Issue 24, January 2017

© Wyrm Publishing, 2017
wyrmpublishing.com
forever-magazine.com

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the January 2017 issue of Forever Magazine!

Happy New Year! After the chaos that swept through my life in the latter half of 2016, I’m happy to see the year done and gone. It’s a silly way of looking at things. A new year won’t clear the slate and fix everything, but I have a few things to look forward to in 2017, so that’s what helping set the current tone. For starters, my anthology Galactic Empires will be out from Night Shade Books in a couple of weeks. To celebrate, I’ve included an empire story in this month’s issue.

I’m also happy to say that the second volume in my Best Science Fiction of the Year series is done and scheduled for publication in a few months. This one was a bit more work than the first, but in a good way. I look forward to sharing the table of contents with everyone later this month.

With those out of the way, I can start story selection for three other anthologies: Clarkesworld Magazine: A Tenth Anniversary Anthology, More Human Than Human, and War Machines. Looking forward to diving into these projects.

Thanks for continuing to read and support Forever Magazine.

Until next month . . .

-Neil

Forty, Counting Down

Harry Turtledove

“Hey, Justin!” Sean Peters’ voice floated over the top of the Superstrings, Ltd., cubicle wall. “It’s twenty after six—quitting time and then some. Want a drink or two with me and Garth?”

“Hang on,” Justin Kloster answered. “Let me save what I’m working on first.” He told his computer to save his work as it stood, generate a backup, and shut itself off. Having grown up in the days when voice-recognition software was imperfectly reliable, he waited to make sure the machine followed orders. It did, of course. Making that software idiotproof had put Superstrings on the map a few years after the turn of the century.

Justin got up, stretched, and looked around. Not much to see: the grayish-tan fuzzy walls of the cubicle and an astringently neat desktop that held the computer, a wedding photo of Megan and him, and a phone/fax. His lips narrowed. The marriage had lasted four years—four and a half, actually. He hadn’t come close to finding anybody else since.

Footsteps announced Peters’ arrival. He looked like a high-school linebacker who’d let most of his muscle go to flab since. Garth O’Connell was right behind him. He was from the same mold, except getting thin on top instead of going gray. “How’s the Iron Curtain sound?” Peters asked.

“Sure,” Justin said. “It’s close, and you can hear yourself think—most of the time, anyhow.”

They went out into the parking lot together, bitching when they stepped from air conditioning to San Fernando Valley August heat. Justin’s eyes started watering, too; L.A. smog wasn’t so bad as it had been when he was young, but it hadn’t disappeared.

An Oasis song was playing when the three software engineers walked into the Iron Curtain, and into air conditioning chillier than the office’s. The music took Justin back to the days when he’d been getting together with Megan, though he’d liked Blur better. “Look out,” Sean Peters said. “They’ve got a new fellow behind the bar.” He and Garth chuckled. They knew what was going to happen. Justin sighed. So did he.

Peters ordered a gin and tonic, O’Connell a scotch on the rocks. Justin asked for a Bud. Sure as hell, the bartender said, “I’ll be right with you two gents”—he nodded to Justin’s coworkers—“but for you, sir, I’ll need some ID.”

With another sigh, Justin produced his driver’s license. “Here.”

The bartender looked at him, looked at his picture on the license, and looked at his birthdate. He scowled. “You were born in 1978? No way.”

“His real name’s Dorian Gray,” Garth said helpfully.

“Oh, shut up,” Justin muttered, and then, louder, to the bartender, “Yeah, I really turned forty this past spring.” He was slightly pudgy, but he’d been slightly pudgy since he was a toddler. And he’d been very blond since the day he was born. If he had any silver mixed with the gold, it didn’t show. He also stayed out of the sun as much as he could, because he burned to a crisp when he didn’t. That left him with a lot fewer lines and wrinkles than his buddies, who were both a couple of years younger than he.

Shaking his head, the bartender slid Justin a beer. “You coulda fooled me,” he said. “You go around picking up high-school girls?” His hands shaped an hourglass in the air.

“No.” Justin stared down at the reflections of the ceiling lights on the polished bar.

“Middle school,” Garth suggested. He’d already made his scotch disappear. Justin gave him a dirty look. It was such a dirty look, it got through to Sean Peters. He tapped Garth on the arm. For a wonder, Garth eased off.

Justin finished the Bud, threw a twenty on the bar, and got up to leave. “Not going to have another one?” Peters asked, surprised.

“Nope.” Justin shook his head. “Got some things to do. See you in the morning.” Out he went, walking fast so his friends couldn’t stop him.

As soon as the microchip inside Justin’s dead-bolt lock shook hands with the one in his key, his apartment came to life. Lamps came on. The stereo started playing the Pulp CD he’d left in there this morning. The broiler heated up to do the steak the computer knew was in the refrigerator. From the bedroom, the computer called, “Now or later?”

“Later,” Justin said, so the screen stayed dark.

He went into the kitchen and tossed a couple of pieces of spam snailmail into the blue wastebasket for recycling. The steak went under the broiler; frozen mixed vegetables went into the microwave. Eight minutes later, dinner.

After he finished, he rinsed the dishes and silverware and put them in the dishwasher. When he closed the door, the light in it came on; the machine judged it was full enough to run a cycle in the middle of the night.

Like the kitchen, his front room was almost as antiseptically tidy as his cubicle at Superstrings. But for a picture of Megan and him on their honeymoon, the coffee table was bare. All his books and DVDs and audio CDs were arranged alphabetically by author, title, or group. None stood even an eighth of an inch out of place. It was as if none of them dared move without his permission.

He went into the bedroom. “Now,” he said, and the computer monitor came to life.

A picture of Megan and him stood on the dresser, another on the nightstand. Her high-school graduation picture smiled at him whenever he sat down at the desk. Even after all these years, he smiled back most of the time. He couldn’t help it. He’d always been happy around Megan.

But she hadn’t been happy around him, not at the end. Not for a while before the end, either. He’d been a long, long time realizing that. “Stupid,” he said. He wasn’t smiling now, even with Megan’s young, glowing face looking right at him out of the picture frame. “I was stupid. I didn’t know enough. I didn’t know how to take care of her.”

No wonder he hadn’t clicked with any other woman. He didn’t want any other woman. He wanted Megan—and couldn’t have her any more.

“E-mail,” he told the computer, and gave his password. He went through it, answering what needed answering and deleting the rest. Then he said, “Banking.” The computer had paid the monthly Weblink bill, and the cable bill, too. “All good,” he told it.

The CD in the stereo fell silent. “Repeat?” the computer asked.

“No.” Justin went out to the front room. He took the Pulp CD out of the player, put it in its jewel box, and put the jewel box exactly where it belonged on the shelf. Then he stood there in a rare moment of indecision, wondering what to pull out next. When he chose a new CD, he chuckled. He doubted Sean or Garth would have heard of the Trash Can Sinatras, let alone heard any of their music. His work buddies had listened to grunge rock back before the turn of the century, not British pop.

As soon as Cake started, he went back into the bedroom and sat down at the computer again. This time, he did smile at Megan’s picture. She’d been crazy for the Trash Can Sinatras, too.

The music made him especially eager to get back to work. “Superstrings,” he said, and gave a password, and “Virtual reality” and another password, and “Not so virtual” and one more. Then he had to wait. He would have killed for a Mac a quarter this powerful back in 1999, but it wasn’t a patch on the one he used at the office. The company could afford the very best. He couldn’t, not quite.

He went to the keyboard for this work: for numbers, it was more precise than dictating. And he had to wait again and again, while the computer did the crunching. One wait was long enough for him to go take a shower. When he got back, hair still damp, the machine hadn’t finished muttering to itself. Justin sighed. But the faster Macs at the office couldn’t leap these numbers at a single bound. What he was asking of his home computer was right on the edge of what it could do.

Or maybe it would turn out to be over the edge. In that case, he’d spend even more lunch hours in his cubicle in the days ahead than he had for the past six months. He was caught up on everything the people above him wanted. They thought he worked his long hours to stay that way.

“What they don’t know won’t hurt them,” Justin murmured. “And it may do me some good.”

He didn’t think anyone else had combined superstring physics, chaos theory, and virtual reality this way. If anyone had, he was keeping quiet about it—nothing in the journals, not a whisper on the Web. Justin would have known; he had virbots out prowling all the time. They’d never found anything close. He had this all to himself . . . if he hadn’t been wasting his time.

Up came the field parameters, at long, long last. Justin studied them. As the computer had, he took his time. He didn’t want to let enthusiasm run away with him before he was sure. He’d done that half a lifetime ago, and what had it got him? A divorce that blighted his life ever since. He wouldn’t jump too soon. Not again. Not ever again. But things looked good.

“Yes!” he said softly. He’d been saying it that particular way since he was a teenager. He couldn’t have named the disgraced sportscaster from whom he’d borrowed it if he’d gone on the rack.

He saved the parameters, quit his application, and had the computer back up everything he’d done. The backup disk went into his briefcase. And then, yawning, he hit the sack.

Three days later, Garth O’Connell was the first to gape when Justin came into the office. “Buzz cut!” he exclaimed, and ran a hand over his own thinning hair. Then he laughed and started talking as if the past twenty years hadn’t happened: “Yo, dude. Where’s the combat boots?”

In my closet, Justin thought. He didn’t say that. What he did say was, “I felt like doing something different, that’s all.”

“Like what?” Garth asked. “Globalsearching for high-school quail, like the barkeep said? The competition doesn’t wear short hair any more, you know.”

“Will you melt it down?” Justin snapped.

“Okay. Okay.” Garth spread his hands. “But you better get used to it, ’cause everybody else is gonna say the same kind of stuff.”

Odds were he was right, Justin realized gloomily. He grabbed a cup of coffee at the office machine, then ducked into his cubicle and got to work. That slowed the stream of comments, but didn’t stop them. People would go by the cubicle, see the side view, do a double take, and start exclaiming.

Inside half an hour, Justin’s division head came by to view the prodigy. She rubbed her chin. “Well, I don’t suppose it looks unbusinesslike,” she said dubiously.

“Thanks, Ms. Chen,” Justin said. “I just wanted to—”

“Start your midlife crisis early.” As it had a few evenings before, Sean Peters’ voice drifted over the walls of the cubicle.

“And thank you, Sean.” Justin put on his biggest grin. Ms. Chen smiled, which meant he’d passed the test. She gave his hair another look, nodded more happily than she’d spoken, and went off to do whatever managers did when they weren’t worrying about haircuts.

Sean kept his mouth shut till lunchtime, when he stuck his head into Justin’s cubicle and said, “Feel like going over to Omino’s? I’ve got a yen for Japanese food.” He laughed. Justin groaned. That made Peters laugh harder than ever.

Justin shook his head. Pointing toward his monitor, he said, “I’m brown-bagging it today. Got a ton of stuff that needs doing.”

“Okay.” Peters shrugged. “Anybody’d think you worked here or something. I’ll see you later, then.”

Between noon and half past one, Superstrings was nearly deserted. Munching on a salami sandwich and an orange, Justin worked on his own project, his private project. The office machine was better than his home computer for deciding whether possible meant practical.

“Yes!” he said again, a few minutes later, and then, “Time to go shopping.”

Being the sort of fellow he was, he shopped with a list. Vintage clothes came from Aaardvark’s Odd Ark, undoubtedly the funkiest secondhand store in town, if not in the world. As with his haircut, he did his best to match the way he’d looked just before the turn of the century.

Old money was easier; he had to pay only a small premium for old-fashioned smallhead bills at the several coin-and-stamp shops he visited. “Why do you want ’em, if you don’t care about condition?” one dealer asked.

“Maybe I think the new bills are ugly,” he answered. The dealer shrugged, tagging him for a nut but a harmless one. When he got to $150,000, he checked money off the list.

He got to the office very early the next morning. The security guard chuckled as he unlocked the door. “Old clothes and everything. Looks like you’re moving in, pal.”

“Seems like that sometimes, too, Bill.” Justin set down his suitcases for a moment. “But I’m going out of town this afternoon. I’d rather have this stuff indoors than sitting in the trunk of my car.”

“Oh, yeah.” Bill nodded. He had to be seventy, but his hair wasn’t any lighter than iron gray. “I know that song.” He knew lots of songs, many dating back to before Justin was born. He’d fought in Vietnam, and been a cop, and now he was doing this because his pension hadn’t come close to keeping up with skyrocketing prices. Justin wondered if his own would, come the day.

But he had different worries now. “Thanks,” he said when the guard held the door for him.

He staggered up the stairs; thanks to the stash of cash (a new compact car here, nothing more, even with the premium he’d had to pay, but a young fortune before the turn of the century), some period clothes scrounged—like the Dilbert T-shirt and baggy jeans he had on—from secondhand stores, and the boots, those suitcases weren’t light, and he’d never been in better shape than he could help. The backpack in which he carried his PowerBook and VR mask did nothing to make him more graceful, either.

Once he got up to the second floor, he paused and listened hard. “Yes!” he said when he heard nothing. Except for Bill down below, he was the only person here.

He went into the men’s room, piled one suitcase on the other, and sat down on them. Then he took the laptop out of its case. He plugged the VR mask into its jack, then turned on the computer. As soon as it came up, he put on the mask. The world went black, then neutral gray, then neutral . . . neutral: no color at all, just virtual reality waiting to be made real.

It all took too long. He wished he could do this back at his desk, with an industrial-strength machine. But he didn’t dare take the chance. This building had been here nineteen years ago. This men’s room had been here nineteen years ago. He’d done his homework as well as he could. But his homework hadn’t been able to tell him where the goddamn cubicle partitions were back before the turn of the century.

And so . . . the john. He took a deep breath. “Run program superstrings–slash–virtual reality–slash–not so virtual,” he said.

The PowerBook quivered, ever so slightly, on his lap. His heart thudded. Talk about your moments of truth. Either he was as smart as he thought he was, or Garth or Sean or somebody would breeze in and ask, “Justin, what the hell are you doing?”

A string in space-time connected this place now to its earlier self, itself in 1999. As far as Justin knew, nobody but him had thought of accessing that string, of sliding along it, with VR technology. When the simulation was good enough, it became the reality—for a while, anyhow. That was what the math said. He thought he’d done a good enough job here.

And if he had . . . oh, if he had! He knew a hell of a lot more now, at forty, than he had when he was twenty-one. If he-now could be back with Megan for a while instead of his younger self, he could make things right. He could make things last. He knew it. He had to, if he ever wanted to be happy again.

I’ll fix it, he thought. I’ll fix everything. And when I slide back to here-and-now, I won’t have his emptiness in my past. Everything will be the way it could have been, the way it should have been.

An image began to emerge from the VR blankness. It was the same image he’d seen before slipping on the mask: blue tile walls with white grouting, acoustic ceiling, sinks with a mirror above them, urinals off to the left, toilet stalls behind him.

“Dammit,” he muttered under his breath. Sure as hell, the men’s room hadn’t changed at all.

“Program superstrings–slash–virtual reality–slash–not so virtual reality is done,” the PowerBook told him.

He took off the mask. Here he sat, on his suitcases, in the men’s room of his office building. 2018? 1999? He couldn’t tell, not staying in here. If everything had worked out the way he’d calculated, it would be before business hours back when he’d arrived, too. All he had to do was walk out that front door and hope the security guard wasn’t right there.

No. What he really had to hope was that the security guard wasn’t Bill.

He put the computer in his backpack again. He picked up the suitcases and walked to the men’s-room door. He set down a case so he could open the door. His heart pounded harder than ever. Yes? Or no?

Justin took two steps down the hall toward the stairs before he whispered, “Yes!” Instead of the gray-green carpet he’d walked in on, this stuff was an ugly mustard yellow. He had no proof he was in 1999, not yet. But he wasn’t in Kansas any more.

The place had the quiet-before-the-storm feeling offices get waiting for people to show up for work. That fit Justin’s calculations. The air conditioner was noisier, wheezier, than the system that had been—would be—in his time. But it kept the corridor noticeably cooler than it had been when he lugged his stuff into the men’s room. The ’90s had ridden an oil glut. They burned lavishly to beat summer heat. His time couldn’t.

There was the doorway that led to the stairs. Down he went. The walls were different: industrial yellow, not battleship gray. When he got to the little lobby, he didn’t recognize the furniture. What was there seemed no better or worse than what he was used to, but it was different.

If there was a guard, he was off making his rounds. Justin didn’t wait for him. He opened the door. He wondered if that would touch off the alarm, but it didn’t. He stepped out into the cool, fresh early morning air of . . . when?

He walked through the empty lot to the sidewalk, then looked around. Across the street, a woman out power-walking glanced his way, but didn’t stop. She wore a cap, a T-shirt, and baggy shorts, which proved nothing. But then he looked at the parked cars, and began to grin a crazy grin. Most of them had smooth jelly-bean lines, which, to his eyes, was two style changes out of date. If this wasn’t 1999, it was damn close.

With a clanking rumble of iron, a MetroLink train pulled into the little station behind his office. A couple of people got off; a handful got on. In his day, with gas ever scarcer, ever costlier, that commuter train would have far more passengers.

Standing on the sidewalk, unnoticed by the world around him, he pumped a fist in the air. “I did it!” he said. “I really did it!”

Having done it, he couldn’t do anything else, not for a little while. Not much was open at half past five. But there was a Denny’s up the street. Suitcases in hand, he trudged toward it. The young, bored-looking Hispanic waitress who seated him gave him a fishy stare. “You coulda left your stuff in the car,” she said pointedly.

His answer was automatic: “I don’t have a car.” Her eyebrows flew upward. If you didn’t have a car in L.A., you were nobody. If you didn’t have a car and did have suitcases, you were liable to be a dangerously weird nobody. He had to say something. Inspiration struck: “I just got off the train. Somebody should’ve picked me up, but he blew it. Toast and coffee, please?”

She relaxed. “Okay—coming up. White, rye, or whole wheat?”

“Wheat.” Justin looked around. He was the only customer in the place. “Can you keep an eye on the cases for a second? I want to buy a Times.” He’d seen the machine out front, but hadn’t wanted to stop till he got inside. When the waitress nodded, he got a paper. It was only a quarter. That boggled him; he paid two bucks weekdays, five Sundays.

But the date boggled him more. June 22, 1999. Right on the money. He went back inside. The coffee waited for him, steaming gently. The toast came up a moment later. As he spread grape jam over it, he glanced at the Times and wondered what his younger self was doing now.

Sleeping, you dummy. He’d liked to sleep late when he was twenty-one, and finals at Cal State Northridge would have just ended. He’d have the CompUSA job to go to, but the place didn’t open till ten.

Megan would be sleeping, too. He thought of her lying in a T-shirt and sweats at her parents’ house, wiggling around the way she did in bed. Maybe she was dreaming of him and smiling. She would be smiling now. A few years from now . . . Well, he’d come to fix that.

He killed forty-five minutes. By then, the restaurant was filling up. The waitress started to look ticked. Justin ordered bacon and eggs and hash browns. They bought him the table for another hour. He tried not to think about what the food was doing to his coronary arteries. His younger self wouldn’t have cared. His younger self loved Denny’s. My younger self was a fool, he thought.

He paid, again marveling at how little things cost. Of course, people didn’t make much, either; you could live well on $100,000 a year. He tried to imagine living on $100,000 in 2018, and shook his head. You couldn’t do it, not if you felt like eating, too.

When he went out to the parking lot, he stood there for forty minutes, looking back toward the train station. By then, it was getting close to eight o’clock. Up a side street from the Denny’s was a block of apartment buildings with names like the Tivoli, the Gardens, and the Yachtsman. Up the block he trudged. The Yachtsman had a vacancy sign.

The manager looked grumpy at getting buzzed so early, but the sight of greenbacks cheered him up in a hurry. He rented Justin a one-bedroom furnished apartment at a ridiculously low rate. “I’m here on business,” Justin said, which was true . . . in a way. “I’ll pay three months in advance if you fix me up with a TV and a stereo. They don’t have to be great. They just have to work.”

“I’d have to root around,” the manager said. “It’d be kind of a pain.” He waited. Justin passed him two fifties. He nodded. So did Justin. This was business, too. The manager eyed his suitcases. “You’ll want to move in right away, won’t you?”

Justin nodded again. “And I’ll want to use your phone to set up my phone service.”

“Okay,” the manager said with a sigh. “Come into my place here. I’ll get things set up.” His fish-faced wife watched Justin with wide, pale, unblinking eyes while he called the phone company and made arrangements. The manager headed off with a vacuum cleaner. In due course, he came back. “You’re ready. TV and stereo are in there.”

“Thanks.” Justin went upstairs to the apartment. It was small and bare, with furniture that had seen better decades. The TV wasn’t new. The stereo was so old, it didn’t play CDs, only records and cassettes. Well, his computer could manage CDs. He accepted a key to the apartment and another for the security gates, then unpacked. He couldn’t do everything he wanted till he got a phone, but he was here.

He used a pay phone to call a cab, and rode over to a used-car lot. He couldn’t do everything he wanted without wheels, either. He had no trouble proving he was himself; he’d done some computer forgery before he left to make his driver’s license expire in 2003, as it really did. His number hadn’t changed. Security holograms that would have given a home machine trouble here-and-now were a piece of cake to graphics programs from 2018. His younger self didn’t know he’d just bought a new old car: a gray early-’90s Toyota much like the one he was already driving.

“Insurance is mandatory,” the salesman said. “I can sell you a policy . . . ” Justin let him do it, to his barely concealed delight. It was, no doubt, highway robbery, especially since Justin was nominally only twenty-one. He’d dressed for the age he affected, in T-shirt and jeans. To him, though, no 1999 prices seemed expensive. He paid cash and took the car.

Getting a bank account wasn’t hard, either. He chose a bank his younger self didn’t use. Research paid off: he deposited only $9,000. Ten grand or more in cash and the bank would have reported the transaction to the government. He didn’t want that kind of notice. He wanted no notice at all. The assistant manager handed him a book of temporary checks. “Good to have your business, Mr. Kloster. The personalized ones will be ready in about a week.”

“Okay.” Justin went off to buy groceries. He wasn’t a great cook, but he was a lot better than his younger self. He’d had to learn, and had.

Once the groceries were stowed in the pantry and the refrigerator, he left again, this time to a bookstore. He went to the computer section first, to remind himself of the state of the art. After a couple of minutes, he was smiling and shaking his head. Had he done serious work with this junk? He supposed he had, but he was damned if he saw how. Before he was born, people had used slide rules because there weren’t any computers yet, or even calculators. He was damned if he saw how they’d done any work, either.

But the books didn’t have exactly what he wanted. He went to the magazine rack. There was a MacAddict in a clear plastic envelope. The CD-ROM that came with the magazine would let him start an account on a couple of online services. Once he had one, he could e-mail his younger self, and then he’d be in business.

If I—or I-then—don’t flip out altogether, he thought. Things might get pretty crazy. Now that he was here and on the point of getting started, he felt in his belly how crazy they might get. And he knew both sides of things. His younger self didn’t.

Would Justin-then even listen to him? He had to hope so. Looking back, he’d been pretty stupid when he was twenty-one. No matter how stupid he’d been, though, he’d have to pay attention when he got his nose rubbed in the facts. Wouldn’t he?

Justin bought the MacAddict and took it back to his apartment. As soon as he got online, he’d be ready to roll.

He chose AOL, not Earthlink. His younger self was on Earthlink, and looked down his nose at AOL. And AOL let him pay by debiting his checking account. He didn’t have any credit cards that worked in 1999. He supposed he could get one, but it would take time. He’d taken too much time already. He thought he had about three months before the space-time string he’d manipulated would snap him back to 2018. With luck, with skill, with what he knew then that he hadn’t known now, he’d be happier there. But he had no time to waste.

His computer, throttled down to 56K access to the outside world, might have thought the same. But AOL’s local access lines wouldn’t support anything faster. “Welcome,” the electronic voice said as he logged on. He ignored it, and went straight to e-mail. He was pretty sure he remembered his old e-mail address. If I don’t, he thought, chuckling a little as he typed, whoever is using this address right now will get awfully confused.

He’d pondered what he would say to get his younger self’s attention, and settled on the most provocative message he could think of. He wrote, Who but you would know that the first time you jacked off, you were looking at Miss March 1993, a little before your fifteenth birthday? Nobody, right? Gorgeous blonde, wasn’t she? The only way I know that is that I am you, more or less. Let me hear from you. He signed it, Justin Kloster, age 40, and sent it.

Then he had to pause. His younger self would be working now, but he’d check his e-mail as soon as he got home. Justin remembered religiously doing that every day. He didn’t remember getting e-mail like the message he’d just sent, of course, but that was the point of this exercise.

Waiting till half past five wasn’t easy. He wished he could use his time-travel algorithm to fast-forward to late afternoon, but he didn’t dare. Too many superstrings might tangle, and even the office machine up in 2018 hadn’t been able to work out the ramifications of that. In another ten years, it would probably be child’s play for a computer, but he wouldn’t be able to pretend he was twenty-one when he was fifty. Even a baby face and pale gold hair wouldn’t stretch that far. He hoped they’d stretch far enough now.

At 5:31, he logged on to AOL again. “Welcome!” the voice told him, and then, “You’ve got mail!”

“You’ve got spam,” he muttered under his breath. And one of the messages in his mailbox was spam. He deleted it without a qualm. The other one, though, was from his younger self @earthlink.net.

Heart pounding, he opened the e-mail. What kind of stupid joke is this? his younger self wrote. Whatever it is, it’s not funny.

Justin sighed. He supposed he shouldn’t have expected himself-at-twenty-one to be convinced right away. This business was hard to believe, even for him. But he had more shots in his gun than one. No joke, he wrote back. Who else but you would know you lost your first baby tooth in a pear at school when you were in the first grade? Who would know your dad fed you Rollos when he took you to work with him that day you were eight or nine? Who would know you spent most of the time while you were losing your cherry staring at the mole on the side of Lindsey Fletcher’s neck? Me, that’s who: you at 40. He typed his name and sent the message.

His stomach growled, but he didn’t go off and make supper. He sat by the computer, waiting. His younger self would still be online. He’d have to answer . . . wouldn’t he? Justin hadn’t figured out what he’d do if himself-at-twenty-one wanted nothing to do with him. The prospect had never crossed his mind. Maybe it should have.

“Don’t be stupid, kid,” he said softly. “Don’t complicate things for me. Don’t complicate things for yourself, either.”

He sat. He waited. He worried. After what seemed forever but was less than ten minutes, the AOL program announced, “You’ve got mail!”

He read it. I don’t watch X-Files much, his younger self wrote, but maybe I ought to. How could you know all that about me? I never told anybody about Lindsey Fletcher’s neck.

So far as Justin could recall, he hadn’t told anyone about her neck by 2018, either. That didn’t mean he’d forgotten. He wouldn’t forget till they shoveled dirt over him.

How do I know? he wrote. I’ve told you twice now—I know because I am you, you in 2018. It’s not X-Files stuff—it’s good programming. The show still ran in endless syndication, but he hadn’t watched it for years. He went on, Believe me, I’m back here for a good reason, and sent the e-mail.

Again, he waited. Again, the reply came back fast. He imagined his younger self eyeing the screen of his computer, eyeing it and scratching his head. His younger self must have been scratching hard, for what came back was, But that’s impossible.

Okay, he typed. It’s impossible. But if it is impossible, how do I know all this stuff about you?

More waiting. The hell with it, he thought. He’d intended to broil lamb chops, but he would have had to pay attention to keep from cremating them. He took a dinner out of the freezer and threw it into the tiny microwave built in above the stove. He could punch a button and get it more or less right. Back to the computer.

“You’ve got mail!” it said once more, and he did. I don’t know, his younger self had written. How do you know all this stuff about me?

Because it’s stuff about me, too, he answered. You don’t seem to be taking that seriously yet.

The microwave beeped. Justin started to go off to eat, but the PowerBook told him he had more mail. He called it up. If you’re supposed to be me, himself-at-twenty-one wrote, then you’ll look like me, right?

Justin laughed. His younger self wouldn’t believe that. He’d probably think it would make this pretender shut up and go away. But Justin wasn’t a pretender, and didn’t need to shut up—he could put up instead. Right, he replied. Meet me in front of the B. Dalton’s in the Northridge mall tomorrow night at 6:30 and I’ll buy you dinner. You’ll see for yourself. He sent the message, then did walk away from the computer.

Eating frozen food reminded him why he’d learned to cook. He chucked the tray in the trash, then returned to the bedroom to see what his younger self had answered. Three words: See you there.

The mall surprised Justin. In his time, it had seen better years. In 1999, just a little after being rebuilt because of the ’94 earthquake, it still seemed shiny and sparkly and new. Justin got there early. With his hair short, with the Cow Pi T-shirt and jeans and big black boots he was wearing, he fit in with the kids who shopped and strutted and just hung out.

He found out how well he fit when he eyed an attractive brunette of thirty or so who was wearing business clothes. She caught him doing it, looked horrified for a second, and then stared through him as if he didn’t exist. At first, he thought her reaction was over the top. Then he realized it wasn’t. You may think she’s cute, but she doesn’t think you are. She thinks you’re wet behind the ears.

Instead of leaving him insulted, the woman’s reaction cheered him. Maybe I can bring this off.

He leaned against the brushed-aluminum railing in front of the second-level B. Dalton’s as if he had nothing better to do. A gray-haired man in maroon polyester pants muttered something about punk kids as he walked by. Justin grinned, which made the old fart mutter more.

But then the grin slipped from Justin’s face. What replaced it was probably astonishment. Here came his younger self, heading up from the Sears end of the mall.

He could tell the moment when his younger self saw him. Himself-at-twenty-one stopped, gaped, and turned pale. He looked as if he wanted to turn around and run away. Instead, after gulping, he kept on.

Justin’s heart pounded. He hadn’t realized just how strange seeing himself would feel. And he’d been expecting this. For his younger self, it was a bolt from the blue. That meant he had to be the one in control. He stuck out his hand. “Hi,” he said. “Thanks for coming.”

His younger self shook hands with him. They both looked down. The two right hands fit perfectly. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? Justin thought. His younger self, still staring, said, “Maybe I’m not crazy. Maybe you’re not crazy, either. You look just like me.”

“Funny how that works,” Justin said. Seeing his younger self wasn’t like looking in a mirror. It wasn’t because himself-at-twenty-one looked that much younger—he didn’t. It wasn’t even because his younger self wasn’t doing the same things he did. After a moment, he figured out what it was: his younger self’s image wasn’t reversed, the way it would have been in a mirror. That made him look different.

His younger self put hands on hips. “Prove you’re from the future,” he said.

Justin had expected that. He took a little plastic coin purse, the kind that can hook onto a key chain, out of his pocket and squeezed it open. “Here,” he said. “This is for you.” He handed himself-at-twenty-one a quarter.

It looked like any quarter—till you noticed the date. “It’s from 2012,” his younger self whispered. His eyes got big and round again. “Jesus. You weren’t kidding.”

“I told you I wasn’t,” Justin said patiently. “Come on. What’s the name of that Korean barbecue place on . . . Reseda?” He thought that was right. It had closed a few years after the turn of the century.

His younger self didn’t notice the hesitation. “The Pine Tree?”

“Yeah.” Justin knew the name when he heard it. “Let’s go over there. I’ll buy you dinner, like I said in e-mail, and we can talk about things.”

“Like what you’re doing here,” his younger self said.

He nodded. “Yeah. Like what I’m doing here.”

None of the waitresses at the Pine Tree spoke much English. That was one reason Justin had chosen the place: he didn’t want anybody eavesdropping. But he liked garlic, he liked the odd vegetables, and he enjoyed grilling beef or pork or chicken or fish on the gas barbecue set into the tabletop.

He ordered for both of them. The waitress scribbled on her pad in the odd characters of hangul, then looked from one of them to the other. “Twins,” she said, pulling out a word she did know.

“Yeah,” Justin said. Sort of, he thought. The waitress went away.

His younger self pointed at him. “Tell me one thing,” he said.

“What?” Justin asked. He expected anything from What are you doing here? to What is the meaning of life?

But his younger self surprised him: “That the Rolling Stones aren’t still touring by the time you’re—I’m—forty.”

“Well, no,” Justin said. That was a pretty scary thought, when you got down to it. He and his younger self both laughed. They sounded just alike. We would, he thought.

The waitress came back with a couple of tall bottles of OB beer. She hadn’t asked either one of them for an ID, for which Justin was duly grateful. His younger self kept quiet while she was around. After she’d gone away, himself-at-twenty-one said, “Okay, I believe you. I didn’t think I would, but I do. You know too much—and you couldn’t have pulled that quarter out of your ear from nowhere.” He sipped at the Korean beer. He looked as if he would sooner have gone out and got drunk.

“That’s right,” Justin agreed. Stay in control. The more you sound like you know what you’re doing, the more he’ll think you know what you’re doing. And he has to think that, or this won’t fly.

His younger self drank beer faster than he did, and waved for a second tall one as soon as the first was empty. Justin frowned. He remembered drinking more in his twenties than he did at forty, but didn’t care to have his nose rubbed in it. He wouldn’t have wanted to drive after two big OBs, but his younger self didn’t worry about it.

With his younger self’s new beer, the waitress brought the meat to be grilled and the plates of vegetables. She used aluminum tongs to put some pork and some marinated beef over the fire. Looking at the strips of meat curling and shrinking, himself-at-twenty-one exclaimed, “Oh my God! They killed Kenny!”

“Huh?” Justin said, and then, “Oh.” He managed a feeble chuckle. He hadn’t thought about South Park in a long time.

His younger self eyed him. “If you’d said that to me, I’d have laughed a lot harder. But the show’s not hot for you any more, is it?” He answered his own question before Justin could: “No, it wouldn’t be. 2018? Jesus.” He took another big sip of beer.

Justin grabbed some beef with the tongs. He used chopsticks to eat, ignoring the fork. So did his younger self. He was better at it than himself-at-twenty-one; he’d had more practice. The food was good. He remembered it had been.

After a while, his younger self said, “Well, will you tell me what this is all about?”

“What’s the most important thing in your life right now?” Justin asked in return.

“You mean, besides trying to figure out why I’d travel back in time to see me?” his younger self returned. He nodded, carefully not smiling. He’d been looser, sillier, at twenty-one than he was now. Of course, he’d had fewer things go wrong then, too. And his younger self went on, “What could it be but Megan?”

“Okay, we’re on the same page,” Justin said. “That’s why I’m here, to set things right with Megan.”

“Things with Megan don’t need setting right.” Himself-at-twenty-one sounded disgustingly complacent. “Things with Megan are great. I mean, I’m taking my time and all, but they’re great. And they’ll stay great, too. How many kids do we have now?”

“None.” Justin’s voice went flat and harsh. A muscle at the corner of his jaw jumped. He touched it to try to calm it down.

“None?” His younger self wasn’t quick on the uptake. He needed his nose rubbed in things. He looked at Justin’s left hand. “You’re not wearing a wedding ring,” he said. He’d just noticed. Justin’s answering nod was grim. His younger self asked, “Does that mean we don’t get married?”

Say it ain’t so. Justin did: “We get married, all right. And then we get divorced.”

His younger self went as pale as he had when he first saw Justin. Even at twenty-one, he knew too much about divorce. Here-and-now, his father was living with a woman not much older than he was. His mother was living with a woman not much older than he was, too. That was why he had his own apartment: paying his rent was easier for his mom and dad than paying him any real attention.

But, however much himself-at-twenty-one knew about divorce, he didn’t know enough. He’d just been a fairly innocent bystander. He hadn’t gone through one from the inside. He didn’t understand the pain and the emptiness and the endless might-have-beens that kept going through your mind afterwards.

Justin had had those might-have-beens inside his head since he and Megan fell apart. But he was in a unique position, sitting here in the Pine Tree eating kimchi. He could do something about them.

He could. If his younger self let him. Said younger self blurted, “That can’t happen.”

“It can. It did. It will,” Justin said. The muscle started twitching again.

“But—how?” Himself-at-twenty-one sounded somewhere between bewildered and shocked. “We aren’t like Mom and Dad—we don’t fight all the time, and we don’t look for something on the side wherever we can find it.” Even at twenty-one, he spoke of his parents with casual contempt. Justin thought no better of them in 2018.

He said, “You can fight about sex, you can fight about money, you can fight about in-laws. We ended up doing all three, and so . . . ” He set down his chopsticks and spread his hands wide. “We broke up—will break up—if we don’t change things. That’s why I figured out how to come back: to change things, I mean.”

His younger self finished the second OB. “You must have wanted to do that a lot,” he remarked.

“You might say so.” Justin’s voice came harsh and ragged. “Yeah, you just might say so. Since we fell apart, I’ve never come close to finding anybody who makes me feel the way Megan did. If it’s not her, it’s nobody. That’s how it looks from here, anyhow. I want to make things right for the two of us.”

“Things were going to be right.” But his younger self lacked conviction. Justin sat and waited. He was better at that than he had been half a lifetime earlier. Finally, himself-at-twenty-one asked, “What will you do?”

He didn’t ask, What do you want to do? He spoke as if Justin were a force of nature. Maybe that was his youth showing. Maybe it was just the beer. Whatever it was, Justin encouraged it by telling his younger self what he would do, not what he’d like to do: “I’m going to take over your life for a couple of months. I’m going to be you. I’m going to take Megan out, I’m going to make sure things are solid—and then the superstring I’ve ridden to get me here will break down. You’ll live happily ever after: I’ll brief you to make sure you don’t screw up what I’ve built. And when I get back to 2018, I will have lived happily ever after. How does that sound?”

“I don’t know,” his younger self said. “You’ll be taking Megan out?”

Justin nodded. “That’s right.”

“You’ll be . . . taking Megan back to the apartment?”

“Yeah,” Justin said. “But she’ll think it’s you, remember, and pretty soon it’ll be you, and it’ll keep right on being you till you turn into me, if you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” his younger self said. “Still . . . ” He grimaced. “I don’t know. I don’t like it.”

“You have a better idea?” Justin folded his arms across his chest and waited, doing his best to be the picture of inevitability. Inside, his stomach tied itself in knots. He’d always been better at the tech side of things than at sales.

“It’s not fair,” himself-at-twenty-one said. “You know all this shit, and I’ve gotta guess.”

Justin shrugged. “If you think I did all this to come back and tell you lies, go ahead. That’s fine.” It was anything but fine. But he couldn’t let his younger self see that. “You’ll see what happens, and we’ll both be sorry.”

“I don’t know.” His younger self shook his head, again and again. His eyes had a trapped-animal look. “I just don’t know. Everything sounds like it hangs together, but you could be bullshitting, too, just as easy.”

“Yeah, right.” Justin couldn’t remember the last time he’d said that, but it fit here.

Then his younger self got up. “I won’t say yes and I won’t say no, not now I won’t. I’ve got your e-mail address. I’ll use it.” Out he went, not quite steady on his feet.

Justin stared after him. He paid for both dinners—it seemed like peanuts to him—and went home himself. His younger self needed time to think things through. He saw that. Seeing it and liking it were two different things. And every minute himself-at-twenty-one dithered was a minute he couldn’t get back. He stewed. He fumed. He waited. What other choice did he have?

You could whack him and take over for him. But he rejected the thought with a shudder. He was no murderer. All he wanted was some happiness. Was that too much to ask? He didn’t think so, not after all he’d missed since Megan made him move out. He checked his e-mail every hour on the hour.

Two and a half mortal days. Justin thought he’d go nuts. He’d never dreamt his younger self would make him wait so long. At last, the computer told him, “You’ve got mail!”

All right, dammit, himself-at-twenty-one wrote. I still don’t know about this, but I don’t think I have any choice. If me and Megan are going to break up, that can’t happen. You better make sure it doesn’t.

“Oh, thank God,” Justin breathed. He wrote back, You won’t be sorry.

Whatever, his younger self replied. Half of me is sorry already. More than half.

Don’t be, Justin told him. Everything will be fine.

It had better be, his younger self wrote darkly. How do you want to make the switch?

Meet me in front of the B. Dalton’s again, Justin answered. Park by the Sears. I will, too. Bring whatever you want in your car. You can move it to the one I’m driving. I’ll do the same here. See you in two hours?

Whatever, his younger self repeated. Justin remembered saying that a lot. He hoped it meant yes here. The only things he didn’t want his younger self getting his hands on here were his laptop (though it would distract himself-at-twenty-one from worrying about Megan if anything would) and some of his cash. He left behind the TV and the stereo and the period clothes—and, below the underwear and socks, the cash he wasn’t taking along. His younger self could eat and have some fun, too, provided he did it at places where Megan wouldn’t run into him.

This time, his younger self got to the mall before him. Thoroughly grim, himself-at-twenty-one said, “Let’s get this over with.”

“Come on. It’s not a root canal,” Justin said. Now his younger self looked blank—he didn’t know about root canals. Justin wished he didn’t; that was a bit of the future less pleasant to contemplate than life with Megan. He went on, “Let’s go do it. We’ll need to swap keys, you know.”

“Yeah.” Himself-at-twenty-one nodded. “I had spares made. How about you?”

“Me, too.” Justin’s grin twisted up one corner of his mouth. “We think alike. Amazing, huh?”

“Amazing. Right.” His younger self started back toward Sears. “This better work.”

“It will,” Justin said. It has to, goddammit.

They’d parked only a couple of rows apart. His younger self had a couple of good-sized bundles. He put them in Justin’s car while Justin moved his stuff to the machine himself-at-twenty-one had been driving. “You know where I live,” his younger self said after they’d swapped keys. “What’s my new address?”

“Oh.” Justin told him. “The car’s insured, and you’ll find plenty of money in the underwear drawer.” He put a hand on his younger self’s shoulder. “It’ll be fine. Honest. You’re on vacation for a couple of months, that’s all.”

“On vacation from my life.” Himself-at-twenty-one looked grim again. At twenty-one, everything was urgent. “Don’t fuck up, that’s all.”

“It’s my life, too, remember.” Justin got into the car his younger self had driven to the mall. He fumbled a little, finding the right key. When he fired up the engine, the radio started playing KROQ. He laughed. Green Day was the bomb now, even if not quite to his taste. It wasn’t music for people approaching middle age and regretting it. He cranked the radio and drove back to his younger self’s apartment.

The Acapulco. He nodded as he drove up to it. It looked familiar. That made him laugh again. It hadn’t changed. He had.

After he drove through the security gate, he found his old parking space more by letting his hands and eyes guide his brain than the other way round. He couldn’t remember his apartment number at all, and had to go to the lobby to see which box had kloster Dymo-taped onto it. He walked around the pool and past the rec room hardly anybody used, and there it was—his old place. But it wasn’t old now. This was where his younger self had lived and would live, and where he was living now.

As soon as he opened the door, he winced. He hadn’t remembered the bile-colored carpet, either, but it came back in a hurry. He looked around. Here it was—all his old stuff, a lot of it things he hadn’t seen in half a lifetime. Paperbacks, CDs, that tiny statuette of a buglike humanoid standing on its hind legs and giving a speech . . . During which move had that disappeared? He shrugged. He’d been through a lot of them. He fondly touched an antenna as he went past the bookcase, along a narrow hall, and into the bedroom.

“My old iMac!” he exclaimed. But it wasn’t old; the model had been out for less than a year. Bondi blue and ice case—to a taste formed in 2018, it looked not just outmoded but tacky as hell, but he’d thought it was great when it came out.

His younger self had left a note by the keyboard. In case you don’t remember, here’s Megan’s phone number and e-mail. Don’t screw it up, that’s all I’ve got to tell you.

He had remembered her e-mail address, but not her phone number. “Thanks, kid,” he said to himself-at-twenty-one. There by the phone on the nightstand lay his younger self’s address book, but having things out in the open made it easier.

Instead of calling her, he walked into the bathroom. His hand shook as he flipped on the light. He stared at the mirror. Can I do this? He ran a palm over his cheek. Yeah, I look young. Do I look that young? What will Megan think when I come to the door? What will her folks think? I’m only a couple of years younger than they are, for Christ’s sake.

If I come to the door wearing his—my—clothes, though, and talking like me, and knowing things only I could know, who else would I be but Justin Kloster? She’ll think I’m me, because I can’t possibly be anybody else. And I’m not anybody else—except I am.

He was still frowning and looking for incipient wrinkles when the telephone rang. As he hurried back to the bedroom, he hoped it would be a telemarketer. I’m not ready, I’m not ready, I’m not . . . “Hello?”

“Hiya! How the hell are you?” It was Megan, all right. He hadn’t heard her in more than ten years, but he knew her voice. He hadn’t heard her sound bouncy and bubbly and glad to be talking to him in a lot more than ten years. Before he could get a word in, she went on, “You mad at me? You haven’t called in two days.”

By the way she said it, it might have been two years. “I’m not mad,” Justin answered automatically. “Just—busy.”

“Too busy for me?” Now she sounded as if she couldn’t imagine such a thing. Justin’s younger self must have been too caught up in everything else to have time for her. At least he hadn’t blabbed about Justin’s return to 1999. “What were you doing? Who were you doing it with—or to?”

She giggled. Justin remembered her asking him questions like that later on, in an altogether different tone of voice. Not now. She didn’t know she would do that. If he changed things here, she wouldn’t. “Nothing,” he said. “Nobody. Things have been hairy at work, that’s all.”

“A likely story.” But Megan was still laughing. He remembered her doing things like that. He remembered her stopping, too. She said, “Well, you’re not working now, right? Suppose I come over?”

“Okay,” he said, thinking about baptism by total immersion. Either this would work, or it would blow up in his face. What do I do if it blows up? Run back to 2018 with my tail between my legs, that’s what.

But Megan didn’t even give him time to panic. “Okay?” she said, mock-fierce. “Okay? I’ll okay you, mister, you see if I don’t. Ten minutes.” She hung up.

Justin ran around like a madman, to remind himself where things were and to clean up a little. He hadn’t remembered his younger self as such a slob. He checked the refrigerator. Frozen dinners, beer, Cokes—about what he’d expected.

He waited for the buzz that would mean Megan was at the security door. But he’d forgotten he’d given her a key. The first he knew she was there was the knock on the door. He opened it. “Hi,” he said, his voice breaking as if he really were twenty-one, or maybe sixteen.

“Hiya.” Megan clicked her tongue between her teeth. “You do look tired. Poor baby.”

He was looking at her, too, looking and trying not to tremble. She looked just like all the photos he’d kept: a swarthy brunette with flashing dark eyes, a little skinny maybe, but with some meat on her bones even so. She always smiled as if she knew a secret. He’d remembered. Remembering and seeing it in the flesh when it was fresh and new and a long way from curdling were very different things. He hadn’t imagined how different.

“How tired are you?” she said. “Not too tired, I hope.” She stepped forward, put her arms around him, and tilted her face up.

Automatically, his arms went around her. Automatically, he brought his mouth down to hers. She made a tiny noise, deep in her throat, as their lips met.

Justin’s heart pounded so hard, he was amazed Megan couldn’t hear it. He wanted to burst into tears. Here he was, holding the only woman he’d ever truly loved, the woman who’d so emphatically stopped loving him—only now she did again. If that wasn’t a miracle, he didn’t know what was.

She felt soft and smooth and warm and firm. Very firm, he noticed—a lot firmer than the women he’d been seeing, no matter how obsessively they went to the gym. And that brought the second realization, almost as blinding as realizing he, Justin, was alone with her, Megan: he, a forty-year-old guy, was alone with her, a twenty-year-old girl.

What had the bartender asked? You go around picking up high-school girls? But it wasn’t like that, dammit. Megan didn’t know he was forty. She thought he was his going-into-senior-year self. He had to think that way, too.

Except he couldn’t, or not very well. He’d lived half a lifetime too long. He tried not to remember, but he couldn’t help it. “Wow!” he gasped when the kiss finally ended.

“Yeah.” Megan took such heat for granted. She was twenty. Doubt never entered her mind. “Not bad for starters.” Without waiting for an answer, she headed for the bedroom.

Heart pounding harder than ever, Justin followed. Here-and-now, they hadn’t been lovers very long, and neither had had a whole lot of experience beforehand. That was part of what had gone wrong; Justin was sure of it. They’d gone stale, without knowing how to fix things. Justin knew a lot more now than he had at twenty-one. And here he was, getting a chance to use it when it mattered.

He almost forgot everything the next instant, because Megan was getting out of her clothes and lying down on the bed and laughing at him for being so slow. He didn’t stay slow very long. As he lay down beside her, he thanked God and Superstrings, Ltd., not necessarily in that order.

His hands roamed her. She sighed and leaned toward him for another kiss. Don’t hurry, he thought. Don’t rush. In a way, that was easy. He wanted to touch her, caress her, taste her, forever. In another way . . . He wanted to do more, too.

He made himself go slow. It was worth it. “Oh, Justin,” Megan said. Some time later, she said, “Ohhh, Justin.” He didn’t think he’d ever heard her sound like that the first time around. What she said a few minutes after that had no words, but was a long way from disappointed.

Then it was his turn. He kept having the nagging thought that he was taking advantage of a girl half his age who didn’t know exactly who he was. But then, as she clasped him with arms and legs, all the nagging thoughts went away. And it was just as good as he’d hoped it would be, which said a great deal.

Afterwards, they lay side by side, sweaty and smiling foolishly. Justin kept stroking her. She purred. She stroked him, too, expectantly. When what she was expecting didn’t happen, she gave him a sympathetic look. “You must be tired,” she said.

Did she think he’d be ready again right then? They’d just finished! But memory, now that he accessed it, told him she did. He clicked his tongue between his teeth. He might look about the same at forty as he had at twenty-one, but he couldn’t perform the same. Who could?

Had he thought of this beforehand, he would have brought some Viagra back with him. In his time, it was over-the-counter. He wasn’t even sure it existed in 1999. He hadn’t had to worry about keeping it up, not at twenty-one.

But Megan had given him an excuse, at least this time. “Yeah, day from hell,” he said. “Doesn’t mean I can’t keep you happy.” He proceeded to do just that, and took his time about it, teasing her along as much as he could.

Once the teasing stopped, she stared at him, eyes enormous. “Oh, sweetie, why didn’t you ever do anything like that before?” she asked. All by itself, the question made him sure he’d done the right thing, coming back. It also made him sure he needed to give his younger self a good talking-to before he slid up the superstring to 2018. But Megan found another question: “Where did you learn that?”

Did she think he had another girlfriend? Did she wonder if that was why he could only do it once with her? Or was she joking? He hoped she was. How would his younger self have answered? With pride. “I,” he declared, “have a naturally dirty mind.”

Megan giggled. “Good.”

And it was good. A little later, in the lazy man’s position, he managed a second round. That was very good. Megan thought so, too. He couldn’t stop yawning afterwards, but he’d already said he was tired. “See?” he told her. “You wear me out.” He wasn’t kidding. Megan didn’t know how much he wasn’t kidding.

She proved that, saying, “I was thinking we’d go to a club tonight, but I’d better put you to bed. We can go tomorrow.” She went into the bathroom, then came back and started getting dressed. “We can do all sorts of things tomorrow.” The smile she gave him wasn’t just eager; it was downright lecherous.

Christ, he thought, she’ll expect me to be just as horny as I was tonight. His younger self would have been. To him, the prospect seemed more nearly exhausting than exciting. Sleep. I need sleep.

Megan bent down and kissed him on the end of the nose. “Pick me up about seven? We’ll go to the Probe, and then who knows what?”

“Okay,” he said around another yawn. “Whatever.” Megan laughed and left. Justin thought he heard her close the door, but he wasn’t sure.

He couldn’t even sleep late. He had to go do his younger self’s job at CompUSA, and himself-at-twenty-one didn’t keep coffee in the apartment. He drank Cokes instead, but they didn’t pack the jolt of French roast.

Work was hell. All the computers were obsolete junk to him. Over half a lifetime, he’d forgotten their specs. Why remember when they were obsolete? And his boss, from the height of his late twenties, treated Justin like a kid. He wished he’d told his younger self to keep coming in. But Megan stopped by every so often, and so did other people he knew. He wanted himself-at-twenty-one out of sight, out of mind.

His younger self probably was going out of his mind right now. He wondered what the kid was doing, what he was thinking. Worrying, he supposed, and dismissed himself-at-twenty-one as casually as his boss had dismissed him, believing him to be his younger self.

His shift ended at five-fifteen. He drove home, nuked some supper, showered, and dressed in his younger self’s club-hopping clothes: black pants and boots, black jacket, white shirt. The outfit struck him as stark. You needed to be skinny to look good in it, and he’d never been skinny. He shrugged. It was what you wore to go clubbing.

Knocking on the door to Megan’s parents’ house meant more strangeness. He made himself forget all the things they’d say after he and Megan went belly-up. And, when Megan’s mother opened the door, he got another jolt: she looked pretty damn good. He’d always thought of her as old. “H-Hello, Mrs. Tricoupis,” he managed at last.

“Hello, Justin.” She stepped aside. No, nothing old about her—somewhere close to his own age, sure enough. “Megan says you’ve been working hard.”

“That’s right.” Justin nodded briskly.

“I believe it,” Mrs. Tricoupis said. “You look tired.” Megan had said the same thing. It was as close as they could come to, You look forty. But her mother eyed him curiously. He needed a minute to figure out why: he’d spoken to her as an equal, not as his girlfriend’s mother. Gotta watch that, he thought. It wouldn’t be easy; he saw as much. Even if nobody else did, he knew how old he was.

Before he could say anything else to raise eyebrows, Megan came out. She fluttered her fingers at Mrs. Tricoupis. “See you later, Mom.”

“All right,” her mother said. “Drive safely, Justin.”

“Yeah,” he said. Nobody’d told him that in a long time. He grinned at Megan. “The Probe.”

He’d had to look up how to get there in the Thomas Brothers himself-at-twenty-one kept in the car; he’d long since forgotten. It was off Melrose, the center of youth and style in the ’90s—and as outmoded in 2018 as the corner of Haight and Ashbury in 1999.

On the way down, Megan said, “I hear there’s going to be another rave at that place we went to a couple weeks ago. Want to see?”

“Suppose.” Justin hoped he sounded interested, not alarmed. After-hours illicit bashes didn’t hold the attraction for him they once had. And he had no idea where they’d gone then. His younger self would know. He didn’t.

He had as much trouble not grinning at the fashion statements the kids going into the club were making as Boomers did with tie-dye and suede jackets with fringe. Tattoos, pierced body parts . . . Those fads had faded. Except for a stud in his left ear, he’d never had more holes than he’d been born with.

Somebody waved to Megan and him as they went in. He waved back. His younger self would have known who it was. He’d long since forgotten. He got away with it. And he got carded when he bought a beer. That made him laugh. Then he came back and bought another one for Megan, who wasn’t legal yet.

She pointed toward the little booth with the spotlight on it. “Look. Helen’s deejaying tonight. She’s good!”

“Yeah.” Justin grinned. Megan sounded so excited. Had he cared so passionately about who was spinning the music? He probably had. He wondered why. The mix hadn’t been that much different from one deejay to another.

When the music started, he thought the top of his head would blow off. Coming home with ears ringing had been a sign of a good time—and a sign of nerve damage, but who cared at twenty-one? He cared now.

“What’s the matter?” Megan asked. “Don’t you want to dance?” He thought that was what she said, anyhow; he read her lips, because he couldn’t hear a word.

“Uh, sure.” He hadn’t been a great dancer at twenty-one, and hadn’t been on the floor in a lot of years since. But Megan didn’t criticize. She’d always liked getting out there and letting the music take over. The Probe didn’t have a mosh pit, for which Justin was duly grateful. Looking back, pogoing in a pit reminded him more of line play at the Super Bowl than of dancing.

He hadn’t been in great shape when he was twenty-one, either. Half a lifetime riding a desk hadn’t improved things. By the time the first break came, he was blowing like a whale. Megan’s face was sweaty, too, but she loved every minute of it. She wasn’t even breathing hard. “This is so cool!” she said.

She was right. Justin had long since stopped worrying about whether he was cool. You could stay at the edge till you were thirty—thirty-five if you really pushed it. After that, you were either a fogy or a grotesque. He’d taken fogydom for granted for years. Now he had to ride the crest of the wave again. He wondered if it was worth it.

Helen started spinning more singles. Justin danced till one. At least he had the next day off. Even so, he wished he were home in bed—not with Megan but alone, blissfully unconscious. No such luck. Somebody with enough rings in his ears to set off airport metal detectors passed out Xeroxed directions to the rave. That told Justin where it was. He didn’t want to go, but Megan did. “You wearing out on me?” she asked. They went.

He wondered who owned the warehouse—a big Lego block of a building—and if whoever it was had any idea what was going on inside. He doubted it. It was a dreadful place for a big party—concrete floor, wires and metal scaffolding overhead, acoustics worse than lousy. But Megan’s eyes glowed. The thrill of the not quite legal. The cops might show up and throw everybody out.

He knew they wouldn’t, not tonight, because they hadn’t. And, at forty, the thrill of the not quite legal had worn off for him. Some smiling soul came by with little plastic bottles full of greenish liquid. “Instant Love!” he said. “Five bucks a pop.”

Megan grabbed two. Justin knew he had to grab his wallet. “What’s in it?” he asked warily.

“Try it. You’ll like it,” the guy said. “A hundred percent natural.”

Megan had already gulped hers down. She waited expectantly for Justin. He remembered taking a lot of strange things at raves, but that had been a long time ago—except it wasn’t. Nothing had killed him, so he didn’t suppose this would.

And it didn’t, but not from lack of trying. The taste was nasty plus sugar. The effect . . . when the shit kicked in, Justin stopped wishing for coffee. He felt as if he’d just had seventeen cups of the strongest joe ever perked. His heart pounded four hundred beats a minute. His hands shook. He could feel the veins in his eyeballs sticking out every time he blinked.

“Isn’t it great?” Megan’s eyes were bugging out of her head.

“Whatever.” When Justin was twenty-one, he’d thought this kind of rush was great, too. Now he wondered if he’d have a coronary on the spot. He did dance a lot more energetically.

And, when he took Megan back to his place, he managed something else, too. With his heart thudding the way it was, remembering anything related to foreplay wasn’t easy, but he did. Had he been twenty-one, it surely would have been wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am. Megan seemed suitably appreciative; maybe that Instant Love handle wasn’t altogether hype.

But his real age told. Despite the drug, whatever it was, and despite the company, he couldn’t have gone a second round if he’d had a crane to get it up. If that bothered Megan, she didn’t let on.

Despite his failure, he didn’t roll over and go to sleep, the way he had the first night. He wondered if he’d sleep for the next week. It was past four in the morning. “Shall I take you home?” he asked. “Your folks gonna be worried?”

Megan sat up naked on the bed and shook her head. Everything moved when she did that; it was marvelous to watch. “No problem,” she said. “They aren’t on me twentyfour-seven like some parents. You don’t want to throw me out, I’d just as soon stay a while.” She opened her eyes very wide to show she wasn’t sleepy, either.

“Okay. Better than okay.” Justin reached out and brushed the tip of her left breast with the backs of his fingers. “I like having you around, you know?” She had no idea how much he wanted to have her around. With luck, she’d never find out.

“I like being around.” She cocked her head to one side. “You’ve been kind of funny the last couple days, you know?”

To cover his unease—hell, his fear—Justin made a stupid face. “Is that funny enough for you?” he asked.

“Not funny like that,” Megan said. He made a different, even more stupid, face. It got a giggle from her, but she persisted: “Not funny like that, I told you. Funny a different sort of way.”

“Like how?” he asked, though he knew.

Megan didn’t, but groped toward it: “Lots of little things. The way you touch me, for instance. You didn’t used to touch me like that.” She looked down at the wet spot on the sheets. “I like what you’re doing, believe me I do, but it’s not what you were doing last week. How did you . . . find this out, just all of a sudden? It’s great, like I say, but . . . ” She shrugged. “I shouldn’t complain. I’m not complaining. But . . . ” Her voice trailed off again.

If I’d known then what I know now—everybody sang that song. But he didn’t just sing it. He’d done something about it. This was the thanks he got? At least she hadn’t come right out and asked him if he had another girlfriend.

He tried to make light of it: “Here I spent all night laying awake, trying to think of things you’d like, and—”

“I do,” Megan said quickly. She wasn’t lying, not unless she was the best actress in the world. But she went on, “You looked bored in the Probe tonight. You never looked bored in a club before.”

Damn. He hadn’t known it showed. What was hot at twenty-one wasn’t at forty. Been there, done that. That was what people said in the ’90s. One more thing he couldn’t admit. “Tired,” he said again.

Megan nailed him for it. “You never said that, either, not till yesterday—day before yesterday now.” Remorselessly precise.

“Sorry,” Justin answered. “I’m just me. Who else would I be?” Again, he was conscious of knowing what she didn’t and keeping it from her. It felt unkosher, as if he were the only one in class who took a test with the book open. But what else could he do?

Megan started getting into her clothes. “Maybe you’d better take me home.” But then, as if she thought that too harsh, she added some teasing: “I don’t want to eat what you’d fix for breakfast.”

He could have made her a damn fine breakfast. He started to say so. But his younger self couldn’t have, not to save his life. He shut up and got dressed, too. Showing her more differences was the last thing he wanted.

Dawn was turning the eastern sky gray and pink when he pulled up in front of her parents’ house. Before she could take off her seat belt, he put his arm around her and said, “I love you, you know?”

His younger self wouldn’t say those words for another year. Taking my time, the socially backwards dummy called it. For Justin at forty, the words weren’t just a truth, but a truth that defined his life—for better and, later on, for worse. He had no trouble bringing them out.

Megan stared at him. Maybe she hadn’t expected him to say that for quite a while yet. After a heartbeat, she nodded. She leaned over and kissed him, half on the cheek, half on the mouth. Then she got out and walked to her folks’ front door. She turned and waved. Justin waved back. He drove off while she was working the dead bolt.

He finally fell asleep about noon. The Instant Love kept him up and bouncing till then. At two-thirty, the phone rang. By the way he jerked and thrashed, a bomb might have gone off by his head. He grabbed the handset, feeling like death. “Hello?” he croaked.

“Hi. How are things?”

Not Megan. A man’s voice. For a second, all that meant was that it didn’t matter, that he could hang up on it. Then he recognized it: the voice on his own answering machine. But it wasn’t a recording. It was live, which seemed more than he could say right now. His younger self.

He had to talk, dammit. “Things are fine,” he said. “Or they were till you called. I was asleep.”

“Now?” The way himself-at-twenty-one sounded, it might have been some horrible perversion. “I called now ’cause I figured you wouldn’t be.”

“Never mind,” Justin said. The cobwebs receded. He knew they’d be back pretty soon. “Yeah, things are okay. We went to the Probe last night, and—”

“Did you?” His younger self sounded—no, suspicious wasn’t right. Jealous. That was it. “What else did you do?”

“That after-hours place. Some guy came through with flyers, so I knew how to get there.”

“Lucky you. And what else did you do?” Yeah. Jealous. A-number-one jealous.

Justin wondered how big a problem that would be. “About what you’d expect,” he answered tightly. “I’m you, remember. What would you have done?”

The sigh on the other end of the line said his younger self knew exactly what he would have done, and wished he’d been doing it. But I did it better, you little geek.

Before his younger self could do anything but sigh, Justin added, “And when I took her home, I told her I loved her.”

“Jesus!” himself-at-twenty-one exclaimed. “What did you go and do that for?”

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

“That doesn’t mean you’ve got to say it, for Christ’s sake,” his younger self told him. “What am I supposed to do when you go away?”

“Marry her, doofus,” Justin said. “Live happily ever after, so I get to live happily ever after, too. Why the hell do you think I came back here?”

“For your good time, man, not mine. I’m sure not having a good time, I’ll tell you.”

Was I really that stupid? Justin wondered. But it wasn’t quite the right question. Was my event horizon that short? Holding on to patience with both hands, he said, “Look, chill for a while, okay? I’m doing fine.”

“Sure you are.” His younger self sounded hot. “You’re doing fucking great. What about me?”

Nope, no event horizon at all. Justin said, “You’re fine. Chill. You’re on vacation. Go ahead. Relax. Spend my money. That’s what it’s there for.”

That distracted his younger self. “Where’d you get so much? What did you do, rob a bank?”

“It’s worth a lot more now than it will be then,” Justin answered. “Inflation. Have some fun. Just be discreet, okay?”

“You mean, keep out of your hair.” His younger self didn’t stay distracted long.

“In a word, yes.”

“While you’re in Megan’s hair.” Himself-at-twenty-one let out a long, angry breath. “I don’t know, dude.”

“It’s for you.” Justin realized he was pleading. “It’s for her and you.”

Another angry exhalation. “Yeah.” His younger self hung up.

Everything went fine till he took Megan to the much ballyhooed summer blockbuster two weekends later. She’d been caught up in the hype. And she thought the leading man was cute, though he looked like a boy to Justin. On the other hand, Justin looked like a boy himself, or he couldn’t have got away with this.

But that wasn’t the worst problem. Unlike her, he’d seen the movie before. He remembered liking it, though he’d thought the plot a little thin. Seen through forty-year-old eyes, it had no plot at all. He had a lot less tolerance for loud soundtracks and things blowing up every eight and a half minutes than his younger self would have. And even the most special special effects seemed routine to somebody who’d been through another twenty years of computer-generated miracles.

As the credits finally rolled, he thought, No wonder I don’t go to the movies much any more.

When Megan turned to him, though, her eyes were shining. “Wasn’t that great?” she said as they headed for the exit.

“Yeah,” he said. “Great.”

A different tone would have saved him. He realized that as soon as the words were out of his mouth. Too late. The one he’d used couldn’t have been anything but sarcastic. And Megan noticed. She was good at catching things like that—better than he’d ever been, certainly. “What’s the matter?” she demanded. “Why didn’t you like it?”

The challenge in her voice reminded Justin of how she’d sounded during the quarrels before their breakup. She couldn’t know that. His younger self wouldn’t have known, either—he hadn’t been through it. But Justin had, and reacted with a challenge of his own: “Why? Because it was really dumb.”

It was a nice summer night, clear, cooling down from the hot day, a few stars in the sky—with the lights of the San Fernando Valley, you never saw more than a few. None of that mattered to Megan. She stopped halfway to the car. “How can you say that?”

Justin saw the special-effects stardust in her eyes, and the effect of a great many closeups of the boyishly handsome—pretty, to his newly jaundiced eye—leading man. He should have shut up. But he reacted viscerally to that edge in her voice. Instead of letting things blow over, he told her exactly why the movie was dumb.

He finished just as they got to the Toyota. He hadn’t let her get in word one. When he ran down, she stared at him. “Why are you so mean? You never sounded so mean before.”

“You asked. I told you,” he said, still seething. But when he saw her fighting back tears as she fastened her seat belt, he realized he’d hit back too hard. It wasn’t quite like kicking a puppy, but it was close, too close. He had a grown man’s armor, and weapons to pierce a grown woman’s—all the nastier products of experience—and he’d used them on a kid. Too late, he felt like an asshole. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

“Whatever.” Megan looked out the window toward the theater complex, not at him. “Maybe you’d better take me home.”

Alarm tore through him. “Honey, I said I was sorry. I meant it.”

“I heard you.” Megan still wouldn’t look at him. “You’d better take me home anyhow.”

Sometimes, the more you argued, the bigger the mess you made. This looked like one of those times. Justin recognized that now. A couple of minutes sooner would have been better. “Okay,” he said, and started the car.

The ride back to her folks’ house was almost entirely silent. When he pulled up, Megan opened the door before the car stopped rolling. “Goodnight,” she said. She started for the front door at something nearly a run.

“Wait!” he called. If that wasn’t raw panic in his voice, it would do. She heard it, too, and stopped, looking back warily, like a frightened animal that would bolt at any wrong move. He said, “I won’t do that again. Promise.” To show how much he meant it, he crossed his heart. He hadn’t done that since about the third grade.

Megan’s nod was jerky. “All right,” she said. “But don’t call me for a while anyway. We’ll both chill a little. How does that sound?”

Terrible. Justin hated the idea of losing any precious time here. But he saw he couldn’t argue. He wished he’d seen that sooner. He made himself nod, made himself smile, made himself say, “Okay.”

The porch light showed relief on Megan’s face. Relief she wouldn’t be talking to him for a while. He had to live with that all the way home.

He wished he could have walked away from his younger self’s job at CompUSA, but it would have looked bad. He’d needed a few days to have the details of late-1990s machines come back to him. Once they did, he rapidly got a reputation as a maven. His manager bumped him a buck an hour—and piled more hours on him. He resisted as best he could, but he couldn’t always.

Three days after the fight with Megan, his phone rang as he got into his—well, his younger self’s—apartment. He got to it just before the answering machine could. “Hello?” He was panting. If it was himself-at-twenty-one, he was ready to contemplate murder—or would it be suicide?

But it was Megan. “Hiya,” she said. “Didn’t I ask you not to call for a little bit? I know I did.”

“Yeah, you did. And I—” Justin broke off. He hadn’t called her. What about his younger self? Maybe I ought to rub him out, if he’s going to mess things up. But that thought vanished. He couldn’t deny a conversation she’d surely had. “I just like talking to you, that’s all.”

Megan’s laughter was rainbows to his ears. “You were so funny,” she said. “It was like we hadn’t fought at all. I couldn’t stay pissed. Believe me, I tried.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” Justin said. And I do need to have a talk with my younger self. “You want to go out this weekend?”

“Sure,” Megan answered. “But let’s stay away from the movies. What do you think?”

“Whatever,” he said. “Okay with me.”

“Good.” More relief. “Plenty of other things we can do. Maybe I should just come straight to your place.”

His younger self would have slavered at that. He liked the idea pretty well himself. But, being forty and not twenty-one, he heard what Megan didn’t say, too. What she meant, or some of what she meant, was, You’re fine in bed. Whenever we’re not in bed, whenever we go somewhere, you get weird.

“Sure,” he said, and then, to prove he wasn’t only interested in her body, he went on, “Let’s go to Sierra’s and stuff ourselves full of tacos and enchiladas. How’s that?”

“Fine,” Megan said.

Justin thought it sounded fine, too. Sierra’s was a Valley institution. It had been there since twenty years before he was born, and would still be going strong in 2018. He didn’t go there often then; he had too many memories of coming there with Megan. Now those memories would turn from painful to happy. That was why he was here. Smiling, he said, “See you Saturday, then.”

“Yeah,” Megan said. Justin’s smile got bigger.

Ring. Ring. Ring. “Hello?” his younger self said.

“Oh, good,” Justin said coldly. “You’re home.”

“Oh. It’s you.” Himself-at-twenty-one didn’t sound delighted to hear from him, either. “No, you’re home. I’m stuck here.”

“Didn’t I tell you to lay low till I was done here?” Justin demanded. “God damn it, you’d better listen to me. I just had to pretend I knew what Megan was talking about when she said I’d been on the phone with her.”

“She’s my girl, too,” his younger self said. “She was my girl first, you know. I’ve got a right to talk with her.”

“Not if you want her to keep being your girl, you don’t,” Justin said. “You’re the one who’s going to screw it up, remember?”

“That’s what you keep telling me,” his younger self answered. “But you know what? I’m not so sure I believe you any more. When I called her, Megan sounded like she was really torqued at me—at you, I mean. So it doesn’t sound like you’ve got all the answers, either.”

“Nobody has all the answers,” Justin said with such patience as he could muster. He didn’t think he’d believed that at twenty-one; at forty, he was convinced it was true. He was convinced something else was true, too: “If you think you’ve got more of them than I do, you’re full of shit.”

“You want to be careful how you talk to me,” himself-at-twenty-one said. “Half the time, I still think your whole setup is bogus. If I decide to, I can wreck it. You know damn well I can.”

Justin knew only too well. It scared the crap out of him. But he didn’t dare show his younger self he was afraid. As sarcastically as he could, he said, “Yeah, go ahead. Screw up your life for good. Keep going like this and you will.”

“You sound pretty screwed up now,” his younger self said. “What have I got to lose?”

“I had something good, and I let it slip through my fingers,” Justin said. “That’s enough to mess anybody up. You wreck what I’m doing now, you’ll go through life without knowing what a good thing was. You want that? Just keep sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong. You want to end up with Megan or not?”

Where nothing else had, that hit home. “All right,” his younger self said sullenly. “I’ll back off—for now.” He hung up. Justin stared at the phone, cursed, and put it back in its cradle.

Megan stared at her empty plate as if she couldn’t imagine how it had got that way. Then she looked at Justin. “Did I really eat all that?” she said. “Tell me I didn’t really eat all that.”

“Can’t do it,” he said solemnly.

“Oh, my God!” Megan said: not Valley-girl nasal but sincerely astonished. “All those refried beans! They’ll go straight to my thighs.”

“No, they won’t.” Justin spoke with great certainty. For as long as he’d known—would know—Megan, her weight hadn’t varied by more than five pounds. He’d never heard that she’d turned into a blimp after they broke up, either. He lowered his voice. “I like your thighs.”

She raised a dark eyebrow, as if to say, You’re a guy. If I let you get between them, of course you like them. But the eyebrow came down. “You talk nice like that, maybe you’ll get a chance to prove it. Maybe.”

“Okay.” Justin’s plate was as empty as hers. Loading up on heavy Mexican food hadn’t slowed him down when he was twenty-one. Now it felt like a bowling ball in his stomach. But he figured he’d manage. Figuring that, he left a bigger tip than he would have otherwise.

The waiter scooped it up. “Gracias, señor.” He sounded unusually sincere.

Driving north up Canoga Avenue toward his place, Justin used a sentence that had the phrase “after we’re married” in it.

Megan had been looking at the used-car lot across the street. Her head whipped around. “After we’re what?” she said. “Not so fast, there.”

For the very first time, Justin thought to wonder whether his younger self knew what he was doing when he took another year to get around to telling Megan he loved her. He-now had the advantage of hindsight; he knew he and Megan would walk down the aisle. But Megan didn’t know it. Right this minute, she didn’t sound delighted with the idea.

Worse, Justin couldn’t explain that he knew, or how he knew. “I just thought—” he began.

Megan shook her head. Her dark hair flipped back and forth. She said, “No. You didn’t think. You’re starting your senior year this fall. I’m starting my junior year. We aren’t ready to think about getting married yet, even if . . . ” She shook her head again. “We aren’t ready. What would we live on?”

“We’d manage.” Justin didn’t want to think about that even if. It had to be the start of something like, even if I decide I want to marry you. But Megan hadn’t said all of it. Justin clung to that. He had nothing else to cling to.

“We’d manage?” Megan said. “Yeah, right. We’d go into debt so deep, we’d never get out. I don’t want to do that, not when I’m just starting. I didn’t think you did, either.”

He kept driving for a little while. Clichés had women eager for commitment and men fleeing from it as if from a skunk at a picnic. He’d gone and offered to commit, and Megan reacted as if he ought to be committed. What did that say about clichés? Probably not to pay much attention to them.

“Hey.” Megan touched his arm. “I’m not mad, not for that. But I’m not ready, either. Don’t push me, okay?”

“Okay.” But Justin had to push. He knew it too damn well. He couldn’t stay in 1999 very long. Things between Megan and him had to be solid before he left the scene and his younger self took over again. His younger self, he was convinced, could fuck up a wet dream, and damn well had fucked up what should have been a perfect, lifelong relationship.

He opened the window and clicked the security key into the lock. The heavy iron gate slid open. He drove in and parked the car. They both got out. Neither said much as they walked to his apartment.

Not too much later, in the dark quiet of the bedroom, Megan clutched the back of his head with both hands and cried out, “Ohhh, Justin!” loud enough to make him embarrassed to show his face to the neighbors—or make him a minor hero among them, depending. She lay back on the bed and said, “You drive me crazy when you do that.”

“We aim to please.” Did he sound smug? If he did, hadn’t he earned the right?

Megan laughed. “Bull’s-eye!” Her voice still sounded shaky.

He slid up to lie beside her, running his hands along her body as he did. Strike while the iron is hot, he thought. He felt pretty hot himself. He said, “And you don’t want to talk about getting married yet?”

“I don’t want to talk about anything right now,” Megan said. “What I want to do is . . . ” She did it. If Justin hadn’t been a consenting adult, it would have amounted to criminal assault. As things were, he couldn’t think of any stretch of time he’d enjoyed more.

“Jesus, I love you,” he said when he was capable of coherent speech.

Megan kept straddling him—not that he wanted to escape. Her face was only a couple of inches above his. Now she leaned down and kissed him on the end of the nose. “I love this,” she said, which wasn’t the same thing at all.

He ran a hand along the smooth, sweat-slick curves of her back. “Well, then,” he said, as if the two things were the same.

She laughed and shook her head. Her hair brushed back and forth across his face, full of the scent of her. Even though she kissed him again, she said, “But we can’t do this all the time.” At that precise moment, he softened and flopped out of her. She nodded, as if he’d proved her point. “See what I mean?”

Justin wished for his younger self’s body. Had himself-at-twenty-one been there, he would have been hard at it again instead of wilting at the worst possible time. But he had to play the hand he’d been dealt. He said, “I know it’s not the only reason to get married, but isn’t it a nice one?” To show how nice it was, he slid his hand between her legs.

Megan let it stay there for a couple of seconds, but then twisted away. “I asked you not to push me about that, Justin,” she said, all the good humor gone from her voice.

“Well, yeah, but—” he began.

“You didn’t listen,” she said. “People who get married have to, like, listen to each other, too, you know? You can’t just screw all the time. You really can’t. Look at my parents, for crying out loud.”

“My parents are screwing all the time,” Justin said.

“Yeah, but not with each other.” Megan hesitated, then said, “I’m sorry.”

“Why? It’s true.” Justin’s younger self had been horrified at his parents’ antics. If anything, that horror had got worse since. Up in 2018, he hadn’t seen or even spoken to either one of them for years, and he didn’t miss them, either.

Then he thought, So Dad chases bimbos and Mom decided she wasn’t straight after all. What you’re doing here is a lot weirder than any of that. But was it? All he wanted was a happy marriage, one like Megan’s folks had, one that probably looked boring from the outside but not when you were in it.

Was that too much to ask? The way things were going, it was liable to be.

Megan said, “Don’t get me wrong, Justin. I like you a lot. I wouldn’t go to bed with you if I didn’t. Maybe I even love you, if you want me to say that. But I don’t know if I want to try and spend my whole life with you. And if you keep riding me twentyfour-seven about it, I’ll decide I don’t. Does that make any sense to you?”

Justin shook his head. All he heard was a clock ticking on his hopes. “If we’ve got a good thing going, we ought to take it as far as we can,” he said. “Where will we find anything better?” He’d spent the rest of his life looking not for something better but for something close to as good. He hadn’t found it.

“Goddammit, it’s not a good thing if you won’t listen to me. You don’t want to notice that.” Megan got up and went into the bathroom. When she came back, she started dressing. “Take me home, please.”

“Shouldn’t we talk some more?” Justin heard the panic in his own voice.

“No. Take me home.” Megan sounded very sure. “Every time we talk lately, you dig the hole deeper for yourself. Like I said, Justin, I like you, but I don’t think we’d better talk for a while. It’s like you don’t even hear me, like you don’t even have to hear me. Like you’re the grownup and I’m just a kid to you, and I don’t like that a bit.”

How seriously did a forty-year-old need to take a twenty-year-old? Unconsciously, Justin must have decided, not very. That looked to be wrong. “Honey, please wait,” he said.

“It’ll just get worse if I do,” she answered. “Will you drive me, or shall I call my dad?”

He was in Dutch with her. He didn’t want to get in Dutch with her folks, too. “I’ll drive you,” he said dully.

Even more than the drive back from the movie theater had, this one passed in tense silence. At last, as Justin turned onto her street, Megan broke it: “We’ve got our whole lives ahead of us, you know? The way you’ve been going lately, it’s like you want everything nailed down tomorrow. That’s not gonna happen. It can’t happen. Neither one of us is ready for it.”

“I am,” Justin said.

“Well, I’m not,” Megan told him as he stopped the car in front of her house. “And if you keep picking at it and picking at it, I’m never going to be. In fact . . . ”

“In fact, what?”

“Never mind,” she said. “Whatever.” Before he could ask her again, she got out and hurried up the walk toward the house. He waved to her. He blew her a kiss. She didn’t look back to see the wave or the kiss. She just opened the door and went inside. Justin sat for a couple of minutes, staring at the house. Then, biting his lip, he drove home.

Over the next three days, he called Megan a dozen times. Every time, he got the answering machine or one of her parents. They kept telling him she wasn’t home. At last, fed up, he burst out, “She doesn’t want to talk to me!”

Her father would have failed as White House press secretary. All he said was, “Well, if she doesn’t, you can’t make her, you know”—hardly a ringing denial.

But that’s what I came back for! Justin wanted to scream it. That wouldn’t have done any good. He knew as much. He still wanted to scream it. He’d come back to make things better, and what had he done? Made them worse.

On the fourth evening, the telephone rang as he walked in the door from his shift at CompUSA. His heart sank as he hurried into the bedroom. His younger self would be flipping out if he’d tried to call Megan and discovered she wouldn’t talk to him. He’d told his younger self not to do that, but how reliable was himself-at-twenty-one? Not very. “Hello?”

“Hello, Justin.” It wasn’t his younger self. It was Megan.

“Hi!” He didn’t know whether to be exulted or terrified. Not knowing, he ended up both at once. “How are you?”

“I’m okay.” She paused. Terror swamped exultation. When she went on, she said, “I’ve been talking with my folks the last few days.”

That didn’t sound good. Trying to pretend he didn’t know how bad it sounded, he asked, “And?” The word hung in the air.

Megan paused again. At last, she said, “We—I’ve—decided I’d better not see you any more. I’m sorry, Justin, but that’s how things are.”

“They’re making you say that!” If Justin blamed Megan’s parents, he wouldn’t have to blame anyone else: himself, for instance.

But she said, “No, they aren’t. My mom, especially, thought I ought to give you another chance. But I’ve given you a couple chances already, and you don’t know what to do with them. Things got way too intense way too fast, and I’m not ready for that. I don’t want to deal with it, and I don’t have to deal with it, and I’m not going to deal with it, and that’s that. Like I said, I’m sorry and everything, but I can’t.”

“I don’t believe this,” he muttered. Refusing to believe it remained easier than blaming himself. “What about the sex?”

“It was great,” Megan said at once. “I won’t tell you any lies. If you make other girls feel the way you make—made—me feel, you won’t have any trouble finding somebody else. I hope you do.”

Christ, Justin thought. She’s letting me down easy. She’s trying to, anyhow, but she’s only twenty and she’s not very good at it. He didn’t want to be let down easy, or at all. He said, “What about you?”

“I’ll keep looking. If you can do it for me, probably other fellows can, too,” Megan answered with devastating pragmatism. Half to herself, she added, “Maybe I need to date older guys, or something, if I can find some who aren’t too bossy.”

That would have been funny, if only it were funny. Justin whispered, “But I love you. I’ve always loved you.” He’d loved her for about as long as she’d been alive here in 1999. What did he have to show for it? Getting shot down in flames not once but twice.

“Don’t make this harder than it has to be. Please?” Megan said. “And don’t call here any more, okay? You’re not going to change my mind. If I decide I was wrong, I’ll call your place, all right? Goodbye, Justin.” She hung up without giving him a chance to answer.

Don’t call us. We’ll call you. Everybody knew what that meant. It meant what she’d been telling him anyhow: so long. He didn’t want to hang up. Finally, after more than a minute of dial tone, he did.

“What do I do now?” he asked himself, or possibly God. God might have known. Justin had no clue.

He thought about calling his younger self and letting him know things had gone wrong: he thought about it for maybe three seconds, then dropped the idea like a live grenade. Himself-at-twenty-one would want to slaughter him. He metaphorically felt like dying, but not for real.

Why not? he wondered. What will it be like when you head back to your own time? You wanted to change the past. Well, you’ve done that. You’ve screwed it up bigtime. What kind of memories will you have when you come back to that men’s room in 2018? Not memories of being married to Megan for a while and then having things go sour, that’s for sure. You don’t even get those. It’ll be nineteen years of nothing—a long, lonely, empty stretch.

He lay down on the bed and wept. He hadn’t done that since Megan told him she was leaving him. Since the last time Megan told me she was leaving me, he thought. Hardly noticing he’d done it, he fell asleep.

When the phone rang a couple of hours later, Justin had trouble remembering when he was and how old he was supposed to be. The old-fashioned computer on the desk told him everything he needed to know. Grimacing, he picked up the telephone. “Hello?”

“You son of a bitch.” His younger self didn’t bellow the words. Instead, they were deadly cold. “You goddamn stupid, stinking, know-it-all son of a bitch.”

Since Justin was calling himself the same things, he had trouble getting angry when his younger self cursed him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I tried to—”

He might as well have kept quiet. His younger self rode over him, saying, “I just tried calling Megan. She said she didn’t want to talk to me. She said she never wanted to talk to me again. She said she’d told me she never wanted to talk to me again, so what was I doing on the phone right after she told me that? Then she hung up on me.”

“I’m sorry,” Justin repeated. “I—”

“Sorry?” This time, his younger self did bellow. “You think you’re sorry now? You don’t know what sorry is, but you will. I’m gonna beat the living shit out of you, dude. Fuck up my life, will you? You think you can get away with that, you’re full of—” He slammed down the phone.

Justin had never been much for fisticuffs, not at twenty-one and not at forty, either. But his younger self was so furious now, who could guess what he’d do? What with rage and what had to be a severe case of testosterone poisoning, he was liable to mean what he’d said. Justin knew to the day how many years he was giving away.

He also knew his younger self had keys to this apartment. If himself-at-twenty-one showed up here in fifteen minutes, did he want to meet him?

That led to a different question: did he want to be here in 1999 at all any more? All he’d done was the opposite of what he’d wanted. Why hang around, then? Instead of waiting to slide back along the superstring into 2018 in a few more weeks, wasn’t it better to cut the string and go back to his own time, to try to pick up the pieces of whatever life would be left to him after he’d botched things here?

Justin booted up the PowerBook from his own time. The suitcases he’d brought to 1999 were at the other apartment. So was a lot of the cash. His mouth twisted. He didn’t think he could ask his younger self to return it.

As he slipped the VR mask onto his head, he hoped he’d done his homework right, and that he would return to the men’s room from which he’d left 2018. That was what his calculations showed, but how good were they? Only real experience would tell. If this building still stood then and he materialized in somebody’s bedroom, he’d have more explaining to do than he really wanted.

He also wondered what memories he’d have when he got back to his former point on the time line. The old ones, as if he hadn’t made the trip? The old ones, plus his memories of seeing 1999 while forty? New ones, stemming from the changes he’d made back here? Some of each? He’d find out.

From its initial perfect blankness, the VR mask view shifted to show the room in which he now sat, PowerBook on his lap. “Run program superstrings–slash–virtual reality–slash–not so virtual–slash–reverse,” he said. The view began to shift. Part of that was good old-fashioned morphing software, so what he saw in the helmet looked less and less like this bedroom and more and more like the restroom that was his destination. And part was the superstring program, pulling him from one point on the string to the other. He hoped part of it was the superstring software, anyhow. If the program didn’t run backwards, he’d have to deal with his angry younger self, and he wasn’t up to that physically or mentally.

On the VR screen, the men’s room at the Superstrings building had completely replaced the bedroom of his younger self’s apartment. “Program superstrings–slash–virtual reality–slash–not so virtual reality–slash–reverse is done,” the PowerBook said. Justin kept waiting. If he took off the helmet and found himself still in that bedroom . . .

When he nerved himself to shed the mask, he let out a long, loud sigh of relief: what he saw without it matched what he’d seen with it. His next worry—his mind coughed them up in carload lots—was that he’d gone to the right building, but in 1999, not 2018.

His first step out of the men’s room reassured him. The carpeting was its old familiar color, not the jarring one from 1999. He looked at the VR mask and PowerBook he was carrying. He wouldn’t need them any more today, and he didn’t feel like explaining to Sean and Garth and everybody else why he’d brought them. He headed downstairs again, to stow them in the trunk of his car.

As he walked through the lobby toward the front door, the security guard opened it for him. “Forget something, sir?” the aging Boomer asked.

“Just want to put this stuff back, Bill.” Justin held up the laptop and mask. Nodding, the guard stepped aside.

Justin was halfway across the lot before he realized the car toward which he’d aimed himself wasn’t the one he’d parked there before going back to 1999. It was in the same space, but it wasn’t the same car. He’d driven here in an aging Ford, not a top-of-the-line Volvo.

He looked around the lot. No Ford. No cars but the Volvo and Bill’s ancient, wheezing Hyundai. If he hadn’t got here in the Volvo, how had he come? Of itself, his hand slipped into his trouser pocket and came out with a key ring. The old iron ring and the worn leather fob on it were familiar; he’d had that key ring a long time. The keys . . .

One was a Volvo key. He tried it in the trunk. It turned in the lock. Smoothly, almost silently, the lid opened. Justin put the computer and the VR mask in the trunk, closed it, and slid the keys back into his pants pocket.

They weren’t the pants he’d worn when he left his apartment that morning: instead of 1990s-style baggy jeans, they were slacks, a lightweight wool blend. His shoes had changed, too, and he was wearing a nice polo shirt, not a Dilbert T-shirt.

He ran his left hand over the top of his head. His hair was longer, the buzz cut gone. He started to wonder if he was really himself. His memories of what he’d been before he went back and changed his own past warred with the ones that had sprung from the change. He shook his head; his brain felt overcrowded.

He started back toward the Superstrings building, but wasn’t ready to go in there again quite yet. He needed to sit down somewhere quiet for a while and straighten things out inside his own mind.

When he looked down the street, he grinned. There was the Denny’s where he’d had breakfast right after going back to 1999. It hadn’t changed much in the years since. He sauntered over. He was still on his own time.

“Toast and coffee,” he told the middle-aged, bored-looking Hispanic waitress.

“White, rye, or whole wheat?”

“Wheat,” he answered.

“Yes, sir,” she said. She brought them back with amazing speed. He smeared the toast with grape jelly, let her refill his cup two or three times, and then, still bemused but caffeinated, headed back to Superstrings, Ltd.

More cars in the lot now, and still more pulling in as he walked up. There was Garth O’Connell’s garish green Chevy. Justin waved. “Morning, Garth. How you doing?”

O’Connell smiled. “Not too bad. How are you, Mr. Kloster?”

“Could be worse,” Justin allowed. Part of him remembered Garth being on a first-name basis with him. The other part, the increasingly dominant part, insisted that had never happened.

They went inside and upstairs together, talking business. Garth headed off into the maze of cubicles that made up most of the second floor. Justin started to follow him, but his feet didn’t want to go that way. He let them take him where they would. They had a better idea of where exactly he worked than his conscious mind did right now.

His secretary was already busy at the computer in the anteroom of his office. She nodded. “Good morning, Mr. Kloster.”

“Good morning, Brittany,” he said. Had he ever seen her in all his life? If he hadn’t, how did he know her name? How did he know she’d worked for him the past three years?

He went into the office—his office—and closed the door. Again, he had that momentary disorientation, as if he’d never been here before. But of course he had. If the founder and president of Superstrings, Ltd., didn’t deserve the fanciest office in the building, who did?

The part of him that had traveled back through time still felt confused. Not the rest, the part that had been influenced by his trip back to 1999. Knowing such things were possible—and having the seed money his time-traveling self left behind—wouldn’t he naturally have started getting involved in this area as soon as he could? Sure he would have—he damn well had. On the wall of the office, framed, hung, not the first dollar he’d ever made, but a quarter dated 2012. He’d had it for nineteen years.

He sat down at his desk. The view out the window wasn’t much, but it beat the fuzzy, grayish-tan wall of a cubicle. On the desk stood a framed picture of a smiling blond woman and two boys he’d never seen before—his sons, Saul and Lije. When he stopped and thought, it all came back to him, just as if he’d really lived it. As a matter of fact, he had. He’d never got over Megan. His younger self, who’d never married her, was a different story—from the way things looked, a better story.

Why, he even knew how the image had been ever so slightly edited. She could be vain about the silliest things. His phone buzzed. He picked it up. “Yes, Brittany?”

“Your wife’s on the line, Mr. Kloster,” his secretary said. “Something she wants you to get on the way home.”

“Sure, put her through.” Justin was still chuckling when his wife came on the line. “Okay, what do you need at the store, Lindsey?”

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 1999.

The Muse of Empires Lost

Paul M. Berger

A ship had come in, and now everything would change. Jemmi had recently become adept at crouching under windows and listening around corners, so when the village went abuzz with the news, she heard all the excitement. She was hungry and lonely, and she thought of Port-Town and the opportunities that would be found there now, and she left the village before light. She went with only the briefest pang of homesickness, and she went by the marsh trail rather than the main road, because if she had met any of her neighbors along the way, they would have stoned her.

The path was swallowed up by the murky water sooner than she expected, and the gray silt sucked at Jemmi’s worn straw zori with each step. Poor old Sarasvati, always laboring to bestow ease and prosperity upon her people, and always falling a bit more behind. These were supposed to be fields, but the marshes stretched closer to their houses each year. She couldn’t even get any decent fish to breed there. In the village they clucked their tongues and said that was old Sara’s nanos going, as if anyone knew what that meant or could do anything about it. But sometimes you could melt handfuls of this silt down and chip it into very sharp little blades that would hold their edge for a shave or two and could be bartered for a bite to eat. Sometimes you could see it slowly writhe in your hand.

Now that the village had turned against her, Sara was Jemmi’s closest and only chum. When Jemmi was at her most alone she would sit quietly and concentrate on a tiny still spot deep in her center and maybe think a few words in her heart, and a spark would answer, and a huge warm and beloved feeling would spread through her. She knew that was Sara speaking to her. Everyone wanted Sara to listen to them, but Sara barely ever spoke back to anyone.

By midday Jemmi struck a road, and the next morning she reached Port-Town. Her parents had taken her there once when she was little, so she already knew to expect the tumult and smells and narrow streets packed with new faces, but the sheer activity spun her around as she tried to track everything that moved through her line of sight. Jewel-green quetzals squabbled and huddled together under the eaves of high-peaked shingled roofs, and peacocks dodged rickshaw wheels and pecked at the dust and refuse in the streets. There was plenty of food here if she could get it, and fine things to own, stacked in stalls and displayed in shop windows.

She was drawn most of all, though, to the mass of humanity that surrounded her—she could practically taste their thoughts and needs as they swirled by. The townsfolk were thronging towards the old wharf, and she let herself be swept up with them. Sometimes men or women brushed against her or jostled her without a glance or a second thought, and she grinned to herself at the rare physical contact.

An ambitious vendor had piled bread and fruit into a wooden cart at the edge of the street to catch the passers-by, and Jemmi stopped in front of him.

“Neh, what ship is it?” she asked above the din.

“Haven’t you heard, then?” he replied. “It’s Albiorix!”

Jemmi thought he was mocking her until she caught the man’s exultant smile. Albiorix—no ship had stopped here for more than a generation, and now this! Albiorix was the stuff of legend, a proud giant among ships, braver and broader-ranging than any other. If Sarasvati was on Albiorix’s route now, they would all be rich again.

“Who was on board, then?”

“No one’s seen them yet. Looks like they’ll be debarking any minute.”

Jemmi checked her urge to race off towards the wharf. She put her hand on the vendor’s forearm and smiled her warmest smile, and as he stood distracted and fuddled she swept an apple and two rolls into her pockets. She turned and ran before the man’s head cleared.

The crowds along the quay were packed tight and jostling viciously, but Jemmi plunged in and no one noticed or resisted as she slipped right up to the barrier. A boy was standing near her. He was clear-eyed and honey-skinned and probably about two years older than she was. Judging from his clothes and the rich dagger that hung at his belt—the hilt bound with real wire—his family was quite well-to-do. With visions of regular meals and a roof over her head, she sidled towards him. The boy looked over her rags and begrimed face and straightaway disregarded her. Jemmi held firm and let the motion of the crowd press him close to her. The back of his hand brushed against her bare wrist, and he unconsciously jerked it away. She shifted her weight so that she was a fraction closer to him. The next time he moved he touched her again, and she imagined that he was not quite so quick to pull back.

The third time they touched she kept her hand against his, and the boy did not pull away. He turned shyly to Jemmi.

“Hello,” he said. “My name’s Roycer.”

At that moment, the entire length of Sarasvati trembled with a gentle impact, and the crowd’s cheer was deafening.

Outside, languid in the vacuum of space, Albiorix stroked Sarasvati’s stony mantle with the fluid tip of a miles-long tentacle—an overture and an offering. Sarasvati recalled Albiorix of old, and his strength and boldness were more than she could have hoped for. She extended a multitude of soft arms from deep within the moonlet that served as her shelter and her home, and entwined them with his. She dwarfed him as she embraced him. Her tentacles brushed the length of his nacreous spiral shell, and in the silence dizzying patterns of light flashed across both their surfaces. The colors matched and melded, until they raced along his arms and up hers and back again. Sarasvati was receptive, and eager to welcome Albiorix after his lonely journey across the vastness. He disentangled himself and drifted down to the tip of her long axis, and they both spread their arms wide as he clasped his head to the orifice there. She released her great outer valve for him, and he gently discharged his passengers and all their cargo. Sarasvati accepted them gracefully, and in return, flooded his interior with fresh atmosphere from her reserves. Now duty and foreplay had been dispensed with, and they embraced again in earnest, spinning in the void.

The sphincter on Sarasvati’s inner surface dilated open, and the passengers off Albiorix stepped through into Port-Town, armed and alert. The arrivals were well aware that half the inhabitants of any orbital would tear newcomers apart just to see what they carried in their packs, and they hustled down the quay in tight phalanxes that bristled with weapons. They no doubt came from richer lands—Jemmi noticed the glint of steel in the trappings of their spears and crossbows as they passed. One group brandished old-style plasma rifles, but Jemmi assumed that was a bluff; everyone knew the smart electronics hadn’t worked since the day the Cosmopolis fell. The crowds parted grudgingly around this threat, and Roycer was pushed closer to Jemmi, his gaze never leaving her face.

The rest of the townsfolk watched the arrivals’ every move as they sought shelter in the winding streets. Those that could strike deals with families or inns to harbor them were likely to survive. This must have been an especially long voyage, Jemmi thought, or else star travel must be harder than anyone remembered. These arrivals all looked sunken-cheeked and worn down as if drained, or haunted by something they could not name.

One last traveler stepped through into Sarasvati, alone. He was the oddest thing Jemmi had ever seen. He was tall and slightly stooped and unnaturally pale—both his skin and his sparse hair were the same shade of thin gruel—and although at a distance Jemmi assumed he was very old, as he approached Jemmi realized she could not guess his age at all. His only luggage was a canister that hung from his shoulder on a strap. He walked unarmed along the barrier and Jemmi was certain he would be snatched up, yet no one in the throng made a move towards him or particularly noted his presence. He took his time, scanning the faces and garments as if looking for something. He stopped in front of Jemmi and her boy, and smiled. His teeth were the same color as his skin, and were all broad and very large in his gums.

“You’ll do,” he told the boy. “Shouldn’t we be getting home now?”

Wordlessly, the boy nodded and released Jemmi’s hand. He slipped under the barrier and joined the traveler, and led him down the quay into town.

Jemmi, stunned with amazement and impotent wrath, stood there slack-jawed until long after they left her sight.

With the excitement over, the crowd melted away, and Jemmi saw no chances to get close to anyone else. She spent the rest of the day sidestepping traffic and looking into windows, and she was able to grab a bit more to eat in the same manner she had acquired breakfast. After dusk one or two men on the darkened streets spoke to her, but they didn’t look useful and she didn’t like what their voices implied, so after that she took to helping people ignore her. That meant she couldn’t get indoors to sleep, but luckily Sara was still too distracted with her beau to make a proper rain. Jemmi spent the night curled at the foot of a weather-beaten neighborhood shrine at the end of a narrow alley. It was certainly not what she had hoped for when she had decided to make the journey to town, but it was not too different from what she had left behind. Amongst the incense ash and candle-stubs and tentacled figurines, some housewife had left a rag doll dressed in a new set of toddler’s clothes, a supplication to Sara for an easy birth and a healthy baby. The offering of a portion of a family meal that sat alongside it had barely gone cold, but some things were sacred, and Jemmi was not tempted to take it.

She fell asleep thinking how happy she was for old Sara, and she dreamed a wondrously clear vision of the two lovers floating clasped together with countless arms, surrounded by stars, auroras chasing along their skins. Jemmi accepted the image without question, notwithstanding she had never seen a sky before.

She awoke when she felt that Sara was about to make dawn, and she stood in her alley to watch it. Directly overhead, the coil of viscera that stretched along Sarasvati’s axis sparked and sputtered with flashes of bioluminescence, and then kindled down its entire length. As the light phased from gold to yellow to white, Jemmi was able to pick out the fields and woods and streets of her own village hanging high above and upside down along Sarasvati’s great inner vault. It was significant to her only as a starting point; she had come to town now, and her home would be here. She set out walking again, looking for breakfast and Opportunity.

Before she found either, she found the traveler. He was sitting on the veranda of a home in a wealthy neighborhood, drinking tea and reading. The street was busy with passers-by, but none of them seemed to take any notice of his odd looks, or his book, or the fact that he seemed to actually know how to read it. Jemmi stopped in the street in front of him and stared.

The pale man stirred in his seat and looked up from his book. Jemmi’s thoughts immediately shifted to other things—the kerchief on that woman walking past and how she would wear it if she had it, what plans the tradesman across the way might have for the bound lamb he carried, and wouldn’t a single gutter down the middle of the street make it easier to clean than one down each side?—as if there were a broad, gentle pressure in the center of her mind. This, the thought struck her, must be what she made the people in crowds around her feel. She held her ground and pushed back.

The man met her gaze with a small, amused smirk. “What can I do for you, daughter?” he called down.

The pressure in Jemmi’s mind immediately grew focused and became an urge to comply, practically dragging an answer from her. She refused, and met the force head-on. The compulsion increased, and she resisted.

She stood there frozen by the exertion, and suddenly the frontal assault on her mind dissipated, replaced by the barest sideways push that took her completely off balance.

“I had a boy,” she called back, and heard the anger in her voice in spite of herself. “A boy and a dry place to sleep.”

“Indeed?” the pale man answered. “Now, what would make you think—Oh my . . . ” His little smirk wavered, and he said, mainly to himself, “Here, in this forsaken backwater? Can it be?” He considered his closed book for a moment, then put it aside and stepped to the veranda railing. “I think perhaps we should get to know each other. Won’t you come up?”

If there was any coercion now, it was too subtle for Jemmi to feel, and she was intrigued by his bearing, and warily flattered. She joined him, and he sat her beside him like a lady of substance.

“My name,” he said, “is Yee.”

“Neh, that’s a funny name, isn’t it?”

His half-smirk returned. “Possibly. It was originally much longer, and there was a string of titles that went after it at one time, but these days Yee is sufficient for my needs.” He had an old-fashioned accent that made her think of fancy dances attended by the lords of planets, and a way of speaking as if every word counted.

“I’m Jemmi, then.”

“Jemmi, it is an unexpected pleasure to meet you. You are what, eleven, twelve years old?” Up close, Yee’s eyes were nearly colorless, but Jemmi got the impression that if he looked too long at something, it would start to smolder—or maybe Yee would.

“Fourteen.”

“Fourteen? Ah, yes, of course. Puberty would have begun. And I don’t suppose you eat particularly well. Forgive me—I’ve been a neglectful host. Would you join me in breakfast?”

She nodded.

“I suspected as much. Roycer!” Yee called, barely raising his voice.

The boy from the crowd at the quay stepped out of the door as if he had been waiting beside it. He had the look of someone who had been working feverishly all night.

“I believe our guest could do with a bit to eat,” said Yee.

“Breakfast! Of course!” said the boy, as if it were a stroke of genius. He disappeared back into the house.

“Tell me, Jemmi,” continued Yee. “Do you have any family?”

She shook her head.

“So I conjectured. They didn’t, by any chance, die under mysterious circumstances within the past few months, did they?”

The glance she shot him was all the answer he needed.

“I believe we have much in common, you and I . . . and I honestly can’t recall ever saying that to anyone else.”

Roycer hurried out of the house with a tray piled with a random assortment of cold meats and vegetables and cups and loaves and cheeses. He set it down before them and stepped away. Yee made a graceful gesture with an open palm, and Jemmi tore into it.

“Perhaps you could also prepare a bath for our guest,” Yee suggested while she ate.

“Hot water!” the boy muttered to himself. “Cool water! And soap!” and raced back inside.

Yee watched Jemmi bolt down the food. “You would not be reduced to this if you were on a true world,” he reflected. “A planet holds more riches than one person could ever grasp, and you would just be discovering you could take anything you desired right now. How ironic that you and I should both be trapped out in space, at the mercy of the vagaries of a forgotten fad.”

Jemmi looked up. “What’s that, then?”

“A fad?” said Yee. “A trend of fashion. A novelty. I’m sure you must take it for granted, but please believe me when I tell you that it is not at all an intuitive choice for a human to live in the belly of a mollusk adrift in the ether. When I commissioned the first orbitals, they were intended merely as pleasure palaces to keep my associates content and distracted. We gave the males mobility only to ensure that the species bred strong and true, not because we planned to ride them.”

“You did? Like Sara? Like Albiorix?”

“Yes. Your Sarasvati is one of the oldest, one of my first. Through a twist of fate, I happened to be visiting one of her sisters the day the Cosmopolis fell. There wasn’t time to return groundside before the machines stopped working of course, and not even a big ship like Albiorix is strong enough to make planetfall.

“Without the smart machines, you and I may ride ships from one impoverished orbital to the next, while the planets are rich and savage, but utterly isolated. The resources to rebuild civilization are there, but always just beyond my reach.”

Jemmi had no clear idea of how long ago the Cosmopolis had fallen, but if Yee had been there her original impression was correct, and he was quite old. She was still hungry, but she was smart enough to stop eating before she got sick or sleepy. She pushed the tray away from her, half its contents untouched. Yee seemed to note this with the barest hint of an approving nod. Jemmi thought back to Sara’s joy at the unexpected arrival of a suitor, and connected it to this unexpected man.

“Neh, why did Albiorix come back to Sara?”

“Ah, truth be told, it was not his intention at all. Albiorix prefers his route through his regular harem, and he likely planned to call on Demeter, and then Freya. It was time for me, however, to move rimward. It was a considerable struggle to make him accept my lead.”

No one had ever taken such pains to answer Jemmi’s questions before. She composed another one. “Why rimward, then?”

His smirk this time was a bit indulgent. “I have been to the galactic core, and I no longer believe I will find what I seek there. I am a man on a quest, you see.”

The boy appeared in the doorway. “The bath is ready,” he announced to the veranda in general.

“Roycer serves with excellent enthusiasm,” Yee confided with a lowered voice. “Do you find everyone in Sarasvati so?”

Jemmi shrugged, nonplussed. “No one ever serves me,” she admitted.

“Indeed? Well that must change. That must change immediately.” He stood and offered his hand. “Would you care to join us inside?”

Roycer and Yee led her into the house, which was very old. Parts of it must have been built before the Fall, because they were made of textureless materials Jemmi had no words for, while other rooms were made of wood and stone. They passed through a side parlor, where the rest of Roycer’s family lolled in chairs or sprawled across the rug. Jemmi counted two parents, a brother, and three sisters, all with sunken, husk-like faces. They were all dead. She was very surprised—her parents had looked the same way when they died.

“A pity, I know,” said Yee, gesturing towards the corpses with an upraised chin, “but I needed to simplify the household, and the boy is strong enough for my needs for the time being.” Roycer didn’t seem to see them at all.

Roycer’s family was so rich they had a room just for baths, at the back of the house. It was floored with rough flagstones and had a hearth for heating the water, and a high-backed earthenware tub right in the middle. Jemmi thought it was very odd to take a bath in someone else’s house in the middle of the day, and momentarily froze with the apprehension that she was being entrapped, but Yee dismissed it with a shake of his head.

“If you want to pass as townsfolk,” he told her, “you really shouldn’t be noticeably filthier than they are. Besides, I am too old to take advantage of you, and I promise Roycer will be a perfect gentleman. He will scrub your back if you like.”

Yee graciously turned to face the wall, and on her other side, Roycer did the same. Perhaps this was what the high-born did during morning visits. Jemmi let her ragged tunic and leggings fall to the floor, and stepped in. The water was hotter than any water she had ever touched, but she was committed, so she gasped and puffed and slid herself down the side of the tub in tender increments. Her knees immediately disappeared behind swirls of brown. It was scalding, but she discovered that if she kept her legs pressed together and moved only when absolutely necessary, it was nearly relaxing. When she was settled, Yee sat himself on a stool in a corner, looking for all the world like a pale long-legged spider. Roycer remained where he was.

Jemmi picked up a cloth and swiped experimentally at dark patches on her skin. Yee suggested she try the soap, and she had more luck that way. Underneath, she was rather fair, and turning pink in the hot water.

“Neh, Yee,” she said, comparing a pink-scrubbed arm to a besmudged one. “Where are you from?”

“Ah,” he said. “I was born in the chief city of the greatest dominion the world had ever known.”

“The Cosmopolis Core?”

He shook his head. “Long before that. This was so long ago that it was little more than a legend to the builders of the Cosmopolis. In those days our god walked apart from us as a formless creature of faith and awe, quite unlike the beings who have given us their bodies to be our homes and our worlds in this age. He failed us in the end, I suppose, because that empire fell. It was not the first empire to fall, and it certainly was not the last, but it fell badly when it went. And I was a young boy, trapped on a narrow and crowded island of towers when the chaos descended.”

Jemmi was silent. Anyone raised among the half-buried reminders of the abrupt and terrible failure of the Cosmopolis had a visceral understanding of that type of chaos.

“This was all so far back that I can recall only the memories of recalling it centuries later. But I know the instrument of our downfall was a plague, that our enemies brought among us. Death tore through us so quickly that we who considered ourselves the capital of the world and the heart of its hope were no longer a city, but brutal pockets of marauders running through a steel-and-glass wasteland. I was thirteen then, and the sickness seized me suddenly. It was clear that I would die, but I did not. When I fought to live, I was somehow able to reach out and find strength in the people closest to me. When I recovered, I found they had wasted away in proportion to the vigor I gained. My parents and siblings were dead and empty around me, and I was utterly alone.

“Then the savages who had been our neighbors found our home and ransacked it. I cowered and sought to make myself invisible to their eyes, and they walked past me without seeing me, though I could have put out a hand and touched them. At that point I realized I was now something different, but there was no one to explain it to me.”

Jemmi knew exactly what he meant.

“Many dark years followed, but I survived, and my people worked diligently to rebuild something of their society, and I always amassed the best of everything. Gradually I realized this industriousness was my own doing—I could not force a man to do a thing he did not wish to do, but I could place an idea in that man’s head and give him the drive to realize it at any cost. The same way, I believe, that you are now learning to do, Jemmi. I felt your mind as you stood out on the street. A power has begun to emerge in you, though you do not know how to use it. This is a rare and precious gift. In all the history of the world, it may be only we two who have had it. And you are the first I have ever told.

“While the rest of our planet squabbled in the dust, my people strove in lockstep and regained their learning and power. They had been close to the secret of star travel when I was a child, though this knowledge was lost for generations during the dark ages. Eventually, though, I saw that mankind’s future lay in its ability to spread across worlds, and I gave them the urge to create that technology. When they finally left to cross space in the first great wormhole-drive craft, I went with them, always as a counselor, never as a ruler. That is the proper role for you and me.”

Jemmi nodded, wide-eyed.

“I have kept mankind focused on its own advancement and prosperity and culled the weak and the distractions, and I accept relatively little in return—I take no more from my people than the barest life force necessary to remain alive and continue in my role. I have shepherded humanity through eons of history, and ensured that each new empire was built according to my design. The Cosmopolis was my greatest work. Only when it fell and the worlds were sundered from one another did humanity lose my guidance. And look what has become of you.”

Jemmi had never had a clear picture of life under the Cosmopolis, but she suddenly sensed that it must have been unimaginably finer than the way people lived now, and she felt ashamed.

“So you see, that is why I am here. To rescue mankind. I must rebuild the Cosmopolis.”

To Jemmi sitting in her tub that sounded so grand it was absurd. “From Sarasvati? She’s old and poor. How would she help, then?”

“As I told you, I am a man on a quest. I need only to reach an inhabited planet to raise humanity up again. But for that, I need a shuttle—one of the old machines. I have searched since the Great Fall, and none remain intact in any of the orbitals between here and the center. Perhaps there is one left in Sarasvati.”

“But, neh, the old machines don’t work.”

Yee smiled his half-smirk again. “I believe that if I can find a shuttle, I can render it operable.” His tone became more urgent. “Join with me, Jemmi. I will have need of your support in the days ahead. Add your power to mine, and there will be nothing we cannot do. We will save mankind from itself and bring order to the stars and lead an empire that spans the galaxy and can never be overthrown!”

“Okay.”

He stopped short as if he had prepared more to say. “Excellent,” he said.

“But I don’t know what help I can be.”

“People want to help you, Jemmi,” said Yee. “It’s in your nature. Roycer?”

Roycer stepped up behind her with a long-handled brush, and began to rub warm suds along her spine. Jemmi decided she enjoyed the sensation, and leaned forward to give him more surface to work with. He ran the brush up and down the same route, mechanically focused on the center of her back.

“If you’d like him to do something else, you may direct him,” said Yee. “I hand the reins over to you. Simply feel his mind and put the idea into it. You’ll find he will be avid to put it into action.”

“Don’t I need to touch him, then?”

“You shouldn’t—I don’t,” Yee told her.

Jemmi thought back to her earlier struggle with Yee, and reached out with her mind the way she imagined he had. She sensed nothing, so she pressed stronger and further. Suddenly she connected—and she was immense and floating in space, lost and engrossed in animal passion, tangled with Albiorix and straining mightily against his thrusts to receive him deeper and deeper within her. She had gone too far, and was now in Sarasvati’s mind.

Overwhelmed by the sensation and shocked by her transgression, Jemmi recoiled and shook herself free of Sara. As she went, she caught a final flash of Sara’s sight—stars wheeling around her, and much closer, a blue disk half covered with a whorl of white. Then she was back in the tub.

“Nothing, eh?” Yee said gently from his corner. “Well, try again. You’ll do it.”

She took a deep breath and reached out again, this time barely past her own skin. She felt Yee in the room with her—he nearly filled it—so she turned the other way and touched Roycer. She hesitated, then decided that people like Yee and herself were beyond bashfulness, and gave the boy the idea of her right shoulder.

The brush moved from her spine and made gentle circles around her right shoulder blade. This was nothing at all like how she was used to confounding minds. It was subtle and focused and efficient. She immediately saw it as a thing of beauty, as if she had been born to it.

“Excellent!” It sounded a little strained when Yee said it. “It seems you learn more quickly than I did. But always be aware that his enthusiasm may be diverted to other ideas.”

The brush was now circling her left shoulder.

Jemmi gently reminded Roycer of her right side, and the brush returned to make its circles there. Yee moved him away again—and it was more challenge than test. Jemmi pictured her right shoulder in detail and pressed the image into Roycer’s mind, and then pressed even harder in response to Yee’s redoubled pressure. Roycer stood frozen, torn between the two equal demands. After nearly a minute, the long-handled brush began to shudder silently.

“Well, there’s no point in breaking him,” Yee said a bit too lightly. “I still have some plans for the boy.”

Behind her Roycer emitted a sigh, and the brush resumed its gentle circles on her right shoulder blade.

Afterwards, when Yee suggested that the bath had done as much for her as could reasonably be expected, she stood up into a large towel Roycer held for her. She pressed the water out of her hair, and tossed the towel over her shoulder like a gown.

“Neh, am I beautiful now?” she asked.

Yee looked her over with an eye that had appraised queens.

“Why would you ask such a thing?” he said at last. “For you, that will never matter.”

So Jemmi moved in with Yee and Roycer, and got her warm dry bed and a boy to serve her after all. The bedroom was filled with magnificent girl-things that had been Roycer’s sisters’ and Yee said were now all hers. She dressed herself in a frock of a crisp, shiny fabric that would be ruined forever if it were even in the same room with a speck of grease, and put ribbon after ribbon into her hair until the whole mass could practically stand on its own. Yee saw it and muttered a vague comment that restraint was often the better part of elegance, so she kicked the dress into a corner and changed into a more practical working skirt.

The next day, as they finished breakfast and sat looking over the jumbled heap of everything Roycer had pulled out of the larder, Yee slid his chair back and observed, “We seem to have exhausted this house’s stores. Come—it’s time we went to the market.” Jemmi and Roycer followed him out.

Jemmi loved crowds, and to her mind the market was the best part of Port-Town. Yee led them to the busiest, most densely-packed street, where folk shoved to get by them and hawkers vied to drown out each others’ voices. He turned to Jemmi, and his voice carried perfectly without raising at all. “Roycer and I have some business to attend to and will leave you to do the shopping,” he told her coolly. “Please do not return until you have acquired everything you think the household needs. And do try not to get yourself killed while you’re about it. I have noticed subtlety is not your strong suit.”

He steered Roycer into the crowd, and they disappeared in a few steps. Jemmi didn’t even have a basket. Was Yee kicking her out already? Had she failed somehow? Or did it just mean he wanted her to practice putting ideas in peoples’ heads? She couldn’t tell, and she felt alone again, and very exposed. She fought to stay in one place for a long while until the buffeting from the shoppers became unbearable, and then, near tears, she fled to a quiet corner at the edge of the square.

She forced herself to breathe deeply until she was nearly calm again, and then reached out for the comfort of feeling Sara.

There was a brief, dizzying sensation of stretching through free-fall and then she was back in Sara’s mind, gargantuan but still less than a mote in the immeasurable space that surrounded her. The Herculean coupling with Albiorix showed no sign of slowing, but those sensations were too strong for Jemmi and she turned to other aspects of Sara’s awareness.

Sara, she saw, floated in a barren void but carried her ecosystem entire within her, as if someone had taken an empty house set in a garden, then turned all of it inside-out. She gloried in the living beings she harbored, both because they were the foundation of her own survival, and because they had sprung from her own body. Designed into the core of her awareness was the drive to shore up that precarious balance by any means possible. She could win over allies and choose favorites, and smite the enemies growing inside her as if they were incipient contagions.

Jemmi saw the spindle-shaped world inside Sara through Sara’s own mind, and she felt the angst and darkness that had been taking hold as her facility to orchestrate that environment slipped away. Sara was old and proud and secretly ashamed to be failing in her duty. Her wordless hopes were focused on the great egg she had prepared for Albiorix. If it quickened, she would have a glorious new life within her for a time, and then the lives she sheltered would have a new home.

Jemmi showed herself to Sara and guilelessly let the fact of her budding talent flow through. For a moment she felt Sara freeze the link between them, as if assessing the best way to react to some startling threat. But when Sara came back, her response was to engulf Jemmi with the sensation that she knew her and cherished her and reveled in her. It overwhelmed Jemmi and flooded through her, and she was powerless against it. Sara had unlimited reserves of love to draw on, and she used them mercilessly.

Jemmi was pinned there like an enraptured butterfly for a long, timeless instant. She was unable to move or think, and she wouldn’t have given it up for anything. Finally, when the effect was deep enough, Sara bid her farewell and gently withdrew.

Finding herself squatting by herself on muck-covered cobblestones, Jemmi hugged herself and sobbed quietly. She would have clawed her way back into Sara’s mind, but the connection had ended with a note of finality that she would not overstep. Gradually, she realized she was not empty, but filled with warmth and strength, and she could think of nothing but the great heart that had given her that. She now knew down through her bones that she would never have any use for Yee’s old empires or for planets where there was nothing at the other side of the sky but more sky, because Sarasvati was her world. Jemmi belonged here, where she could reach out with her hand or mind and touch her god, and if there was anything beyond Sara, it did not interest her.

But for the time being at least, Yee was helping her learn her own strength. She remembered the task he had given her and half-heartedly stepped to the edge of the crowd. She extended her mind just the slightest bit beyond her own skin, and the maelstrom of thoughts and words and desires that hit her was like ducking her head under a waterfall. She drew back and focused on the thoughts of the woman closest to her.

The invasion of privacy was thrilling. The woman was picking vegetables from big baskets, and Jemmi found herself swimming through twisting currents of intentions and half-ignored impressions and the occasional diamond-clear string of words. She wondered if she might become lost in the woman’s mind if she got any closer.

Ever so gently—not at all like guiding Roycer’s hand—she tossed in the notion that a vendor across the square might be willing to negotiate his price, and watched the ripples spread out across the woman’s other thoughts. Her eyes lit, and she hurried away from the table.

Start at the beginning, Jemmi decided. She strode up to the vegetable seller, and graciously allowed him to place his hastily emptied wicker basket on her arm. Then she moved on to a baker, who placed two loaves into it with a flourish as if it was the wittiest thing in the world, and strolled on into the heart of the square.

Jemmi returned home at the head of a small, heavily-laden parade. She directed the string of young men carrying her parcels to line them up along the veranda, and then sent them off. Yee stepped out of the house to observe this, then turned back inside with an audible sniff. Jemmi ran up after him.

“Neh, I can do it!” she told him. “I did it!”

“I daresay you did,” he said. “And made quite a scene, by the looks of it. It’s a wonder they didn’t have you burned at the stake. Have Roycer move your booty inside.” He turned away again.

Jemmi was crestfallen.

“Neh, Yee,” she blurted. He stopped. “How come Sara—Why don’t things work like they did in the olden days?” she asked.

That must have been the right question to ask him, because he immediately warmed to her again. “Ah,” he said. “It was the machines. Few people remember that it was the destruction of the machines that caused the fall of the Cosmopolis, and not the other way around. In the days of its greatest strength, the Cosmopolis had enemies who preferred utter anarchy to the order and prosperity it gave them. They were fools and fanatics. They introduced a machine pandemic that spread from one end of inhabited space to the other.”

“And all the machines got sick?”

“Not at first. It slept quietly for years, and then at a pre-ordained signal it struck everywhere, simultaneously. All the smart electronics died at that moment, and the Cosmopolis was shattered. To re-create the technology that humans or Sarasvati relied on, we will have to build from the beginning again: steam and iron. It is a long road, but I have walked it before.”

Jemmi did not trust Yee, and she didn’t think she liked him, but she would follow him anywhere if it would save Sara.

“In fact, Roycer and I were able to uncover some information towards that end while you were out,” he told her. “We learned that Sarasvati originally had a shuttle port at either extremity. These were large and busy, so they likely contained several shuttles at the time of the Fall, but they were quite prominent and I expect they were plundered generations ago. There were also several emergency evacuation portals scattered throughout her. These have been lost, and there is a chance that one may be untouched. They will have to be searched out.”

That seemed like a lot of work to Jemmi. “Why don’t you just ask Sara?”

Yee scoffed. “And what would the question be? The ships and orbitals are very simple beasts, and even if they understood, they couldn’t form an answer. But come, I will show you how it’s done.” He stepped over her groceries and led her back down into the street.

“What we need is people who seem persistent and resourceful, and whose absence will not be noted overly much,” said Yee. “People like you and me—but expendable, of course.”

Yee approached a laborer in a floppy, grease-stained cap pulling a heavy cart, and smiling and clasping his long pale hands together, asked him if he knew anything about the old-days shuttle port at the end of Sarasvati’s long axis. The man, obviously annoyed, shook his head and looked at Yee as if he were cracked. Yee appeared disappointed, and observed it was a pity, since it wouldn’t do to go spreading this around, but he was eager for news of any undamaged shuttles, and was more than willing to reimburse the man who brought that news quite handsomely. A fortune, really. At any rate, if he heard of anything, Yee lived right over there—the house with the veranda, can you see?—and would be delighted to receive any news. The man moved on as if he was glad to be rid of Yee. His steps became increasingly more hesitant though, as if something was unfolding in his mind. Finally, about a hundred paces down the street he abandoned his cart completely with a furtive look back, and sprinted away along the quickest route out of Port-Town.

The next man Yee spoke to developed a frantic urge to make the grueling trek to the ruins of the shuttle port at Sarasvati’s far end and return to report on his findings. After that, four others became fascinated with the pressing need to locate one of the lost evacuation ports scattered along her length. It seemed to Jemmi that before they hurried off, each of them had been struck by the sudden inspiration for a scheme that simultaneously delighted them and tortured them.

“If a man sees it as a struggle to express an idea from within, he’ll exhaust everything he has to bring it to fruition,” Yee explained, as the last one began to run. “Well, after your success in the market this morning, I believe I can leave the rest to you. You’ll need to send out about another dozen or so.” He turned to go.

“Neh, why so many?”

“One of the first things you must learn, Jemmi, is that one man acting alone will change nothing. To have progress, you must mobilize a society. Once we are on a world, you will see how quickly entire kingdoms move forward when they embrace the goals we give them.”

Yee returned to the house and stepped over the groceries on the veranda as he went in. Jemmi stalked the street recruiting searchers for the rest of the afternoon, and the food sat out there until evening, when she reckoned she had snared enough.

There was no dawn the next morning. Jemmi jumped out of her big bed with a sense of foreboding and a gut feeling that it was later than it looked. She ran down the wooden stairs and out onto the road in her bare feet. Shock and woe were palpable in the air and the soil, and Sara was lamenting with all her heart. Then it hit Jemmi—Albiorix was dead. He had weakened and gone still and fallen slack in Sara’s embrace, and she was nearly paralyzed by loneliness and the weight of this new failure.

People in the villages high overhead began to wake and light lamps and fires as they tentatively started their day. The scattering of weak sparks in the darkness was a pale imitation of the stars Jemmi had seen through Sara’s eyes. Yee stepped out onto the veranda and silently leaned over the rail to look upwards and sniff, as if he were tasting the weather.

“Yee—Do you know? Albiorix is dead,” Jemmi said.

“I’m not surprised,” answered Yee. “He was stubbornly fixed on his old route, and I had to relieve him of much of his strength before he would accept my course. We’re lucky I made it this far.”

Jemmi’s hands were fists. “How could you do that?”

“I know what you’re thinking—and it’s not a problem. Albiorix has always been trailed by younger males as he makes his rounds. I’m sure Horus or Xolotl will be here by the time we are ready to move on.”

“But she was going to have his baby!” Jemmi managed.

“Not likely. The orbitals and ships are improbable beings, so they must be part animal, part machine,” Yee told her. “I’m certain you’ve noticed Sarasvati is no longer the paradise she was intended to be. Since the Fall, they have been unable to replenish the nanomachines that they need to grow and heal themselves. I doubt there would have been any offspring.” He shrugged.

Jemmi tried to say something, but her grief and rage were like a solid mass that seared through her throat and chest. She had no words to express the depth of his sin and blasphemy. She knew that to strike at Yee would be suicide, so instead, she forced herself to turn from him and raced down the darkened street. When her legs tired, she walked through Port-Town as she had on her first night, staying to the shadows and peeking in windows.

It was hours before she got bored with wandering and returned home. Yee was out.

“Roycer!” Jemmi said. “Where’s the jar, then?”

“Which jar, Jemmi?” he asked.

“The one he brought with him off Albiorix. Where does he hide it?”

He paused, and she flicked the boy’s mind to give him just a bit of encouragement. “In the tub room. Underneath the floor stones.”

“Show me.”

Roycer led her to the room with the tub and lifted a flat stone away. In the space beneath was the gray canister Yee had carried when they had first seen him. Jemmi pulled it out. It was obviously very old, because it was made of a single piece of something very smooth and very strong. She grasped the cap, but it would not turn. It had an indentation the shape of a palm on top, but nothing happened when she pressed her hand against it. She handed it back to Roycer and told him to return it just as they found it. He could demonstrate astounding attention to detail when prompted.

As he moved the stone back into place, Sarasvati stirred herself to remember her duty, and her sky sullenly flickered and kindled with morning light, half a day late.

Jemmi and Yee and Roycer continued to live together over the next dozen or so days, but Jemmi saw Yee as little as possible. She also began to avoid looking directly at Roycer. The boy seemed brittle and stretched thin, and he was getting weak and clumsy. He was no longer pretty. Jemmi suspected he would be replaced shortly.

The laborer in the floppy hat returned after a few days, limping and exhausted as if he had run all the way up to the old shuttle port and back. It had been picked clean, he reported, and nothing bigger than a wagon-wheel was left. Several nights after that, the searcher that had been sent to the far end of Sarasvati crawled across the veranda and scratched weakly at the door. He could not speak, but he had just enough strength left to convey that he had also found nothing. Roycer dragged the body inside before the neighbors noticed.

Jemmi approached Yee the next morning. “Neh, Yee, how long will the other searchers be gone?”

Yee snorted. “Were you expecting them back? The task you gave them was to return only when they could report something of value, and to continue searching until then. I’d be surprised if many of them are still standing. Your old Sarasvati is worthless to us, as I expected.” He seated himself and picked up his book.

“You and I should begin planning our departure. One of the younger orbitals further rimward is more likely to have what we need.”

Jemmi slipped outside and sat in a corner of the veranda. She stretched her mind out across the emptiness, and touched Sara.

All of Sara that was not dedicated to the physics of regulating her inner environment was still in mourning for Albiorix, and she was in no mood to notice Jemmi.

Please, Sara! I’m going to have to leave if you don’t . . . We’re all going to have to leave! She visualized Sarasvati’s interior deserted and bare, and prodded her with the image. Resentful, Sara turned part of her attention to Jemmi, and sluggishly recognized her as one marked as her own.

You have to help us find a shuttle, or else he’s going to take me far away. There was no reaction to the words, of course. Jemmi tried to make an image of a shuttle, but she had no idea what a spacecraft would look like. Instead, she imagined people flying in and out of Sarasvati.

Sara responded with a picture of a flawless white fish, smoother than an egg and shaped like a teardrop, with stubby fins. The fish dove out of a hole in the side of Sarasvati’s asteroid and swam across empty space.

That must be it, then! Where?

But Sara did not have a mind that could answer a question like that.

Jemmi leapt onto the veranda railing and caught hold of the edge of the roof, then scrambled on top of the house. From its peak she could look down along Sarasvati’s entire inner length as it curved over her head in lieu of a sky.

Is it there? she asked, looking at a spot directly across, and kept the interrogative at the front of her mind as she moved her eyes across Sarasvati’s interior. When Jemmi reached a point that was far off—90° around and two-thirds of the way towards her other end—Sara stirred, and Jemmi’s vision of the spot came into clear focus. She had a sudden image of the white shuttle in a smooth white cavern, clasped by metal arms that held it suspended over the floor.

Thank you, Sara! Thank you! Now I’ll never have to leave you.

Jemmi gently withdrew and left Sara to her grief. She remained on the veranda until she had collected herself, and went inside.

“Neh, Yee,” she said as if she was discussing the weather. “I’ve found a shuttle.”

Yee looked up from his book, as cold as ice. “Do not even think of toying with me, child—you would die before you hit the ground. Run along.”

“It’s smooth and white, in a big white room. One of my searchers made it back.”

Yee was out of his seat and gripping her collar as if propelled by lightning. “Where?” he demanded. “Let me talk to him!”

She shook her head. “Can’t. He’s dead now. But I know where it is.” She took him to the mullioned window and pointed out the spot to him.

“There? Where the river makes the bend around the tip of the cloud forest?” He calculated. “That’s a three-day journey. Roycer—the packs!” Jemmi heard heavy footsteps running frenetically through the house, and Roycer burst into the room carrying two loaded rucksacks and an enormous backpack.

“We leave now,” said Yee said to her. “Prepare anything you need to take.”

He left the room. Jemmi could think of nothing, so she sat and waited. When Yee passed through again, he had the gray canister slung over his shoulder, and he didn’t pause to see if they followed him.

Three days later, Jemmi was farther from home than she had ever been. They had had men pull them in carts day and night for most of the way, but the last one had dropped from exhaustion just as they decided to leave the road, and they had hiked through the brush on their own.

They stood in a clearing in a jungle. Humid air, blown erratically out of an obstructed duct from one of Sarasvati’s lungs, met the cool currents overhead and sent a thick perpetual cloud rolling through the trees. Moisture dripped from the leaves like rain. In front of them was a symmetrical grassy mound, like a small hill standing alone.

“This is assuredly an evacuation portal,” said Yee, pacing around it. “That’s the entrance, and it is overgrown and partially buried, so the space beyond certainly could have remained intact. But how did your source know what was inside?”

He shot Jemmi a glance. She shrugged.

“No matter. We are very close, and our day is at hand.” He removed two packets from his rucksack and tucked them in the tumbled stones that filled a door-shaped indentation. “Roycer, light this string here and here, please, then join me quickly.” He strode away. “Jemmi, you might care to accompany me.”

She followed Yee back into the trees. Roycer came running up, and then there was an explosion that sent earth and spinning shards of timber flying past them. The cloud amongst them jumped, and Sarasvati flinched violently under their feet.

A third of the mound was blasted away. The explosion had removed the layer of soil and stone covering it, and laid bare several yards of a deep purple-pink gash that oozed and glistened wetly. Jemmi wondered if the wound was as bad for Sara as it looked, or if on her miles-long body it was less than a scratch. Of the doorway only smoke and rubble remained, but beyond it was a steep shaft that led down through Sarasvati.

Yee tossed aside his pack and hurried in. Roycer and then Jemmi followed him down a long spiral staircase, smooth flowing steps formed by Sarasvati’s living body. When daylight could no longer reach them, the steps above and below them glowed to light their way. They descended so far that Jemmi could feel herself becoming heavier.

A chitinous membrane blocked the passage and drew them up short. Yee placed his hand in its center, and it dilated open. They stepped through, and it silently closed behind them. Another blocked their way, and the air pressure changed and Jemmi’s ears popped before it opened for them.

The stairs here were no longer alive. They were mathematically perfect, with precise lines and right angles that had never existed in Jemmi’s world. They were a sterile white, against which Yee and Roycer seemed both more vivid and less whole. Jemmi had left Sarasvati, and was standing in the bare asteroid that protected her soft flesh from the harsh vacuum.

The white staircase was short, and it opened up into a cavernous chamber walled and floored in featureless white. The vaulted ceiling was a warm silky gray, chased with flickers of colored lights—Sarasvati’s outer surface, pressed tight across the top of the space. At the center, as big as a house, a pristine fish-shaped shuttle was suspended over the floor by a set of jointed steel arms.

Yee rushed forward with a sound that was part gasp and part sob. He circled the shuttle, reaching out a hand and pulling it back to his mouth as if he were afraid to touch it. Jemmi ran her palm along its side. It was smoother than an egg, and cool.

“It’s whole, and perfect!” Yee crowed. “At long last, I’ve done it!”

Jemmi nudged at it. “But, neh, Yee,” she said. “It’s dead. It doesn’t go.”

“Ah, but it will now.” He caressed the canister he carried.

“What’s in that thing, then?”

“Today, it is the greatest treasure in all the galaxy. I have carried it with me since before the Fall, when I first began to suspect that my enemies might take extreme measures to divest humanity of my direction.”

“I thought you said they were the enemies of Cosmopolis.”

“I may have—did you think there was any difference?”

Near the tail of the shuttle, Yee gingerly pried open a tiny drawer in the craft’s skin and inspected its interior with one eye. Then he placed his palm on the lid of the canister and twisted. It came off with a chuff of air. He handed the lid to Roycer, and reverently held the container out towards Jemmi.

“Behold—one and a half liters of breeder nanos, sealed away long prior to the Fall.” Inside was a gritty paste. It smelled like hot sand and rising bread dough. “This is quite possibly the last batch in existence untouched by the machine plague. Each speck can replicate thousands of the same nanomachines that built and ran the technology of the Cosmopolis. What I hold here is enough to raise an entire planet from the dark ages back to enlightenment. It is the key to our next empire.”

He lifted the canister to the intake panel. “It would not do to waste it—would half a spoonful be too much?” He tilted a drop in. “The nanos will find the diagnostic system, and it will activate them to begin whatever repairs it needs.”

He pushed the little drawer closed and bore those eyes of his into the surface of the spacecraft as if willing it to let him see its inner workings. Nothing happened for as long as Jemmi could hold her breath, and then a faint ticking and hissing sound emerged. Yee cackled with delight. “It will be no time at all now,” he told Jemmi. “In a few hours you’ll have had your first taste of fresh air. You will have seen your first sunset.”

“But then we’ll come back to Sara, neh?”

Still preoccupied, he answered, “What’s that? Don’t be absurd. Once you’re on a real planet, you won’t spare another thought for this rat-hole.”

Jemmi turned her back on him. Near the entrance stood a heavy hand crank and a podium topped with switches and levers. She ran her hands over the alien textures and idly toyed with the switches to hear them click.

She closed a simple circuit that had remained alive across the centuries, and the floor beneath them disappeared, phasing into transparency. Her heart lurched and she groped for balance. She stood atop a star-spattered bottomless void, and looked between her feet far out into nothing. Suddenly, an edge of the emptiness was occluded by a shape that swung past her. For a moment, staring up into the chamber was a golden-green, slit-pupilled, lidless eye—flat, dead, and far broader than the entire launch bay. It was Albiorix.

Sara was unable to bring herself to release him, and he wafted like marsh-grass in her embrace.

Jemmi stood transfixed until he swept beyond her range of vision, and said carefully, “Neh, Yee. I don’t think I want to go with you.”

Yee faced her, and his voice was cold with threat. “That is unacceptable, Jemmi. You have a great responsibility to humanity, and I need you by my side for the great works I will do. You will be my empress. One way or another you will accompany me, and I assure you that you will rejoice in the opportunity.”

Jemmi averted her eyes from his. She reached out and placed a thought in Roycer’s mind: Roycer, kill Yee. It’s important.

Roycer sized up Yee with a stony glance, and quietly shucked his heavy pack. He took a few wary steps, and then rushed him. Suddenly startled, Yee snapped his head around, and Roycer froze in mid-stride. His muscles shuddered horribly as Jemmi leaned the force of her mind against Yee’s. Blood trickled down Roycer’s chin from where his jaw had clenched on his tongue.

“Is this the best you can do, child?” Yee sneered. “Use the last gasp of an exhausted puppet against me? Countless others with real weapons have made the attempt, and they have all failed.” His stoop disappeared, and he became a towering presence in the white chamber. “I am the immortal Andrew Constantin Fujiwara Borsanyi, founder of the Cosmopolis, eternal First Lord of the League of Man, and architect of all mankind’s history. Who are you?”

Jemmi had no answer to that.

She released her pressure on Roycer, and he fell backwards towards her across the invisible floor. Instead, she reached out to Sara. She had to grope because she no longer knew where to find her, but at last they touched, and Jemmi’s urgency roused Sara’s attention. Jemmi concentrated all her awareness on the launch bay, dead Albiorix, and Yee standing next to the shuttle.

He’s the one! She flung the rage and fear towards Sara. He killed Albiorix! And now he’ll do worse—

The thought suddenly bloomed in Jemmi’s mind that the most clever and crucial thing she could do was get down on her knees and bow her head. She welcomed the idea as an inspired stroke of brilliance, and rushed to kneel in submission. She heard Yee’s footsteps snap against the crystal floor as he sauntered towards her, and it did not trouble her.

They felt the rumbling through the walls and the floor then. It started hushed and far off, a sustained roll of thunder that rushed up and overtook them.

Yee cocked his head and frowned, and then his eyes widened as he identified the sound: Sara had spasmed her entire boneless body in a long rolling wave, like a rope snapped across miles of ground. It was the roar of an earthquake, focused and aimed right at him.

Jemmi grabbed Roycer and spurred him with an intensity that sent him scrabbling maniacally past her into the cover of the stairwell. She dove in after him.

Yee dropped the canister and extended his arms overhead, not to fend off Sara’s body, but to reach into her mind. He stood there for the space of a heartbeat, but there was no time to learn to contact her, and he abruptly broke and fled for the stairwell, all gangly arms and legs.

He snatched at Jemmi’s ankle, and from somewhere she found the wherewithal to shout, “Your nanos!” throwing all the weight and urgency she could into the thought. Yee stared at her and hesitated a moment—perhaps it was the power of her suggestion, or perhaps it was the age-old habit of cherishing his burden—and then spun back into the launch bay.

At that moment the living ceiling of the chamber lurched high up with a great solid heave that pulled the air screaming past their ears and whiplashed back down into the launch bay. It hammered against the invisible floor in an paroxysm of violence that obliterated Jemmi’s scream. The shuttle and its equipment, which could bear the forces of vacuum, fire and ice and had stood unmarked for centuries, were instantly pulverized into a thin stratum of wreckage. Yee, standing among them, was mashed into nothing.

The wave rolled off again just as quickly, trailed by the sound of receding thunder. A stunning silence stretched for several minutes, punctuated as bits of unrecognizable debris rained down towards the stars from where they were embedded in Sarasvati’s side, clattering or splatting to a stop against the crystal.

Jemmi pressed her face hard against the stairwell wall and waited until the world had stopped reverberating. It took a long time before she judged it was safe to move.

“Let’s go, then,” she said to Roycer—no compulsion, just an order. “Ah, wait.”

She threaded her way into the launch bay and picked through the ankle-high detritus until she found Yee’s canister. It was dented and scraped, but almost none of the paste had been spilled. She took it.

“Now we can go.” She led Roycer back into Sarasvati, and up the long stairs. She was careful not to touch his thoughts again. Near the top of the climb, he stumbled to his knees, and clear-minded for the first time in weeks, sobbed with horror and loss. Jemmi sat several steps above him with her arms wrapped around her shins and waited patiently, mindful of all the things Roycer had seen and done, allowed no feeling but solicitude for Yee’s needs. He doubled over and retched. When he began glaring at her during his pauses for breath, Jemmi picked herself up and continued climbing. He hurried to follow.

Jemmi stepped out through the ragged hole at the surface and climbed to the top of the mound. The air tasted to her as if it were filled with pain and righteous fury. A raw pink line now ran from the end of Sarasvati, crossing over the stairwell, and continuing deep into her interior. A strip of ground more than a hundred paces wide had wrenched itself clear, exposing the bare flesh beneath it. Trees, stones, earth and bits of homes lay tossed and scattered to either side for as far as she could see. In the hazy distance, a series of aftershocks or convulsions raised dust clouds and sent ripples running back towards them. Jemmi’s own body burned in aggrieved empathy. She would never let anyone hurt Sara again.

Roycer joined her on the rubble and surveyed the destruction.

“What are you?” he asked.

Jemmi blinked for a moment, and while she considered, he shifted his weight and raised his fists to strike her. She flicked his mind and he went still. And that gave Jemmi her answer.

“Bow down,” she told Roycer. “Get on your knees and bow down before me. I am the priestess of Sarasvati. I have come, and everything will change now.”

With that, as her boy knelt with earnest awe and reverence, Jemmi walked to the place where Sara’s wound was the worst, and poured the contents of Yee’s canister out into it.

Originally published in Twenty Epics edited by Susan Marie Groppi and David Moles.

The Mind is its Own Place

Carrie Vaughn

Professional fingers pried open Mitchell’s left eyelid, and white light blinded him. The process repeated on the right. He winced and turned his head to escape. The grip released him.

“Lieutenant Greenau?”

He lay on a bunk in an infirmary. It wasn’t the Francis Drake’s infirmary. The smell was wrong; the background hum of the vessel was wrong. This place sounded softer, more distant. Larger. With effort, he shifted an arm. His head hurt. He felt like he’d been asleep for days.

“Lieutenant Greenau? Mitchell?” The figure at the side of his bed gave him something to focus on. A middle-aged man in a white tunic, with a narrow face and a receding hairline, frowned at him. “How are you feeling?”

“Groggy.” He struggled for awareness.

“You were sedated.”

“Can you give me something to clear it up?”

“I’d rather not put anything else into your system just yet.”

He wished he didn’t have to ask: “Where am I?”

“You’re at Law Station, Lieutenant.”

Law Station was a Military Division forward operating base and shipyard. It would have taken the Drake days to get here, and he didn’t remember the trip. Law also housed an extensive medical facility.

Softly, as if afraid of upsetting a fragile piece of equipment, he asked, “Why am I here?”

“What do you remember?”

He’d arrived on the bridge for his shift. He’d checked in with Captain Scott. Then he assumed he’d taken his place at the navigator station. He must have done his job as he had a hundred times before. He checked in with the captain, the duty log scanned his thumbprint—

“I was on the Francis Drake. On the bridge. I said good morning to the captain. Then—I don’t remember.” He kneaded the sheet draped over him, cramping his fingers. He was wearing a patient gown, not his uniform.

“That’s all right.” The doctor smiled, but the expression was shallow, artificial, a forced attempt at bedside manner. “I’m Doctor Dalton, one of the supervising physicians here. If you need anything, a pager is at the side of the bunk.”

“Doctor—” Mitchell forced himself up, rolling to his side and leaning hard on his elbow. The effort left him gasping. “What happened?”

Dalton’s manner was implacable, as if he’d had this conversation before, with other patients, over many years. “This is the neurophysiology ward. Are you familiar with what we do here?”

His heart pounded; his tongue was dry. “Yes.”

“You were brought here because you have OSDS.”

Among themselves, in private, the navigators called it Mand Dementia. The condition was degenerative and incurable. It was one of the risks of the job. An acceptable risk.

“But I feel fine. I don’t feel—” Except for the sedation—why had he needed to be sedated? “I don’t feel sick. I’m not—” I’m not crazy.

“I know, Lieutenant. I’m sorry.”

Mitchell slumped back against the mattress.

He kept a close count of the time. It seemed important, to prove he wasn’t sick. Everything he did had to be 11normal and healthy. He wasn’t sick, and the doctor was wrong.

Halfway through his first waking day cycle, he heard voices coming from the office next to the infirmary. Doctor Dalton was one, and he brightened to hear the other: Captain Crea Scott.

Dalton said, “He didn’t exhibit any symptoms before?”

Scott answered, her normally brash voice hushed and brittle: “He didn’t. I know what to look for. He was fine at the start of the shift, and an hour later he was screaming about flying monkeys to starboard—”

Mitchell lay very still.

“He hasn’t exhibited any symptoms since he’s been here. He also doesn’t remember anything that happened. We won’t know the extent of the damage until we run tests.”

“Could there be a mistake? Could it be something else?”

“I reviewed the log myself, Captain.”

“May I see him?”

“That should be all right.”

Mitchell lay with his back to the door and didn’t see them enter. He waited to turn when Scott said, “Lieutenant Greenau?”

Scott stood a few feet away from the bed, her petite frame tense, her arms crossed. Her face was drawn; she looked ten years older than the last time he’d seen her— when?

He sat up and smiled, relieved. Like she was going to rescue him or something. “Captain Scott. It’s good to see you.”

She didn’t return the smile. “How are you feeling, Lieutenant?”

“Still groggy from the sedative. But I’m okay. I feel fine.” He glanced at Doctor Dalton to make sure he heard.

“That’s good.”

“Captain, I don’t understand why I’m here.”

“That’s okay. Just rest. Don’t worry about it.” After putting a hand on his arm, she bowed her head and turned away.

“I did something, didn’t I? What did I do?”

Scott didn’t turn around. Her voice was painfully steady. “Just take care of yourself, Mitchell. Don’t worry.”

Dalton followed Scott out of the room, and Mitchell heard his captain say, “He’ll be safe here?”

“Yes. As safe as we can make him.”

Then Scott said, her voice low and angry, “Make sure he never remembers what happened.”

A door slid open, then closed again, and the captain was gone.

He pressed his thumb to the duty log, he said good morning to the captain, he went to his station—

He only knew that much because it was the routine, what he’d done over and over for years. Was he remembering some other time, or that time?

Compared to his quarters aboard the Drake, the room he was given here was spacious, an eight by eight square with a bed, desk, computer console, and private washroom. For the whole of his adult life, Mitchell had slept in closets, with a narrow bunk and a cupboard for his belongings. He’d shared washrooms with other junior officers. Who needed more? Who ever spent time in their rooms? He’d always been so busy.

The door to the room locked from the outside. He couldn’t leave without escort. Orderlies brought meals and returned to take away the trays. Mitchell counted two of them, Baz and Jared, working in shifts. They were polite. Mitchell said thank you, and they smiled at him. He had a change of clothing—pale blue hospital-issue jumpsuits—every day. He could read or watch entertainments at the console to pass the time, when he wasn’t in therapy.

That first night he didn’t sleep, but lay back on his cot and stared at a bubbled security monitor in the ceiling, wondering if this was a test.

The second doctor he encountered had an unflappably optimistic professional demeanor, and Mitchell distrusted her for no good reason except that nobody was that genuinely enthusiastic about anything. In spite of himself, Mitchell shook her hand after Baz escorted him to her lab.

Her space was a bit more inviting than other areas of the hospital. Handheld terminals lay strewn across the desk among forgotten drink bottles and writing implements. A sweater hung over the back of a chair. Photos shone from wall displays: image after image of human brains, parts color-coded and labeled.

A dark-skinned woman with short hair and an eager smile, she came around the desk. “Lieutenant Greenau? I’m Doctor Ava Keesey. I’ll be starting your therapy today.” She offered her hand.

“Not Doctor Dalton?”

“I’ve requested your case. I hope that’s all right?”

He didn’t know what his choices were to be able to make one, so he said nothing.

“Have a seat right over here, Lieutenant.” She guided him to a reclining chair surrounded by unidentifiable equipment. Gingerly, he climbed in; its cushions molded under him, supporting his body. The chair tipped back until he was horizontal.

“Any questions before we start?”

“Is the Drake still in dock?”

“I don’t know. I can check for you.”

Her smile was fake; he didn’t think she would check.

“What happened? Why was I brought here?”

“It’s better if you remember on your own, rather than construct false memories based on anything I tell you. If you can please keep your head back, I’d like to start the scan.” Her cool hand on his forehead eased him back against the headrest. “You’ve been through a cortical mapping session before, yes?”

“Yes.” Every navigator had one done at the start of their career. A baseline.

“Then you know all about this. Just relax.”

Machinery closed over his crown, sensors pressing against his scalp, tickling the fuzz of his hair. He looked straight up to off-white ceiling.

“Can you hear me?” she said.

“Yes.”

“I’d like you to move your left thumb. And again. Left index. And again. Left middle. And again.”

And so it went, through the range of motor skills, then across the range of sensory input. Keesey played music and noises, offered him tastes, put sandpaper and cotton into his hands, recording the results with straightforward efficiency.

“Now I’m going to show you some colors, each one for a few seconds. Pay attention, please.”

A screen swung into view over the chair and flashed to life, displaying solid blue, then green, then yellow.

He went to the navigator station, slid into his chair and belted in. Ready for the jump in three, two—the monitor showed a swirl of color. The wrong colors, circling like predators—

Orange, red, purple. Mitchell blinked. Solid squares appeared in sequence on the screen. Harmless.

“What is two plus two, Lieutenant?”

“Four.”

“Two times two?”

“Four.”

“Four times four?”

“Sixteen.”

“Sixteen squared?”

“Two hundred fifty-six.”

Yellow, orange, red.

“Thank you.”

The wrong colors. They were the wrong colors.

Keesey moved away, her footsteps clicking on the hard floor of the lab. He remained locked in the chair, unable to turn his head.

“Can I sit up?”

“In a minute, Lieutenant.”

He wished he could see what she was doing. He heard clicks, movements, maybe fingers tapping on a keypad, or machinery shifting into place. All the sounds were inexplicable.

Mitchell waited a painful, silent minute before saying, “Doctor?”

“Patience, Lieutenant. I want to get a little more data.” Did her voice sound stressed? Uncertain?

She went through the entire sequence again, generating a second cortical map. Finally, she released him from the equipment.

“What’s wrong?” he said, sitting up.

Her smile didn’t seem any different than the one she gave him at the start of the session. “How much do you know about OSDS?”

Occupational Synaptic Dysfunction Syndrome. It was the bogeyman, the monster in the dark. The price they paid for crossing the void. Some people said M-drive propulsion violated the laws of physics, and the Universe took the cost of that somewhere else: in the minds of the navigators who plotted courses through the unreal. Their minds became . . . nonlinear.

“It affects the neural organization of the brain,” he said.

Keesey said, “It develops when some neurotransmitters don’t reach adjacent neurons but instead stimulate neurons in distant parts of the brain. Reducing the stimulation our patients receive can prevent the damage from getting worse by keeping faulty connections from developing. That means sheltering patients, perhaps more than seems reasonable. I’ll have some instructions for you once I’ve had a chance to study the scans.”

“You made two maps. Is that normal?”

“Just confirming the data, Lieutenant.”

She hadn’t believed what she saw the first time.

“But I don’t feel sick.” If he were really well, he wouldn’t have to keep saying it.

“And we want to keep you that way.”

She escorted him back to his quarters herself. He would never be allowed to just wander, would he? He was curious about every door, every branch in the corridor. Every place he couldn’t go. And where was the Drake now?

They’d almost reached his quarters when a scream rang out and echoed along the walls. The corridor curved to match the curve of the station; the scream came from ahead, just out of sight.

Keesey’s practiced demeanor slipped. “Stay here.” She gripped his arm and pushed him against the wall, as if she could stick him there.

When she trotted ahead, Mitchell followed her, to where Baz was half-helping, half-dragging a thirty-year-old man in a hospital jumpsuit through an open door. Mitchell couldn’t tell if they were trying to enter or leave what must have been the man’s quarters. Baz held the man’s shoulders, as if he were simply guiding him, but he stumbled, his legs buckling as if he couldn’t support himself. Disheveled brown hair hung around his shoulders, he held his hands over his ears, and his face was twisted in an anguished cry. He screamed again.

Keesey knelt by the patient and tried to take hold of his face.

“Morgan, look at me. Morgan! Focus!”

The man, Morgan, squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head.

Keesey said, “Baz, I can’t look after him now. Take him to the infirmary, and I’ll be there in a minute.” She pulled something out of her pocket—a patch—and slapped it on Morgan’s wrist. His struggles subsided; his moans continued.

The orderly nodded and lifted his burden, guiding Morgan along the corridor, past Mitchell, stopping every few steps as the man doubled over, then raising him up and continuing.

Keesey quickly took Mitchell’s arm and steered him back to his own room—just a couple of doors down from Morgan’s. She keyed it open with her wristband, and she urged him inside. He was being put away in a box.

“What’s wrong with him?” Mitchell asked.

“Get some rest, Mitchell. We’ll talk later about your treatment.”

“But—”

“He has OSDS, Mitchell.”

He sat at his tiny desk and pretended it was the Drake’s navigator station, the self-contained compartment located through a hatch at the fore of the equipmentladen bridge. Here, isolated from the bustle at the heart of the ship, he monitored the calculations that allowed the M-drive to fling the ship from one point to another across folded space. It was a mind-boggling journey, possible through a complex quirk of physics, comprehensible through advanced mathematics. Nevertheless, Mitchell was a romantic, and he could imagine the journey—not an instantaneous manipulation of space-time, but a race across the galaxy, stars flying past in a Dopplered rainbow of colors, the gas of nebulae swirling in his wake. The stuff of children’s adventure stories.

If this were the chair in his station, the computer console would have been here, the screen here, the proximity monitor here, the holo-maps there. Where had they been going? Had the blank space in his memory happened before or after they’d jumped? He would have located departure and arrival matrices, he would have generated equations describing those endpoints in real space, converted the holography . . .

He thought some part of the process would jog his memory. He calculated a dozen iterations of the same equation, variations in the matrices, imagined the graph they would plot, imagined traveling along that shape. The Universe and all its paths could be described this way.

The path made a swirl of colors—gases inflamed by cosmic radiation, distant starlight—and the colors made him nervous. They never had before.

The computer had to be connected to Law Station’s network. The Drake had docked here, so the station database would have some record of it. The Drake’s logs might even have been uploaded.

From this terminal he was only supposed to have access to entertainments, but with a little hunting, he found that the library’s reading material included the station’s daily news feed, which listed a record of dockings by interstellar ships. Mitchell found the records from a couple of weeks before and worked forward.

A week ago, the M.D.S. Francis Drake had docked for temporary repairs. It was scheduled to continue to the Mil Div Sol shipyards for more extensive repairs. That hadn’t been on their schedule; the Drake had years of operation left before it needed an overhaul. Unless something had happened. And something had happened, or Mitchell wouldn’t be here. The logs, he had to find the logs—

The screen went blank, the computer shut down. Its power had been cut off. Standard procedure for any terminal being used for unauthorized access.

He stared at his hands, flattened on the surface of the desk. They weren’t even shaking.

“Lieutenant, I’d really appreciate it if you not work on any math.” Keesey said.

He had started physical therapy—work on a treadmill, standard weightlifting. It was very boring, but the doctors watched him closely. Maybe in case he started singing when he only meant to move his leg.

He stopped walking. The treadmill powered down. “What?”

“You have books to read, vids to watch. You should avoid mathematics problems.”

He laughed. Navigational math lived in his brain like his own heartbeat; he didn’t even think of it.

Keesey explained: “The mathematics involved in navigation instigated your injury. I don’t want you making it worse.”

“Doctor, what was wrong with my cortical map?”

She consulted her handheld, donned her pleasant demeanor. “I think you might benefit from some social time. Meet some of the other patients so you can realize you’re not alone here.”

He knew he wasn’t alone. He’d seen Morgan.

The common room where stabilized patients were allowed to socialize was carpeted, comfortable, and round. It gave an impression of nest-like safety. There were no corners to cower in. A few upholstered chairs occupied one side, some tables the other. The lighting was soft. An orderly stood watch inside the doorway.

Three people wearing hospital jumpsuits sat in the room, all apart from each other. Only one, a shorthaired woman curled up in one of the easy chairs, reading a handheld, looked up when Mitchell and Keesey appeared in the doorway.

The other two, a man and a woman, sat at different tables. The woman’s eyes were closed, and she nodded in time to some tune all her own. The man held a stylus and bent over a handheld datapad, which he marked now and then. There was something odd about him, something small and shrunken. Maybe because he wore a helmet shielding him down to his ears. Mitchell expected him to start banging his head against the table at any moment.

Mitchell whispered to Keesey, “What’s the point of socializing if no one talks to each other?”

“Have a little patience.” She gestured to the man and woman at the tables. “Communication is difficult for Jaspar and Sonia, so they’ve isolated themselves. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t spend time in proximity with others. But here—this is Dora.”

No ranks, no surnames. Their old lives had been thoroughly erased here. He wanted his uniform back.

She led him to the side of the room where the woman watched them expectantly. “Dora? I’d like you to meet our new resident. This is Mitchell.”

“Hello, Mitchell.” Dora, head propped on her hand, smiled up at him.

Mitchell gave a mental sigh of relief. She sounded normal. Friendly, even. Not prone to screaming.

Keesey said, “Baz will come fetch you in half an hour.” She left them alone.

Dora gestured at the chair next to hers. “Sit. You look uncomfortable.”

“I am uncomfortable. I don’t think I belong here.”

“Because you’re not crazy. Because you’re not like them.” She nodded at the others.

“I’m not. I’m not.” Dora smiled a thin, cat-like smile. “What made them send you here?”

Dora smiled a thin, cat-like smile. “What made them send you here?”

“I don’t remember.”

She tapped her nose and grinned wider.

“So why are you here?” he asked.

She gave a demure tilt to her head. “It was a conspiracy. Captain didn’t like me. Some of the crew didn’t agree with the decision to lock me up. They’ll come back for me, break me out of here.”

And to think she acted so normal.

“Ah,” she said. “You’re giving me a look like now you think I’m crazy, too.”

“They break you out? Then what? You become pirates?”

“Hm, that sounds like fun. Didn’t you dream of that when you were a kid? Being a pirate, blazing across space having all sorts of adventures.”

“I was going to save innocent starships from the bad pirates. Kids never dream about being bad pirates; it’s always good pirates.”

“There are no good pirates.”

Mitchell gestured toward Jaspar and Sonia. “Do you know anything about them?”

Dora sat back in her chair. “Jaspar doesn’t do anything but work puzzles—for sixyear-olds. Sonia will talk to you, but she won’t make any sense. Go try it.”

He half-expected this to be some sort of initiation—humiliate the new kid by making him try to find something that wasn’t there. But he crossed the room to Sonia anyway. She was pretty, if ragged. In her thirties, like all of them were, because that was when Mand Dementia tended to strike.

“Hello,” he said, sitting in the chair across from her.

She looked up. Her eyes were swollen, shadowed, tired. Her light-colored hair needed brushing.

“I’m Mitchell. I’m new, so I thought I’d introduce myself.”

She sat very still, in contrast to her previous nodding.

“Dora says you’ll talk.”

“Glass. Concerto for Violin,” she said in a hesitating voice.

Mitchell blinked, startled. “What does that mean?”

Her eyes glistened. There was a spark of something there, a flicker. Understanding. Sentience. Something that wasn’t insane. Like she was staring through the bars of a cage.

“Chopin. Opus 28, Prelude Number 6.”

Composers. Music. She was speaking pieces of music like they meant something. He stared at her, wishing he could understand, and it was like staring into his own future.

“Chopin. Opus 28, Prelude Number 6,” she called after him when he turned to leave. Her gaze pleaded, but he didn’t understand what she wanted. Except maybe out of here, like him.

He tried talking to Jaspar next, but the man turned his back on him, filling Mitchell’s sight with the off-white mound of his helmet—that was protecting what, exactly?

He returned to Dora, who explained, “She was a musician. The dementia crosswired music and language. Keesey thinks there’s some correlation between the mood or situation and what song she says. You know, ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ means ‘pissed off.’ I think it’s a smokescreen and she’s just hiding from everyone.”

“She looks like she’s listening to something.”

“The music in her mind. The doctors won’t let her listen to actual music. They’re afraid it’ll ‘reinforce faulty neural pathways,’” she said. She did a pretty good impression of Dalton’s flat tone. “I knew her, before. She associated every step of navigating to different songs. She said the sound of an M-drive powering up matched the opening measures of the overture to ‘The Marriage of Figaro.’ Then it all went to hell, I guess.”

If someone locked you in a room full of crazy people, was there any chance that you weren’t crazy?

She said softly, “You know, everyone here commits suicide sooner or later. The whole place is a futile attempt to keep us from killing ourselves. But everyone manages it. They can’t help us. This isn’t a hospital, it’s a hospice.”

Quietly he said, “How do you stand it?”

She spread her hand over the handheld in her lap. “I’m looking at this as a chance to catch up on my reading.”

“Lieutenant? It’s time to leave.” Baz stood at his shoulder. Mitchell hadn’t been aware of his approach. Meekly, he let the orderly guide him away.

Back in his room, he listened to the piece of music Sonia had named, the Chopin. A sad piano melody wafted gently from his terminal, like a ghost. He wondered what it meant to her.

Dora was wrong: This was not a place where navigators killed themselves. Keesey was wrong: he was not ill. He kept trying to remember what happened on the Drake. The thing Scott didn’t want him to remember, that the doctors didn’t want him to think about.

He’d signed in, said good morning to the captain, went to his station. We have an hour until we need to jump, Lieutenant. The first step to initiating a jump was identifying the arrival matrix and locking in coordinates. The next step: convert the holography of local space from manifold to loop representation, another computerized operation that nonetheless required monitoring.

Ultimately the navigator, the human element, confirmed the optimum departure matrix generated by the navigation system, or chose an alternate. Then the M-drive would push the ship through it to emerge across interstellar space at the desired arrival matrix. At some level, even if only intuitively, he had to understand the mathematics that connected the two ends of the ship’s journey.

By remembering routine, he forced himself through his breakdown, moment by moment.

He confirmed the departure matrix—and it was wrong. The colors swirled around it like light bursting to its death, and the space through which the ship should have been traveling was a mouth waiting to devour them. It wasn’t a departure matrix but a black hole. The colors were wrong, the math was wrong, the computer was broken—

“Mitchell! Look at me.”

Keesey leaned over him. Her cool hand touched his cheek. His skin was clammy, and his heart was racing. He couldn’t control his breathing; air rasped roughly through his throat. He was on the floor of his quarters; some alarm must have summoned the doctor.

“What is it, Mitchell? What happened?” Her concern was professional, unemotional.

“I-I think I remembered something.”

“Can you describe it?”

He had to speak very carefully. He didn’t want to say the wrong thing. He had to say the thing that would explain all this away. “I saw colors. They were wrong.”

He winced and turned his head, or tried to, but Keesey held him in place. Baz stood behind her. A vent fan hummed somewhere.

“Make your mind a blank, Mitchell. Let the images fall away until you see nothing.” He obeyed her psychiatrist’s calm, and the colors faded. Baz came closer with a bottle and urged him to drink. Mitchell was obedient. The rehydrating fluid somehow made him feel weaker. He shouldn’t need all this attention, this treatment. He wasn’t sick.

“There was something wrong with the computer,” he tried to tell them. That would explain everything.

Keesey wrote on a handheld as she spoke. “Your cortical map shows a faulty connection within your visual cortex. You can’t trust your eyes, Mitchell. I know this is going to be hard, but I’d like you to limit your visual stimulation over the next couple of days. I can give you a blindfold if you’d like.”

Blindfold? Like taking away Sonia’s music.

“What are you writing down?” he asked. Maybe he shouldn’t be looking. Is this what she meant by visual stimulation?

“Some exercises we’ll try at your next session. We need to stabilize the dysfunctional area of the visual cortex. Please, rest your eyes if you can.”

If they could reduce his world to a tiny, thoughtless box, then nothing at all could damage him. They could blindfold him. But he was still going to try and remember.

“I overheard Dalton and Keesey talking about you,” Dora told him. He was sitting in his usual chair with his eyes closed. It didn’t help. If he could just figure out what was wrong with the computer . . .

She continued, “You’ve got the piss scared out of Dalton. He seems to think you should be locked up and tied down full time. You must have done something spectacular. On the other hand, Keesey thinks you’re the key to the holy grail that’s going to save us all.”

Dora was wrong—this wasn’t a hospice, this was a laboratory. A hundred years of interstellar travel and they hadn’t figured out how to prevent or treat Mand Dementia. That was why they were here; they were data points.

“I don’t know why either of them should think that.”

“Let me ask you a question. What is Mand navigation? Is it the math, or is it the mind of the navigator? See, the math alone isn’t enough. Otherwise the computers could do it all. But no—they need us to process it. Not just anyone can be a navigator. A navigator has to understand what the computer is doing when it crunches those numbers. All those aptitude tests—they’re measuring us, making sure we have the right kind of brain. We’re the key. So why does the Trade Guild have this place?”

She leaned over the arm of her chair and lowered her voice to a bare whisper. “The Guild doesn’t put us here because we’re crazy. They put us here because they’re afraid of us. It’s not that we’re sick. It’s that they can’t control us. We’re too powerful, and this hospital, this so-called disease, all the sedatives, it’s the only way they can keep us under control.”

Powerful? He was a navigator. Part of a crew. He wouldn’t do anything to hurt anyone. “We’re not that special—”

“Mitchell, what do we do?”

“We review the M-drive navigation system, confirming departure and arrival matrices—”

“Do we confirm them? Or do we create them?”

He stared at her. He had to squint against the light, and the colors seemed wrong.

Her eyes grew even wider. “What if some of us have learned to manipulate the process without M-drives, without starships? What would that make us?”

His voice was small. “Powerful.”

“It drives some of us crazy.” She nodded at Jaspar and Sonia at their same places at the table, absorbed in their same tasks. “But some of us are the next step in evolution. It’s not God that makes the Universe, it’s math. Know the math, and you are God.”

Mitchell found Baz and asked to be escorted back to his room. He flinched, though, when Sonia walked smoothly to intercept him before he reached the door.

She touched Mitchell’s arm. “Prokofiev. Prokofiev.”

He could only stare and wish to understand. Bowing her head, she stepped aside and let them pass.

“What did that mean?” Mitchell asked Baz.

“It doesn’t mean anything.”

They passed far enough along the curve of the station that the common room door was out of sight when a buzzer sounded, and Baz brought his wrist comm to his face. “Yeah?”

A desperate voice—Mitchell thought it belonged to the other orderly—replied. “Morgan knocked out Dalton and sealed himself in the decompression chamber.”

Baz ran, shouting, “Damn! Damn, damn—”

Running after him, Mitchell’s slippers skidded a little on the floor. This was what rebellion looked like in the Mand Dementia ward; he wanted to see it. Baz rounded a corner, flashed his wristband to open the door, and Mitchell followed him into the infirmary.

Jared pounded on the control panel of the decompression chamber and called Morgan’s name over and over. Baz joined him, pushing at the chamber’s sliding door as if he could open it with brute force. Impossible, of course, with the difference in air pressure. Mitchell had stopped in the doorway; Keesey pushed him aside.

“Oh no,” she breathed, her voice thick with despair.

Jared said, “He locked up the controls and pumped out all the air. I couldn’t do anything. I tried, but I couldn’t stop him, I couldn’t.”

Keesey’s face was twisted into an expression that might have been a comforting smile, or suppressed grief. She rested her forehead against the window. “Where is Doctor Dalton? Is he all right?”

Jared pointed back to where Dalton was sitting on the floor holding a cold compress to his head.

Mitchell’s feet were leaden as he moved toward the chamber door. He’d come this far. He had to see.

The chamber was a gray room, large enough for a stretcher. Morgan lay on the floor, curled in fetal position, naked. His hospital jumpsuit was tangled around his feet. The half-light that entered the chamber through the window cast weird shadows over him. His skin looked silver, painted with the dark splotches of burst blood vessels. His brown hair, haloed around his bent head, looked silver. He was hugging himself, as if this was what he’d wanted.

“Why?” Mitchell asked, his hand on the door, like he could reach through, reach him. Keesey said, “The air against his skin was screaming. He felt the air and heard it as screaming. He was trying to get away from the screaming.”

“I don’t understand,” he said. All people had to do to kill themselves in space was let the air out. It was so easy.

“Good,” Keesey said.

“What is he doing here?” Dalton said from across the room, pointing at Mitchell.

Keesey went over to him and commenced a hushed conversation, but at the last exchange Dalton’s voice carried.

“It’s cruel giving them hope, Ava!”

“Hush!” she hissed back.

Baz stayed with Mitchell, who stared through the window at the man lying curled in the gray shadows.

Morgan turned his head. His eyes opened and met Mitchell’s gaze. He blinked, and movement trembled along his arm.

“He isn’t dead.” Mitchell pressed both fists to the door and lurched forward until his nose touched the window. “He moved, he’s alive!”

Baz looked. “He hasn’t moved.”

“He did!”

Morgan brushed his hand along his cheek, tugging open his mouth, which was dark, bottomless and dark, like a black hole.

“Open the door! He’s alive!”

Baz took hold of his shoulders and pinned him to the wall next to the hyperbaric chamber. Keesey stood in front of him. Mitchell hadn’t seen her approach.

“Mitchell, what did you see? Tell me what you saw.”

“There isn’t time, we have to save him, we have to—”

“It’s too late, Mitchell.” She held his cheeks in her hands. “Tell me what you saw.”

He wanted to pull away from them, their oppressive touches. He wanted to put space between them, because he didn’t trust them. But Baz held him firmly against the wall, and Keesey immobilized his face so he couldn’t look away. His throat tightened, and a primitive voice inside him tried to whimper.

“What did you see?”

He swallowed to clear his throat. “He turned his face. He looked at me. I saw his eyes; there was life in them.”

“Baz, are his eyes open?”

“No, doctor.”

“Mitchell, think about it. Does that seem possible? There’s no air in that chamber.”

Logic said no. Common sense said no. He swallowed again, this time to quell a growing nausea. He saw what he saw. She was asking him to deny the truth of his own observation. He said, “The M-drive isn’t supposed to be possible. But it is.”

Keesey held one of his arms, Baz held the other. Their grips were tight; he couldn’t get away from them. If he could just get to Morgan, he’d show them. He lurched, writhed, strained to escape. Keesey pinned his upper arm between her arm and body, pulled up his sleeve, and slapped a patch on his wrist. Immediately a flush like warm syrup flowed up his arm, to his heart, to his head. His knees buckled. She and Baz lowered him to the floor.

A Keesey-shaped shadow knelt by him. She brushed her hand over his face, touching his eyes, closing his eyelids for him, and the world was dark. “Go to sleep, Mitchell. Just go to sleep.”

Mitchell worked to move his lips, to say something, to scream, to curse them. To curse them for being right.

 . . . an hour later he was screaming about flying monkeys to starboard . . .

Space could be described in terms of numbers and colors. Hydrogen burned orange, helium glowed red. But when the colors were wrong, he—

He couldn’t remember.

He awoke in his quarters, his cell, lying on the bed. When he sat up, his belly lurched sickeningly, and he lay back down. He had seen a dead man move, and it hadn’t been real.

At least, they told him it hadn’t been real.

A navigator told the captain what departure matrices to use. They were invisible, regions in space identified only by the navigator. The captain trusted him to know the way. Captain Scott had always trusted him. He was used to being trusted. He was used to seeing what others couldn’t. To doubt this, to doubt that he could see what others couldn’t—he could never trust himself again.

Morgan had been trying to tell him something. That last look he had given him, those wide-open eyes. If Morgan had wanted to kill himself, there were easier ways.

He wondered what was under Jaspar’s helmet. How had he tried to kill himself?

But what if Morgan hadn’t been trying to kill himself? He’d gone to that specific place, like it was one end of a set of coordinates of a journey he’d plotted. That was the matrix he’d found; he’d needed to launch himself from there to get to the place he really wanted to be—away from here. The jump hadn’t worked. That happened sometimes.

Morgan had tried traveling without a ship, and he’d sent Mitchell a message. Looked in his eyes and told him, it almost worked. They could see what no one else could.

The door opened, and Keesey appeared, smiling and happy, as if nothing bad happened, ever. She had the attitude of a doctor about to give a child an injection.

“Hello, Mitchell. How do you feel?” She’d been watching for the moment he woke, he was sure.

“Numb,” he said flatly.

“The sedative’s still wearing off.”

“What difference does it make?”

He didn’t know what was worse—being treated like a sullen teenager or discovering that he was acting like one. He didn’t have any dignity left.

She continued. “I’d like to help you figure out what’s going on inside your head. The kind of things a cortical map can’t tell us.”

He turned his head toward the wall and shut his eyes, because tears threatened to fill them. He was trapped on so many levels he’d lost count. On the station, in the ward, within his own mind.

“Nobody will ever let me on a ship again. And I don’t know why. I just want to go back to the Drake.”

After a moment of thoughtful silence, she asked a question that sounded genuine and not like a scientist fishing for answers. “If you hadn’t become a navigator, what would you be?”

He’d joined Trade Guild and applied for shipboard duty because he loved space. He’d become an M-drive navigator because he could, he had the aptitude, and the Trade Guild had gladly taken him and assigned him to Mil Div. Being a navigator had seemed as close as a human being could ever get to the stars. The math was the language he used to understand space.

“Maybe mathematics. Cosmology.”

“The theoretical side of M-drive navigation.”

“I suppose.”

He’d always visualized his journeys through space. They happened quickly, leaping over real space, but he always imagined stars, gases, nebulae soaring past him in a blaze of color.

Keesey said, “I’ve observed—in a completely unscientific fashion, mind you—that there are two kinds of navigators. There are those who are tested, identified as having the proper aptitude, and recruited. For them, it’s a job, like any other. Then there are those who love the work, who couldn’t think of doing anything else. They live for the distances between the stars. I’ve observed that everyone who ends up in this ward falls into the latter group.”

So, those who loved navigation would eventually be destroyed by it.

One glimpse of the Drake. To say goodbye, to have one more chance to try and remember. If he could see the Drake again, he might remember. If he could see anything besides these corridors, the lab, the walls of his tiny room. A longing overcame him, a physical pain settling in his gut. He refused to wipe away tears, because if he brought his hands to his face, Keesey would know he was crying.

Careful to steady his voice, he said, “I’d like to see outside. The station has to have an observation area near the docking ports. I want to see a ship again. Any ship.”

Spoken aloud, the desire sounded vague and childish.

“I’m not sure that’s feasible. The sensory input might trigger another episode.”

How many patients had she watched kill themselves, and still she smiled. Such blind dedication was its own insanity, but Keesey wasn’t the one locked in a cell.

“Then when can I leave my quarters? I’d like to go to the common room.”

“So you can talk to Dora some more? I know what she says, what she thinks. She’s paranoid, in a clinical sense.”

He tried sitting up again and managed to keep his stomach on an even keel. He stared at the gray rubberized floor instead of Doctor Keesey and her pitying, patronizing face.

“Dora says that all the patients here commit suicide.”

“Dora says a lot of things.”

I’m going to die soon. Being here, that was the only conclusion Mitchell could draw.

“She says Dalton thinks I should be locked up. Why would he think that?”

“I think you shouldn’t listen to everything Dora says.”

He looked up, glaring. “I don’t have anyone else to talk to.”

“I’m sorry, Mitchell, but we need to stabilize your neural—”

She didn’t need to do anything. It was all about him, his brain; he was the one who had to live with it. He’d lost his rank somewhere. Wasn’t Lieutenant anymore, just Mitchell.

“Doctor, I need to know what happened on the Francis Drake.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think you should.” She paused a moment, her mouth open in mid-sentence. Then changed her mind. “We haven’t been able to do much about controlling OSDS, much less curing it. The physicists who understand the M-drive don’t know anything about physiology, and the doctors don’t know anything about the Mdrive. Sometimes I think we’re just waiting for the genius who’s an expert in both to come along and tell us what we’ve been doing wrong.”

Mitchell took a deep breath, ignoring the pressure of the headache that threatened to build whenever he tried to think too hard, to dig in those places in his mind. His own body was telling him to leave it alone.

“The colors were wrong. I remember looking at the monitor, and the colors were wrong.” Something was wrong with the departure matrix. He’d chosen a course correction, an alternative that would avoid the wrongness he was sure was there. He’d announced the course correction, he’d entered the course correction—

Frowning, he touched his temple and shook his head. It was gone, what happened next was gone from his mind, and the pressure was building.

Keesey gripped his wrists. Startled, he flinched back.

“Mitchell,” she said, her voice stern. “Stop. Stop trying to remember. The more you do, the more you’ll exacerbate the problem. That’s where the damage started, with those memories. So just—just stop.”

She let him go and went to his desk computer, typed in a few commands. Music started, something slow and classical.

“I’ve disabled the screen on your computer. You only have audio output now. I’d like you to just listen for a while. All right?”

Who was he to argue? He didn’t say anything, didn’t even nod or shake his head. She wasn’t giving him a choice, no need for him to respond.

She left, and the door shut and locked.

M-drives pushed ships between coordinates in space dozens of light years apart. Dora insisted some navigators—the elite ones, the crazy ones—could create jump points themselves. Mitchell had never heard of such a thing. Wouldn’t someone have tried it by now?

Maybe they had and ended up here. Sedated in a featureless room, like him.

Everything that could be done could be described by mathematics. Sometimes the equations took years to discover, and M-drive mechanics were only a hundred years old. What if the technology could be scaled down to the size of an individual human body? It was a nice idea to think about, so Mitchell did.

The room could be described in terms of dimension and volume. His chair, his position on it, his distance to the door, graphed and defined.

If a memory could be delineated by the laws and structures of mathematics, then the equations defining it could be discovered, reconstructed, remembered. And he could escape from this.

The point on the middle of the plane of the door had a set of coordinates in space, identifiable along a standard set of recognized coordinates. Or he could define his own system, with that point on the door as zero-zero-zero. Any location Mitchell could wish to find himself, from any place on Law Station to, say, the bridge of the Drake, had another concrete set of coordinates. He had only to identify those coordinates, describe those coordinates. In those terms the entire Universe was finite, concrete, describable. In the end, those numbers defined what one could know, what one could manipulate.

That was all navigation was, identifying two points and traveling the most likely route between them. The math, the ships, the drive, were only tools that enabled people to travel more easily. But what if, what if . . . What if they’d been missing something all along?

He put his hand flat against the door that would not open for him. Given this point in space had a finite value, and some other point in space also had a finite value, and an equation could be found describing a relationship between them, and the path between them could be collapsed, the distance between them could be made into nothing. He could step through the door.

He’d done this a hundred times, sitting in the navigator station of the Drake. He knew the process so well, his training had ingrained it in him so thoroughly, it was part of his mind, second nature, as unconscious as dreaming.

Captain Scott said, “Greenau, do you have our heading?”

“Yes, sir. Transferred to your monitor.”

And the matrix was there. He could touch it. He could put his fingers inside it, work it open wider, stretch it open, and he could climb through and out, away from here. He dug with his fingers to make the area wider, to make a doorway. He should have listened to Dora. People would be able to travel across the galaxy with a thought. No more ships, no more danger. When he stepped through the door, he’d find Keesey and show her she was wrong, that there was more happening here than a neurophysiological disorder. Humanity was on the cusp of learning something it couldn’t yet control. The navigators who were patients here were only the first pioneers, sacrificed for the pursuit of knowledge. Mitchell felt proud to be in their company.

Only a little more, and the point would be wide enough for him to climb through.

“Lieutenant!”

The sound was a shockwave rattling his ears.

“Lieutenant Greenau! Mitchell!” Baz appeared out of nowhere. No—he’d opened the door, and he shoved Mitchell back, grabbing his hands.

Mitchell tried to explain. “No, it’s all right. I know what I’m doing. It’s all in the mathematics.”

“Mitchell, focus on me. Focus.”

That was what Keesey had said to Morgan. Mitchell looked at Baz, the cleanshaven face lined with worry. Mitchell’s gaze furrowed with confusion.

“Mitchell, look at your hands.”

He did, as Baz lifted them to hold before him.

They were bleeding, the fingertips shredded, bits of torn flesh dripping red. Mitchell lurched, trying to get away from the vision, but they were his own hands, and they followed him.

He fell against the wall, breathing hard, his arms rigid before him.

Baz touched the door controls. The door shut, revealing a red stain, blood smeared across the metal from the point through which Mitchell had been trying to escape. He’d rubbed his hands raw and bleeding against the door. Where he’d seen a jump matrix, there’d been nothing.

So what had there been when he directed the Drake to those coordinates, the ones he’d been so sure were safe?

“Come on, Mitchell. Come on, buddy.” Baz manhandled him off the floor, got him to stand, and walked him, puppet-like, to the infirmary. He murmured condescending encouragements. Mitchell heard them only distantly. He kept staring at his hands, which were the wrong color.

This time when he woke up, he was restrained. His hands, still stiff and sore from treatment, rested at his sides. He couldn’t move his legs. He lurched up anyway, thinking he must have been imagining it, that he couldn’t really be tied to the bed. He got his shoulders off the padding, then had to stop, because no matter how much he pulled and strained, he couldn’t move any farther.

He rattled his hands to make the bindings rub and squinted against the searing light that lanced pain through his mind. His whole head throbbed.

“Please,” he said, clearing a hoarseness from his throat. “Turn the lights down, please. They’re too bright.”

“The lights aren’t on, Mitchell,” said Doctor Keesey’s voice, but he couldn’t see her, couldn’t even tell where she was. She might have been close by and whispering. He winced. He knew he was in the infirmary. It smelled like the infirmary. He didn’t know anything else.

“I don’t understand.” The rich tone of despair in his own voice startled him. The voice came from another place, far from here, a place he hadn’t yet arrived.

Someone touched his arm, and he let out a startled yelp, because he hadn’t heard anyone approach the bed, but someone must have. Another dose of sedative warmed his blood, soothed his muscles, and he fell asleep gratefully.

Another voice woke him, this one speaking very close by.

“I don’t have much time, Mitchell. But I wanted to talk to you. You did it, didn’t you?”

He opened his eyes and was more relieved than he could have imagined to see the beds, supply cupboards, and equipment of the infirmary around him, gray and lurking in the dimmed to near-nothing light.

Dora was leaning on the bed, speaking close to his ear.

“Dora.” His mouth was sticky, his throat dry. His wrinkled jumpsuit scratched against his skin, his scalp itched, and he suspected he smelled ripe. He felt like an invalid, too sick for the luxury of a shower.

“Easy.” She rested a hand tenderly on his arm. “Mitchell. You have to tell me how you did it.”

“Did what?”

“Saved Morgan. You saw him—the orderlies were talking about it. You saw his soul pass on. That was what you saw, wasn’t it? He jumped to the next phase, and you saw it, and you’re getting ready to follow him. I want to know how you did it.”

Mitchell stared at her, meeting her wild-eyed gaze. Her fingers clenched on his jumpsuit, like she expected him to help her somehow, even though he was the one strapped to the bed. One of her hands had a fresh white bandage wrapped around it.

“You aren’t supposed to be here, are you?”

“I cut my hand. I did it so they’d bring me here.” She displayed the bandage. “I had to talk to you. You have to tell me what you saw.”

“I don’t know what I saw, Dora. I don’t know.” His visual cortex was damaged . . . .

“But you do. You’re special. You are, Dalton says so. Tell me about Morgan. Tell me.”

Baz or one of the doctors must have been in the next room, distracted while Dora stole in to speak with him. Dora’s urgency must have meant she didn’t have much time until they discovered her and returned her to her quarters. Which meant Mitchell didn’t have much time, either.

He had to learn to the truth.

“Dora, untie me. Undo the straps, please. Then I’ll tell you.”

Nodding slowly, she touched the straps, studied them a moment, then moved to a control panel at the head of the bed. She tapped a couple of keys, and the tension on the straps released. He could move his feet, and by wriggling his hands he freed his wrists.

Dora held his hand and pressed something flat into the palm.

“I took Baz’s wristband. He didn’t notice. You’re going to follow Morgan, aren’t you?”

“Maybe, maybe—”

“Dora!” Keesey called, reprimanding, from across the room. “Dora, I asked you to wait in the chair.”

Mitchell wrapped his hands around the loose straps and hoped the doctor didn’t examine him too closely. Dora didn’t move until Keesey called again.

“Dora.”

Slowly, Dora stepped away, her gaze still on him, not wavering, until she reached the doorway where Keesey was waiting. The doctor was a shadow, indistinct in the room’s dimness, but he recognized her shape, her posture.

“Mitchell?” she said. “Are you all right?”

He swallowed back a laugh. “Not really.”

“I know this is difficult.” She sounded sympathetic, but it was the sympathy of a person who didn’t really know what she was sympathizing with. “I’ll come back to talk with you in a little while, all right?”

“Sure.”

When she was gone, he slid off the bed to his feet, and his head swam and vision wavered. He was still tired and woozy; whether from the remnants of the sedative or his rebellious senses, he didn’t know. He was ill. He could admit that now. It only meant he had to be a little more careful. He slipped Baz’s band around his wrist.

The corridor was empty. He reached the first bulkhead door. He showed the wristband to the scanner.

The door slipped open, an escape portal, and a weight lifted from his mind. Free. He could run if he wanted.

You’re going to follow Morgan.

If he could only see space again, see ships traveling against the backdrop of stars, he’d remember, and everything would be all right. He’d remember and tell them what really happened.

He passed the common room. Only Jaspar was inside, which was too bad. If Sonia had been there, he might have asked her if she wanted to go with him. It didn’t matter what she replied; the words that came out of her mouth didn’t matter, as long as she went with him.

Still working on impulse, he crossed the room and took hold of the man’s helmet. Jaspar looked up at him. If he had looked at all confused or scared, Mitchell would have left him alone. But the man looked resigned. So Mitchell took off the helmet. His stomach spasmed with shock.

Jaspar was missing about a third of his skull, a great bite taken out of the right side, from his temple to the top of his ear and disappearing around to the back. A jagged edge of bone showed under his skin, which stretched to cover the remains of his head, dipping like a sinkhole into a concave space where the right half of his brain should have been. Looking at him from the left side, one might never guess he had anything wrong with him. From the front, he was a ruin.

Mitchell carefully set the helmet back in place. It protected whatever was left.

“What happened to you?” Mitchell breathed. Jaspar looked back and couldn’t say.

Everyone here commits suicide.

Whatever Jaspar had done hadn’t been successful. Mitchell turned and ran.

He coded open the next bulkhead door and left the ward. He could tell by the smell, which turned industrial instead of antiseptic. The corridor branched ahead, and Mitchell guessed which one would lead him to the center of the station, to the docking area. Other people he encountered struck him as strange-looking, as if he were traveling in a foreign country. He took calming breaths and tried not to look out of place. He knew the formulae that could take him from one end of the galaxy to the other. There ought to be formulae, equations, to do anything. He should find a way to turn invisible, so no one would see him. Visibility was all a matter of light and color. Space was color, the color of numbers. He could make himself transparent.

The corridor he followed now was straight, not curved, indicating he was walking along one of the spokes, toward the center of the cylindrical station. The gravity should be lessening. Mitchell stretched, lengthening his stride, to see if he could fly yet.

He keyed himself through two more bulkhead doors. Other corridors branched off to different levels, other departments, other wards. Mitchell’s heart lurched at the sight of blue Mil Div uniforms. He almost stopped to study the faces of those who wore them to see if Captain Scott was among them, if he recognized any of his crewmates. But that was unlikely. Surely the Drake had left the station by now.

Mitchell’s steps developed spring, but he wasn’t yet weightless. Ahead, the corridor opened into a wider thoroughfare, large enough for mechanized carts to travel. Equipment lockers lined the walls, vacuum suit closets in place between airlock doors. He could just go through the airlock and fly away. He could follow Morgan into an airless world.

He turned right and looked for an observation area.

“Mitchell! Mitchell, stop!” Both Keesey and Dalton appeared at the intersection of the corridor.

Mitchell ran.

“Stop him! Somebody stop him!”

He hunched his shoulders and kept on, grimly staring ahead, anticipating obstacles. Station personnel stared after him, shocked, or looked back at Keesey and Dalton pounding after him. Ahead, the corridor bulged outward. In most station designs, this meant there was some kind of work area, often with view ports that would let him see the ships in the dockyards. He was almost there. He just needed a glimpse of a ship’s running lights in space.

Somebody tackled him. A man half a head taller wearing a Mil Div uniform enclosed him in a bear hug and slammed him against the far wall. Mitchell’s head rang with the impact. He couldn’t hope to escape. He tried anyway, bucking and thrashing against his captor.

“Mitchell, look at me! Look at me!” Sweaty hands pressed against his cheeks. He shook his head, trying to break free of their grasp. “Mitchell!” Keesey shouted, pleading.

You’re going to follow Morgan.

He begged, “Let me look! I just want to look! I’m not going to kill myself, I’m not going to do anything! I haven’t done anything! Let me go!”

Multiple grips pinned his arms to the wall now. Others had come to help, he didn’t know how many. The more he struggled, the harder they held him. When he felt his sleeve being pushed up, he knew it meant somebody wielded a sedative patch.

Mitchell screamed in defiance; his voice echoing in the steel corridor startled him. “Mitchell!” Keesey managed to make herself heard over his noise. He clamped his mouth shut.

In the sudden quiet, the scene paused for a moment. Dalton held the patch ready but hadn’t yet pressed it against his arm.

Softly, Mitchell said, “Let me look. Just let me look outside one more time. Please. Please trust me. Please.”

This was his last chance at life.

He saw his desperation clearly reflected back at him in Keesey’s gaze. He thought he knew: She wanted to cure all her patients, and she kept failing. In him she was failing again.

He whispered, “You’ve never tried giving us what we want. What can it hurt? I’m already dead. Let me look.”

Dalton released him first. Then Keesey said, “Let him go.”

It had taken two others besides the doctors to restrain him. They all stepped back, tense, even Keesey, like he was a wild animal and they couldn’t predict what he’d do next. He moved deliberately, brushing his sleeves back into place. He would give them no cause to capture him like an animal and drag him back to the cage. Keeping a shoulder to the wall, he moved toward the observation area. The others followed, forming a half-circle around him, penning him in.

At last he rounded the corner, entered the darkened observation area, and his knees almost buckled. He leaned against the wall, and his eyes stung with tears.

The windows looked out over the edge of the dockyards where Law Station opened into space. A trio of ships was in dock and there was a scattering of light from the hull of the station—traffic guides, lights shining out of other view ports. The rest of the view looked into the black and the points of light of distant stars.

The Universe opened before him. This was seeing home after a long, impossible journey.

He put his face close to the window and cupped his hands around his eyes to cut out reflections.

Ships, bulging lengths of steel, drifted in the open. The blisters of modular sections—decks, sensory apparatus, weaponry, docking space—made their silhouettes uneven, monstrous, confusing. The shapes distracted the eye, which looked for the streamlined profile of something that might swim through water but only found these accreted, inartistic objects. Yet they moved so gracefully. The eye could not judge their scale against the backdrop of shadow and gray steel. He was watching a scene impossibly distant. Yet the lights threatened to swallow him.

One of the ships was a Research Division cruiser, probably returned from a frontier mission for a refit. The other two were Mil Div. The far one—his heart fluttered, because it was a courier class, a sleek, minimalist ship built for speed, blockade running and dodging firing lines. The Francis Drake was a courier. They were the prettiest ships in the fleet. It might even be—hard to tell from here.

His brow furrowed, he pulled away from the window. “Is that the Drake in dock?”

“Yes,” Keesey said.

“She should be long gone by now.” He turned back to the window, rubbed his sleeve over it when his breath fogged it.

“Look again.”

He watched for a long time, as long as he needed. The ship was locked into longterm docking, not simply linked by umbilical and airlock tubes like the other ships. She’d been damaged, a hole blasted into her starboard side as if a great monster had taken a bite out of her. Lights moved around her like fluttering insects: repair drones, suited workers on maneuvering platforms. A search light happened to run over the name written in bold cursive: M.D.S. Franc—. The remaining letters were charred.

The ship looked a little like Jaspar’s skull.

His mind formed the question, what happened, but he did not speak the words. A neural pathway that had been ruptured rebuilt itself when offered the proper bridge.

He pressed his hand to the window.

He put his thumb on the duty roster scanner inside the hatchway to the bridge.

“Good morning, Captain.”

Captain Crea Scott spared a glance over her shoulder. “Lieutenant. We have an hour until we need to jump. That enough time?”

“Yes, sir. The arrival matrix data’s on the console?”

“Ready and waiting.”

After two years together on the Francis Drake their routine was well practiced. He passed along the bridge’s upper walkway, paying only cursory attention to the displays and consoles that monitored the ship’s systems, nodding to the crewmates who looked up from their work, and arrived at the hatchway leading down to the navigator station.

M-drive navigation was a one-person booth isolated from the rest of the bridge. He settled into the couch, belted in, and activated the console. Monitors, scanners, processors lit up, casting a cool glow and humming comfortably. It was his own realm—quiet, secure, and powerful. Here, he controlled the equipment that could propel the ship light-years across space.

He clipped his comm piece over his ear and called up the navigation data, destination, and optimum window of arrival. With the ease of habit, he started the process that would identify the departure matrix for the most efficient jump to the designated arrival matrix.

Departure matrices flashed on the holographic display in unfamiliar hues. He frowned, reviewed the data, then cleared the equations. He had time; he’d simply run the calculations over again.

If he weren’t entirely clear on which matrix they left from and where they were arriving, the ship would break apart as it tried to make the crossing. An anomaly in the possible departure matrices made him pause. If he wasn’t certain about a matrix, he rejected it.

He’d never failed to find a departure matrix before. The Universe was massive and diverse; a solution could always be found. But this time they were all mouths, ready to swallow him, spitting out the wrong colors. The numbers cycled and showed him a void.

Except one. There it was, the solution. The matrix that would carry them safely away from this hole in space. He entered it, and the numbers flashed red.

Captain Scott said over the comm, “Greenau, do you have our heading?”

“Yes, sir. Departure matrix data transferred.”

A silence answered him. The workings of the ship hummed and murmured.

“Greenau, send those coordinates again, please.”

He did, with a touch of frustration.

“We can’t follow that heading, Lieutenant. Those coordinates are inside the hull of the ship.”

Of course not, the M-drive would push the ship into itself, making for one hell of an explosion. But Mitchell couldn’t ignore the numbers.

“It’s the only one, Captain.” All the other colors were wrong.

“Mitchell, are you all right?”

“There aren’t any other matrices. The space here is wrong. The colors are wrong.”

“Oh my God—”

They didn’t know it, they couldn’t see what he saw. He had to save them.

He’d fought as every crewmember on the bridge tried to stop him, because he thought he was saving them. That he could see something no one else could see. It never occurred to him that he’d gone mad. They’d seen it instantly—everyone knew what could happen to navigators, they all knew the symptoms. Still, he’d managed to get to the helm and punch in the drive protocol with the faulty departure matrix still entered—

They should have killed him before letting him get that far. They stopped short because he was theirs.

Parts of three levels ripped open instantly, spilling the ship’s guts to the void. Captain Scott managed to cut all the ship’s power, deactivating the drive before the ship was destroyed completely. The ship’s medics sedated Mitchell. The accident had killed twenty people, a third of the crew. Through sheer, stubborn heroism, Scott and the remaining crew patched up the ship and managed to fly to Law, the closest outpost. There, Lieutenant Mitchell Greenau could be deposited with people who might be able to explain what had gone wrong with his mind.

Head bowed, Mitchell knelt on the floor below the window as Doctor Keesey explained.

“The dysfunction usually develops gradually. The patient experiences memory loss, synesthesia, schizophrenia, dystonia, ataxia—any number of neurological anomalies. The captain of the ship will take a navigator off duty at the first signs. A sudden, catastrophic episode like yours is very rare.”

Who had died? He wanted to ask, but he doubted Keesey would know. Twenty names were too many to remember. But Mitchell would have to learn someday who among his friends and colleagues he had killed.

“You saw the right numbers, like you always saw,” Keesey said. “But your mind showed you something else.”

“Captain Scott didn’t want me to know what happened.”

“Because she knew it wasn’t your fault. It’s a terrible memory. I’m sorry.”

A memory that, for all he had struggled to reclaim it, now felt pristine, nestled in the center of his mind.

Mitchell felt calm now. Dalton stood nearby, and Keesey knelt beside him; both were watchful, like they expected him to break, or burst, or something, with the knowledge he had found.

Keesey finally said, “Mitchell, how do you feel?”

He despised that question.

He chuckled a little. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry—”

“Mitchell—”

He could look up, and even at this awkward angle he could see lights on the opposite curve of the station, the blackness of the shadows. The beauty was an ache in his gut. That he could still feel that beauty startled him. “Don’t isolate us from what makes us happy. We kill ourselves trying to get back to it.”

“Are you ready to come back to the ward?”

He climbed to his feet, using the wall as a prop. He looked out the window again to the stark vastness of even this little corner of space. “Just another minute, Doctor.”

They waited for him.

When Mitchell finally returned to the common room, Dora wasn’t there. She’d made an escape attempt and had been sedated.

Jaspar was at his usual table, working his word puzzles on his handheld. Mitchell found what had happened to him: he’d tried to close his head in a bulkhead door. No one knew why. The trauma team got to him quickly, and he’d survived, somehow. People were resilient.

Sonia was also present, humming, her eyes closed. Mitchell sat across from her.

He placed a player with earpieces in front of her. She stopped humming. She looked at him, her gaze narrowed and confused.

“It’s yours.”

Her hands trembling, she reached for the headphones. They skittered away from her fingertips the first time, but she caught them, slapping her hand to the table. Then she hooked on the earpieces.

Mitchell had gotten Keesey to give him records of Sonia’s musical vocabulary, all the pieces of music she’d been known to speak of. He convinced the doctors to let her have the player.

She touched the play key. Her face tightened, an expression of anxious disbelief. Then tears slipped down her cheeks. Mitchell heard the music, a faint buzzing through the earpieces, and his fists clenched nervously. He thought she would smile. He wanted her to smile.

Then she did smile, though she still didn’t relax, and Mitchell realized that she was concentrating on the music with every muscle she had. She met his gaze, and he thought she looked happy.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, September 2016.

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

Harry Turtledove

Harry Turtledove is the award-winning author of the alternate-history works The Man with the Iron Heart; The Guns of the South; How Few Remain (winner of the Sidewise Award for Best Novel); the Worldwar saga: In the Balance, Tilting the Balance, Upsetting the Balance, and Striking the Balance; the Colonization books: Second Contact, Down to Earth, and Aftershocks; the Great War epics: American Front, Walk in Hell, and Breakthroughs; the American Empire novels: Blood & Iron, The Center Cannot Hold, and Victorious Opposition; and the Settling Accounts series: Return Engagement, Drive to the East, The Grapple, and In at the Death. Turtledove is married to fellow novelist Laura Frankos. They have three daughters: Alison, Rachel, and Rebecca.

Paul M. Berger (paulmberger.com)

Paul M. Berger has been a Japanese bureaucrat, an M.I.T. program manager, an Internet entrepreneur, a butterfly wrangler, a museum administrator and (God help him) a Wall Street recruiter, all of which, in the aggregate, may have prepared him for nothing except the creation of speculative fiction. His work has appeared in publications including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2011, Strange Horizons, Interzone, Podcastle, and Escape Pod. The story of his battle against giant Japanese spiders was the first true-life memoir published in Weird Tales. He is a graduate of the 2008 Clarion workshop, and a founding member of the stunningly talented New York-based writers’ group Altered Fluid.

Carrie Vaughn (carrievaughn.com)

Carrie Vaughn is The New York Times Bestselling author of more than twenty novels and over eighty short stories. She’s best known for the Kitty Norville urban fantasy series about a werewolf who hosts a talk radio advice show for supernatural beings—the series includes fourteen novels and a collection of short stories—and the superhero novels in the Golden Age saga. She’s a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared-world novels edited by George R.R. Martin, and also writes the Harry and Marlowe steampunk short stories about an alternate nineteenth century that makes use of alien technology. She has a masters degree in English lit, graduated from the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop in 1998, and returned to the workshop as Writer in Residence in 2009. She has been nominated for the Hugo Award, various RT Reviewer Choice Awards—winning for Best First Mystery for Kitty and The Midnight Hour—and won the 2011 WSFA Small Press award for best short story for “Amaryllis.”

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). His next anthology, Galactic Empires, will be published this month and the second volume in his Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology series will be published by Night Shade Books later this year. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.