cosmonaut Aksyonov was distracted throughout. Cosmonaut Aksyonov was upside down.

Should he say something? He knew that at four hundred kilometers above the earth’s surface the term “upside down” was meaningless, but the sensation persisted. Even with his eyes closed he felt inverted, as if all the blood was rushing to his head. Surely Yegorov’s countless sensors, which studded every crevice and cranny of Aksyonov’s body, would detect such a thing? For a moment, Aksyonov fancied that the doctor was aware of his upside-downness and just hadn’t said anything, to spare Aksyonov’s feelings. After all, reorienting himself, swapping ends, would be impossible for any of the three crewmen in this cramped space. Here there was even less room to maneuver than in the back seat of that ridiculous Italian car in which Aksyonov had ridden three abreast with these very men a month before, on a futile midnight jaunt to Tyuratam for vodka. Even with the ability to unstrap himself and float, could the middle person suddenly cry, “Switch!” and reverse himself at will? No, if Aksyonov was upside down, he would have to stay that way until re-entry. And if he was not upside down, but merely insane, then he might stay that way a lot longer, but he tried not to think about that.

“Looks like a slight anomaly in the saline balance,” Yegorov said, as he peered at his hand-sized lab kit. The doctor sounded very proud of his salty blood. He had poked and prodded himself with sensors and needles and probes ever since reaching orbit, but found himself lamentably normal—until this final pinprick of blood, which Yegorov had flipped from his finger like a tiny red berry, finally yielded something unearthly, if tedious. Well, fine, Comrade Doctor, Aksyonov wanted to say, why do all your little tests not tell you that we’ve been upside down for the past two hours? Because if Aksyonov was upside down, then Yegorov and Novikov must be upside down as well. The thought did not console him.

“How do you feel, Comrade Aksyonov?” Novikov asked.

“I am fine,” Aksyonov replied.

The pilot smiled in reply and returned his attention to the sealed tube of black currant juice that drifted between his outstretched hands. In space as on Earth, Novikov thrilled at small things. Back at the cosmodrome, he had been aghast at Aksyonov’s ignorance of Kazakh food. He had prepared for the reluctant engineer lamb strips and noodles, which he called besh barmak, and poured him a foamy mug of fermented kumiss. “You will enjoy space more,” the pilot had said, “if you experience more of Earth beforehand. Drink up. It’s mare’s milk, but what do you care? We are young yet. Drink.” Now Novikov was engrossed with the plastic tube, which he batted first with his right hand, then his left, as if he were playing tennis with himself, and the tube tumbled first one way, then another. Aksyonov was fairly certain of the tube’s movements to left and right, but what of “up” and “down”? Was the tube, end over end over end, ever truly upside down? Or was it right side up the whole time, as the rest of the capsule revolved around it? Aksyonov wanted to throw up.

“If you aren’t going to drink that, how about passing it over?” asked the jolly doctor, who probably wanted to test the effects of black currant juice on his saline levels. “Here you go,” replied the equally jolly pilot. He lifted his right hand to let the tube pass beneath it on its way across Aksyonov’s chest. The doctor caught it and said, “Thanks.” He popped the lid with his thumb and squeezed it to release a shivering blob of juice. The doctor let go of the tube (which began a slow drift back across the cabin in response to the slight push of his hand upon release), and brought both hands together to clasp the juice at its middle, mashing the blob until it divided, cell-like, into two separate jellies. The doctor raised his head from his couch and allowed one of them to float into his mouth. He licked his lips and said, “Mmm,” and nudged the other blob toward Novikov. It drifted across Aksyonov’s chest like a dark cloud above a picnic, and was gobbled in its turn; the pilot flicked out his tongue like a frog to catch it.

And these were grown men!

“Would you like some currant juice, Comrade Aksyonov?”

“No, thank you.” His mouth tasted like kumiss.

“Water?”

“Coffee?”

“Orange juice?”

“Apple, perhaps?”

“Thank you, I’m not thirsty. Thanks all the same.” He envisioned a headsized glob of vomit bouncing about the cabin as its three captives flinched and moaned beneath, like schoolchildren trapped in a room with a bat. Aksyonov took deep breaths of the canned air and tried to focus on the fireflies outside the window.

“Comrade Aksyonov has the spacesickness,” Yegorov murmured, as if he and Novikov were exchanging confidences.

“I do not!” Aksyonov cried.

“You have lain there like a fish for an hour,” the doctor continued. “Pulse rate normal, respiration normal, eye movements slightly accelerated but otherwise normal, you check out normal on all my readouts, and frankly you look like hell.”

“Everybody gets it,” Novikov said. “Titov, Nikolayev, Popovich, Bykovsky, Tereshkova—all had it, in some degree or other.”

“Gagarin, too?” Aksyonov asked.

“No, Gagarin didn’t get it.”

“Do you have it?”

“Ah, no, actually I don’t. But I’ve been a pilot for years, you know. Fighter training and so on.”

“I have it a little, I think,” Yegorov said. “Just some giddiness. The Americans have reported it, too. We think it may have something to do with the effect of weightlessness on the inner ear.” The doctor had published a number of important papers on the inner ear, and Aksyonov was surprised he had waited so long to bring up that remarkable organ. “Do you feel disoriented, spatially confused in any way?”

“Yes,” Aksyonov sighed. “I feel as if I’m upside down. I have trouble focusing my eyes. The instruments swim around a little when I try to read them. And I’m a bit queasy as well.”

“Are you going to throw up?” Novikov asked.

“No!” Aksyonov retorted, and began to feel better.

“This is very interesting,” Yegorov said, making notes. “You must report all your symptoms as they occur.”

“I am not reporting, I am complaining,” Aksyonov said. “And yet I am a crew member aboard the world’s first three-man spacecraft, on the highest manned orbit in history. Forgive me, comrades.”

Even as he said it, he winced to call the Sunrise a “three-man spacecraft.” It was the same old East capsule minus reserve parachute and ejection system, a risky modification that left just enough room to wedge in a third narrow couch. No room for pressure suits, either, so they all wore grey coveralls, paper-thin jackets, and sneakers. “A shirtsleeve flight,” Khrushchev had called it, when he presented his demands to the Chief at the Chairman’s Black Sea villa the summer before.

The Chief’s rage had percolated all the way back to Baikonur; by the time he relayed his orders to Aksyonov, he was in a near-frenzy, stomping about the design lab and slamming his fist on the work tables to punctuate his denunciations. “So now we must suspend work on the Union, delay all our progress toward the moon, so that Khrushchev can taunt the Americans, ‘Ha ha! Your Gemini sends up two men, but our Sunrise sends up three! We win again!’” Pencils and rulers rattled as the great fist came down.

Aksyonov shook his head over the sketches. “It will be three brave cosmonauts who will board this craft,” he said.

“Not three cosmonauts at all,” the Chief replied. “I have not yet told you the worst part. The Sunrise will carry aloft one trained cosmonaut and two untrained ‘civilians’—one a doctor, one a scientist or engineer. This way Khrushchev can brag of the first scientific laboratory in space. He said, ‘If you cannot build this for me, if you cannot continue to advance our glorious space program, then I assure you that Comrade Shandarin can.’” The Chief paced back down the table to brood over the diagrams. “But what engineer, I ask you, would be noble and courageous and foolish and short enough to climb into such a bucket without a rifle at his back?”

At that moment, Aksyonov knew his answer. He had seen the Chief shudder at the mention of Shandarin’s name. But Aksyonov spent a week working up the nerve to pass his answer on to the Chief, and then another couple of weeks persuading him.

The same evening the Chief finally relented, Aksyonov helped him write a long and detailed letter to be sent by special courier to the Politburo member most familiar with the Baikonur program—the former Kazakhstan party secretary, Comrade Brezhnev. The report detailed Comrade Khrushchev’s increasing interference with the Soviet space program, and implied (without quite saying so) that ignominious disaster loomed if more rational and far-sighted leaders did not intervene. While the Chief laboriously pecked away at the final draft, for even his two-fingered typing was superior to Aksyonov’s, the Motherland’s newest cosmonaut sketched a cartoon called “How To Send A Bureaucrat Into Orbit.” It showed Khrushchev being shoe-horned into a cannon with a crowbar.

“Look out there,” Novikov said.

The Sunrise’s porthole twinkled with hundreds of tiny lights, each lasting less than a second. A shimmering envelope of ice crystals surrounded the hurtling spacecraft.

“I heard and read descriptions of the fireflies,” Aksyonov said, “but I never dreamed how beautiful they are.”

“Are you still upside down, Comrade?” the doctor asked him.

Aksyonov laughed. “Yes, but if you can stand it so can I. If I were not as upside down as you two, I would not be here, would I?”

“Well, the Chief will turn us all upside down,” Novikov said, “if we don’t get some more chores done before we fly back into radio range. We have transitional spectra to photograph, ion fluxes and background radiation to measure, and of course spontaneous greetings to prepare for our Olympic team in Tokyo. Yegorov, perhaps you and our topsy-turvy friend could rehearse the script while I see to these instruments.”

“Right away, Comrade. Let me just finish these medical notes . . . . ”

Aksyonov squinted at Yegorov’s writing hand. “Comrade Doctor,” he said. “Is that the pen you typically use for note-taking? In zero gravity, it seems prone to skip.”

Yegorov stopped writing, opened his mouth, closed it again, and cast Aksyonov a sheepish glance. “This is not my usual pen, Comrade. I borrowed it for the flight. It is one of the Chief’s pens.”

His crewmates regarded the doctor for a few seconds. Then Novikov chuckled and reached into a pocket. “Don’t be ashamed, Comrade Doctor. Look. I myself asked for one of the great man’s handkerchiefs.”

After a pause, pilot and doctor both looked at the engineer who lay between them.

“For my part,” Aksyonov said, “I have a note he gave me just before launch.” He pulled the small square of paper from his jacket and began to unfold it. “I see no harm in sharing it with you—”

Novikov tapped his hand.

“No, Comrade,” he said. “That note is for you, and not for us. Maybe at some point we will need to hear it, and then you may read it to us, but not now. Not now. Now we have our orders, Comrades. Shall we get to work?”

VII. SUNRISE TWO, 18 MARCH 1965

“I can’t do it. Come in, Baikonur. I can’t do it.”

“Leonov, this is the Chief. What did you say? Please repeat.”

“I can’t get back into the airlock, Chief.”

“Explain.”

“My pressure suit, sir. It has swollen, as we expected, because of the unequal stresses on the materials . . . but it has swollen much more than we anticipated, in only a ten-minute spacewalk. I didn’t realize how much, until just now, when I tried to bend to enter the hatch. It’s becoming rigid, Chief, like a suit of armor, or a statue. Please advise.”

“I understand, Leonov. This is an inconvenience, nothing more. Have you tried to maneuver with the handholds? Grasp them and haul yourself forward headfirst. Stretch out and pull yourself along like a log. I know it’s awkward, but clipping the television camera to the hull was awkward, too, remember?”

“All right. I will try, Chief.”

“You’re doing fine, Leonov. You have executed a flawless extravehicular activity. Your suit may be stiff, but you are more free at this moment than any other man who has ever lived, and we all envy you, Leonov. Report when you are ready. Baikonur out.”

“Uh, Baikonur, this is Leonov. Come in, Baikonur. Come in, Chief.”

“Yes, Leonov, this is the Chief. What news?”

“No news yet, Chief, I’m still trying. It’s hard, because my arms are getting stiff, too, but I’m trying. Chief, could you perhaps keep talking? It helps me focus. Believe it or not, there are a lot of distractions up here. I keep wanting to look at the Earth, at the clouds over the Volga. Or the other way, at the blackness—although it’s really a dark blue, and it’s beautiful too, in its own way. If you keep talking, Chief, it will help keep me on task.”

“Why, Leonov. Am I such an evil boss that you fear my wrath even five hundred kilometers above? Everyone in the control room is smiling and nodding his head, Leonov, so everyone here agrees with you. I am quite the dictator, I see. Well, I will try to mend my ways. When you return I will be a new man, yes? Yes. I will be only the proud uncle to my young friend Leonov. How are you doing, Leonov?”

“I’m still trying, Chief. Keep talking.”

“Leonov, do you remember when I came to your cottage last night to tell you to go to bed? I also told you that we cannot foresee every problem on the ground, that your job and pilot Belyayev’s job is to step in to deal with the problems that we haven’t foreseen down here, and that we have complete faith in your abilities to do this. Well, here is just such a problem as I was talking about, Leonov. This is the unforeseen that was foreseen. And there you are to solve it for us. How are you doing, Leonov? Please report.”

“Chief . . . I’m still out here, and I don’t think the handholds will be much use. It’s not just that I can’t bend in the middle; my arms and legs are sticking out, too, and the hatch is only a meter wide. And the suit is stiffening even as we speak. Maneuvering is like trying to swim without moving my arms and legs. Please advise.”

“Thank you, Leonov, we better understand your situation now. We will advise you in a moment. Just now I am going to speak with your pilot, all right? I will switch over very briefly, then confer with my comrades in the control room, then come back to you. If you like, you may admire the Volga. You will be able to describe it all the more vividly when you return.”

“All right, Chief.”

“Baikonur out . . . . Sunrise Two, this is the Chief. Come in, Sunrise Two.”

“Chief, this is Sunrise Two. Do you want me to go out and get him?”

“Negative, Belyayev, negative. You are to stay inside until you receive contrary orders from me. I cannot have both my cosmonauts waltzing together outside the craft until we are sure we can get both of you back inside. Do you understand, Belyayev?”

“I understand, Chief. What shall I do?”

“Do as you are doing, and carry out your orders, and prepare yourself to exit if I say the word. Baikonur out.”

“Leonov, this is the Chief. Any progress?”

“No, Chief . . . but the sunlight on the Black Sea is remarkable.”

“And so are you, friend Leonov, and so are you. Listen, Leonov, we have found a way to make your pressure suit a bit more manageable. Your current air pressure reading is six. If you begin to lessen the air pressure, you should gain some flexibility. Do you understand, Leonov?”

“ . . . Uh, Chief, I do understand, but my pressure’s already pretty low relative to the inside of the capsule. How much lower can I go without some real trouble when I get back in? I won’t be much good to the mission if I get the bends, Chief.”

“That is true, Leonov, but we have work for you to do inside. We don’t pay you to loiter out there and watch the clouds all day. And Comrade Belyayev is lonely for your company.”

“I don’t like this, Chief.”

“Nor do we, friend Leonov, nor do we. But you have counted the minutes as attentively as we have, have you not?”

“Yes, Chief.”

“And you have noted your oxygen supply as well, correct?”

“Yes, Chief.”

“And do you have any alternate courses of action to propose at this time?”

“No, Chief.”

“Very well, Leonov, begin to adjust your—”

“Chief.”

“I am here, Leonov.”

“Is this a group recommendation, Chief? A consensus? Or is it your personal recommendation?”

“ . . . It is my personal recommendation, Leonov. This is the course of action I would take were I in your place. It is the recommendation of the Chief Designer.”

“Thank you, Chief, I will do it. Adjust pressure to what level?”

“No target level. Adjust as slowly, as gradually as possible, all the while trying to flex your arms and legs and bend your waist. We want you through the lock with the highest suit pressure possible. Understood?”

“Understood, Chief. Beginning to reduce suit pressure …

“Five and a half, no good, continuing . . . .

“Five, I do see some improvement in mobility, Chief, repeat, some improvement, but I am still a slow old man up here, continuing . . . .

“Four and a half, I’m doing my best, trying to wedge myself in there, but I can’t . . . can’t quite . . . shall I continue this, Chief?”

“Continue.”

“Continuing to reduce pressure . . . . Four point twenty-five, I really am not liking this, Chief, I really—Chief! My head and shoulders are inside, I’m pulling myself along, I’m turning around in the airlock—I’m in, Chief? I’m in, in! Hurrah!”

“Excellent, Leonov! Excellent! Can you hear our applause? Well done!”

“Shit, that was close. I beg your pardon, Chief. Closing airlock. Preparing to equalize pressure . . . . ”

“Any problems to report, Leonov? How are you feeling?”

“No problems, Chief. But Belyayev said I smelled pretty ripe when I came in.”

“Chief, Lyosha here has not sweated so much since his last physics exams.”

“He just completed his most difficult physics exam, friend Belyayev, and he passed it with honors. Congratulations, Leonov.”

“Only because you helped me through, Chief.”

“Well, I know all about such things, you see. I move like an old man every day. And now, I think, I will let one of these younger fellows talk to you a while, about how we are to get you fellows home again. Chief out.”

VIII. BAIKONUR COSMODROME, 12 JANUARY 1966

Vasily!

Alive! Here! How—?

“Oleg, stop the car! Stop the car, I said!”

After a moment’s hesitation, Oleg braked and steered to the shoulder, just beside the ditch that separated the highway from the railroad track and the featureless warehouses beyond. Korolev was out the door before the car quite stopped; he lurched, off balance, until the world quit moving, nearly toppling into the ditch. Some engineer he was, to forget his physics like that.

“Chief, what is it?” Aksyonov called. “What’s wrong?”

Ignoring him, Korolev trotted to catch up with the shuffling column of zeks being herded, single file, back toward the launch pad from which he had come. He felt slow, clumsy, like a runner in a nightmare. His legs moved as if knee-deep in roadside slush, though the ground was grey and bare. In this barren land, snow was as rare as rain.

“Chief! Hey!” Car doors slammed. “What’s going on?”

Vasily was dead, surely. Had to be. No man could survive, what—twenty years in the Kolyma? Even if he were such a wonder man, he would be no good to work an outdoor construction detail in a Kazakhstan winter. And Vasily had been at least ten years Korolev’s senior to begin with. Thus Korolev reasoned as he quickened his pace, his heart racing. “Vasily!” he cried. “Wait!”

He started to identify himself, then wondered: Had he ever told Vasily his name? Would Vasily remember his number? Oh luckless day! No matter, no matter, surely Vasily would recognize him—unless eating utterly could transform a man. “Vasily!”

One of the guards at the rear of the line turned and raised a hand in warning. “No closer!” he cried. None of the fifty-odd prisoners looked around; all curiosity had been scoured from them, Korolev knew, long long ago. The other guard unstrapped his rifle.

“Halt the line!” boomed Oleg, as he sprinted past Korolev. “It is the will of the Chief Designer! Halt the line!”

The first guard blew a whistle, and the prisoners immediately looked like men who had not walked or moved in years, who had aged in all weathers beside the road, and who would not deign to fall even when they died.

Puffing, Korolev leaned on Aksyonov’s shoulder.

“Chief, please. How many more heart attacks do you want? Calm down.”

Hands on hips, glaring downward at them, Oleg was trying to intimidate the guards. “Do you have a man named Vasily in this detail?”

The guards, impervious, shrugged. “How should we know, Comrade?”

Oleg began to pace the line, calling the name at intervals. Korolev shook his head. The fortunate man obviously had no experience with political prisoners—himself excepted, of course. “Let’s follow Oleg,” Korolev told Aksyonov. “Slowly, mind you—slowly.”

“That was my plan,” Aksyonov said.

Korolev couldn’t remember now whether the face he had seen from the car window had been in the back of the line, the front, or the middle (or in a cloud? a clump of weeds?), so he peered at all the faces as he overtook them. So far no glimmer, no trace, no Vasily; but as he walked on, another, more terrible recognition dawned. These men all looked alike. The vacant stares, the beards, the scars and creases of misery—they could all be brothers. How would anyone be able to distinguish among them?

Korolev stopped at the head of the line, smiled weakly at the guard he faced there, then looked back along the column. “I am sorry,” Korolev said. “Do you all understand? I am genuinely sorry. My friends, I think I will rest a moment.” With the help of Aksyonov and Oleg, he lowered himself onto the weedy rim of the ditch, as weary as the engines of the stars.

“Carry on,” Oleg barked, and at the whistle the sad processional shuddered into motion again. The guards eyed Korolev as they passed. He heard them begin to mutter about how nutty the scientists get, with their heads in outer space all the time. Korolev started to laugh, then was seized with his worst coughing fit of the day.

“I will bring the car,” Oleg said.

When the coughs had passed, Korolev glanced sideways at Aksyonov. “Your Chief is a wreck,” he said. “Do you want a transfer?”

“Sure, Chief, send me to the moon. Who’s this Vasily?”

Korolev shook his head, drew his coat a bit closer around him. “Someone I knew many years ago. In the camps.”

“The Kolyma.”

“Yes. He collapsed at mealtime, was dragged away. I got a piece of his bread, and enjoyed it. Maybe I’m guilty for that, I don’t know. I assumed he was dead. I suppose he is dead. Yes, I’m sure he is.”

“He died, you lived. That’s nothing to feel guilty about, Chief. Have you brooded about Vasily all this time?”

Korolev smiled. “Comrade, I had not thought about Vasily once, not in twenty years, until a few moments ago in the car. And then it all came back. Like a comet that has been away for so long that no one remembers it, eh? Yet all the while it is on track out there, makes its great loop, comes round again. As dependable as Oleg, here. Yes, thank you, Oleg. No, stay put, we’ll be right over. Aksyonov.”

“Yes, Chief?”

“Listen to me. Tonight I go to Moscow, back into the hospital. I hope to be back in a week, maybe two. The Health Minister has scheduled an operation for me, a hemorrhoid operation. I’ve had problems down there.”

“Is it serious?”

“Serious. It’s my ass, isn’t it? Yes, my ass is serious. Stop interrupting. Do you still have your copy of Tsiolkovsky’s book, of Exploration of Cosmic Space—”

“—with Reactive Devices, yes, Chief, you know I do.”

“While I am gone, I want you to read it over again. Every word of it. Study every diagram. Read it as if it were the first time, as if there were no satellites, no Gagarin, no spacewalk, no cosmonauts, and see where your ideas take you. And I, I will do the same. For I have been too old lately, Aksyonov, and turning you old along with me, I’m afraid; but when I return, we will talk about all these new wonders we have envisioned, and we will savor the sky and be astonished again.”

IX. MOSCOW, 14 JANUARY 1966

The Health Minister enjoyed one last cigarette as he leaned against the wall opposite the scrub room. Down the darkened corridor toward the elevators huddled the doctors and nurses who would assist him. They murmured among themselves. One or two looked his way, then avoided his glance.

No doubt they dreaded performing under the scrutiny of the Motherland’s most honored physician, and so sought to encourage each other. They did not know their patient’s name, but they knew they had not been whisked here after hours to work on any mundane Party apparatchik. They knew that Chairman Brezhnev himself awaited the outcome of the operation; the Health Minister had told them this at the briefing, to impress upon them the importance of this hemorrhoidal procedure, and the honor of their participation in it.

As he watched them now, the Health Minister smiled and shook his head with fond indulgence, smoke pluming. These hard-working men and women did not realize it, but he already had made up his mind to be lenient with them. They would be unusually nervous, with good reason, and he would make allowances when writing his report. He was a servant of the State, yes, but he was also a human being; he could understand, even forgive, the frailties of others; he prided himself on this trait, one of his most admirable and practical. He took a final pull, crushed the butt into his coffee cup, and sighed with satisfaction. Too bad these Winstons were so hard to find . . . .

The doctors and nurses now approached him as a shuffling unit, little Dr. Remek in the lead. Stepping away from the wall, the Health Minister, who had been the third tallest dignitary on the reviewing stand at the 1965 May Day parade, drew himself to his full height and smiled down at them. “Are we all ready to wash up, Comrades? Our patient should be prepared by now.”

Dr. Remek cleared his tiny throat. He sounded like a noisemaker blown by an asthmatic child. “Comrade Minister, my colleagues and I . . . with all due respect, sir . . . we would like to recommend that . . . that, the gravity of the situation being what it is, that you, or, that is, we, take the added precaution of, of . . . ”

“I am waiting, Dr. Remek,” the Minister murmured. His eyes had narrowed during this preamble.

Remek turned to the others with a look of despair. One of the nurses stepped forward and said:

“Comrade Minister, we request that Dr. Vishnevskiy be included on this surgical team.”

“Vishnevskiy,” the Minister repeated. He should have guessed. The others fidgeted. The nurse (whose name escaped him; he would look it up later) maintained her defiant gaze. “And what could young Dr. Vishnevskiy contribute to these proceedings?”

Now they all found voices.

“He has performed dozens of these operations.”

“His technique is flawless, Comrade Minister, you should see him at work.”

“He has not been so . . . burdened with administrative duties in recent years as you, Comrade Minister.” That was Remek, the toad.

“And surely the welfare of this patient, so vital to the interests of the Revolution, warrants the collaboration of all the finest doctors on the staff.”

The Health Minister smiled and raised a hand. “I thank you all for your counsel. It has been duly noted, and will not be forgotten. I cannot detail my reasons for not calling upon Dr. Vishnevskiy—for much of the material that crosses my desk, as you know, is classified—but suffice to say that security issues were among my considerations. Besides. My understanding is that young Dr. Vishnevskiy’s surgical technique, however flashy and attention-getting, may be somewhat impaired after the dinner hour. Thank you all again for your concern. After you . . . comrades.”

The team trudged into the scrub room like a detail of zeks. All avoided the Health Minister’s gaze except for that one nurse, whose glance was not only contemptuous but dismissive. Fighting his anger, the Minister took a deep breath and consoled himself with the thought that the upstart Vishnevskiy would share none of the credit for this service to the Revolution. No, this personal friend of Brezhnev, this most laudable Communist, would receive a most singular honor. His operation would be personally performed by a full, sitting member of the Politburo. The Health Minister pushed forward, and behind him the swinging doors repeatedly clapped.

The sirens grew louder as Vishnevskiy and his friend the music critic, the last to leave as usual, bantered outside the opera.

“No, no, you will go before I do, my friend,” the music critic said. “The moon will need surgeons long before symphonies, and a critic? If we know what’s good for us, we critics will all stay down here, where there’s so much more to criticize.”

Vishnevskiy guffawed and clapped his friend on the back. “Well said, well said, but surely musicians, writers, artists of every stripe should be among the first to walk the lunar landscape. Who better to relay its wonders to the rest of us? The job must not be left to the television cameras, of that I’m sure. The mind reels at the thought.”

“We have visitors,” said the music critic, suddenly grave.

Roaring up the circular drive were four police motorcycles, sirens wailing. They wheeled to a halt in the gray slush at the foot of the grand staircase. “Dr. Vishnevskiy?” one of the officers called.

“Yes,” he stated. His shoulder ached beneath the clamp of his friend’s hand, but he was nonetheless grateful for it.

“You are urgently needed in the operating room, Comrade Doctor. We are here to escort you.”

The music critic slumped in relief, and Vishnevskiy exhaled a roiling cloud of breath.

“I thank you, Comrades,” he said. “I am ready to go.”

Poor Remek, talking so fast he practically stuttered, briefed him through the intercom as he lathered his arms. Vishnevskiy wasted no time asking questions, enough time had been wasted already, but he wondered: How the hell had intestinal cancer been mistaken for hemorrhoids? And why hadn’t they halted the procedure, called for help and more equipment, instead of hacking around in him for hours? Then Remek started babbling about the importance to the State of the poor soul on the table, and Vishnevskiy had his answer.

“The Minister,” he snarled.

The damned fool didn’t even have the nerve to look up as Vishnevskiy ran into the operating room, though all other heads turned. His run to the table became a trot, then a walk, as he looked at the Health Minister, who moaned softly as he worked, and at the others, bloody hands at their sides. Vishnevskiy looked at the patient, closed his eyes, and controlled himself before he opened them again. He reached up and ripped off the mask.

“I do not operate on dead men,” he said.

Outside, alone and glad of the cold, Vishnevskiy looked up and thought, ah moon, what do you know of slaughter, and pride, and folly? Better we should stay where we are.

X. BAIKONUR COSMODROME, FEBRUARY 1966

At first, Aksyonov pretended he didn’t hear the knocking. He figured it was only Shandarin again, with a freshly typed sheet of demands. Shandarin liked to deliver his memos in person so that he could watch his team leaders read them, gauge their reactions, and satisfy himself that his wishes were clear. They were clear to Aksyonov even before the first memo, clear at least from the afternoon of the Chief’s funeral, when Shandarin had left the Kremlin wall in Brezhnev’s limousine.

The Chief’s plan for tanker craft carried into orbit by Old Number Seven had been scrapped. Not spectacular enough, not decisive enough, for Shandarin (and not, presumably, for Brezhnev either). Instead, Shandarin’s own giant Proton, designed to carry hundred-megaton warheads, would blast cosmonauts into a loop around the moon in October 1967; the Proton’s as-yet theoretical descendant, Shandarin’s cherished G-1, would launch the redesigned Union spacecraft toward a moon landing the following year. As for the Chief’s meticulous series of incremental test flights to check out the new Union’s capabilities one at a time, Shandarin had crossed out most of them, so that a totally revamped craft could be shot into orbit in a year—or less.

When Aksyonov first realized the enormity of what the Chief’s successor intended to do, he was too dumbfounded even to be angry. Instead he laughed. Chuckling, Aksyonov spun the dossier down the conference table, so that pages whirled out of the folder like petals, and said, “Impossible.”

The folder stopped in front of Shandarin, who sat at the far end of the long table, in what he had wrongly assumed was the chief’s chair. (The Chief had paced during meetings, never sat anywhere, and where the others sat, or whether they sat at all, had never been among his concerns.) “Impossible?” Shandarin snorted. “What nonsense. Have you forgotten, Comrade? Artificial satellites are impossible. A manned spacecraft in orbit is impossible. We have done the impossible for years, Comrade Aksyonov. Now we will do it faster and more efficiently, that’s all.”

Aksyonov drew from his wallet a clipping from the January 16 edition of Truth. Already two such clippings had fallen to pieces in his hands from repeated unfolding and reading and folding again; fortunately, old Truths were not hard to find, even at Baikonur. “You read this tribute to the Chief upon his death, did you not, Comrade Shandarin?”

“Of course I read it. You wave it at me every three days; how could I fail to have read it?”

“To my knowledge,” Aksyonov continued, “this was the first time the Chief’s name ever appeared in print. Think of that. For twenty, no, thirty years he was the guiding genius of the Soviet space program—even before the government knew it had a space program. Yet how many Soviets knew his name? How many of the disciples who worked beside him every day knew his name? How many of the cosmonauts who entrusted their lives to him knew his name? And did the Chief care? Did he mind that he was a man without a name?”

“What is your point, Aksyonov? I have work to do today, if you do not.”

“I am making no point, Comrade Shandarin. You are the man who makes points—very clear and unequivocal points. No, I just wonder whether your goal is to put a man on the face of the moon, or to put your name on the front page of Truth, and how many of us nameless men you will sacrifice to get it there.”

Shandarin stood, smiled, gathered his papers, and slowly walked the length of the table. He patted Aksyonov on the shoulder, leaned forward until their noses practically touched, and said in a warm and fatherly voice, “Not so very many years ago, I commanded a far more efficient operation, where I occasionally had my workers shot for insolence.”

“How strange, then, that you didn’t shoot the Chief when you had the chance,” Aksyonov replied, “since he always knew you to be a tyrant and a fool. I am surprised you were not strong enough to bury his body in the snow of the gulag, and lead us all into space on your own.”

And so Aksyonov felt no real reason to answer the door. He just sat on the swaybacked couch, read the clipping again, and let the man knock. Knock, knock! Yet this didn’t sound like Shandarin’s impatient rap, nor the idiot pounding of the KGB. This was the gentle, incessant knock of someone who would stand there on the porch of the cottage until doomsday, secure in the faith that his knocking was not in vain. Growling, Aksyonov kicked through the litter of dirty clothes (what was the point of laundry now?) and flung open the door.

A woman.

A wide, heavy-set, attractive woman of about fifty, graying hair tied behind in a youthful braid. Large nose and deep brown eyes. She cradled in her arms a bulky cardboard box bound with masking tape. Behind her, at the foot of the drive, Oleg stood at attention beside the car.

Aksyonov blinked at both of them in wonderment.

“Comrade Aksyonov? I apologize for disturbing you so late, but I must return to Moscow tonight. I am Nina Ivanovna Korolev. Sergei Pavlovich’s wife. The Chief’s wife.”

“His wife!” Aksyonov exclaimed.

She stooped and set the box onto the porch at his feet. Straightening, she smiled a thin, sad smile. “You need not struggle to conceal your astonishment, Comrade. I know that my husband never spoke of me here. Far safer, he said, to keep his family as secret as possible.”

“His family!” Next the sun and the moon would wrestle for dominion of the sky.

“I am sure I know much more about you than you about me, Comrade Aksyonov. My husband spoke of you whenever he came to Moscow. He said he had more faith in you than in any rocket he had ever designed.” She nodded at the box and said, “These are a few of his personal effects. I am sure he would have wanted you to have them.”

“Personal effects,” Aksyonov said, slumped against the doorway. He felt increasingly redundant in this conversation. “Please, forgive my manners, Nina Ivanovna. Won’t you come inside, out of the cold? Oleg, you come, too. Please, I will brew some tea—”

She shook her head. “I am sorry, but I must go. The helicopter waits. Goodbye, Comrade Aksyonov. Thank you for your help to my husband.” She moved with remarkable grace for a large woman, and was halfway down the steps before he could react.

“Wait!” he cried.

She did, though she did not look around. She faced the frozen yard, and trembled.

“Please, I don’t understand. There’s so much I want to ask you, about your family, and about the Chief—I mean, about Sergei Pavlovich. He was such a tremendous influence on me, you see, on so many of us, and I know so little about him. So little. Next to nothing, really. And I could tell you things. I could tell you what he was like here, what he used to do and say, how the cosmonauts all venerated him, you have no idea. You should know all this. Come inside, please. We have so much to talk about—”

“We have nothing to talk about,” she said as she faced him. “Don’t you see? Can’t you imagine how difficult it was for me to come here? To see this place that destroyed my husband—that destroyed me? Year after year after year, Comrade Aksyonov, about once a month, with no warning whatsoever, my telephone would ring, and I would answer it immediately, for our apartment is small and I sleep but lightly, and then I would go downstairs and watch my husband climb out of a car full of soldiers—so slowly, oh, so slowly he moved, like an old, old man—I never saw him when he wasn’t exhausted. He and I would sit at the foot of the stairs and talk for an hour or more, until he had gathered the strength to climb to the bedroom and go to sleep. And the next morning the car full of soldiers would still be out there, and it would take him away again. Back to this place. Back to all of you. Do you understand, Comrade Aksyonov, why do I not rush to embrace you now?” She walked a few paces into the yard, then added: “When my husband was sent to Siberia, so many years ago, I was like a madwoman. I thought he was lost to me, that he would be in prison for the rest of his life. And I was right, Comrade, I was right.”

“Your husband was a free man,” Aksyonov said.

“I have no control over what you believe,” Nina Ivanovna said. She nodded toward the package on the porch. “I have given you all that I can give you. And now I must go home.”

She walked to the car, where Oleg held open the passenger door. Just before she stepped inside, she called out, “Try to get some sleep, Comrade Aksyonov. My husband always worried because you worked so late.”

Aksyonov knelt beside the package, rubbed his hands across the smooth surfaces of tape, looking for a seam, as the car sputtered to life and Oleg and Nina Ivanovna drove away. He never saw either of them again.

XI. BAIKONUR COSMODROME, 24 APRIL 1967

Aksyonov would not have thought it possible: Somehow the two soldiers who flanked the control-room door, already as erect and expressionless as twin gantries, managed to snap to attention as the prime minister walked in. Every controller, engineer, and technician in the room stood as well, though they had not been trained in it and were far less impressive than the soldiers.

The prime minister wore a well-tailored black suit that looked nondescript beside the uniform of his escort, General Zeldovich, who was splendid in medals and buttons and epaulets. The prime minister nodded at everyone and patted the air. With a collective exhalation, everyone sat and returned to their tasks, except for Aksyonov and Shandarin, who joined the dignitaries in the back of the room.

Aksyonov was aware of the sweaty moons beneath his own arms, of the hair he had neither washed nor combed in more than a day, and he cursed himself for such thoughts. What must poor Novikov look like at this moment? Novikov, who had cooked him besh barmak; Novikov, who had told him it was no dishonor to be sick in space; Novikov now was in an orbital hell, somersaulting in vomit and terror.

“This is a great honor, Comrade Prime Minister,” Shandarin said, and shook his hand a bit too vigorously. “Your historic contribution to this mission will do wonders for Comrade Novikov’s performance.”

“Whatever I can do to help, Comrade,” the prime minister said, and gently freed his hand. He surveyed the descending tiers of desks and instrument panels; the vast display screens on the far wall, the litter of sandwich wrappers and tea glasses underfoot, the samovar in the corner. His nose wrinkled slightly: The sweat of unwashed men, Aksyonov wondered, or the far worse stink of desperation? “Please show me to my microphone, and tell me the current situation,” the prime minister said. “In layman’s terms, mind you.”

Shandarin rolled his own plush chair back over Aksyonov’s toes and gestured for the prime minister to sit. He had cleared his work station of everything but a microphone and a small gold-plated bust of Lenin, which the prime minister pushed aside to open his leather briefcase. Shandarin glanced at Aksyonov, who recited on cue:

“Comrade Novikov is in his eighteenth orbit of the Earth. Because of a failed solar panel, his craft is critically low on electrical power, so that most of its automatic systems are inoperable. He has attempted for some time to manually orient the craft for re-entry, thus far without success. Even now we are talking him through the process.”

The prime minister had opened a manila file folder containing many closely typed pages. Aksyonov edged closer, tried to read over the prime minister’s shoulder. “About an hour ago,” Aksyonov continued, “Novikov spoke to his wife on the radio. Understandably, she was quite upset.”

The prime minister glanced around at the general, his papers poised. “The woman we passed in the corridor?”

The general nodded.

“I assumed she was one of the female cosmonauts,” the prime minister said.

The general looked uncomfortable and said, “No, Comrade.” All the other women cosmonauts-in-training had, of course, been sent home after Valentina Tereshkova landed safely four years earlier. Tereshkova herself had been sent on a worldwide lecture tour, her three-day space career at an end.

“Good,” the prime minister said. “I had wondered at such a womanly outburst from a trained pilot.” The general tugged at his white mustache as if to say yes, yes, just so. “Proceed, Comrade.”

“One more thing, Comrade Prime Minister,” Aksyonov continued. “The craft’s shortwave radio failed very early in the flight. We have been using the craft’s ultra-shortwave backup radio, but because electrical power is in such short supply, even that is beginning to fade. Much of your message to the cosmonaut, in short, may be lost in static and garble.”

The prime minister smiled for the first time. “You may know quite a lot about spaceflight, Comrade,” he said, “but I know a good bit about speeches. And I assure you, the individual sentences are never as important as the cumulative whole—as Comrade Castro has demonstrated, eh, Comrade General?” He and the general chuckled, and Shandarin, after a pause, joined them. Aksyonov did not. He was scanning the text of the prime minister’s welcome-home address to honor Jakov Novikov, in which each reference to the cosmonaut as “he” and “his” had been amended, in a neat and precise hand, to “you” and “your.” Then the prime minister laid his hand across the sheet.

“Do you have any questions, Comrade Prime Minister?” Shandarin asked.

“Just one,” the prime minister said, looking at Aksyonov. “Does Novikov’s wife have reason to weep?”

Shandarin opened his mouth to reply, but Aksyonov was quicker. He said: “The Union One is out of control.”

The prime minister, the general, Shandarin, all regarded him. The whole room was hushed by this heresy, though none but the nearest tier of controllers could have overheard.

Several tiers below, one man read aloud a list of numbers for another man to double-check. The numbers were long, with many decimal places, and their progress was slow. “Let’s just start over,” one of the men said.

“I see,” the prime minister said, as he rubbed his eyes. He swiveled to face forward, squared the edges of his speech, and said, “I am ready, Comrade.”

Glaring at Aksyonov, Shandarin flipped a switch at the base of the prime minister’s antiquated desk microphone and adjusted his own compact headset, which had been deemed too complicated for the visitor. “Speakers, please,” Shandarin said.

Amplified static filled the room. Aksyonov sat at his reassuringly cluttered station and focused on the blinking dot that marked Novikov’s position on a world map—as if the cosmonaut’s border crossings, one every few minutes, mattered to him now.

“Union One, this is Baikonur. Union One, this is Baikonur, can you hear me, Union One?” More static. “Union One, this is Baikonur. Please respond if you can hear me, Union One.”

More static, then: “I’m doing it, I’m doing it, but it doesn’t work. Do you hear me, Baikonur? It doesn’t work!” More static.

Shandarin raised his eyebrows at the flight director, who said, “We asked him to try the automatic stabilizers again.”

Aksyonov shook his head. How many different ways could a man push the same button?

“Union One, this is Baikonur. We hear you, and we continue to work on the problem. But now we have another visitor for you, Union One, a very important visitor who wants to speak with you. Here beside me is the prime minister of the Soviet Union. Do you understand, Union One?”

More static. Then: “The prime minister?”

“Yes, Union One. I ask for your attention. The next voice you hear will be that of the prime minister, with a personal message of tribute.” He nodded at the prime minister, who nodded in return, leaned close enough to the microphone to kiss it, and shouted:

“Greetings, Jakov Novikov, loyal son of our Motherland, wonderful Communist, courageous explorer of space, comrade in arms, and friend . . . . ”

Responding to Shandarin’s signals, Aksyonov and the team leaders joined him and the general in the back of the room.

“Obviously Novikov will be unable to maneuver the craft into the best trajectory for re-entry,” Shandarin said. “The best he can do is turn the craft so that the heat shield faces the Earth, and then fire the retro-rockets. Discussion?”

Everyone spoke at once, and after one loud instant muted themselves so as not to disturb the prime minister.

“That’s suicide—”

“It’s such a narrow window, he’ll never—”

“He’ll be so far off course, God knows where he’ll end up—”

“He’ll have no way to control the spin as he comes down—”

“You all have considered this outcome already, I see,” Shandarin said. “Have you also thought of other options? Perhaps Novikov should press every button in the craft another hundred times, until the radio dies, and we all go home?”

No one replied. A couple of the men shook their heads. All looked pale and sick.

“Aksyonov, you are uncharacteristically silent. What do you say?”

“I just broke a young man’s neck, Madam, with a slide rule and the stroke of a pen.”

“What?”

Aksyonov pressed the heels of his hands to his forehead. “I am talking to myself, Comrade. I apologize. But much as I hate to admit it, I must agree with you. I see no other option.”

“We’re trusting to blind luck!” one man said.

“Perhaps so,” Shandarin retorted, “but all the luck in orbit has run out. If any luck remains for this flight, Novikov must find it on re-entry.”

The flight director lighted a cigarette and ticked off items on his fingers. “Solar panel down. Shortwave radio down. Stabilizers down. Thrusters down. Suppose the retro-rockets are down, too? And the parachute, for that matter?”

“And the ejection seat?” the general added.

The others looked at the floor. “Comrade General,” Aksyonov said, as gently as he could, “on Union One there is no ejection seat. You approved the design yourself, Comrade General.”

The general began to curse, and the others returned to their stations. Shandarin gripped Aksyonov’s upper arm so tightly that the younger man winced.

“I will not forget your support,” Shandarin said.

Aksyonov wrenched himself free.

The prime minister glanced up from his text, then faltered before he found his place again. “In all future generations, your name will summon the glory of our great Socialist country to new feats—”

Then Novikov’s voice, the voice of a man roused from a long trance, ripped from the speakers:

“What is this bullshit? God damn! God damn! Baikonur! Baikonur! This is Union One. Help me, Baikonur!”

The prime minister sat frozen, mouth agape. Shoving past Aksyonov, Shandarin switched on his headset. “This is Baikonur, Union One. Explain yourself, Union One!”

“Explain myself? Explain myself! Shit shit shit!” More static. “Don’t you understand? You’ve got to do something. I don’t want to die. Do you hear me, Baikonur? I don’t want to die!”

A fresh burst of static obliterated his next words, but Aksyonov, like everyone else in the room, recognized their rhythms; he himself had sobbed just as uncontrollably at the Chief’s funeral.

The cosmonaut’s despair seemed to yank something vital from Shandarin. He swayed forward like a falling tree, slammed his hands onto the desktop, and leaned there, looking at nothing.

With a trembling hand, the general switched off the prime minister’s microphone. “Perhaps under the circumstances,” he began.

“Yes, of course,” the prime minister said, as he swept up his papers and his briefcase. He stood so clumsily that the swivel chair toppled over. The guards, staring at the loudspeakers, paid the prime minister no heed as the general hustled him out the door.

Shandarin slumped against the console. Still Novikov continued to sob. Three dozen faces looked up at Shandarin. Several were streaked with tears.

Aksyonov couldn’t stand it. “Say something!” he hissed. “Reassure him. Tell him we have a plan.”

He shook Shandarin once, twice. Then he slapped him, a blistering crack that affected Shandarin not at all.

“I . . . I can’t . . . I don’t . . . . ” Shandarin’s voice was a ghastly, slurred imitation of itself.

The flight director cried, “For God’s sake, talk to him!”

Aksyonov strode to the prime minister’s microphone, switched it on, and said:

“Novikov. Novikov. Think of the Chief.”

Amid the static, a small voice. “ . . . What . . . ? ”

Absolute silence in the control room.

“The Chief, Novikov. What would the Chief do?”

“ . . . The Chief . . . ”

“This is Aksyonov. You remember me, eh? Your upside-down engineer friend? You piloted me into orbit, Novikov, and brought me safely down again, and I complained the whole way—you did it, Novikov. We did it. You and me and the doctor, and the Chief. Do you remember?”

“Yes . . . yes, Comrade . . . I remember.”

“Listen to me, Novikov. We have a plan, a plan I believe the Chief would approve of. But first, I want to read you something. You remember the note I carried into space? The note the Chief gave me just before launch? You told me then that I shouldn’t read you the note until the proper time had come. Well, I have the note with me now, Novikov. I have carried it in my pocket ever since. Let me unfold it now . . . Here is what it says, Novikov. It says, ‘My friend, I am good at spacecraft design because I know just what cosmonauts feel like. I too have been alone and frightened and very far from home, and surrounded by the cold. Soon you will know how this feels, as well. But I survived, my friend, and so will you, and we will continue to design great things together. Signed, the Chief.’ Do you understand, Novikov? The Chief knows exactly how you feel.”

A long silence. Aksyonov watched the blinking dot approach Africa. One of the team leaders thrust a printout under his nose and whispered, “The nineteenth orbit is coming up. It’s his last chance to—” Aksyonov waved him away.

The cosmonaut spoke. “The Chief . . . is dead.”

“Do you really believe that, Novikov? Do you really for a moment believe that?”

More static, then Novikov slowly and soberly replied: “No, Comrade. No, I don’t.”

Aksyonov dragged the microphone with him as he sat on the floor. He no longer could see the map, just the Chief’s face, laughing in the darkness outside Gagarin’s cottage. “I don’t either, Novikov,” Aksyonov said, and raked the tears from his eyes. He smiled at the men to left and right who passed him calculations and tissues. “Now listen to me carefully. Here’s what we are going to do . . . . ”

The Union One plunged through the atmosphere, tumbled end over end like a boy who has lost his sled halfway down the hill, its useless parachute a braided rope behind.

The final intelligible radio transmission from its pilot was not the despairing

you are guiding me wrongly, you are guiding me wrongly, can’t you understand

reported by a U.S. intelligence officer years after the fact, but in fact a later message, a three-word scrap:

Chief is here

Some who have heard the tape do not believe, and say these are not the words.

But the cosmonauts—they believe.

XII. BAIKONUR COSMODROME, 22 AUGUST 1997

“Excellent!”

“Wonderful!”

“Good job, Peace!”

Cheers, applause, shouts reverberated through the control room. People hugged, kissed, pounded one another on the back.

One of the small, short-haired women—Lyudmilla? No, Lyudmilla had vacationed in Prague, and now sported a half-dozen earrings in her right ear, all the way up, like the spiral in a notebook—one of them, anyway, was swept into the air by that oaf Atkov, who did not even know how to use a slide rule. They kissed with a smack audible over the din, and then Atkov handed her to the next man, Serebrov? Shatalov? One of the newcomers. She kissed him, too, and squealed like a child.

Aksyonov watched, and said nothing. The engineers were due some good news, some release, and he supposed he could suffer their enthusiasm. For a while.

Aksyonov stood alone on the topmost row at the back of the room, hands clasped behind. He stood rigid, head tilted. At his left elbow was the big standing model of the Peace, its core module likewise tilted, a few degrees off true.

The official mission control room for the Peace was outside Moscow, of course, in the complex named for the Chief. But the entire Russian space program had been on red alert since the June 25 collision—especially Baikonur, where Earth’s lone space station had been designed and built.

Onscreen, the three crewmen—Solovyev, Vinogradov, and Mike the American—crouched over their instruments. The image was blurred, but they obviously were grinning like NASA chimps. Mike the American held up both his thumbs as he grimaced, as if being tortured. This was for television’s benefit. Yet the crew had reason to be happy, of course. Askyonov looked at his watch. For another few seconds.

“Confirmed, Moscow,” Solovyev said, his voice fractured by static. “All electrical circuits working fine. The new hatch is a success. Repeat, a success. Full power is restored.”

A new round of cheers and shrieks in the control room. Aksyonov’s lips moved as he counted. Eight. Five. Three. Tolubko strode up the stairs toward him, smiling behind her headset microphone, her heavy eyebrows a single dark swath across her pretty face. He nodded at her, then clapped his hands once, twice, solid reports. He would have clapped a third time, but the room was already silent.

“Gentlemen and ladies,” he called out. “To your tasks, please.” He disdained the public-address system. His reedy quaver was embarrassing enough these days without amplification. Yet he was heard. Look how they bustled into position. The workaday murmur resumed. The party was over.

Sometimes they forgot that Askyonov’s role here was purely sentimental, purely ceremonial. Sometimes Aksyonov forgot it himself. Why did his colleagues always jump when he so much as lifted an eyebrow? He would never understand it, no, not if he lived to be two hundred, and had helped build twenty-five space stations, flying all the flags of the world.

“Moscow wants you to say a word,” Tolubko said.

Surprised, Aksyonov picked up and put on his headset, which he had wrenched off in a brief moment of jubilation. He cast an inquiring glance at Tolubko. She nodded and mouthed, “You’re on.”

“Comrades on Peace, this is Aksyonov,” he said. He saw Tolubko frown at “comrades,” but he couldn’t devote the short remainder of his life to preventing Tolubko’s frowns, could he? “You have done well. You have made history, comrades, with your indoor space walk.” Why did they look so blurred? It was his eyes, Tolubko had assured him. Yet another body part failing. “But now we down here must make some history of our own, if this station is to become fully functional again. Stand by, please. Aksyonov out.”

Why bother? He lacked the Chief’s eloquence; he always had. Suddenly weary, he peeled off the headset. Tolubko nodded at her second, Merkys, who nodded in turn and began rattling off suggestions to Moscow, reading from a clipboard that others kept sliding papers onto. Aksyonov set down the headset, too close, it happened, to the edge of the desk. His hand shot out to catch it, but missed. The little plastic hoop tumbled to the floor. A dart in his shoulder, he had strained himself again. Tolubko crouched to retrieve the headset, her skirt riding up, and stood beside him again, reminding him anew that she was taller than he was. She touched his arm.

“Evgeny?” she murmured. “Are you all right?”

“I am fine,” he said. He knew he didn’t sound convincing. He leaned on the back of a chair. “I am a man of iron, my dear.” He nodded toward the model. “It is the Peace that is falling apart. Worry about her.”

“The Peace has power again. Your turn now. Go to bed, Evgeny. Get some rest. Come back fresh tomorrow, when we’re ass-deep in crises again.” Her smile was an older woman’s smile, knowing and known. “We won’t repair everything while you’re gone. I promise.”

As she spoke, she nudged him toward the exit, her arm around his shoulders, and Aksyonov let her. He did not appreciate being lectured, however gently, but he granted Tolubko many liberties. He knew she realized this, took advantage. What of it? The young had the advantage already.

“I think the Georgians are coming by tomorrow,” Tolubko continued, as they neared the door. “You should look nice for them. Put on your other shirt.”

“The hell with the Georgians,” Aksyonov said. He halted, and Tolubko walked just a little past before compensating. “Don’t tell me about the Georgians. If the Georgians hadn’t charged us the moon for that automated guidance system, Moscow wouldn’t have made us steer the cargo ship in by hand in the first place. No wonder we knocked the station half out of orbit.” He waved at the men on the screen. “It ought to be Georgians up there, treading water. Putting out fires.” He faltered, snorted. “Georgians!”

Tolubko was smiling. He flushed.

“You have heard all this before,” he muttered. “Why don’t you interrupt?”

She squeezed his arm. “You told me once, ‘No one learns anything by interrupting.’”

“I tell you many things,” he said. “You don’t have to listen.”

The guard held the door open, waiting. He looked terrified—whether of the old man, or of the young woman, Aksyonov couldn’t tell. Maybe he feared being blamed for everything that had happened to the Peace this summer, from the collision onward. The guard in the back of the room, yes! He did it! That was no unreasonable fear in the Soviet Union, or in Yeltsin’s Russia, either.

“Tolubko,” Merkys called. “Come look at these figures, will you?”

“Be right there,” she called. “Good night, Evgeny.” He hesitated, and she pushed, so slightly it was almost a telepathic pulse. “Good night.” She squeezed his arm again before striding away. He did not allow himself to watch the back of her head, the sway of her skirt. Ah, Evgeny, he thought. Once you laughed at such follies. Now you, too, are a foolish old man.

As he passed, the guard asked, “May I radio for an escort, sir?”

“No,” he replied, more harshly than he meant.

“As you wish, sir. Good night, sir.”

He wanted to say something friendly, to make the guard feel better, but could think of nothing. Was this the guard with the young son, the boy with the scar? Fathers love to be asked about their children. Or was that one of the other guards? Oh, the hell with it. The door had closed anyway, and Aksyonov was alone in the corridor.

As he walked the winding incline he had walked for so many years, Aksyonov passed through three sets of guards and five sets of scanners and ignored them all. The guards saluted, and the scanners beeped, so he must have measured up to the Platonic Aksyonov of their memories. Or close enough.

Between checkpoints, his footsteps echoed in the dim, deserted halls. The darkness was a budget-cutting measure. Lights were more critical in orbit, and so four-fifths of the overheads in the old sector, mostly used for storage, had been switched off. Aksyonov’s colleagues didn’t mind. Hadn’t Gorbachev, as a farewell gesture, built them a grand new entrance, with a new elevator bank? No longer any need to pass through this back way, this tilted maze, to reach the surface. Why not leave it to the rats?

But Aksyonov was never in a hurry to reach the surface. He didn’t like elevators, either, not since Sunrise One. And he was secretly pleased to walk through space that others shunned. For people claimed strange experiences down here, in the old sector. To have seen people who, in the next instant, weren’t there. To have heard voices. The guards had petitioned for fewer checkpoints, consolidated shifts. (And, needless to add these days, more money.) Everyone was uneasy—except the scanners, which never saw anything odd, and Aksyonov, who had roamed these corridors for decades, and who wasn’t about to stop now. He hated agreeing with the scanners on anything.

He was walking a little faster these days, though. For the exercise.

He passed the last checkpoint and emerged into a full-face breeze on the north side of the windswept plaza, in front of Brezhnev’s hideous cafeteria. Aksyonov stood in the round mouth of the tunnel, breathed deeply, and stretched his arms, his habit whenever reaching the surface. A foolish habit; there was just as much room for stretching underground. He swung his arms back and forth, hugged himself three times, clap clap clap. Too cloudy for stargazing, but the night was warm, and the breeze was pleasant with the distant scents of wild onions and newmown hay—a reminder, Aksyonov realized with a scowl, that there had been no launches in, how long? In the old days there was a fine, constant stench. He ripped a tuft of grass from a crack in the pavement, let the blades sift through his fingers. The weeds beneath the plaza survived every attempt at eradication. One night Aksyonov would camp out here, and watch them grow.

He walked across the deserted plaza, his footsteps still echoing. An acoustical trick. His path took him past that rare thing in the former Soviet Union, a new statue. Hands on hips, a rolled blueprint under one arm, Sergei Korolev stood stiff-legged and looked at the sky. As Aksyonov approached, he thought once again: a poor likeness. It favored Lenin. As how could it not? The sculptor had done only Lenins for thirty years.

As he approached the marble Chief, he began to smell the flowers. More than usual, judging from the smell and from the dark heaps at the base of the statue. At dawn the Kazakhs would clear away the oldest bouquets, but enough would remain to give the plaza its only color, its only mystery.

The Kazakhs picked up just the flowers, and left the rest. Space photos clipped from magazines and crudely framed. Children’s plastic toy rockets. Boxes of the shoddy East German pens the Chief had used—as if he had had much choice. About once a month, Aksyonov fetched a crate from the cafeteria and collected them all, carried them to the lost and found. A silly chore, beneath his dignity; he could easily ask the Kazakhs to do it, or anyone else at the complex, for that matter. But Aksyonov had never spoken to anyone at Baikonur about this—this whatever-it-was-this shrine. And he never intended to. Not even to ask who in the devil kept piling up the stuff in the first place. One toy space station, he knew, he had carted away at least three times.

No one ever offered to help him, either.

As Aksyonov passed the statue, he saw a new shape on the ground. What—? He stopped and gaped, sucked in his breath.

The shape reared up, and Aksyonov cried out. A man was scrambling to his feet.

“Apologies, good sir,” the man said, in Kazakh. “I did not mean to frighten. My apologies.”

The man already was trotting away, dusting himself. He might have looked back once, but then he was lost in the darkness of the plaza.

Exhaling, willing his heart to slow, Aksyonov peered at the base of the statue. Had the man left some token of esteem? Aksyonov was quite sure he had interrupted something.

Had the man really been on his knees, prone on the pavement, facing the statue? Had he really been in the Muslim attitude of prayer?

Aksyonov hurried across the pavement to the blank-faced Khrushchev block that housed his rooms. On the stoop, he fumbled for his keys.

Aksyonov had read that in Paris, grieving tourists piled sentimental litter atop the graves of movie actors and pop stars. One expected such things of Paris.

But this was Baikonur, sobersided Baikonur. There were no tourists, no adolescents here. The cosmonauts, yes, they were a superstitious, childish lot, always had been—the stories they brought back from the Peace, well! Really. But the engineers, computer programmers, astrophysicists, bureaucrats?

Absurdity—the Chief a pop star!

Unlocked, the door proved to be stuck, as usual; he shouldered it open. Another dart of pain.

Who prays to a pop star?

He closed the door behind him and groped for the switch. With typical foresight, Khrushchev’s electricians had placed the switch more than a yard away from the door, and at a peculiar height. It was always a bit of a search.

The cafeteria light was easier to find. Once, Aksyonov, restless in the middle of the night, had walked into the darkened cafeteria, flipped on the light, and startled a group of fifteen or so engineers, all young, huddled around a single candle at a corner table. They looked stricken. A dope orgy, was Aksyonov’s first thought. Thrilled and mortified, he fumbled an apology, turned the light back off, and left, never to raise the subject with anyone. It was none of his business. He never asked Tolubko what it was that she whisked off the table, and hid in her lap. It had looked, fleetingly, like a photograph.

Aksyonov did not encourage his colleagues to share the details of their personal lives. Only the details of the projects they were working on. And they did that, he was sure.

Pretty sure.

Where was that damn light? His fingernails raked the plaster.

A space program as jihad. Imagine.

When they pray to the Chief, does he answer?

He answered Novikov.

“Novikov,” Aksyonov muttered. Old men were allowed to talk to themselves, weren’t they? “I put the Chief in Novikov’s head! Just to calm him down, make his last moments less horrible. If anyone helped him, it was not the Chief. It was I. I, Aksyonov.”

His hands slid all over the wall. This was embarrassing. Would he have to call someone, to cry out, Tolubko, please come over here, turn on my light for me? She’d think it a ruse, a ploy to entice her into bed. He laughed, then began to cry. He would never find the light. He was an old, old man, and there was no light. He leaned against the wall and slid down. He sat on the floor, sobbing in the darkness.

Stop it, Aksyonov. Stop it.

He closed his eyes, wrapped his arms around himself, clutched himself. He felt the trembling worsen. He bit his lip, fought a scream.

He was not alone in the room.

This was helpful, a fact to hold. The trembling in his arms gradually eased, and he relaxed his grip. His upper arms and his fingers were sore. Stiff tomorrow. He breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth, as his mother had taught him long ago. He did not open his eyes, but he knew that if he did …

He knew.

“Ah, Chief,” Aksyonov said. “Lurk around here all you wish. I will never worship you. I know you too well, and I love you too much.”

He woke up, sitting against the wall. He ached everywhere. The lights were on, and it was night outside. Beside him was the telephone table. Good; it was sturdy enough. He hauled himself up, holding on, groaning only a little. He stood, rubbed his arms and legs, wondered why on earth he had fallen asleep in such a position. He answered himself, I am an old man, and then sought other problems. With some trouble and trembling he unbuttoned his shirt, absently switched on the drafting-table lamp. He looked down at his designs and was immediately engrossed, lost in his work even as he sank into the creaking chair.

And if while working he sometimes vocalized his thoughts, as if comparing notes, airing ideas—yes, even arguing—with an old friend, well, what of it? He was no cultist, no kneeling Kazakh. He was an engineer.

“Here’s the problem, Chief,” Aksyonov murmured. “Here, this is the best design for the solar arrays, in terms of fuel efficiency. Mounted like so, on the service module. So far, so good. But there are other considerations. For example . . . ”

Aksyonov’s papers slid one over the other. His chair creaked. Tight-lipped, with ruler and pen, he drew a true line. He laid his plans all through the night, until dawn.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2001.

Stable Strategies for Middle Management

Eileen Gunn

Our cousin the insect has an external skeleton made of shiny brown chitin, a material that is particularly responsive to the demands of evolution. Just as bioengineering has sculpted our bodies into new forms, so evolution has changed the early insect’s chewing mouthparts into her descendants’ chisels, siphons, and stilettos, and has molded from the chitin special tools—pockets to carry pollen, combs to clean her compound eyes, notches on which she can fiddle a song.

—From the popular science program Insect People!

I awoke this morning to discover that bioengineering had made demands upon me during the night. My tongue had turned into a stiletto, and my left hand now contained a small chitinous comb, as if for cleaning a compound eye. Since I didn’t have compound eyes, I thought that perhaps this presaged some change to come.

I dragged myself out of bed, wondering how I was going to drink my coffee through a stiletto. Was I now expected to kill my breakfast, and dispense with coffee entirely? I hoped I was not evolving into a creature whose survival depended on early-morning alertness. My circadian rhythms would no doubt keep pace with any physical changes, but my unevolved soul was repulsed at the thought of my waking cheerfully at dawn, ravenous for some wriggly little creature that had arisen even earlier.

I looked down at Greg, still asleep, the edge of our red and white quilt pulled up under his chin. His mouth had changed during the night too, and seemed to contain some sort of a long probe. Were we growing apart?

I reached down with my unchanged hand and touched his hair. It was still shiny brown, soft and thick, luxurious. But along his cheek, under his beard, I could feel patches of sclerotin, as the flexible chitin in his skin was slowly hardening to an impermeable armor.

He opened his eyes, staring blearily forward without moving his head. I could see him move his mouth cautiously, examining its internal changes. He turned his head and looked up at me, rubbing his hair slightly into my hand.

“Time to get up?” he asked. I nodded. “Oh God,” he said. He said this every morning. It was like a prayer.

“I’ll make coffee,” I said. “Do you want some?”

He shook his head slowly. “Just a glass of apricot nectar,” he said. He unrolled his long, rough tongue and looked at it, slightly cross-eyed. “This is real interesting, but it wasn’t in the catalog. I’ll be sipping lunch from flowers pretty soon. That ought to draw a second glance at Duke’s.”

“I thought account execs were expected to sip their lunches,” I said.

“Not from the flower arrangements . . . ,” he said, still exploring the odd shape of his mouth. Then he looked up at me and reached up from under the covers. “Come here.”

It had been a while, I thought. And I had to get to work. But he did smell terribly attractive. Perhaps he was developing aphrodisiac scent glands. I climbed back under the covers and stretched my body against his. We were both developing chitinous knobs and odd lumps that made this less than comfortable. “How am I supposed to kiss you with a stiletto in my mouth?” I asked.

“There are other things to do. New equipment presents new possibilities.” He pushed the covers back and ran his unchanged hands down my body from shoulder to thigh. “Let me know if my tongue is too rough.”

It was not.

Fuzzy-minded, I got out of bed for the second time and drifted into the kitchen.

Measuring the coffee into the grinder, I realized that I was no longer interested in drinking it, although it was diverting for a moment to spear the beans with my stiletto. What was the damn thing for, anyhow? I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out.

Putting the grinder aside, I poured a can of apricot nectar into a tulip glass. Shallow glasses were going to be a problem for Greg in the future, I thought. Not to mention solid food.

My particular problem, however, if I could figure out what I was supposed to eat for breakfast, was getting to the office in time for my 10AM meeting. Maybe I’d just skip breakfast. I dressed quickly and dashed out the door before Greg was even out of bed.

Thirty minutes later, I was more or less awake and sitting in the small conference room with the new marketing manager, listening to him lay out his plan for the Model 2000 launch.

In signing up for his bioengineering program, Harry had chosen specialized primate adaptation, B-E Option No. 4. He had evolved into a text-book example: small and long-limbed, with forward-facing eyes for judging distances and long, grasping fingers to keep him from falling out of his tree.

He was dressed for success in a pinstriped three-piece suit that fit his simian proportions perfectly. I wondered what premium he paid for custom-made. Or did he patronize a ready-to-wear shop that catered especially to primates?

I listened as he leaped agilely from one ridiculous marketing premise to the next. Trying to borrow credibility from mathematics and engineering, he used wildly metaphoric bizspeak, “factoring in the need for pipeline throughput,” “fine-tuning the media mix,” without even cracking a smile.

Harry had been with the company only a few months, straight out of business school. He saw himself as a much-needed infusion of talent. I didn’t like him, but I envied him his ability to root through his subconscious and toss out one half-formed idea after another. I know he felt it reflected badly on me that I didn’t join in and spew forth a random selection of promotional suggestions.

I didn’t think much of his marketing plan. The advertising section was a textbook application of theory with no practical basis. I had two options: I could force him to accept a solution that would work, or I could yes him to death, making sure everybody understood it was his idea. I knew which path I’d take.

“Yeah, we can do that for you,” I told him. “No problem.” We’d see which of us would survive and which was hurtling to an evolutionary dead end.

Although Harry had won his point, he continued to belabor it. My attention wandered—I’d heard it all before. His voice was the hum of an air conditioner, a familiar, easily ignored background noise. I drowsed and new emotions stirred in me, yearnings to float through moist air currents, to land on bright surfaces, to engorge myself with warm, wet food.

Adrift in insect dreams, I became sharply aware of the bare skin of Harry’s arm, between his gold-plated watchband and his rolled-up sleeve, as he manipulated papers on the conference room table. He smelled delicious, like a pepperoni pizza or a charcoal-broiled hamburger. I realized he probably wouldn’t taste as good as he smelled. But I was hungry. My stiletto-like tongue was there for a purpose, and it wasn’t to skewer cubes of tofu. I leaned over his arm and braced myself against the back of his hand, probing with my stylets to find a capillary.

Harry noticed what I was doing and swatted me sharply on the side of the head. I pulled away before he could hit me again.

“We were discussing the Model 2000 launch. Or have you forgotten?” he said, rubbing his arm.

“Sorry. I skipped breakfast this morning.” I was embarrassed.

“Well, get your hormones adjusted, for chrissake.” He was annoyed, and I couldn’t really blame him. “Let’s get back to the media allocation issue, if you can keep your mind on it. I’ve got another meeting at eleven in Building Two.”

Inappropriate feeding behavior was not unusual in the company, and corporate etiquette sometimes allowed minor lapses to pass without pursuit. Of course, I could no longer hope that he would support me on moving some money out of the direct-mail budget . . .

During the remainder of the meeting, my glance kept drifting through the open door of the conference room, toward a large decorative plant in the hall, one of those oases of generic greenery that dot the corporate landscape. It didn’t look succulent exactly—it obviously wasn’t what I would have preferred to eat if I hadn’t been so hungry—but I wondered if I swung both ways?

I grabbed a handful of the broad leaves as I left the room and carried them back to my office. With my tongue, I probed a vein in the thickest part of a leaf. It wasn’t so bad. Tasted green. I sucked them dry and tossed the husks in the wastebasket.

I was still omnivorous, at least—female mosquitoes don’t eat plants. So the process wasn’t complete . . .

I got a cup of coffee, for company, from the kitchenette and sat in my office with the door closed and wondered what was happening to me. The incident with Harry disturbed me. Was I turning into a mosquito? If so, what the hell kind of good was that supposed to do me? The company didn’t have any use for a whining loner, a bloodsucker.

There was a knock at the door, and my boss stuck his head in. I nodded and gestured him into my office. He sat down in the visitor’s chair on the other side of my desk. From the look on his face, I could tell Harry had talked to him already.

Tom Samson was an older guy, pre-bioengineering. He was well versed in stimulus-response techniques, but had somehow never made it to the top job. I liked him, but then that was what he intended. Without sacrificing authority, he had pitched his appearance, his gestures, the tone of his voice, to the warm end of the spectrum. Even though I knew what he was doing, it worked.

He looked at me with what appeared to be sympathy, but was actually a practiced sign stimulus, intended to defuse any fight-or-flight response. “Is there something bothering you, Margaret?”

“Bothering me? I’m hungry, that’s all. I get short-tempered when I’m hungry.”

Watch it, I thought. He hasn’t referred to the incident; leave it for him to bring up. I made my mind go bland and forced myself to see his eyes. A shifty gaze is a guilty gaze.

Tom just looked at me, biding his time, waiting for me to put myself on the spot. My coffee smelt burnt, but I stuck my tongue in it and pretended to drink. “I’m just not human until I’ve had my coffee in the morning.” Sounded phoney. Shut up, I thought.

This was the opening that Tom was waiting for. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Margaret.” He sat there, hunched over in a relaxed way, like a mountain gorilla, unthreatened by natural enemies. “I just talked to Harry Winthrop, and he said you were trying to suck his blood during a meeting on marketing strategy.” He paused for a moment to check my reaction, but the neutral expression was fixed on my face and I said nothing. His face changed to project disappointment. “You know, when we noticed you were developing three distinct body segments, we had great hopes for you. But your actions just don’t reflect the social and organizational development we expected.”

He paused, and it was my turn to say something in my defense. “Most insects are solitary, you know. Perhaps the company erred in hoping for a termite or an ant. I’m not responsible for that.”

“Now, Margaret,” he said, his voice simulating genial reprimand. “This isn’t the jungle, you know. When you signed those consent forms, you agreed to let the B-E staff mold you into a more useful corporate organism. But this isn’t nature, this is man reshaping nature. It doesn’t follow the old rules. You can truly be anything you want to be. But you have to cooperate.”

“I’m doing the best I can,” I said, cooperatively. “I’m putting in eighty hours a week.”

“Margaret, the quality of your work is not an issue. It’s your interactions with others that you have to work on. You have to learn to work as part of the group. I just cannot permit such backbiting to continue. I’ll have Arthur get you an appointment this afternoon with the B-E counselor.” Arthur was his secretary. He knew everything that happened in the department and mostly kept his mouth shut.

“I’d be a social insect if I could manage it,” I muttered as Tom left my office. “But I’ve never known what to say to people in bars.”

For lunch I met Greg and our friend David Detlor at a health-food restaurant that advertises fifty different kinds of fruit nectar. We’d never eaten there before, but Greg knew he’d love the place. It was already a favorite of David’s, and he still has all his teeth, so I figured it would be okay with me.

David was there when I arrived, but not Greg. David works for the company too, in a different department. He, however, has proved remarkably resistant to corporate blandishment. Not only has he never undertaken B-E, he hasn’t even bought a three-piece suit. Today he was wearing chewed-up blue jeans and a flashy Hawaiian shirt, of a type that was cool about ten years ago.

“Your boss lets you dress like that?” I asked.

“We have this agreement. I don’t tell her she has to give me a job, and she doesn’t tell me what to wear.”

David’s perspective on life is very different from mine. I don’t think it’s just that he’s in R&D and I’m in Advertising—it’s more basic than that. Where he sees the world as a bunch of really neat but optional puzzles put there for his enjoyment, I see it as . . . well, as a series of SATs.

“So what’s new with you guys?” he asked, while we stood around waiting for a table.

“Greg’s turning into a goddamn butterfly. He went out last week and bought a dozen Italian silk sweaters. It’s not a corporate look.”

“He’s not a corporate guy, Margaret.”

“Then why is he having all this B-E done if he’s not even going to use it?”

“He’s dressing up a little. He just wants to look nice. Like Michael Jackson, you know?”

I couldn’t tell whether David was kidding me or not. Then he started telling me about his music, this barbershop quartet that he sings in. They were going to dress in black leather for the next competition and sing Shel Silverstein’s “Come to Me, My Masochistic Baby.”

“It’ll knock them on their tails,” he said gleefully. “We’ve already got a great arrangement.”

“Do you think it will win, David?” It seemed too weird to please the judges in that sort of a show.

“Who cares?” said David. He didn’t look worried.

Just then Greg showed up. He was wearing a cobalt blue silk sweater with a copper green design on it. Italian. He was also wearing a pair of dangly earrings shaped like bright blue airplanes. We were shown to a table near a display of carved vegetables.

“This is great,” said David. “Everybody wants to sit near the vegetables. It’s where you sit to be seen in this place.” He nodded to Greg. “I think it’s your sweater.”

“It’s the butterfly in my personality,” said Greg. “Waiters never used to do stuff like this for me. I always got the table next to the espresso machine.”

If Greg was going to go on about the perks that come with being a butterfly, I was going to change the subject.

“David, how come you still haven’t signed up for B-E?” I asked. “The company pays half the cost, and they don’t ask questions.”

David screwed up his mouth, raised his hands to his face, and made small, twitching, insect gestures, as if grooming his nose and eyes. “I’m doing okay the way I am.”

Greg chuckled at this, but I was serious. “You’ll get ahead faster with a little adjustment. Plus you’re showing a good attitude, you know, if you do it.”

“I’m getting ahead faster than I want to right now—it looks like I won’t be able to take the three months off that I wanted this summer.”

“Three months?” I was astonished. “Aren’t you afraid you won’t have a job to come back to?”

“I could live with that,” said David calmly, opening his menu.

The waiter took our orders. We sat for a moment in a companionable silence, the self-congratulation that follows ordering high-fiber foodstuffs. Then I told them the story of my encounter with Harry Winthrop.

“There’s something wrong with me,” I said. “Why suck his blood? What good is that supposed to do me?”

“Well,” said David, “you chose this schedule of treatments. Where did you want it to go?”

“According to the catalog,” I said, “the No. 2 Insect Option is supposed to make me into a successful competitor for a middle-management niche, with triggerable responses that can be useful in gaining entry to upper hierarchical levels. Unquote.” Of course, that was just ad talk—I didn’t really expect it to do all that. “That’s what I want. I want to be in charge. I want to be the boss.”

“Maybe you should go back to BioEngineering and try again,” said Greg. “Sometimes the hormones don’t do what you expect. Look at my tongue, for instance.” He unfurled it gently and rolled it back into his mouth. “Though I’m sort of getting to like it.” He sucked at his drink, making disgusting slurping sounds. He didn’t need a straw.

“Don’t bother with it, Margaret,” said David firmly, taking a cup of rosehip tea from the waiter. “Bioengineering is a waste of time and money and millions of years of evolution. If human beings were intended to be managers, we’d have evolved pin-striped body covering.”

“That’s cleverly put,” I said, “but it’s dead wrong.”

The waiter brought our lunches, and we stopped talking as he put them in front of us. It seemed like the anticipatory silence of three very hungry people, but was in fact the polite silence of three people who have been brought up not to argue in front of disinterested bystanders. As soon as he left, we resumed the discussion.

“I mean it,” David said. “The dubious survival benefits of management aside, bioengineering is a waste of effort. Harry Winthrop, for instance, doesn’t really need B-E at all. Here he is, fresh out of business school, audibly buzzing with lust for a high-level management position. Basically he’s just marking time until a presidency opens up somewhere. And what gives him the edge over you is his youth and inexperience, not some specialized primate adaptation.”

“Well,” I said with some asperity, “he’s not constrained by a knowledge of what’s failed in the past, that’s for sure. But saying that doesn’t solve my problem, David. Harry’s signed up. I’ve signed up. The changes are under way and I don’t have any choice.”

I squeezed a huge glob of honey into my tea from a plastic bottle shaped like a teddy bear. I took a sip of the tea; it was minty and very sweet. “And now I’m turning into the wrong kind of insect. It’s ruined my ability to deal with Product Marketing.”

“Oh, give it a rest!” said Greg suddenly. “This is so boring. I don’t want to hear any more talk about corporate hugger-mugger. Let’s talk about something that’s fun.”

I had had enough of Greg’s lepidopterate lack of concentration. “Something that’s fun? I’ve invested all my time and most of my genetic material in this job. This is all the goddamn fun there is.”

The honeyed tea made me feel hot. My stomach itched—I wondered if I was having an allergic reaction. I scratched, and not discreetly. My hand came out from under my shirt full of little waxy scales. What the hell was going on under there? I tasted one of the scales; it was wax all right. Worker bee changes? I couldn’t help myself—I stuffed the wax into my mouth.

David was busying himself with his alfalfa sprouts, but Greg looked disgusted. “That’s gross, Margaret.” He made a face, sticking his tongue part way out. Talk about gross. “Can’t you wait until after lunch?”

I was doing what came naturally, and did not dignify his statement with a response. There was a side dish of bee pollen on the table. I took a spoonful and mixed it with the wax, chewing noisily. I’d had a rough morning, and bickering with Greg wasn’t making the day more pleasant.

Besides, neither he nor David had any respect for my position in the company. Greg doesn’t take my job seriously at all. And David simply does what he wants to do, regardless of whether it makes any money, for himself or anyone else. He was giving me a back-to-nature lecture, and it was far too late for that.

This whole lunch was a waste of time. I was tired of listening to them, and felt an intense urge to get back to work. A couple of quick stings distracted them both: I had the advantage of surprise. I ate some more honey and quickly waxed them over. They were soon hibernating side by side in two large octagonal cells.

I looked around the restaurant. People were rather nervously pretending not to have noticed. I called the waiter over and handed him my credit card. He signaled to several bus boys, who brought a covered cart and took Greg and David away. “They’ll eat themselves out of that by Thursday afternoon,” I told him. “Store them on their sides in a warm, dry place, away from direct heat.” I left a large tip.

I walked back to the office, feeling a bit ashamed of myself. A couple days of hibernation weren’t going to make Greg or David more sympathetic to my problems. And they’d be real mad when they got out.

I didn’t used to do things like that. I used to be more patient, didn’t I? More appreciative of the diverse spectrum of human possibility. More interested in sex and television.

This job was not doing much for me as a warm, personable human being. At the very least, it was turning me into an unpleasant lunch companion. Whatever had made me think I wanted to get into management anyway?

The money, maybe.

But that wasn’t all. It was the challenge, the chance to do something new, to control the total effort instead of just doing part of a project . . .

The money too, though. There were other ways to get money. Maybe I should just kick the supports out from under the damned job and start over again.

I saw myself sauntering into Tom’s office, twirling his visitor’s chair around and falling into it. The words “I quit” would force their way out, almost against my will. His face would show surprise—feigned, of course. By then I’d have to go through with it. Maybe I’d put my feet up on his desk. And then—

But was it possible to just quit, to go back to being the person I used to be? No, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I’d never be a management virgin again.

I walked up to the employee entrance at the rear of the building. A suction device next to the door sniffed at me, recognized my scent, and clicked the door open. Inside, a group of new employees, trainees, were clustered near the door, while a personnel officer introduced them to the lock and let it familiarize itself with their pheromones.

On the way down the hall, I passed Tom’s office. The door was open. He was at his desk, bowed over some papers, and looked up as I went by.

“Ah, Margaret,” he said. “Just the person I want to talk to. Come in for a minute, would you.” He moved a large file folder onto the papers in front of him on his desk, and folded his hands on top of them. “So glad you were passing by.” He nodded toward a large, comfortable chair. “Sit down.

“We’re going to be doing a bit of restructuring in the department,” he began, “and I’ll need your input, so I want to fill you in now on what will be happening.”

I was immediately suspicious. Whenever Tom said, “I’ll need your input,” he meant everything was decided already.

“We’ll be reorganizing the whole division, of course,” he continued, drawing little boxes on a blank piece of paper. He’d mentioned this at the department meeting last week.

“Now, your area subdivides functionally into two separate areas, wouldn’t you say?”

“Well—”

“Yes,” he said thoughtfully, nodding his head as though in agreement. “That would be the way to do it.” He added a few lines and a few more boxes. From what I could see, it meant that Harry would do all the interesting stuff, and I’d sweep up afterwards.

“Looks to me as if you’ve cut the balls out of my area and put them over into Harry Winthrop’s,” I said.

“Ah, but your area is still very important, my dear. That’s why I don’t have you actually reporting to Harry.” He gave me a smile like a lie.

He had put me in a tidy little bind. After all, he was my boss. If he was going to take most of my area away from me, as it seemed he was, there wasn’t much I could do to stop him. And I would be better off if we both pretended that I hadn’t experienced any loss of status. That way I kept my title and my salary.

“Oh, I see,” I said. “Right.”

It dawned on me that this whole thing had been decided already, and that Harry Winthrop probably knew all about it. He’d probably even wangled a raise out of it. Tom had called me in here to make it look casual, to make it look as though I had something to say about it. I’d been set up.

This made me mad. There was no question of quitting now. I’d stick around and fight. My eyes blurred, unfocused, refocused again. Compound eyes! The promise of the small comb in my hand was fulfilled! I felt a deep chemical understanding of the ecological system I was now a part of. I knew where I fit in. And I knew what I was going to do. It was inevitable now, hardwired in at the DNA level.

The strength of this conviction triggered another change in the chitin, and for the first time I could actually feel the rearrangement of my mouth and nose, a numb tickling like inhaling seltzer water. The stiletto receded and mandibles jutted forth, rather like Katharine Hepburn. Form and function achieved an orgasmic synchronicity. As my jaw pushed forward, mantis-like, it also opened, and I pounced on Tom and bit his head off.

He leaped from his desk and danced headless about the office.

I felt in complete control of myself as I watched him and continued the conversation. “About the Model 2000 launch,” I said. “If we factor in the demand for pipeline throughput and adjust the media mix just a bit, I think we can present a very tasty little package to Product Marketing by the end of the week.”

Tom continued to strut spasmodically, making vulgar copulative motions. Was I responsible for evoking these mantid reactions? I was unaware of a sexual component in our relationship.

I got up from the visitor’s chair and sat behind his desk, thinking about what had just happened. It goes without saying that I was surprised at my own actions. I mean, irritable is one thing, but biting people’s heads off is quite another. But I have to admit that my second thought was, well, this certainly is a useful strategy, and should make a considerable difference in my ability to advance myself. Hell of a lot more productive than sucking people’s blood.

Maybe there was something after all to Tom’s talk about having the proper attitude.

And, of course, thinking of Tom, my third reaction was regret. He really had been a likeable guy, for the most part. But what’s done is done, you know, and there’s no use chewing on it after the fact.

I buzzed his assistant on the intercom. “Arthur,” I said, “Mr. Samson and I have come to an evolutionary parting of the ways. Please have him re-engineered. And charge it to Personnel.”

Now I feel an odd itching on my forearms and thighs. Notches on which I might fiddle a song?

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, June, 1988.

Every Hole is Outlined

John Barnes

The ship was at least fourteen thousand years old in slowtime and more than two thousand in eintime, but there were holes in its records and the oldest ones were in no-longer-accessible formats, so the ship estimated that it was more like eighteen thousand slowtime, three and a half thousand eintime. It had borne many names. Currently it was 9743, a name that translated easily for Approach Control no matter where the ship went in human space.

In the last two centuries of eintime, the ship’s conversation with most ports had been wholly mathematical. Synminds chattered about physics and astronomy to get the ship into a berth, and about prices and quantities and addresses afterward, and the human crew had not learned a word of the local language, despite their efforts, except such guesses as that the first things people said probably were something like “hello,” and the last things something like “good-bye,” and in between, perhaps, they might pick up equivalents of “may I?” and “thank you.”

This had little immediate impact on the ship’s operation except that mathematical worlds had no entertainment, or at least none they would sell to the ship’s library; the long-run concern was that the mathematical worlds tended to begin waving off all ships and not communicating at all, after a time, though strangely some of those dark worlds would sometimes begin to talk and call for ships again, after an interval of a few centuries slowtime.

But the problem for this evening meal was both shorter-run than procuring entertainment for the ship’s library, and much longer run than the gradual darkening of the worlds. They needed a new crew member, and they were having a real supper tonight, with cooked food, wine, and gravity, to discuss how to get one.

9743 needed a crew of four to work it, when it needed working, which was only for system entries and system departures because the law of space required it, and for PPDs (the business and navigation sessions held whenever predicted prices at destination shifted enough to require considering a course change) because the crew were the stockholders and synminds were required to consult them. Normally they would work the ship for half a shift for PPDs, but sometimes traffic density close to a star was high enough to engage gammor restrictions for as much as a light-day out from the port, and then 9743 had to have crew in the opsball for more than one shift.

Therefore, for the very rare case of needing more than one shift, the ship usually carried eight people: Arthur and Phlox, who were married and were the captain and first mate; Debi and Yoko, the two physicist’s mates, who shared a large compartment with Squire, who was the physicist; Peter, the astronomer, who was too autistic to sleep with anyone or even to talk much, but a good astronomer and good at sitting beside people and keeping them company; and Mtepic, the mathematician, whose wife Sudden Crow, the mathematician’s mate, had died two years ago in eintime.

In slowtime it had been ten and a half years ago, but ship people have a saying that no one lives in slowtime. By “no one,” they mean almost everyone.

Arthur and Phlox had thought that Mtepic might be too old for another wife, but he surprised them by saying he thought he might have another twenty years of eintime left and he didn’t want to spend it alone.

There was actually only one possible conclusion. They would have to buy someone from a slave world. That was a bad thing, but not hopelessly bad—rather common in fact. Debi, Peter, Sudden Crow, and Arthur had all been slaves, and at least Debi and Arthur felt strongly that buying a slave into a free life, though morally questionable, was usually good for the slave.

The others had been adopted as infants, raised to age four or five on 9743, and then sent through slowtime on a training ship to rejoin the crew when they were adults. All seven of them, whether born slave or free, agreed that it was better to be raised as ship people right from the start.

But they had had no plans for coping when Sudden Crow had died at fifty-one, without warning, from weightless calcium heart atrophy and overweight. 9743 was at least two years eintime from anywhere with freeborn babies available. They would have had to acquire the baby, tend it till it was four or five years old—a long time for a cargo ship to put up with a child, for ship people don’t like to be around other people very much, and children must have attention all the time.

It would constrain them for several voyages—first to a world with adoptable free-borns, then to a shorthaul pair (two inhabited star systems within six or seven light-years of each other) with a training ship orbiting one of them. That shorthaul pair would need to be four to five years eintime away, between twenty-one and twenty-seven light-years distance at the 98.2%c that 9743 usually traveled.

At the shorthaul pair 9743 would then have to hand the child over to the training ship, work a shorthaul shuttle back and forth, then return, rendezvous with the training ship, and pick up the former four-year-old as a trained teenage crew member. It would add up to decades of running badly off the isoprofit geodesic.

They could have afforded that, but the nearest shorthaul pair was Sol/Alfsentary, which was nearly five years eintime away from the nearest system that sold babies. This could all add up to as much as seventeen years eintime before the teenaged crew member came back aboard to keep Mtepic company.

Mtepic was eighty-one and if he died anytime soon, they would not have a mathematician at all. Phlox and Debi, both of whom had math as a secondary, would have to cover, and the whole ship would have to assume the risk of having rusty, less-capable mathematicians filling in.

Besides, the best isoprofit geodesic available for adopting and training a freeborn baby had miserable numbers—long hauls and low profits throughout. A slave would be better, surely. And it was not so bad for the slave, they all assured each other.

The slave market at Thogmarch, the main inhabited world in the Beytydry system, was only six light-years away, and their cargo would take only a small loss there, one that 9743 Corporation could easily absorb and infinitely cheaper than the costs of dealing with a depressed mathematician. The medical synmind was confident at 94.4 percent that Mtepic was depressed. Besides, Mtepic said he was, and thought it was because of the loneliness. The synmind concurred with 78.5 percent confidence that a new mathematician’s apprentice would help lift Mtepic out of it, but the crew were all sure that estimate was low—medics hate to make predictions of any kind about enfleshed intelligences.

9743 had some spare mass to feed to the shielder, and they could safely boost up to 98.65%c and reach Thogmarch in a little less than an einyear. If they radioed now, the message would arrive at Thogmarch almost seven weeks before the ship itself did, so that they could have buyers and sellers ready for cargo switch on arrival, and have dealers lined up to sell them an apprentice mathematician with the sort of personality that could learn to like ship life.

“And 9743 has never bought a slave who wasn’t grateful for a chance to stay on after manumission,” Arthur said, finishing his long, slow reprise, which had begun with the appetizers and was now finishing in the wine after dessert. “Life here compared to what they have dirtside is a lot better.”

Arthur was fond of explaining things that everyone already knew, which was utterly typical. Captains are notorious for spending much time explaining unnecessarily.

Even ship people say so, and for them to say that is saying something, for ship people are all that way. They like to let the talk be slow and affectionate and thorough. They acquire a habit of listening to things they have heard many times before, and already know by heart, just to indulge the person who needs to speak; and, so that the ears of the others stay friendly, most of them learn not to talk very much except at formal occasions.

“Mostly,” Peter said, startling them all because he spoke so infrequently, “we allow them some dignity and privacy.” He meant the slaves, of course, though he might have meant anyone on the ship. “And by the time the first voyage is up they don’t miss home, which anyway gets far enough into the past that it becomes hard to return to.” He drank off a glass of the chilled white wine; they had turned on the gammors for an extra hour this week, to enjoy a sit-down meal in the conference room, because this was a matter that needed some serious attention. At 98.1%c, with a course change imminent, a quarter g of acceleration for a few hours of sitting and talking would have little effect on anything. “I’m for,” Peter said.

“We’re not at voting yet,” Debi corrected him, a little fussily, which was how she did everything.

Squire rubbed her shoulders; it never made her less fussy but they both enjoyed it. “We know what he means, though. This is something that has always worked so far. We find a teenager with very high math aptitude and very low interpersonal attachment. Slavers are cruel; we are merely indifferent. If she doesn’t have too much need for interpersonal attachment, she may even think we are kind—you do want a girl, right, Mtepic?”

“Yes, a girl.”

Squire gestured like a man who would have liked to have a blackboard. “Well, then, life on the ship is better than being beaten and used and ordered about; a bit of respect and dignity often works wonders.”

Phlox was nodding, and when she did, people usually felt that the vote had already been taken, and the thing approved. Everyone, even Arthur, said she would be a better captain, once he died. She rested her hands together in a little tent in front of her, nodded again, and said, “When we manumit her, she will want to stay with us. They always do. So this plan will get us a new mathematician’s mate who can eventually become our mathematician. It is not as kind as adopting a freeborn baby and having a training ship raise the baby as a free member of the ship’s company, and it is not as easy as working an exchange with another ship would be if there were another ship to do it with. But it is kind enough, and easy enough. So we are going to settle on doing it. Now let us enjoy talking about it for some more hours.”

Everyone nodded; ship people are direct, even about delaying getting to the point, and they like to know how new things will come out, before they start them, because they so rarely do.

In the young woman’s file, Mtepic had read that Xhrina had been born a share-worker’s daughter on Thogmarch, and her sale forced, when she was two, by her parents’ bankruptcy. Her records showed that because she had intellectual talent but great difficulty learning social skills, she had been little valued on Thogmarch. The slaver who owned her had slated her for some post where her ability to endure humiliation over the long haul would be an asset; he had in mind either an aristocrat with a taste for brutalizing women, or a household that wanted to boast of its wealth by using human beings instead of robots to scrub floors and clean toilets.

Mtepic, as not only the person who would be working and living with her, but also the most empathetic person on board 9743 (according to the medic-synmind’s most recent testing), had been sent dirtside to decide whether to buy Xhrina, and as he sat in the clean-air support tank his major thought was that he would take her if at all possible, rather than endure planetary gravity for much longer.

His bones were old and space-rotten. Though he was strapped up against the interior supports of the tank, and a small man, there was still far too much weight.

Xhrina spoke a language with a distributed grammar and numerous Altaic and Semitic roots, so the translator box worked tolerably well, and with her aptitude, she was unlikely to have any trouble learning Navish, once she was aboard. Mtepic thought her voice was surprisingly musical for someone so discouraged and unhappy. After he outlined what would happen if 9743 bought her, and made sure the translator had made it clear to her, he asked, “Do you want us to buy you, then?”

She trilled a soft trickle of sweet soprano sibilance. The translator box said, “This property had not yet realized there was any choice with respect to the subject at hand, my-sir.”

“Officially there is not. Unofficially, we don’t like slaving; 9743 has never carried slaves and never will. As you may know, slaving planets all enforce the Karkh Code on ships carrying slaves, so we cannot manumit you until you have performed satisfactory service for thirty years. But the Karkh Code operates in slowtime; in eintime, time as we experience it, you will be a slave for less than seven years, perhaps much less. And as much as we can manage it, within the limits of the Karkh Code, you will be a slave in the eyes of the law only. We won’t ever treat you as a slave.” He had to put that through the translator to her a few times, and they went back and forth again until he was sure she understood the deal.

“And my-sir still makes it have a sounding, correction, gives it an aura of, as if it were this property’s choice, my-sir, and this property is trained not to make choices where my-sir has the right to choose.”

He went at it a sentence at a time, forcing himself to be patient with the translator, which had the uncaring stupidity one would expect of a synmind.

The first critical sentence Mtepic communicated was, “If you ask that we not buy you, we will buy someone else.”

Next, because it might matter to her, whether or not she was allowed to think it did, he spent a while explaining that, “Once you are on board, you will be expected to share a bed with me—my demands are minor, at my age, mostly that you keep away loneliness. Other crew will probably not want sex from you, being happy as they are, but if they do you will comply; our computer must show that for the Karkh Code manumission.”

She seemed to accept that too easily and he didn’t want her to think that was the main issue, so then he worked on getting her to understand that “you will not be coming aboard as a bedmate. Your main job will be to learn enough mathematics so that you are qualified as a mathematician’s mate by the time we reach a port where we are legally allowed to free you with a universal manumission so that you will not be in danger if you change ships, or disembark and then travel again. At that port, you can leave our company if you like, or stay in the crew as a shareholder.” That was actually easier to say, because the synmind was designed to understand contracts.

Then he got back to the main point, again, and this time it seemed to go faster. “If you ask that we not buy you, we will buy someone else. We do not want you to be unwilling.”

“It is forbidden for this property to consider whether this property is willing for anything my-sir wills, my-sir, and I cannot know how this property will feel if this property is ever permitted to consider it, my-sir.” She smiled when she said that; perhaps to let him know that she could only speak the formulas, or that the translator would only translate into the formulas, but that she accepted what he was saying, was that it? Or perhaps something in all this appealed to her sense of humor? In either case, he liked her for that smile.

Mtepic breathed deeply and let the thousands of mechanical fingers lift him straight, and the neurostimulators sharpen his perception and ease his discomfort.

Xhrina’s skin was brown; the slavers had genetically modified her for almost pure-white hair; her nose was long and slim and her jaw and teeth perfectly formed. Her eyes were dark and almond-shaped. He thought that as little as twenty years ago, he would have felt physically attracted. Now, just turned eighty-three, he was attracted by what he could get through the censoring translator: that she didn’t seem to want to exaggerate or overpromise, and clearly had an opinion she was trying to express.

He gave her another angle on it, just to make sure. “We think, based on your psychological evaluation, that you are suited to shipboard life, and you will be living like a free crewmember as soon as we leave the dock here.” That seemed to go right through.

“If this property may ask, is crew life like freeborn life, my-sir?”

“You can always accept a payout and leave at the next port. Of course you have to be on the ship until we reach a port, and if you did decide to leave the ship after your first couple of voyages, you would have to move into a hospital for rehabilitation if you wanted to move permanently to a planetary surface.” That thought reminded Mtepic of how painful the high gravity was, and so he decided to press the offer a little more. He just hoped he correctly understood her quirky smile still struggling through her slavery-deadened face. “I would like you to come with us,” he said. “I am asking you. I could buy you and make you. I prefer that you say yes.” And trying to think of what else he had to offer, he said, “My first order to you, as soon as you are on the ship, will be that you address no one as ‘my-sir,’ but speak to us all as equals.”

She grinned at him as if on the brink of outright laughter. “Then if it pleases my-sir, this property wants to be bought by my-sir, my-sir.”

He was fairly sure that was not what she had said, but surely it had been some form of yes. He didn’t trouble to conceal his sigh of relief.

A few hours later, at her welcome-aboard dinner on 9743, once she had been assured that now she would never be returned to Thogmarch, she used an uncontrolled translator to explain, “I was always going to say yes, but the translator didn’t want me to know I was being asked to say it because I wasn’t supposed to have any choices or respond to them if anyone offered me any. Once I figured out what it wasn’t translating, of course I said yes—it was such a pleasure to be asked. And I beg Mtepic’s forgiveness, for having kept you upright for too long in that uncomfortable tank.” And she favored him again with that extraordinary smile.

Two years eintime, eleven slowtime, on their way to the Sol system; the earlier PPDs had flipped because at Thogmarch they had acquired cargo β–Hy-9743-R56, which was forecast to be at peak value at Sol almost exactly at arrival time. Xhrina’s Navish was fluent and she was already well into group and ring theory, and apter than her test scores showed. Mtepic had turned eight-five the day before, and Xhrina had been disappointed that no one wanted to have a party for him this year (she’d only been able to get two of them to participate the year before), so she’d held one for just the two of them.

She had learned to find it comforting when his fragile body pressed against her in the sleepsack, his skin so soft and dry that he felt like a paper bag of old chicken bones, and she was pleased to indulge his liking for going to bed at the same time; when he died, she would miss his company, but he would probably live for many more years; many ship people lived to be 110.

On the rare occasions when he still wanted any sort of sex, he would gently wake her and ask very politely. She understood that he was determined that she should forget that she was a slave, but Xhrina believed in rules, and would not stop being a slave till she was manumitted, though she was delighted to be ordered to behave like a free person, because the pure autophagy of it made her laugh. They often argued about that in a good-natured way, as he insisted on knowing what she thought and she attempted to tell him only what he wanted to hear, and they enjoyed their mutual failure.

She doubted whether she would ever love anyone, but if she did, it would have been very convenient and not at all a bother or a danger to have loved Mtepic.

When his age-knobbed knuckles brushed down her naked back she turned to let him touch her where he liked, but he placed a finger on her mouth and breathed, “Come with me” in her ear.

He slipped from the sleepsack and swam to his clothes. It was dim in the compartment with only the convenience lights on. As she popped from the sleepsack, he smiled at the sight of her, as he always did, and pushed her coverall bag toward her. She caught it and dressed as she had learned to do, in one movement, like his but swifter because she was young.

He beckoned her to follow him, and opened the hatch into the main crewpipe. They swam in silence up the center of the crewpipe to the opsball. She had only been there the four times that 9743 had needed working: first while they were kerring up the gravity well of Thogmarch, second as they kerred three light-weeks up the gravity well of Beytydry, once before they picked their next destination and turned the main gammors loose to leave Beytydry orbit, and then just two weeks ago for the PPD as budgets, prices, positions, relative velocities, and predictions changed.

That last time, just two weeks ago, Xhrina had been able to follow the discussions, though not really participate in them. Still, she appreciated that Mtepic was a very good ship’s mathematician. It had made her bend harder to her studies, for to be an excellent ship’s mathematician seemed a very grand thing to her, partly because it was clear that all the other ship people respected it, and mostly because it was what Mtepic was.

But this fifth time in the opsball, they were the only ones. He did not turn on the lights; they sneaked in as if to steal something.

She didn’t ask.

She had come, in two years eintime with him, to trust Mtepic. Sometimes she asked herself if she wasn’t just being a very faithful slave, but generally she felt that she was trusting like a free person, that Mtepic and she were friends like free people, and Xhrina was secretly very proud of that.

So she didn’t ask. She just floated beside Mtepic on one side of the opsball. Since he seemed to be very quiet, she tried to stay even quieter.

Presently the surfaces all around them began to glow, and then the image of the stars shone round the opsball, just as if the human crew were about to commence operation, but perhaps a tenth as brightly. For a moment the display was Dopplered, and there was a blue pole that contained a crunched-down vivid blue Cassipy with Sol and Alfsentary in it, and a red smeared-out Leyo and Viryo, but in less than a second the display corrected.

Mtepic and Xhrina floated in what looked exactly like the dark between the stars, warm and comfortable in their crew coveralls. It was so beautiful with no working screens pulled up that she wondered why the crew did not do this all the time. Perhaps she could get permission to float here among the pictures of the stars, now and then, on her off-awake shift?

She had lost count of the breaths she had slowly drawn and released as she watched the projected stars creep along the surface of the opsball when from one side of the opsball, where Leyo was crawling slowly across, a pale white glow like a broken-off bit of the Milky Way burgeoned from a blurry dot to a coin of fog and thence into a lumpy fist of thin white swirl. The swirl swelled into a cloud of particles, then of objects, which surged to swallow the ship and closed around them like a hand grasping a baby bird.

The particles were now as large as people—they were people—translucent and glowing, many of them gesturing as if talking, but not to each other, more as if they had all been abstracted from some larger conversation. The vast crowd converged around the ship, and then all of them were gone except for the dozen who passed right through the wall and into the opsball.

How was that possible? Xhrina wondered. The opsball was buried deep in the center of the ship, 750 meters of holds, lifemachines, quarters, and engines in all directions around it, but the translucent figures, glowing perhaps half as bright as the brightest stars, seemed to merge directly from space outside the ship into space inside the ship.

The pallid figures, mere surfaces and outlines of people, filled the dark sphere. They all took up crew stations as if they were where they belonged, reaching for the opsball surface and calling up workscreens before them, drawing them with their fingers or spreading them with their hands just as regular crew did. The one nearest her was a woman whose strangely patterned coverall had sleeves for both legs and arms, slippers for the feet, and gloves on the hands; Xhrina wondered what sort of ship it was that necessitated so much clothing. That woman seemed to be an astronomer, by what Xhrina could see over her shoulder to her screen, but the graphics were labeled in a language that was not written like Navish.

Directly in front of her, a man who wore coat, shirt, and pants like people in prestellar Earth stories tumbled slowly, pointing and gesturing as if he were the captain. Through his dim translucent sheen, Xhrina could see a nude young woman whose head was half-missing, simply gone behind the ears with brains spilling down her back. Despite that, the young woman was working at a very large screen, apparently trying to estimate a vast matrix and not liking what she saw, redoing and redoing; the screen looked like the math software that Xhrina herself used. As she watched, the naked woman beat on the screen with her fists; Xhrina wondered if the problem was what was on the screen, or the lost parts of her brain.

All round the mathematician and his apprentice, the ghosts worked their ghostly screens, seeming as unaware of each other as of the living beings. They went on working—laughing, cursing, pounding, all without a sound—until the gentle, sweet whistle of Second Shift sounded through the ship. Then they faded through the walls of the opsball, dimming to darkness, and the stars dimmed to nothing after them.

Mtepic brought the running lights up. “Breakfast?”

“Surely,” she said. “Perhaps we should nap again after?”

“We’re bound to be tired,” he agreed. If he was disappointed that she asked no questions, he did not indicate it.

Xhrina had twice celebrated Mtepic’s birthday—the first time with Peter and Yoko who were good-natured but baffled about it, the second time just the two of them the night before they had seen the ghosts. From this, Mtepic deduced that she would like such a thing herself, and checked her bill of sale to find when her birthday was (she had never been told, and Mtepic did not think she should have to see her bill of sale unless she asked).

At one shift close, he surprised her with the news that she had just turned twenty-four, and also with the sort of gifts ship people give: her favorite meal, a small keepsake produced in the ship’s fabricator, and time set aside to sit with her and watch a story he knew she’d like.

She had already known that Mtepic thought that she had a great deal of mathematical talent and believed she would one day be a fine ship’s mathematician, and she knew too that he liked to have her around him. But still it was a surprise to Xhrina to realize that he also just wanted to do things that would make her happy. No one had ever appeared to care about that before, at all. It took her by surprise, put her a little off balance, but she considered the possibility that she might like it.

By her twenty-sixth birthday, after their five months of slowtime in the port orbiting Old Mars, 9743 was bound for Sigdracone, where she was to be manumitted. By now she was quite sure that she liked Mtepic’s kindness and concern for her happiness, and as his health began to fail little by little, she realized that she was glad to be taking care of him, which he only needed occasionally so far, and to be there when he was afraid, which was rare but sometimes severe.

After much thought she concluded that she had been very damaged by the things the slavers had done to her, and guessed that this taking care of Mtepic might be as close to love as she would ever feel. Though she did not miss sex much, she wished he were still well enough to enjoy it; though he was sometimes crabby, and nowadays he slept a great deal, she liked to sit or float where she could have a hand on him, or an arm around him, constantly, as if he were her blanket and she were two years old.

His mind, when he was awake and not in pain, seemed as fine as ever, and she was grateful for that. She was glad she had said she wanted to come along, and everyone knew without saying that she would be staying on the ship, and would probably qualify to be ship’s mathematician as soon as Mtepic died or became senile, though no one mentioned the inevitability of either of those to her. Ship people are indifferent, usually knowing nothing of each other’s feelings, and not caring even when they must know, but even they could tell that she would miss Mtepic terribly and that the title of ship’s mathematician would mean little to her compared to the loss of the only friend she had ever had.

Friend, she thought. That’s what Mtepic is to me. I thought he might be, and how nice to know it now, while I can appreciate it.

They were about halfway there; it would be about two years or so eintime until they would lock themselves into the support field caskets so that every cell wall in their body could be held up against the hundred and fifty g acceleration of the gammors running flat out; three days later they would stagger out hungry and tired. Xhrina had been through all that now three times, and had no dread of it; as far as she was concerned, going from gammors down to Kerr motors meant minor discomfort followed by the most enjoyable meal and nap she was ever likely to have.

But for the moment that was still two years eintime, more than a decade slowtime, in the future. They had little to do but think and learn. Learning was fun: Xhrina had already passed her mathematician’s mate’s exam with highest distinction, and was well on her way to qualifying as a ship’s mathematician.

As for thinking, Xhrina often thought about recursion. She thought it was interesting that she didn’t always know what she liked, and she thought that everyone must have the same problem, for the only people she knew well were her shipmates, and they were impossible to know well, perhaps because they did not know what they liked, either.

She particularly liked the way that thinking about how it was possible not to know what she herself liked made her thoughts turn into circles and whorls and braids, spiraling down into the first questions about how she knew that she knew anything, as if descending into dark empty singularities; as her thoughts would vanish at the edge of those absent unthinkable thoughts, they marked the boundary as surely as the glimmers of vanishing dust and atoms at the Schwarzschild radius of a black hole.

Sometimes for a whole day she would keep track of which thought led to which thought and count how often, and by what diversity of paths, thoughts returned to the surfaces and boundaries of the unknowable. She could have flicked her fingers across any flat surface to make a workscreen, recited her data into the air, and played to her heart’s content with the grafsentatz. But when she was working on the recursivity of her thoughts, she preferred to hang in the dark in the opsball, and bring up stars for their current position/time (she could have brought them up for anywhere/anywhen, but she always chose current position and time). She always brought them up to just bright enough to see once her eyes adjusted.

Then she would slow her breathing and heartbeat, and wait for the perfect calm when her chi settled into tan tien, and see only in her mind’s eye the screens, matrices, graphs, and equations, and endlessly devise graphs to portray, and statistics to measure, the recursion and circularity of her own thoughts, and consider whether thoughts about recursion should be intrinsically, or just accidentally, more or less recursive than other thoughts, and watch as all those thoughts drifted down onto the unknown, unknowing surfaces of those first known-to-be-unanswerable questions.

When she was finally cool and beautiful inside, she would softly ask the opsball to let the stars dim out, watch them till the last star was gone from the blackness, then swim back to Mtepic’s quarters, where she would often find him sleeping fitfully and uneasily, drifting all over the compartment because he had fallen asleep outside the sleepsack. Then she would bathe him and rub him till he fell asleep smiling, and curl up against him for lovely, deep, dreamless sleep. The nightmares of her childhood were mostly gone now, and no more than pale shadows when they returned.

In the Sigdracone system, she still had enough of her gravity-bone to stand up and raise her hand, down on the surface of Aloysio, and receive her freedom under the open air. She wasn’t quite sure why she chose to do that. It all seemed so harsh and uncomfortable and when she returned to the ship, it felt as if she really received her freedom at the dinner they had for her. Though they treated her just as they always had, as an equal, it mattered to her that now they were supposed to.

She affirmed and they voiceprinted it, making Xhrina a shareholder in 9743, backvested with all the equity that she had built up in the trust fund they had kept for her, while she had not been allowed to own property in case the ship had to touch base, and face a books inspection, on a Karkh-Convention world. They drank a toast.

The slowtime people at Aloysio wanted a total cargo changeover, something that only happened once in a century or so of eintime. An organization that the translators called the “Aloysio Museum of Spiritual Anger Corporation” bought the whole cargo, and sold 9743 an entirely new cargo: 1,024 cubes, sixty meters on a side, with identifier strips on every face.

None of 9743’s ship people had known in a long time what ships carried, except that they never carried slaves, because they refused to, or any living thing that needed tending, because none of them wanted to learn how. So they knew the containers in the hold had nothing alive, or at least nothing actively alive, in them.

Other than that they knew nothing; over the slow correspondence of decades between ship people on other ships, there was an eternal argument about why no crew knew what was in the cargo. Some said it was because in the wars of fifteen thousand years ago, a tradition had been established that no ship people were ever to be responsible for anything they carried. Others said it was simply that the hundreds of thousands of cultures in slowtime changed so much and so fast compared with ship people that no one could have understood what the cargo was anyway. And still others said that the people on the worlds did not trust ship people not to steal it if they knew what it was, but most people said that was the silliest of all ideas, since anyone knew that the most valuable thing on a ship was hold space, and who would want to keep cargo and never be able to use the hold space again? Or who would buy or sell something when all contracts were broadcast openly, and it would be obvious to anyone that it was stolen?

Actually even if she had known, she would not have cared what was in the cargo. She did know where the cargo was going—that was what a mathematician did, after all—and she liked that very much. The ship would be making a very long haul, out into the north polar section of the Third Pulse worlds, where the inhabited stars were too distant to have ancient names because they had not been naked-eye visible from Earth, and so had been named for abstract qualities by the Second Pulse surveyors; she loved the idea that the suns all had names like Perspicacity, Charity, and Preternaturalness. And it would be six years eintime before their next system entry, perhaps more if the PPDs broke right.

On her twenty-ninth birthday, they were outbound and life had settled into the most comfortable of routines; after the small gifts and the warm feeling of attention, she rubbed Mtepic to sleep—he was just a soft, thin cover of lumpy bones, anymore, she thought—and drifted off herself, glad Mtepic had been there for her first birthday as a free person, hoping she could complete her mathematics preps and qualify for ship’s mathematician while he could congratulate her for it.

Mtepic’s soft palms and fingers pressed for one light instant on her shoulder blades. “It’s strange how it happens on birthdays.”

She glanced at the clock; she and Mtepic had been asleep for five hours since they had celebrated her birthday. Xhrina turned and held him in a light embrace; he sometimes woke up, now, talking to people he had been talking to in dreams, and she didn’t like to startle him.

He embraced her in return, firmly and strongly, and now she knew he was awake, just starting in the middle as he tended to do. She waited to see what he would do or say. After a sigh—he liked holding her and she knew he might have been glad to do it much longer—Mtepic said, “There will be ghosts in the opsball tonight. I am going to watch them again. Would you like to come with me?”

“Of course,” she said. “Does it happen on everyone’s birthday?”

“Just mine, I thought. But now yours. Dress quickly. There’s never much warning. We must be there and silent before the ghost-power lights up the opsball.”

They dressed, swam through the main crewpipe, and entered the opsball.

Everything that evening was as before, except that the ghosts were different. First the Dopplered stars, and then the corrected stars, dimmer even than when Xhrina came in here to meditate. The fast-moving cloud made of ghosts zoomed silently up out of the Southern Cross to surround them in less than a minute. The ghosts in their thousands swarmed around the outside of (the ship? the opsball? But the opsball was 750 meters inside the ship, and yet the twenty or so ghosts who came inside seemed to merge directly from the projected stars to their positions in the opsball).

This time Xhrina mostly watched two young men, apparently twins, trying to solve what she thought must be an equation, though on each side of the equals sign there was only a rotating projection of a lumpy ellipsoid in several colors.

Or perhaps it was a game. They were both laughing very hard about it, whatever it was, and Xhrina liked the way they threw arms around each other and rested their heads on each other’s shoulders, then went back to their game or problem or whatever it was, sitting left shoulder to right shoulder, making little blobs of multicolor swim off one blob and across the equals sign to stick to the blob on the other side. Whenever they did that, both blobs would reorganize into different colors and shapes, and the two of them would clap, together, rhythmically, silently, as if to an unheard song.

A teenaged girl that Xhrina thought might have been a daughter or some other relative to the smashed-headed woman from last time—or was it the same woman at an earlier stage of life?—was working her screen, whose language looked like some late Konglish derivative, with a gymnast’s concentration.

Another woman, old and stout with jowls, thin short gray hair like velvet, and something rough and wrong with the skin of her neck, wore a military uniform that could have been Late Brazilian Empire, Old Lunar Mexico, or Old Taucetian Guinea; somewhere in the First Interpulse, anyway, around the time of the Trade and Momentum Wars, because she looked just like the characters in a story, with bank codes on her sleeves, Mahmud boots, and a vibratana in a back scabbard.

Xhrina looked more closely, flapping her hands very gently to move herself toward the older woman in the military uniform. Bank trademarks on the shoulders; an admiral, then. Skull-jewels, gold with ruby eyes, in her pierced lower lip; four of them, four battle victories. The bank’s symbol had the ancient dollar and yen signs, crossed, in two pairs, on either side of a balance, which could be any of the dozens of military-and-financial-services companies in any of the three millennia of that era.

The admiral was worried, her fingers gliding over a screen that kept changing its display but always showed a cluster of white points surrounded by a swarm of red points, sometimes labeled in the blocky letters of ancient Romantisco, sometimes connected by varicolored lines, sometimes with little translucent spheres around them and clocks ticking beneath them, sometimes in a view that tumbled and rotated to show the shape that the whole formation made in space.

She kept touching the white dots like a mother cat checking her kittens. Abruptly Xhrina understood; the squadron was bunching together to try to make a run through the closing bag, and the admiral didn’t want to lose any of them. It was a classic situation, so common during those wars; the red dots were ringoes, robot ships that came in at a single target at 100 g, expending their entire magazines at the target and fuel supplies in acceleration, trying to ram just as they ran empty.

Once a ringo locked on and cranked its gammor to full power, they just kept coming, everything about them bent toward pure raw violence, game pieces intended to sacrifice at one to one, but they knew that they were too valuable to throw way on a bad risk, so they would not lock on until they decided they were close enough for a high probability of a kill. The admiral was trying to get her squadron out of a bag of ringoes, losing as few as she could manage. It did not look like that number would be zero, and it would be many hours before the brief burst of their violent escape, so she could choose to save any ship, but not all of them.

A very overweight, brown-skinned older woman dressed in a sleeveless coverall like Xhrina’s own opened an application that Xhrina knew well. Xhrina gently paddled through the air to see better what the woman was doing and found that she was bumping up against Mtepic, paddling over from the other side.

He floated, reflecting the glow of the ghost in front of them. His rounded, reflecting surfaces—forehead, nose, knuckles, knees—glowed gray in the dim light; these seemed to shrink back, as if he were falling back away from the ghosts and the stars beyond them, into utterly lightless dark.

Across Mtepic’s face, shoulders, and chest, a tangle of bright-glowing filaments emerged as if rising through his skin, like noodles in a colander slowly surfacing from boiling water.

The filaments broadened, stuck to each other, filled in gaps between. The dense, glowing web merged into the pale white shape of a newborn baby, like a bas relief just a centimeter or so above Mtepic’s ghost-lit wrinkled old skin. The baby stretched and yawned. Its light washed over Mtepic’s gray, still form and seemed to suck the color out of even his red coverall, leaving his lips blue-gray as dried mold.

The baby’s tiny feet on apostrophes of legs barely reached the bottom of Mtepic’s ribcage, but its head was almost as big as his. The arms, ending in hands too small to fully wrap Xhrina’s thumb, reached out to fathom space around the baby but did not extend as far as Mtepic’s slumped-in shoulders on either side. But the puckered face opened in a toothless, radiant smile of pure What? How? What’s all this? Then the vast, deep eyes, clear and wide, focused on Xhrina, and the tiny soft mouth twisted and folded in the expression with which Mtepic always favored her best jokes. She could not help smiling back.

Not knowing why, she placed the palm of her right hand on the baby’s chest, ever so gently, as if sure it would sink through to the sleeping Mtepic. She was surprised that the baby’s chest was warm, damp, and firm under her hand for that instant.

Then she realized the baby was male, for a stream of phosphorescence poured wet and warm onto her sternum, making a glowing patch on her coverall, and she glanced down to see that the ghost baby, if that was what it was, had no more bladder control than a real one.

It was so unexpected that she giggled, carefully not making a sound but letting her chest convulse, and under her palm she felt the baby’s chest pulse with the baby’s giggle, sharing her delight. Her hand sank a tiny fraction forward, and the baby was gone. Her palm lightly pressed Mtepic’s chest, where his heart thundered and his breath surged in and out as if he had worked too long and hard in the gym again, as he did so often despite her gentle scolding. His bony old hands closed around her strong young fingers, and he smiled at her, squeezing her hand.

For the rest of the night they held hands as they watched the laughing twins, the motherly admiral, the fat mathematician, and the rest of the ghostly crew. At last the shift chimes sounded, and the ghosts faded away, and then the stars. “Lights up slow,” she said, and the opsball appeared around them, its surfaces matte gray, shutdown and inert, the same old opsball it was for months and years at a time.

“Breakfast in our quarters and a long talk?” she asked.

“Surely! And I am so pleased.”

“At what?”

“You said ‘our quarters,’ not ‘your quarters.’ That is the first time in six years.”

“It was important to you? I would have said it much sooner if I had known it mattered.”

“It was important to me that you say it without my asking. And it was not important at all, at first, but it is now.” They swam through the irising door of the opsball. “And when it became important, I began to count. You wouldn’t laugh at my silly senility?”

“You are not senile and I would not laugh at you.”

“Well, then, as it became important, I calculated backward to your arrival, and then began to count, and so I know that it has been 2,222 days eintime since you came aboard, and this is the first time you have said ‘our quarters.’”

“Other people might find something odd in that number,” she said, “all those twos.”

They swam into their quarters. Mtepic flipped over like a seal resting at sea, hands on his belly. “Other people might find something odd in that number, but you and I know about numbers, eh?”

“Exactly so,” she said. “In octal it is merely 4,256, and in duodecimal an even less meaningful 1,352. 32,342 in quintal is about as close as you can get to meaningful expression in any other base, and that’s not very meaningful. And I would say that if meaning is not invariant we can ignore it.”

“Except when we can’t, of course?”

That struck them both as funny, for reasons that they knew no one else would understand, and they laughed as they filled out their breakfast order, and filed their official intention to serve their shifts on call in their quarters that day.

Mtepic’s sweet tooth had grown ever stronger as he aged. His favorite breakfast was now a fluffy, sweet pancake spread with blueberry jam and wrapped around vanilla ice cream, and as he slowly ate that this morning, he seemed to relish it more than ever. “Well,” he asked, “what would you like to know?”

“Was it real?”

He pointed to her chest; the damp spot still glowed.

She ran a finger over it; the very tip of the finger glowed for an instant, and then faded.

“How does it work?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t even know why I wake up knowing there will be ghosts. Or why it was so important to show them to you, or why I want to see them, myself.” He took another bite of his pancake and caressed it in his mouth until it dissolved; she waited until at last he said, “I would have gone, you know. That ghost was Sudden Crow, my wife before you—not that you are my wife, though the offer is open if you want it, it meant a great deal to her, but you’ve never seemed to care.”

“I don’t. ‘Not slave’ is all the title I ever wanted, and you gave me that, and you know I’ll be with you as long as you live—maybe I should say as long as you want to stay. But you almost . . . left? Do you miss Sudden Crow?”

“Not very much, to tell the truth. She was bad-tempered and sometimes rough with me. I wouldn’t mind saying hello again but I hope I wouldn’t have to spend any time with her as a ghost. Thirty years of combined time on this side was enough.”

“Do you say ‘this side’ because it feels spatial?”

Frowning, he thought, and then at last shook his head. “More like the sides of a game or a question than the sides of a segment or a surface.” He pondered more, then took another delighted bite of his breakfast. “Really, your friendship is one good reason to stay on this side, more than enough reason all by itself, but this breakfast could be another, and when I think of all the other things I still enjoy, I can understand why so few people want to go before they have to. It was just that seeing her there, somehow I knew how I could go, if I wanted to go. And the old body is such a nuisance, you know, sometimes, it gets so sore and itchy and hurty. So I did want to, just for that moment, but now I’m glad I didn’t.”

“Do the ghosts come aboard often?”

“You’ve been with me the last two times. Out of six in all. Five on my birthdays, now one on yours. And I’ve never told anyone else, but I knew you were the right one to see it. I’ve searched through all twenty-seven thousand years of star trader history, and records from more than a million ships—traders but also slavers, military, scout, and colony—and though there are many accounts of ghosts, most are just fiction, labeled as such, and many of the rest seem to be merely some bit of culture that came loose from its old moorings in some folktale and washed up in the star trader culture. And 9743 itself records the ghosts but doesn’t perceive them; they are there on camera recordings but if you ask 9743 to look for the ghosts in all its thousands of years of recordings of the opsball, it won’t see any ghosts, and it can look right at a camrec full of ghosts and does not perceive them, it only sees an empty, dark opsball.”

“So they are aphysical. But they record physically. What do you suppose they are?”

“A very expressive hole in spacetime?” Mtepic shrugged. “Most star traders commit bodies to space at peak velocity. Most of us run at 98%c or higher. Once the body is outside the protection of the forward shield, the atoms and dust in interstellar space erode it, and it loses velocity, though not quickly. And of course it is far above galactic escape velocity. Except for the very few that run into stars or black holes or comets, all the bodies committed to space must still be out there, some as much as thirty thousand light-years away if you allow for burials during the First Pulse when there was little or no trade.

“You could picture each corpse as a long pathway, sweeping atoms and ions and molecules and dust out of interstellar space, shaped very much like the dead person at this end in time and space, and as the interstellar medium punches them full of holes and breaks them down, trailing off into just a cloud of nucleons at a far end somewhere way outside the galaxy and some millions of years in the future. Perhaps something aphysical flows back along the path they make, and—‘crystallizes’? ‘condenses’? maybe just ‘organizes’ is the word for what it does, around any passing seed or nucleus or whatever you would call a thing a ghost organizes around. Maybe where a large number of pathways run close together, they entangle like spaghetti, and express as a ghost swarm when something that can appreciate their meaning comes along. That would explain the association with birthdays. Birthdays are meaningful even though they’re so drastically different in slowtime and eintime and depend completely on when you got on the ship, and where it goes, and how long an Old Earth year was at the moment they standardized it. So maybe ghosts annucleate around meaningful things like ships and birthdays. It makes a certain kind of sense. Meaning is aphysical, and ghosts are aphysical. Then again, what do physical beings like us know of aphysics?”

“But none of that would explain the baby coming out of your chest, or that the baby was you, or that we both remember it, let alone that I’ve got a patch of spiritual pee right over my heart.”

“Was I a baby? I wondered why I felt so strangely proportioned, and so small, and had no teeth. Well, that is certainly data to add to the puzzle.”

“Why should there be ghosts or spirits on a starship?”

“Why not here as much as anywhere? And for that matter, why should there be ships? Robot-only starships are just slightly less likely to reach their destinations, but it would be so easy to factor that into the price, and it would be more profitable to send containers one way and just accept some losses at the other end. As it is 9743 pays for an immense amount of space and mass to keep us alive. So why are we here? Why is there even an economy? We make everything on the ship by transmutation and molecular assembly—we never ‘pick up supplies’ though we sometimes buy new goods to record them for later manufacture—and we know the people in slowtime are centuries or millennia ahead of us—so why is there cargo for us to carry?”

“You think that has something to do with the ghosts,” Xhrina said, not a question, just trying to stay with him; clearly he had been thinking about this for a long time, had worked out the perfect presentation in his mind, wanted to have it produce perfect understanding—it was the way he had taught her mathematics. She knew he liked it when she understood at once, and she knew this might be her only chance to understand.

“I think it’s another void in spacetime. Once pretty much everyone human traded, going way back to Old Earth. For some reason it paid to trade between the stars. The ships began to move. Now they just move, bodies in motion remaining in motion, and the trading just happens. Maybe. Maybe we’re all just the ghosts of what humans used to do. Three-quarters of the star systems we traded in at one time or another now just wave us off, new ones come on line, and old ones reactivate after centuries of slowtime. Who can say what goes on out there?”

“Is it possible that the slowtime people on the planets are all just crazy, or perhaps playing at things because there’s nothing real left?”

“The slowtime people might ask the same things about us. We could just liquidate, and move into a nice orbital resort where they’d pamper us silly for the rest of our lives.”

“I would hate that.”

“So would I.” Mtepic smiled shyly. “Do you think it would be all right for me to have another pancake like that last one?”

“You’ve been losing weight,” she said, “and I worry about your appetite. You can have ten as far as I’m concerned. And actually, being very concerned, I wish you would.”

“Let’s start with one, but I’ll keep the offer in mind. And you’re right, I haven’t been taking very good care of myself, and for some reason, now I feel like I want to, at least for a while.”

She prepared it for him, not because he couldn’t do it himself, and not because she had to. She pointed that out as she served it to him, and he said, “You see? Part of what makes it good is all the things it’s not.”

She thought about that for a while and she said, “So the ghosts are not hallucinations. And they’re not physical as we understand it or the machines would be able to see them, rather than just record them. And you think maybe they’re where the bodies—well, the traces of the bodies—are not.”

“Except that Sudden Crow destroyed that theory,” he said. “She always was good at destroying theory. Part of why she was a good shipmate.”

“She hurt you,” Xhrina said, surprised at her own vehemence. “You said she was rough with you.”

“True. But I was not as fragile then as I’ve become, and besides she was a valuable member of the crew. And of course so are you, and getting more valuable all the time, and you are very good to me. You fill up a space different from the one she vacated.”

“I’d better,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to fill her place, at all.” And because she had said it a bit too vehemently, and the two of them were looking at each other awkwardly, she hurried on with the first question she could think of. “Why did you say Sudden Crow destroyed your theory about the traces of the bodies in spacetime?”

“Because she was buried in space about a year and a half out of Aydee-to-Ridny, outbound. Her pathway couldn’t have come anywhere near here.”

“But she was on this ship. Her path before she was dead included it. What if it doesn’t matter as long as you can describe the path, or the place where the path was? Suppose that, and maybe—”

“But it might be too hard if we suppose that,” Mteptic objected. “It doesn’t restrict things enough. Why don’t we see everyone’s ghost all the time?”

“‘Mathematics is how we find the logical implications of the boundaries of things, and the whole history of mathematics is the story of working with fewer and flimsier boundaries,’” she said. “You said that to me the very first time I sat down to learn algebra. Maybe we don’t see them often enough because there aren’t enough boundaries to produce them, or because we live inside so many boundaries, or . . . well, we don’t even know what the boundaries are, do we?”

“Hard to evaluate the boundary conditions,” Mtepic agreed. “But as far as I can see, it’s all holes and voids. There’s some odd thing in the slowtime world, some place we fill, though we don’t know what it is. Empty spots left in crews and on ships when people die, and the holes in space they make when we throw their bodies away, and the big emptiness of space itself, and every hole is outlined, and every outline means the hole—and, well, you must think I’m senile by now, surely.”

“I don’t,” she said. “Oh, I don’t. You know I don’t. Can I make you another pancake?”

In Mtepic’s last few years, they talked more. She liked that. She had received the last promotion she could get while he was alive, to mathematician’s-mate-pending-mathematician. That forced her for the first time to think of the succession. She decided that however she acquired her apprentice (she rather hoped to buy one out of a slave world, she would feel good about freeing someone as she had been freed), she would consider looking for someone who would talk. Many ship people didn’t, for weeks or months at a time.

That was another guess of Mtepic’s, that ship society was where the surrounding slowtime societies were dumping their autistic people and those whose mathematical gifts were no longer needed because they had synminds. “Sort of a featherbed-ding asylum for mathematicians,” he would say, coughing and laughing as she bathed, dried, and rubbed him. She would always laugh too, just because it was Mtepic and she felt how close he was to crossing over to the other side, and she expected to miss him then, and wish she could hear his jokes again.

The night after her thirtieth birthday, she awoke knowing that there would be ghosts in the opsball, and felt Mtepic waking within the circle of her arms. Xhrina dressed them both quickly and gently towed him with her, as she had had to do for the past few months, since his limbs had grown too feeble and shaky to keep him stable as he swam in the air.

It was as before, with a new swarm of ghosts, and in the middle of it, the baby emerged from Mtepic; she held the baby for a long moment, and kissed the tiny mouth tenderly, and then watched it sail off, giggling and tumbling, into the stars, until it was just a star itself, and then gone. She towed Mtepic’s remainder back to their quarters; for reasons she did not understand, she didn’t want to tell her shipmates that he had died in the opsball.

They might have been surprised at how dry her eyes were, and how perfect her composure, when they buried Mtepic’s body in space on the next shift, but ship people are never very surprised at anything human, for they don’t understand it and lose the habit of being curious about it.

Treo often floated with her in the dark opsball now. “It’s a big promotion,” he said, “and an honor, and you would make a good captain. I admit I’m delighted with the idea of being ship’s mathematician without having to wait for you to die.” That was the longest speech he had made, and Xhrina found it faintly ironic that he made it as they floated in the opsball, where normally they were most silent.

It was not a normal occasion; Phlox had chosen to die voluntarily after Arthur’s death, and would be doing it after she said her good-byes tonight, so they were replacing a captain and a first mate. The crew had chosen Xhrina as captain, with Officer-Apprentice Chang to be brevet-promoted to first mate, if they wanted the positions.

Xhrina thought Chang would be all right as a first mate; he was young and should ideally have had a few more years as an apprentice, but she reckoned that he would have them by the time she died, and would still be a young, vigorous, apt-to-be-successful captain. It was a good match all around.

They were far out in the Sixth Pulse systems now, newer worlds with more cargo to send and receive, out in the thinly populated fringes of the human sphere. So there could have been very few of those pathways of the dead that Mtepic imagined, but when they jettisoned Phlox’s body, Xhrina felt something; and the next day was her fiftieth birthday, and she felt it more strongly; so that night she was unsurprised to awaken and feel that it was time to see ghosts in the opsball. It had been a long time since she had seen ghosts, only twice since Mtepic’s death, and this was the first time since Treo had come aboard. She woke him, told him to dress and be quiet and to hurry.

The blue-to-red Dopplered stars became plain white stars, the swarm of ghosts arrived, and as Xhrina was just beginning to watch with wonder, and celebrate being here for such a thing again, Treo cried out in fear, having seen Phlox swim through the hull and take up her navigation station, and all of it vanished.

That settled Xhrina’s mind. She took the captain’s cabin, and shared it with Chang, from then on, letting him rub her back because he seemed to like to do it and it did feel good, and occasionally relieving him sexually, though he was much more attracted to the second physicist’s mate, Robert, who was unfortunately not interested in sex at all, or at least not any kind that Chang offered.

Xhrina didn’t exactly give up on any idea of love, but it was a long time before she trusted Chang as more than a mere colleague and convenient bed companion, so long that she got to know him too well, and settled for trust without love. It was an even longer time before she saw ghosts again.

Of the old generation, only she, Peter, and Squire were left on her eighty-fifth birthday, and Squire spent all of his time sleeping in his life support tank now, though when roused he seemed coherent enough in a querulous sort of way. 9743, by vote of the crew (a vote Xhrina had very carefully nurtured into happening) had been renamed Ulysses, a name it had last had 290 years eintime before. Xhrina could not have said why she preferred that.

There was a Seventh Pulse underway, carrying the human frontier out past 150 light-years from the home system, and at great distances, now and then, they detected the sonic boom of near-lightspeed bodies of a kilometer or more across, pressing so fast through the interstellar medium that their bow shock was too much for the thin trace of plasma and shook it hard enough to make microwaves. “The new colony ships move much faster than the old,” Captain Xhrina observed, at the table with everyone. She had insisted on establishing a tradition of birthdays, real birthdays for everyone, even looking up some old traditions so that everyone wore funny hats, and they served fish, and sang a song called “Years and Years” in ancient Konglish.

“I would like to see one more new part of space before I pass on,” she said. “There may just be time for that if we do this, and there is something in it for all of you. It will make our reputation forever as traders; the name of Ulysses will be known, and that would please me, and I hope it would please you.

“Sixty years ago, according to radio, the Sol and Alfsentary systems were known to be open, so we could make one stop on the way. My plan would be that we would take only half a hold of cargo—we probably can’t even get that, nowadays, anyway, there doesn’t seem to be much at any port—and then stuff the empty holds with extra mass, which we could feed into the shielders, and we could run at ninety-nine-four instead of our usual ninety-eight-two. That would mean eintime would be about one ninth of slowtime, instead of one fifth, and we could be back to the center in about seven years eintime. Switch cargos and pick up more mass there, head out again, and run at ninety-nine four for a hundred twenty years of slowtime, so that we get all the way into the Seventh Pulse worlds on the other side. The corporation could afford to do it a hundred times over; I’d just like to take a chance on being there at the end of that voyage, and if we make it there, we will have made a name for ourselves, forever, among star traders. No other reason.”

Treo would vote with her; he always did because he feared that she thought he was a coward, though she had never said so. And his mathematician’s mate Fatima would vote yes along with him. Peter would probably vote yes just because he found all port calls distressful and would like the idea that he would probably die before they made their first stop. With her vote, that was fifty-fifty; she thought Chang had liked the idea when she explained it to him, but with Chang it was hard to tell about things. The other three tended to think that the economic models that slithered and hissed through Ulysses’s computers, paralyzing everything with their venom of marginal returns, were gods to be propitiated.

“Call the question?” Sleeth, the second physicist’s mate-pending-first, said. That was conventional because she was juniormost voting member; it also fit Sleeth, because she was young and bouncing with energy in a crew of old, tired people. Most of the crew muttered that she was annoying except Squire, who said it outright whenever he was out of the tank, and Robert, the first physicist’s mate, who said it coldly, as if it were the atomic mass of oxygen or the orbital velocity of a planet.

To compensate, Xhrina made no secret that Sleeth was as much her favorite now as when she had come aboard as a too-noisy-for-ship-people two-year-old. As the captain grew older, she had felt more and more that Sleeth was the only person, besides Xhrina, who liked to get things done. So this calling the question was natural, aside from being a duty.

The vote wasn’t even close—only Squire and Robert voted against. Sleeth said apologetically to her cabin mates, “I’d like to be from a famous ship, and these runs around on the surface of the Sixth Pulse are getting dull.”

It seemed to Xhrina more likely that Sleeth, who was barely twenty, but had come back from the training ship when only twelve, had been living too long with an angry husk in a tank, and a cold man who never spoke (did Robert use her roughly? Xhrina had asked Sleeth, more than once, and Sleeth had said no in a way that Xhrina thought meant yes, but please don’t do anything). This looked to be Sleeth’s first little step to saying that she would not be pushed around by Robert and Peter, and it made Xhrina glad in a way that she had not felt in a while.

That night, when Chang crawled into the sleepsack beside Xhrina, he said, “When we approach the home system, and you wake knowing that there are ghosts in the opsball, don’t wake me. I’m afraid of them and I don’t want to know about them.”

“All right,” she said. “Have you been reading my diary?”

“Yes,” he said, “it’s my right as first mate to read anything you write, and I don’t like to ask. And I asked Treo and he told me how frightened he was, and I went back and looked at all your birthdays, and Mtepic’s, and saw the ghosts on the recordings. It made me so afraid I have had a hard time sleeping since. So don’t take me with you. I don’t want to see ghosts.” More gently, he said, “You might talk to Sleeth about it. She’s always been your little shadow, and she would face the fear just for love of you.”

“Thank you,” she said, “I will.” And Xhrina turned her back on him, to enjoy his warmth but not to talk anymore. I suppose I would have faced the ghosts for love of Mtepic, she thought, but I wanted to see them anyway, though I didn’t know it until he showed them to me. I hope it can be that way with Sleeth.

On the night of her ninety-third birthday, Xhrina rolled over and touched Sleeth, who had been her sleepsack partner for some years now. “Ghosts,” she said, “finally.”

“I’m glad,” Sleeth said, awake at once, and they turned up the lights and dressed quickly.

She wasn’t sure that she really was glad. Sleeth and the captain had talked of ghosts at least every few shifts for the last five years, and Sleeth had come to realize that her first time seeing ghosts would be the captain’s last. She had forced herself to seem happy and cheerful about the impending visit of the ghosts all through the annoying too-long layover around Old Earth’s moon, as well, and now that the time was here, she hadn’t really had time to think through what she wanted to feel, or ought to feel, and was stuck with just feeling what she felt—which was a mystery.

She had heard so much from the captain about Mtepic, and ghosts, and all the theories about ghosts, because the captain only needed to work an hour a day or so during the layover, while they found whatever cargo they could. The synminds of Old Earth and Ulysses at last found a small load, but did not seem to be able to explain what was in the containers, except that it was something that it was not inconceivable that someone in the new Seventh Pulse worlds out toward the Southern Cross and Sentaru might want 120 years from now.

The captain had not cared, so Sleeth had not cared. The scant cargo meant that their holds had had that much more room for a load of U238, depleted uranium, not for atomic power as in ancient times—they might as well have taken hay, oats, and water, and would have if nothing denser had been available—but because it was a conveniently dense supply of mass to be torn to nucleons and shot out the bow by the shielder, to clear a path through the interstellar medium for them. With the extra mass, they were able to run at 99.7%c, which meant almost thirteen years of slowtime to one year of eintime. Ulysses would be some sort of legend, now, for sure.

But, Sleeth thought sadly, the end of the legend will not be Captain Xhrina bringing Ulysses to the port of Summer, the port that they had been aiming for since their last PPD and change of course about a year eintime ago.

Xhrina and Sleeth had talked of ghosts, many times, and Sleeth longed to see them, with Xhrina; but she would miss their conversations about them, and it seemed sad that she would have no one to talk about this first time with. But then apparently Mtepic had seen them five times alone, and who knew how many others saw them and never talked about it at all?

Still, Sleeth had always imagined that when at last she saw them, she would be able to talk about them with Captain Xhrina. She had been ship-raised, and because of the way the schedules had worked out, had only been on a training ship for six years, about half what was normal, so that she had spent a great deal of time following Xhrina around when she was younger, and then more time tending her later. Xhrina had always been her one real friend.

Sleeth knew she would miss the captain dreadfully, but she didn’t think she should say so, with the captain’s eyes alight with joy; once they were in the opsball, it was easier, waiting in the dark, because Sleeth could just let her tears quietly flow.

It was all as Sleeth had heard it told, so many times.

As the ghosts neared, Xhrina bounced and fidgeted as if she had a tenth of her years. When the slender, small ghost that had to be Mtepic—though now strong and young—swam through the wall into the opsball, the glowing baby emerged from her head and chest in just two heartbeats, formed fully in the air, and held its arms to Mtepic, who swooped in and scooped up the newborn Xhrina. Just a few seconds, the first time I ever saw the ghosts, and it was all over, Sleeth thought sadly.

As if he had heard her thoughts, Mtepic, still cradling the fiercely glowing ghost-baby, turned back, and smiled a warm knowing smile at Sleeth.

To everyone’s surprise—even to the surprise of Mtepic’s ghost—ghost-Xhrina, newborn and toothless, huge-eyed face wide with glee, in the ghost-mathematician’s now-strong and young arms, waved bye-bye to Sleeth, in a way so like any other baby that Sleeth giggled, aloud, and all the ghosts but Mtepic and Xhrina fled as the stars began to fade.

Grinning, Mtepic raised a finger to his lips—Shhh!—and so did Xhrina, and they both waved bye-bye once again before they were gone into the field of stars, which faded after them, leaving Sleeth laughing in darkness.

Originally published in Jim Baen’s Universe, Issue #1, 2006.

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

Andy Duncan (beluthahatchie.blogspot.com)

Andy Duncan made his first sale in 1997. By the beginning of the new century, he was widely recognized as one of the most individual, quirky, and flavorful new voices on the scene today. His story “The Executioner’s Guild” was on both the Final Nebula Ballot and the final ballot for the World Fantasy Award in 2000, and in 2001 he won two World Fantasy Awards, for his story “The Pottawatomie Giant,” and for his landmark first collection, Beluthahatchie and Other Stories. He also won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 2002 for his novella “The Chief Designer.” His other books include an anthology co-edited with F. Brett Cox, Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic, and a non-fiction guidebook, Alabama Curiosities. His most recent books include a chapbook novella, The Night Cache, and a new collection, The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories. A graduate of the Clarion West writers’ workshop in Seattle, he was born in Batesberg, South Carolina, now lives in Frostburg, Maryland with his wife Sydney, and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Frostburo State University.

Eileen Gunn (eileengunn.com)

Eileen Gunn is the author of the story collection Stable Strategies and Others and the co-editor of The WisCon Chronicles Two. Her fiction has received the Nebula Award in the US the and Sense of Gender Award in Japan, and been nominated for the Hugo, Philip K. Dick, and World Fantasy awards and short-listed for the James Tiptree, Jr. award. She is the editor/publisher of the late Infinite Matrix webzine and served for twenty-two years on the board of directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop.

John Barnes (thatjohnbarnes.blogspot.com)

John Barnes has commercially published dozens of volumes of fiction, including science fiction, men’s action adventure, two collaborations with astronaut Buzz Aldrin, a collection of short stories and essays, one fantasy and one mainstream YA novel, plus two self-published novels, and around forty short stories. His recent books include Losers in Space, Raise the Gipper!, and The Last President. His personal blog is thatjohnbarnes.blogspot.com and he contributes frequent articles about analytics and metrics in business to AllAnalytics.com. He has done a rather large number of occasionally peculiar things for money, mainly in business consulting, academic teaching, and show business, fields which overlap more than you’d think. Since 2001, he has lived in Denver, Colorado, where he has a wonderful spouse, an average income, and a bad attitude, which he feels is actually the best permutation.

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 earlier this year. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.