Issue 25, February 2017

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

Table of Contents

Introduction

by Neil Clarke

Twenty-one, Counting Up

a novella by Harry Turtledove

The Heart’s Filthy Lesson

a novelette by Elizabeth Bear

Twelve and Tag

a novelette by Gregory Norman Bossert

About the Artist and Authors

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the February 2017 issue of Forever Magazine!

For twenty-eight years, I’ve worked in higher education and K-12 as a technology professional. It was a career I loved, but over time, the profession and in particular, the institutional approach to the profession, has made it a less pleasant place to be. Almost five years ago, after my heart attack, I realized that my passion for it had faded, so I began making plans to jump ship.

The last six months have been difficult. I have had some nice milestones in there—turning fifty and Clarkesworld celebrating its tenth anniversary—but it was all overshadowed by events at my day job. I won’t go into specifics, but by Christmas, six people—representing over one hundred combined years of institutional knowledge—resigned. The harm being done to my fellow colleagues and a department that was the legacy of a dear friend became too much for me, so I used a few vacation days before the holidays to get more time to distance myself from the situation and recover.

My mood brightened as I used the vacation to catch up on Clarkesworld, Forever, and other editing-related tasks. Then, as if the universe was trying to tell me something, Lisa found a new job. The plan all along had been that when Lisa went back to work, we’d both work for a while and then I would resign. After some discussion about healthcare—we’ll have to be on the ACA—and having someone here when the kids come home school, we decided that I should resign now.

The day this issue is published will be my first day as a full-time editor, which isn’t to say I’ve reached the point where I’m making a full-time salary. That’s going to take time, which I finally have. The first order of business is to close the salary gap between Lisa’s job and my old one and to cover the cost of our new health plan. I’ve agreed to do some consulting and knowledge transfer sessions with my former employer, so that should help create a bit more of a buffer before our savings account has to come into play.

I’m not quite sure what this will mean for Forever. This project has always been an in-progress experiment and I’d like it to stay that way. I do have to focus the bulk my time on projects that generate more revenue that this one, but it will benefit in some way. I’ll share more as things begin to come together. After all, I’ve barely started on this new path.

Thanks for continuing to read and support Forever Magazine.

Until next month . . .

-Neil

P.S. This month we break with the format a little and go back to Harry Turtledove for novella with ties to the one we ran last month.

Twenty-one, Counting Up

Harry Turtledove

Justin Kloster looked from his blue book to his watch and back again. He muttered under his breath. Around him, a hundred more people in the American history class were looking at their watches, too. Fifteen minutes left. After that, another breadth requirement behind him. His junior year behind him, too. Three down, one to go.

At precisely four o’clock, the professor said, “Time! Bring your blue books up to the front of the lecture hall.”

Like everybody else, Justin squeezed out another couple of sentences before doing as he was told. He wrung his hand to show writer’s cramp, then stuck the pen in the pocket of his jeans and headed for the door.

“How do you think you did?” somebody asked him.

“I’m pretty sure I got a B, anyhow,” he answered. “That’s all I really need. It’s not like it’s my major or anything.” The prof could hear him, but he didn’t much care. This wasn’t a course for history majors, not that Cal State Northridge had many of those. It was a school for training computer people like him, business types, and teachers. After a moment, he thought to ask, “How about you?”

“Probably about the same,” the other fellow said. “Well, have a good summer.”

“Yeah, you, too.” Justin opened the door and stepped from air conditioning and pale fluorescent light into the brassy sun and heat of the San Fernando Valley. He blinked a couple of times as his eyes adapted. Sweat started pouring off him. He hurried across campus to the parking lot where his Toyota waited. He was very blond and very fair, and sunburned if you looked at him sideways. He was also a little—only a little—on the round side, which made him sweat even more.

When he unlocked the car, he fanned the door back and forth a couple of times to get rid of the furnacelike air inside. He cranked the AC as soon as he started the motor. After he’d gone a couple of blocks, it started doing some good. He’d just got comfortable when he pulled into the gated driveway of his apartment building.

The Acapulco was like a million others in Los Angeles, with a below-ground parking lot and two stories of apartments built above it around a courtyard that held a swimming pool, a rec room, and a couple of flower beds whose plants kept dying.

The key that opened the security gate also opened the door between the lot and the lobby. Justin checked his snailmail and found, as he’d hoped, a check from his father and another from his mother. His lip curled as he scooped the envelopes from his little mailbox. His folks had gone through a messy divorce his senior year in high school. These days, his father was living with a redheaded woman only a couple of years older than he was—and his mother was living with a dark-haired woman only a couple of years older than he was. They both sent money to help keep him in his apartment . . . and so they wouldn’t have to have anything more to do with him. That suited him fine. He didn’t want to have anything to do with them these days, either.

He used the security key again to get from the lobby to the courtyard behind it, then walked back to his apartment, which wasn’t far from the rec room. That had worried him when he first rented the place, but hardly anybody played table tennis or shot pool or lifted weights, so noise wasn’t a problem.

His apartment was no neater than it had to be. His history text and lecture notes covered the kitchen table. He chuckled as he shoved them aside. “No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks,” he chanted—and how long had people escaping from school been singing that song? He grabbed a Coke from the refrigerator and started to sit down in front of the space he’d cleared. Then he shook his head and carried the soda back into the bedroom instead.

He really lived there. His iMac sat on a desk in a corner by the closet. Justin grinned when he booted it up. It didn’t look like all the boring beige boxes other companies made. As soon as the desktop came up, he logged on to Earthlink to check his e-mail and see what was going on in some of the newsgroups he read.

None of the e-mail was urgent, or even very interesting. The newsgroups . . . “How about that?” he said a couple of minutes later. Dave and Tabitha, who’d both been posting in the Trash Can Sinatras newsgroup for as long as he’d been reading it, announced they were getting married. Justin sent congratulations. He hoped they’d get on better than his own folks had. His girlfriend’s parents were still together, and still seemed to like each other pretty well.

Thinking of Megan made him want to talk to her. He logged off Earthlink—having only one line in the apartment was a pain—and went over to the phone on the nightstand. He dialed and listened to it ring, once, twice . . . “Hello?” she said.

“What’s the story, morning glory?” Justin said—Megan was wild for Oasis. He liked British pop, too, though he preferred Pulp, as someone of his parents’ generation might have liked the Stones more than the Beatles.

“Oh. Hiya, Justin.” He heard the smile in her voice once she recognized his. He smiled, too. With exams over for another semester, with his girlfriend glad to hear from him, the world looked like a pretty good place. Megan asked, “How’d your final go?”

“Whatever,” he answered. “I don’t think it’s an A, but I’m pretty sure it’s a B, and that’s good enough. Want to go out tonight and party?”

“I can’t,” Megan told him. “I’ve got my English lit final tomorrow, remember?”

“Oh, yeah. That’s right.” Justin hadn’t remembered till she reminded him. “I bet you’re glad to get through with most of that lower-division stuff.” She was a year behind him.

“This wasn’t so bad.” Megan spoke as if telling a dark, shameful secret: “I kind of like Shakespeare.”

“Whatever,” Justin said again. All he remembered from his literature course was that he’d been damn lucky to escape with a B-minus. “I’ll take you to Sierra’s. We can get margaritas. How’s that?”

“The bomb,” Megan said solemnly. “What time?”

“How about six-thirty? I start at CompUSA tomorrow, and I’ll get off a little past five.”

“Okay, see you then,” Megan said. “I’ve got to get back to Macbeth. ’Bye.” She hung up.

Justin put This Is Hardcore, his favorite Pulp album, in the CD player and pulled dinner out of the freezer at random. When he saw what he had, he put it back and got another one: if he was going to Sierra’s tomorrow night, he didn’t want Mexican food tonight, too. Plain old fried chicken would do the job well enough. He nuked it, washed it down with another Coke, then threw the tray and the can in the trash and the silverware into the dishwasher. When he started running out of forks, he’d get everything clean at once.

He went back into the bedroom, surfed the Net without much aim for a while, and then went over to bungie.net and got into a multiplayer game of Myth II. His side took gas; one of the guys didn’t want to follow their captain’s orders, even though his own ideas were a long way from brilliant. Justin logged off in disgust. He fired up his Carmageddon CD-ROM and happily ran down little old ladies in walkers till he noticed in some surprise that it was after eleven. “Work tomorrow,” he sighed, and shut down and went to bed.

Freshly showered, freshly shaved, a gold stud in his left ear, he drove over to Megan’s parents’ house to pick her up. Her mother let him in. “How are you, Justin?” she said. “How do you like your new job?”

“I’m fine, Mrs. Tricoupis,” he answered. “The job’s—okay, I guess.” One day had been plenty to convince him his supervisor was a doofus. The guy didn’t know much about computers, and, because he was pushing thirty, he thought he could lord it over Justin and the other younger people at the store.

Megan’s mom caught Justin’s tone. Laughing, she said, “Welcome to the real world.” She turned and called toward the back of the house: “Sweetie! Justin’s here!”

“I’m coming,” Megan said. She hurried into the living room. She was a slim, almost skinny brunette with more energy than she sometimes knew what to do with. “Hiya,” she told Justin. The way she looked at him, she might have invented him.

“Hi.” Justin felt the same way about her. He wanted to grab her right then and there. If her mother hadn’t been standing three feet away, he would have done it.

Mrs. Tricoupis laughed again, on a different note. It didn’t occur to Justin that she could see through Megan and him. She said, “Go on, kids. Have fun. Drive carefully, Justin.”

“Whatever,” Justin said, which made Megan’s mom roll her eyes up to the heavens. But he’d been in only one wreck since getting his license, and that one hadn’t quite been his fault, so he couldn’t see why she was ragging on him.

He didn’t grab Megan when they got into the car, either. At the first red light, though, they leaned toward each other and into a long, wet kiss that lasted till the light turned green and even longer—till, in fact, the old fart in the SUV behind them leaned on his horn and made them both jump.

Sierra’s had stood at the corner of Vanowen and Canoga for more than forty years, which made it a Valley institution. They both ordered margaritas as they were seated, Megan’s strawberry, Justin’s plain. The waiter nodded to her but told Justin, “I’m sorry, señor, but I’ll need some ID.”

“Okay.” Justin displayed his driver’s license, which showed he’d been born in April 1978, and so had been legal for a couple of months.

“Gracias, señor,” the waiter said. “I’ll get you both your drinks.” Justin and Megan didn’t start quietly giggling till he was gone. Megan was only twenty, but people always carded Justin.

The margaritas were good. After a couple of sips of hers, Megan said, “You didn’t even ask me how I did on my final.”

“Duh!” Justin hit himself in the forehead with the heel of his hand. “How did you do?”

“Great,” she said happily. “I think I might even have gotten an A.”

“That rocks.” Justin made silent clapping motions. Megan took a seated bow. He went on, “How do you feel like celebrating?”

“Well, we probably ought to save club-hopping for the weekend, since you’ve got to go to work in the morning.” Megan stuck out her tongue at him. “See? I think about what’s going on with you.” Justin started to get chuffed, but didn’t let it show. A couple of seconds later, he was glad he didn’t, because Megan went on, “So why don’t we just go back to your place after dinner?”

“Okay,” he said, and hoped he didn’t sound slaveringly eager. Maybe he did; Megan started laughing at him. But it wasn’t mean laughter, and she didn’t change what she’d said. He raised his margarita to his lips. At twenty-one, it’s easy to think you’ve got the world by the tail.

He hardly noticed what he ordered. When the waiter brought it, he ate it. It was good; the food at Sierra’s always was. Afterwards, he had to remember to stay somewhere close to the speed limit as he drove up Canoga toward the Acapulco. Getting a ticket would interrupt everything else he had in mind.

When he opened the door to let Megan into his apartment, she said, “You’re so lucky to have a place of your own.”

“I guess so,” Justin answered. He thought she was pretty lucky to have parents who cared enough about her to want her to stay at home while she went through college. As far as he was concerned, the checks his father and mother sent counted for a lot less than some real affection would have. He’d tried explaining that, but he’d seen it made no sense to her.

She bent down and went pawing through his CDs and put on I’ve Seen Everything, the Trash Can Sinatras’ second album. As “Easy Road” started coming out of the stereo, she sighed. “They were such a good band. I wish they’d made more than three records before they broke up.”

“Yeah,” Justin said. However much he liked the Sinatras, though, he didn’t pay that much attention to the music. Instead, he watched her straighten and get to her feet. He stepped forward to slip an arm around her waist.

She turned and smiled at him from a range of about six inches, as if she’d forgotten he was there and was glad to be reminded. “Hiya,” she said brightly, and put her arms around him. Who kissed whom first was a matter of opinion. They went back into the bedroom together.

They’d been lovers for only a couple of months. Justin was still learning what Megan liked. He didn’t quite get her where she was going before he rather suddenly arrived himself. “Sorry,” he said as his heartrate slowed toward normal. “Wait a few minutes and we’ll try it again.” It was only a few minutes, too. At his age, he could—and did—take that for granted. After the second time, he asked, “Better?”

“Yeah,” Megan answered in a breathy voice that meant it was quite a bit better. Or maybe that breathy voice meant something else altogether, for she was still using it as she went on, “Get up, will you? You’re squashing me.”

“Oh.” Justin slid his weight—too much weight, he thought, not for the first time—off her. “I didn’t mean to.”

“A gentleman,” she said darkly, “takes his weight on his elbows.” But she laughed as she said it, so she couldn’t have been really mad.

Justin scratched his stomach, which gave him an excuse to feel how too much of it there was. He wasn’t really tubby. He’d never been really tubby. But he would never have six-pack abs, either. Twelve-pack or maybe a whole case, yeah. Six-pack? Real live muscles? Fuhgeddaboutit. Unlike some other girls he’d known, Megan had never given him a hard time about it.

“Shall we go down to the Probe Friday night?” he said. “They don’t have me working Saturday, so we can close the place and see what kind of after-hours stuff we can dig up.”

“All right,” Megan said. She slid off the bed and went into the bathroom. When she came back, she started dressing. Justin had half hoped for a third round, but it wasn’t urgent. He put his clothes on again, too.

The drive back to Megan’s house passed in happy silence. Justin kept glancing over at her every so often. I’m a pretty lucky fellow, he thought, finding a girl I can . . . Then he clicked his tongue between his teeth. He didn’t even want to think the word love. After he’d watched his parents’ messy breakup, that word scared the hell out of him. But it kept coming back whether he wanted it to or not. He told himself that was a good sign, and came close to believing it.

The Probe lay a couple of blocks off Melrose, the heart of the L.A. scene. Justin snagged a parking space in front of a house not far away. Megan gave him a hand. “I thought we’d have to hike for, like, miles,” she said.

“Well, we’ve got the shoes for it,” Justin said, which made her grin. They both wore knockoffs of Army boots, big and black and massive, with soles that looked as if they’d been cut from tractor tire treads. Justin made sure he put the Club on the steering wheel before he got out of the car. Things in this neighborhood had a way of walking with Jesus if you weren’t careful.

He and Megan had no trouble snagging a table when they got inside the Probe. “Guard it with your life,” he told her, and went over to the bar to buy a beer. He got carded again, and had to haul out his license. He brought the brew back to Megan, who couldn’t pass the ID test, then got another one for himself.

They both eyed the deejay’s booth, which was as yet uninhabited. “Who’s it supposed to be tonight?” Megan asked. Before Justin could answer, she went on, “I hope it’s Helen. She plays the best mix of anybody, and she’s not afraid to spin things you don’t hear every day.”

“I dunno,” Justin said. “I like Douglas better, I think. He won’t scramble tempos the way Helen does sometimes. You can really dance when he’s playing things.”

Megan snorted. “Give me a break. I have to drag you out there half the time.”

“Proves my point,” Justin said. “I need all the help I can get.”

“Well, maybe,” Megan said: no small concession. She and Justin analyzed and second-guessed deejays the way football fans played Monday-morning quarterback. Their arguments got just as abstruse and sometimes just as heated, too. Megan didn’t drop it cold here: she said, “As long as it’s not Michael.”

Justin crossed his forefingers, as if warding off a vampire. “Anybody but Michael,” he agreed. “I don’t know how they can keep using him. His list is so lame—my father would like most of it.” He could find no stronger condemnation.

A couple of minutes later, a skinny redheaded guy with a buzz cut even shorter than Justin’s, little tiny sunglasses, and a silver lip ring that glittered under the blazing spots sauntered across the stage to the booth. “It’s Douglas,” Megan said. She didn’t sound too disappointed; she liked him next best after Helen.

“Yeah!” Justin let out a whoop and clapped till his hands hurt. A lot of people in the club were doing the same; Douglas had a considerable following. But there were also scattered boos, and even one raucous shout of, “We want Michael!” Justin and Megan looked at each other and both mouthed the same word: losers.

Douglas didn’t waste time with chatter. That was another reason Justin liked him—he didn’t come to the Probe for foreplay. As soon as the music started blaring out, an enormous grin spread over his face. He didn’t even grumble when Megan sprang up, grabbed him, and hauled him out onto the floor. He gave it his best shot. With the bass thudding through him like the start of an earthquake, how could he do anything else?

Tomorrow, he knew, his ears would ring and buzz. His hearing wouldn’t be quite right for a couple of days. But he’d worry about that later, if he worried at all. He was having a good time, and nothing else mattered.

Somewhere a little past midnight, a guy with a pierced tongue drifted through the crowd passing out flyers xeroxed on poisonously pink paper. rave! was the headline in screamer type—and in a fancy font that was barely legible; Justin, who’d just taken a desktop-publishing course, would never have chosen it. Below, it gave an address a few blocks from the Probe and a smudgy map.

“Wanna go?” Justin asked when the thundering music stopped for a moment.

Megan tossed her head to flip back her hair, then wiped her sweaty forehead with the sleeve of her tunic. “Sure!” she said.

After the Probe closed at two, people streamed out to their cars. The not quite legal after-hours action—at which Justin saw a lot of the same faces—was in an empty warehouse. He’d never been to this one before, but he’d been to others like it. Dancing till whenever was even more fun than dancing till two, and there was always the chance the cops would show up and run everybody out.

There were other ways to have fun at raves, too. A pretty blond girl carried an enormous purse full of plastic vials half full of orange fluid. “Liquid Happiness?” she asked when she came up to Justin and Megan.

They looked at each other. Justin pulled out ten bucks. The girl gave him two vials. She went on her way. He handed Megan a vial. They both pulled out the stoppers and drank. They both made faces, too. The stuff tasted foul. The drugs you got at raves usually did. Justin and Megan started dancing again, waiting for the Liquid Happiness to kick in.

As far as Justin was concerned, it might as well have been Liquid Wooziness. He felt as if his head were only loosely attached to the rest of him. It was fun. It would have been even more fun if he’d been more alert to what was going on.

Things broke up about a quarter to five. Justin’s head and the rest of him seemed a little more connected. He didn’t have too much trouble driving back to the Valley. “Take you home or go back to my place?” he asked Megan as he got off the Ventura Freeway and onto surface streets.

“Yours,” Megan said at once. “We’re so late now, another half hour, forty-five minutes won’t matter at all.”

He reached out and set his hand on her thigh. “I like the way you think.”

His boss knew even less about Macs than he did about other computers. Since said boss was convinced he knew everything about everything, persuading him of that took all the tact Justin had, and maybe a little more besides. He got home from CompUSA feeling as if he’d gone through a car wash with his doors open.

As usual, he sorted through his snailmail walking from the lobby to his apartment. As usual, the first thing he did when he got to the apartment was toss most of it in the trash. And, as usual, the first worthwhile thing he did was turn on his computer and check e-mail. That was more likely to be interesting than what he got from the post office.

At first, though, he didn’t think it would be, not today. All he had were a couple of pieces of obvious spam and something from somebody he’d never heard of who used AOL. His lip curled. As far as he was concerned, AOL was for people who couldn’t ride a bicycle without training wheels.

But, with nothing more interesting showing on the monitor, he opened the message. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting. Whatever it was, it wasn’t what he got. Who but you, the e-mail read, would know that the first time you jacked off, you were looking at Miss March 1993, a little before your fifteenth birthday? Gorgeous blonde, wasn’t she? The only way I know is that I am you, more or less. Let me hear from you.

The signature line read, Justin Kloster, age 40.

Justin Kloster, age twenty-one, stared at that: stared and stared and stared. He remembered Miss March 1993 very, very well. He remembered sneaking her into the bathroom at his parents’ house, back in the days before they’d decided to find themselves and lose him. He remembered not quite being sure what would happen as he fumbled with himself, and how much better reality had been than anything he’d imagined.

What he didn’t remember was ever telling anybody about it. It wasn’t the sort of thing you advertised, that was for damn sure. Could he have mentioned it when he was shooting the bull with his buds, maybe after they’d all had a few beers, or more than a few? He shook his head. No way.

He looked at the signature line again. Justin Kloster, age 40? “Bullshit,” he muttered. He wasn’t forty, thank God. Forty was the other side of the moon, the side old men lived on. Not really old, ancient, but old like his father. Old enough. The only thing that made the idea getting to forty even halfway appealing was that he might do it with Megan. After all, she’d only be thirty-nine then.

What to do about the message? He was tempted to delete it, forget it. But he couldn’t, not quite. He chose the REPLY function and typed, What kind of stupid joke is this? Whatever it is, it’s not funny. He thought about adding Justin Kloster, age 21 to it, but he didn’t want to acknowledge it even enough to parody. He sent the bald e-mail just the way it was.

He walked out to the kitchen and threw a Hungry Man dinner in the microwave. As soon as it started, he opened the refrigerator and dithered between Coke and a beer. He seldom drank alcohol when he was by himself. Today, he made an exception. He popped open a can of Coors Light and took a long pull. The beer slid down his throat, cold and welcome.

As if drawn by a magnet, he went back to the computer. He had no way of knowing when the smartass on AOL who signed himself with his own name would send more e-mail soon, or even if he’d send any more at all. But the fellow might—and Justin spent a lot of time online just about every evening, anyhow.

Sure as hell, new e-mail from that same address came in before the microwave buzzed to tell him his dinner was done. He took another big swig of beer, then opened the mail.

No joke, it read. 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 else would know your dad fed you Rollos when he took you to work with him that day when you were eight or nine? Who else 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. Justin Kloster.

“Jesus!” Justin said hoarsely. His hands were shaking so much, the beer slopped and splashed inside the can. He had to put the can down on the desk, or he would have spilled beer on his pants.

Out in the kitchen, the microwave did let him know his dinner was ready. He heard it, but he hardly noticed. He couldn’t take his eyes off the iMac’s monitor. Nobody knew that stuff about him. Nobody. He would have bet money neither his mother nor his father could have told how he lost his first tooth, or when. He would have bet more money his dad couldn’t have remembered those Rollos to save himself from a firing squad.

As for Lindsey Fletcher . . . “No way,” he told the words, the impossible words, on the screen. Telling them that didn’t make them go away. Lindsey was a cute little blonde he’d known in high school. They’d never even broken up, not in the sense of a fight or anything, but she’d moved out to Simi Valley with her folks the summer his parents’ marriage struck a mine, and they’d stopped dating. A damn cute little blonde—but she did have that mole.

Justin went to the kitchen, opened up his dinner, and carried it and a couple of dish towels and (almost as an afterthought) a knife and fork back into the bedroom. He put the towels in his lap so the dinner tray wouldn’t burn his legs and started to eat. He hardly noticed what he was shoveling into his face. What do I say? he kept wondering. What the hell do I say?

That depended on what he believed. He didn’t know what the hell to believe. “Time travel?” he said, and then shook his head. “Bullshit.” But if it was bullshit, how did this guy sending him e-mail know so goddamn much? The truth, no doubt, was out there, but how could anybody go about getting his hands on it?

The line made him decide how to answer. I don’t watch X-Files much, he typed, but maybe I ought to. How could you know all that about me? I never told anybody about Lindsey Fletcher’s neck.

Whoever the other guy was, he answered in a hurry. Justin imagined him leaning toward his computer, waiting for AOL’s stupid electronic voice to tell him, “You’ve got mail!” and then writing like a bastard. How do I know? he said. 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. Believe me, I’m back here for a good reason.

“Believe you?” Justin yelped, as if the fellow sending him e-mail were there in the bedroom with him. “How am I supposed to believe you when you keep telling me shit like this?” His fingers said the same thing, only a little more politely. But that’s impossible, he wrote, and sent the message.

Okay. The reply came back almost instantly. But if it is impossible, how do I know all this stuff about you?

That was a good question, what his grandfather called the sixty-four-dollar question. Justin would have been a lot happier had he had a sixty-four-dollar answer for it. Since he didn’t, being flip would have to do. I don’t know, he wrote. How do you know all this stuff about me?

Because it’s stuff about me, too, said the fellow on the other end of the computer hookup. You don’t seem to be taking that seriously yet.

Justin snorted. “Yeah, right,” he said. “Like I’m supposed to take any of this crap seriously. Like anybody would.” He snapped his fingers and laughed out loud. “I’ll fix you, you son of a bitch. Hassle me, will you?” His fingers flew over the keyboard. If you’re supposed to be me, then you’ll look like me, right?

He laughed again. That’d shut Mr. Mindgames up, by God. Except it didn’t. Again, the reply came back very fast. Right, wrote the stranger who claimed to be his older self. 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.

“Huh,” Justin said. He hadn’t expected to have his bluff called. He hadn’t thought it was a bluff. He typed three defiant words—See you there—sent them off, and shut down his iMac. It was still early, but he’d had enough electronic weirdness for one night.

Like Topanga Plaza, the Northridge mall was one of Justin’s favorite places. He’d spent a lot of time at both of them, shopping and killing things at the arcade (though Topanga, for some reason, didn’t have one) and hanging out with his buds and just being by himself. He’d been especially glad of places to be by himself when his parents’ marriage went south. Northridge had just reopened then, after staying shut for a year and a half after the big quake in ’94. If they’d let him, he would have visited it while it was in ruins. Even that would have beat the warfare going on at his house.

He parked in the open lot on the south side of the mall, near the Sears. Everyone swore up and down that the new parking structures they’d built since the earthquake wouldn’t come crashing down the way the old ones had. Maybe it was even true. Justin didn’t care to find out by experiment.

His apartment was air-conditioned. His Toyota was air-conditioned. He worked up a good sweat walking a hundred feet from the car to the entrance under the Sears façade that was also new since the quake. Summer was here early this year, and felt ready to stay for a long time. Global warming, he thought. He opened the door. The mall, thank God, was also air-conditioned. He sighed with pleasure at escaping the Valley heat again.

He walked through the Sears toward the entryway into the rest of the mall. None of the men’s clothing he passed looked interesting. Some of it was for businessmen—not particularly successful businessmen, or they wouldn’t shop at Sears. The rest of the clothes were casual, but just as unexciting.

An escalator took Justin up to the second level. The B. Dalton’s was on the right-hand side as he went north, not too far past the food court in the middle of the mall. He paused a couple of times to eye pretty girls sauntering past—yeah, he was seeing Megan all the time and happy about that, but it didn’t mean he was blind. One of the girls smiled at him. He wasn’t foolish enough to let himself get distracted. Not quite.

Past the food court, on toward the bookstore. A guy was leaning against the brushed-aluminum rail—a blond, slightly chunky guy in a black T-shirt, baggy jeans, and Army boots. He’d been looking the other way. Now he swung his head back toward Justin—and he had Justin’s face.

Justin stopped in his tracks. He felt woozy, almost ready to pass out, as if he’d stood up too suddenly from a chair. He had to grab the rail himself, to keep from falling down. He didn’t know what he’d expected. That the other guy’s e-mail might be simple truth had never crossed his mind.

He wanted to get the hell out of there. His older self also looked a little green around the gills. And why not? He was meeting himself for the first time, too. Justin made himself keep going.

When he got up to himself-at-forty, his older self stuck out a hand and said, “Hi. Thanks for coming.” His voice didn’t sound the way Justin’s did in his own ears, but it did sound the way he sounded when he got captured on videotape.

Both Justins looked down at the hands that matched so well. “Maybe I’m not crazy,” Justin said slowly. “Maybe you’re not crazy, either. You look just like me.” He studied his older self. Despite the buzz cut that matched his own, despite the Cow Pi T-shirt, he thought himself-at-forty did look older. But he didn’t look a lot older. He didn’t look anywhere close to the age he was claiming.

“Funny how that works,” his older self said with a tight smile.

He was sharper, more abrupt, than Justin. He acted like a goddamn adult, in other words. And, acting like an adult, as if he knew everything there was to know just because he had some years under his belt, he automatically ticked Justin off. Justin put his hands on his hips and said, “Prove you’re from the future.” Maybe this guy was a twin separated at birth. Maybe he was no relation, but a double anyhow. Maybe . . . Justin didn’t know what.

His older self reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a little blue plastic coin purse, the kind only a grownup would use. Squeezing it open, he took out a quarter. “Here—this is for you.” He gave it to Justin.

It lay in Justin’s hand, eagle side up. Justin turned it over. It still looked like any other quarter . . . till he saw the date. He thought his eyes would bug out of his head. “It’s from 2012,” he whispered. “Jesus. You weren’t kidding.” Four little numbers stamped onto a coin, and the reality of what he’d just walked into hit him over the head like a club.

“I told you I wasn’t.” His older self sounded like an adult talking down to a kid. That helped convince him, too. Himself-at-forty continued, “Come on. What’s the name of that Korean barbecue place over on Reseda?”

“The Pine Tree?” Justin said. He liked the restaurant. He’d taken Megan there once, and she’d liked it, too.

“Yeah.” Himself-at-forty sounded as if he’d needed reminding. Did that mean he didn’t go there in 2018? Before the question could do anything more than cross Justin’s mind, his older self went on, “Let’s go over there. I’ll buy you dinner, like I said in the e-mail, and we can talk about things.”

Justin was hungry—he usually ate dinner earlier—but that wasn’t tops on his list. He came out with what was: “Like what you’re doing here.”

His older self nodded. “Yeah. Like what I’m doing here.”

As often as not, Justin and whomever he was with turned out to be the only Caucasians in the Pine Tree. He and Megan had been. He and his older self were, too. The waitresses were all Korean; none of them spoke a whole lot of English. Himself-at-forty ordered marinated beef and pork they could cook themselves at the gas grill set into the tabletop. He ordered a couple of tall OB beers, too. Justin nodded at that. God knew he could use a beer right now.

As their waitress wrote down the order, she kept looking from his older self to Justin and back again. “Twins,” she said at last.

“Yeah,” himself-at-forty said. Justin wondered if he was lying or telling the truth. Damned if I know, he thought as the waitress headed back to the kitchen. He wanted to giggle. This whole business was too bizarre for words.

Instead of giggling, he pointed at his older self. “Tell me one thing,” he said in deep and portentous tones.

“What?” Himself-at-forty looked alarmed. Heaven only knew what he thought would come out of Justin’s mouth.

Justin leered at him. “That the Rolling Stones aren’t still touring by the time you’re—I’m—forty.”

“Well, no.” Now his older self looked irked, as if he couldn’t believe Justin would come out with anything as off-the-wall as that. Don’t have much fun at forty, do you? Justin thought.

Here came the waitress with the beer. She hadn’t asked either of the Justins for his driver’s license. A good thing, too. Justin wondered what kind of license his older self had, or if himself-at-forty had one at all. But he had more important things to worry about. After the waitress went off to deal with a party of Koreans at another table, Justin 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 took a big sip of his OB.

“That’s right,” himself-at-forty said. Again, he sounded as if he knew everything there was to know. That rubbed Justin the wrong way. But, goddamn it, his older self did know more than Justin. How much more? Justin didn’t know. Too much more. He was sure of that.

He drank his glass empty, and filled it from the big bottle the waitress had set in front of him. Pretty soon, that second glass was empty, too. Justin killed the bottle pouring it for a third time. He waved to the waitress for another beer. Why not? His older self was buying. Himself-at-forty hadn’t even refilled his glass once yet. Terrific, Justin thought. I turn into a wet blanket.

Not only did the waitress bring his new beer, but also dinner: plates of strange vegetables (many of them potently flavored with garlic and chilies) for Justin and his older self to share and the marinated beef and pork. She started the gas fire under the grill and used a pair of tongs to put some meat on to cook for them. As the thinly sliced strips started sizzling, Justin pointed at them and said, “Oh my God! They killed Kenny!”

“Huh?” His older self clearly didn’t remember South Park. Wet blanket, Justin thought again. Then a light came on in his older self’s eyes. “Oh.” Himself-at-forty laughed—a little.

Justin said, “If you’d have said that to me, I’d have laughed a lot harder.” He decided to cut his older self some slack: “But the show’s not big for you any more, is it? No, it wouldn’t be. 2018. Jesus.” He made a good start on the new OB.

His older self grabbed the tongs and took some meat. So did Justin. They both ate with chopsticks. Justin wasn’t real smooth with them, but he looked down his nose at people who came to Asian restaurants and reached for the knife and fork. They could do that at home. Himself-at-forty handled the chopsticks almost as well as the Koreans a couple of tables over. More practice, Justin thought.

After they’d made a fair dent in dinner, Justin said, “Well, will you tell me what this is all about?”

His older self answered the question with another question: “What’s the most important thing in your life right now?”

Justin grinned. “You mean, besides trying to figure out why I’d travel back in time to see me?” Himself-at-forty nodded, his face blank like a poker player’s. Justin went on, “What else could it be but Megan?”

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

“Things with Megan don’t need setting right.” Justin could feel the beer he’d drunk. It made him sound even surer than he would have otherwise. “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?” That was the beer talking, too. Without it, he’d never have spoken so freely.

“None.” Himself-at-forty touched the corner of his jaw, where a muscle was twitching.

“None?” That didn’t sound good. The way his older self said the word didn’t sound good, either. Justin noticed something he should have seen sooner: “You’re not wearing a wedding ring.” His older self nodded. He asked, “Does that mean we don’t get married?”

“We get married, all right,” his older self answered grimly. “And then we get divorced.”

Ice ran through Justin. “That can’t happen,” he blurted.

He knew too goddamn much about divorce, more than he’d ever wanted to. He knew about the shouts and the screams and the slammed doors. He knew about the silences that were even deadlier. He knew about the lies his parents had told each other. He knew about the lies they’d told him about each other, and the lies they’d told him about themselves. He had a pretty fair notion of the lies they’d told themselves about themselves.

One of the biggest lies each of them had told him was, Of course I’ll still care for you just as much afterwards as I did before. Megan wasn’t the only one who envied him his apartment—a lot of people his age did. What the apartment meant to him was that his folks would sooner give him money to look out for himself than bother looking out for him. He envied Megan her parents who cared.

And now his older self was saying he and Megan would go through that? He sure was. His voice hard as stone, he squashed Justin’s protest: “It can. It did. It will.” That muscle at the corner of his jaw started jumping again.

“But—how?” Justin asked, sounding even in his own ears like a little boy asking how his puppy could have died. He tried to rally. “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.” He took a long pull at his beer, trying to wash the taste of his parents out of his mouth. And he hadn’t smiled back at that girl in the mall. He really hadn’t.

With weary patience, his older self answered, “You can fight about sex, you can fight about money, you can fight about in-laws. We ended up doing all three, and so . . . ” Himself-at-forty leaned his chopsticks on the edge of his plate and spread his hands. “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.”

Justin poured the last of the second OB into his glass and gulped it down. After a bit, he said, “You must have wanted to do that a lot.”

“You might say so.” His older self drank some more beer, too. He still sounded scratchy as he went on, “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 Justin couldn’t make himself sound as if he believed it. Divorce? He shuddered. From everything he’d seen, anything was better than that. In a small voice, he asked, “What will you do?”

“I’m going to take over your life for the next couple of months.” His older self sounded absolutely sure, as if he’d thought it all through and this was the only possible answer. Was that how doctors sounded, recommending major surgery? Justin didn’t get a chance to wonder for long; himself-at-forty plowed ahead, relentless as a landslide: “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.” Now Justin regretted pouring down two tall beers, one right after the other. He needed to think clearly, and he couldn’t quite. “You’ll be taking Megan out?”

“That’s right.” Himself-at-forty nodded.

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

“Yeah,” his older self 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. Still . . . ” Justin grimaced. “I don’t know. I don’t like it.” When you imagined your girlfriend being unfaithful to you, you pictured her making love with somebody else. Justin tried to imagine Megan being unfaithful to him by picturing her making love with somebody who looked just like him. It made his mental eyes cross.

His older self folded his arms across his chest and sat there in the booth. “You have a better idea?” he asked. He must have known damn well that Justin had no ideas at all.

“It’s not fair,” Justin protested. “You know all this shit, and I’ve gotta guess.”

With a cold shrug, himself-at-forty said, “If you think I did this to come back and tell you lies, go ahead. That’s fine. You’ll see what happens. And we’ll both be sorry.”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know.” Justin shook his head. He felt trapped, caught in a spider’s web. “Everything sounds like it hangs together, but you could be bullshitting, too, just as easy.”

“Yeah, right.” Amazing how much scorn his older self could pack into two words.

Justin got to his feet so fast it made him lightheaded for a couple of seconds—or maybe that was the beer, too. “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, planting his feet with exaggerated care at every stride.

Night had fallen while he and himself-at-forty were eating. He drove back to his apartment building as carefully as he’d walked. Picking up a 502 for driving under the influence was the last thing he wanted. One thought pounded in his head the whole way back. What do I do? What the hell do I do?

He’d just come out of the bathroom—the revenge of those two tall OBs—when the telephone rang. He wondered if it was his older self, calling to give him another dose of lecture. If it was, he intended to tell himself-at-forty where he could stick that lecture. “Hello?” he said suspiciously.

But it wasn’t his older self. “Hiya,” Megan said.

“Oh!” Justin shifted gears in a hurry. “Hi!”

“I just called up to say I think you’re the bomb,” she told him, and hung up before he could answer.

He stared at the telephone handset, then slowly set it back in its cradle. “God damn you,” he whispered, cursing not Megan but his older self. “Oh, God damn you.” He had a girl like this, and himself-at-forty was saying he’d lose her? I can’t do that, he thought. Whatever it takes, I can’t do that.

Even if it means bowing out of your own life for a while? Even if it means letting him stick his nose in? But his older self sticking his nose in didn’t worry Justin. His older self sticking something else in . . .

I don’t have to make up my mind right away. I’m not going to make up my mind right away. This is too important. And if my older self can’t figure that out, tough shit, that’s all.

Justin checked his e-mail even before he brushed his teeth the next morning. Himself-at-forty hadn’t started nagging, anyhow. There was e-mail from Megan, though. Everything else could wait, but he opened that. It said, The bomb. ;-)

He grinned and shook his head. But the grin slipped a moment later. I can’t let her get away from me. Knowing she might . . . He ground his teeth. He didn’t just know she might. He knew she would. He’d never thought of being blind to the future as a blessing, but knowing some of it sure felt like a curse.

At work, his boss chewed him out for not paying attention to anything going on around him. He couldn’t even blame the guy; he wasn’t paying attention to anything going on around him. Too many important things spun through his mind.

He gulped lunch at the Burger King four doors down from the CompUSA, then went to the pay phones around the side of the building. He fed in a quarter—not the one from 2012; he was saving that—and a dime and called Megan. “Hello?” she said.

“Hi. I think you’re the bomb, too.” It wasn’t I love you—it wasn’t even close to I love you—but it was the best he could do.

Megan giggled, as if she’d been waiting by the telephone for him to call. “I bet you say that whenever you phone a girl who isn’t wearing any clothes,” she answered—and hung up on him again.

He spluttered, which did him no good. He reached into his pants pocket for more change to call her back and find out why she wasn’t wearing any clothes—or if she really wasn’t wearing any clothes. But that didn’t matter. He had the image of her naked stuck in his head—which had to be just what she’d had in mind.

As he walked back, he realized he’d made up his mind. I can’t lose her. No matter what, I can’t lose her. If that meant letting his older self fix things up—whatever there was that needed fixing—then it did, and that was all there was to it.

Despite deciding, he took another day and a half to write the e-mail that admitted he’d decided. All write, dammit, he typed. 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.

After he’d sent the e-mail, he looked at it again. It wasn’t exactly gracious. He shrugged. He didn’t feel exactly gracious, either.

An answer came back almost at once. Himself-at-forty must have been hanging around the computer waiting for him to say something. You won’t be sorry, the e-mail told him.

Whatever, Justin wrote. His hands balled into fists. He made them unclench. How do you want to make the switch?

Meet me in front of the B. Dalton’s again, himself-at-forty replied. 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?

Justin sighed. Whatever, he wrote again. Packing didn’t take anything like two hours. He thought about bringing the iMac along, but ended up leaving it behind and taking his PowerBook instead. It was old, but it would do for games and for the Net. He scribbled a note and set it by the iMac’s 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.

Once he’d stuffed everything he thought he needed into a pair of suitcases, he put them in the trunk of his Toyota and headed for the mall. He’d gone only a couple of blocks when he snapped his fingers and swung down to the Home Depot on Roscoe first.

Even with the stop, he still took his place in front of the bookstore before his older self got there. This time, seeing himself-at-forty made him grim, not boggled. “Let’s get this over with,” he said.

“Come on. It’s not a root canal,” his older self said. Justin shrugged. He’d never had one. Himself-at-forty went on, “Let’s go do it. We’ll need to swap keys, you know.”

“Yeah,” Justin said. “I had spares made. How about you?”

“Me, too.” His older self grinned a lopsided grin. “We think alike. Amazing, huh?”

“Amazing. Right.” Justin abruptly turned away and started walking toward Sears and the lot beyond it. “This better work.”

“It will.” Himself-at-forty sounded disgustingly confident.

The two Toyotas sat only a couple of rows apart. They were almost as much alike as Justin and his older self. Justin moved his things into the other car, while himself-at-forty put stuff in his. They traded keys. “You know where I live,” Justin said. “What’s my new address?”

“Oh.” His older self gave it to him. He knew where it was—not as good a neighborhood as the one the Acapulco was in. Himself-at-forty went on, “The car’s insured, and you’ll find plenty of money in the underwear drawer.” His older self patted him on the shoulder, the only time they’d touched other than shaking hands. “It’ll be fine. Honest. You’re on vacation for a couple of months, that’s all.”

“On vacation from my life,” Justin exclaimed. He glared at his older self. “Don’t fuck up, that’s all.”

“It’s my life, too, remember.” Himself-at-forty got into the car Justin had driven to the mall. Justin went to his older self’s Toyota. Still half wondering if this were some elaborate scam, he tried the key. The car started right up. Justin drove off to see where the hell he’d have to wait this out.

Sure enough, the Yachtsman and the apartment buildings on the block with it were older and tireder-looking than the Acapulco and its surroundings. It wasn’t a neighborhood where guys sold crack from parked cars, but it might be heading that way in a few years. The one bright spot Justin saw was the Denny’s on the corner. If he got sick of frozen dinners and his own bad cooking, he could always eat there.

He found his parking space under the apartment building. When he went out to the lobby, a mailbox had kloster Dymo-taped onto it. He checked. His older self hadn’t got any mail. Justin went inside and found his apartment. The door key and dead-bolt key both worked. “Well, what have we got?” he wondered.

When he discovered what he had, his first impulse was to walk right out again. The TV just plugged into the wall: no cable, not even a VCR hooked up. The stereo had to have come out of an antique store. It played cassettes and vinyl, but not CDs. He could play CDs on the PowerBook, but even so . . .

He opened the underwear drawer, more than half expecting BVDs and nothing else. But under the briefs lay . . . “Christ!” he exclaimed. How much was there? He picked up wad after wad of cash, threw them all down on the bed, and started counting. By the time he was through, he’d had almost as much fun as he’d ever had in his life.

Close to seventy grand, he thought dazedly. Jesus. All at once, he stopped doubting his older self’s story. Nobody—but nobody—would spend, or let him spend, that kind of money on a scam. The bills weren’t even crisp and new, as they might have been if they were counterfeits. They’d all been circulating a good long while, and couldn’t be anything but genuine.

“Okay,” he said, fighting the impulse to count them again. “I’m on vacation. Let the good times roll.” He did recount a couple of thousand dollars’ worth, just for the hell of it.

He’d never been in a spot where he could spend all the money he wanted, do whatever he felt like doing. If he wanted to go out and get a VCR, he could—and he intended to. He could charge right down to Circuit City or Best Buy or Fry’s and . . .

“Uh-oh,” he muttered. If he went to any of those places, there was some chance he’d run into Megan. His older self didn’t want him running into Megan for a while, and his older self had left him all this money to play around with so he wouldn’t. He shrugged. He could go over to Burbank or out to Simi Valley or wherever and get a VCR. Then he could charge right down to Blockbuster and rent enough tapes to keep him from getting too . . .

Uh-oh. He didn’t say it this time, but he thought it. Megan was liable to show up at either of the local Blockbusters; she liked watching movies on video as much as everybody else did.

“Okay,” Justin said, as if somebody were arguing with him. “I’ll find some video place out in the boonies, too.”

That made him happier. He had time to kill—nothing but time to kill—and movies were a great way to kill it. But he couldn’t watch movies and play computer games all the damn time. I can go down to . . . But that thought stopped before it was even half formed. He couldn’t go to the mall, not to Northridge, not to Topanga Plaza, not even to the half-dead Promenade farther down Topanga or to tacky Fallbrook. Megan visited all of them.

“Shit,” he said in a low voice. And he really couldn’t go to any of his favorite restaurants, because where would himself-at-forty be taking Megan? To one of them or another, sure as hell. What would she think if she were with his older self and then saw him come in by himself in different clothes? Nothing good, that was for damn sure.

Great, Justin thought. I can do whatever I want, as long as I don’t do it in any of the places I usually go to. Or I can just sit here in this miserable apartment and jack off. He suspected he’d end up doing a lot of that. Thinking about Megan immediately made him want to do more than think about Megan: he was, after all, twenty-one.

Down, boy, he told himself. Himself didn’t want to listen. While he was holed up here by his lonesome, himself-at-forty would be taking Megan out, taking Megan home, taking Megan to bed. No, he didn’t like that worth a rat’s ass. He tried again to imagine Megan being unfaithful to him with somebody with his own face. He came a lot closer to succeeding this time.

He paced out to the kitchen. Even looking at the bed turned him on and pissed him off, regardless of whether it had cash strewn all over it. When he opened the refrigerator, he found a couple of six-packs of microbrews along with fresh vegetables and other things he was unlikely to eat. He tried to unscrew the cap from one of the beers, only to discover it didn’t unscrew. That meant he had to rummage in the drawer till he came up with an opener. Once he got the cap off, he threw it at the wastebasket—and missed. He had to bend down and drop it in—and even then he almost missed again.

Sighing, Justin sipped the hard-won Anchor Porter . . . and made a horrible face. “People pay a buck a bottle for this?” he said. “Jesus! Gimme Coors Light any day.”

When he opened the freezer, he found steaks and chops and chicken in there. He supposed he could do up the steaks in a pan on the stove, but chicken was out of his culinary league. Fortunately, there were also several frozen dinners. He didn’t know what he would have done if his older self had turned into a total foodie.

Like hell I don’t know, he thought, and grinned. I’d just eat out all the time. With that Denny’s right at the end of the block, I might anyway.

After watching network TV that night, he realized he would have to get a VCR ASAP if he wanted to stay anywhere close to sane. He ate bacon and eggs and hash browns at the Denny’s the next morning, then drove over to an electronics place he knew on Ventura Boulevard in Encino—only twenty minutes’ drive from the Yachtsman, but not a place where he was at all likely to run into Megan. He bought the VCR, put the box in his trunk, and headed to a Blockbuster a few doors away to get some tapes.

His address came up on their computer system. “You do know we have locations closer to your home, sir?” the clerk said.

“Yeah.” Justin nodded. “This is near where I work.”

He’d never been a great liar. He was, at the moment, wearing a Dilbert T-shirt and a pair of baggy shorts. The clerk raised an eyebrow. But Justin’s credit checked out okay, so that was all she did.

Having lugged the VCR into his apartment, he discovered, not for the first time, that being a computer-science major didn’t make the damn thing easy to set up. He fumed and mumbled and cussed and finally got the gadget acting the way it was supposed to. With Deep Impact on the TV and a Coke in his hand, life looked better.

He put his feet on the coffee table and belched enormously. Nothing to do but kick back and watch movies for a couple of months? Okay, I can handle it, he thought. Then he snapped his fingers. “Potato chips!” he said out loud. “Doritos. Whatever.”

That day went fine. The next day went all right. By the middle of the afternoon on the third day, he was sick of movies and computer games and hoped he’d never see another nacho-cheese Dorito as long as he lived. He went into the bedroom and picked up the phone. He’d dialed four digits of Megan’s number before he remembered he wasn’t supposed to call her.

“God damn it,” he muttered. “This is so lame. What am I going to do, stay cooped up here till I get all dusty?”

His older self wanted him to do exactly that. His older self had left him plenty of money so he would do exactly that. But what good was the money if he had trouble finding places to blow it? After staring at the walls—and the TV screen, and his laptop’s monitor—for two days straight, his affection for his older self, which had never been high, sank like the Dow on an especially scary day. He’d never understood people saying money couldn’t buy happiness. Now maybe he did.

He wanted to talk with his girlfriend. Hell, he wanted to lay his girlfriend. Himself-at-forty was telling him he couldn’t do either. Himself-at-forty, the son of a bitch, was probably doing both. Justin was no better at handling frustration than anyone else his age. The hornier he got, the worse he got, too.

If he couldn’t talk to Megan, he damn well could talk to his older self. He dialed the number at his apartment, which felt funny. He never called there. Why would he? If he wasn’t home, who would answer? A burglar?

But somebody was home to answer now. And, after three rings, somebody did. “Hello?” Himself-at-forty sounded as if he were talking from deep underwater.

“Hi,” Justin said cheerfully; he had all he could do not to say hiya, the way Megan did. “How are things?”

“Things are fine,” his older self answered after a longish pause. He still sounded like hell; if he hadn’t been ridden hard and put away wet, Justin had never heard anybody who had. Another pause. Then himself-at-forty tried again: “Or they were till you called. I was asleep.”

“Now?” Justin exclaimed in disbelief. He looked at his watch: half past two. He didn’t think he’d been asleep at half past two since he was three years old and quit taking naps. “I called now ’cause I figured you wouldn’t be.”

“Never mind.” His older self yawned, but seemed a little less fuzzy when he went on, “Yeah, things are okay. We went to the Probe last night, and—”

“Did you?” Justin broke in. He didn’t like the way that sounded: him stuck here in this miserable place, himself-at-forty having a good time at his favorite club. No, he didn’t like that at all. “What else did you do?”

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

Yeah, you’d have forgotten, wouldn’t you, you sorry bastard? Aloud, Justin said, “Lucky you. And what else did you do?” He could imagine Megan in his older self’s arms, all right. Now he could. He’d had plenty of time to try. Practice made perfect, dammit. He could hate what he imagined, too.

“About what you’d expect,” himself-at-forty said. Christ, he sounded arrogant. “I’m you, remember. What would you have done?” Justin sighed. He knew what he would have done, by God. But no. He’d stayed here by his lonesome—by his very lonesome—so his older self could do it instead. He sucked in a long, angry breath preparatory to telling himself-at-forty where to head in. Before he could, his older self went on, “And when I took her home, I told her I loved her.”

“Jesus!” Justin yelped, forgetting whatever else he might have said. “What did you go and do that for?”

“It’s true, isn’t it?” his older self asked.

“That doesn’t mean you’ve got to say it, for Christ’s sake,” Justin answered. He shook his head in disbelief, though his older self wasn’t there to see it. His parents must have said they loved each other once upon a time, too, and how had that turned out? “What am I supposed to do when you go away?”

“Marry her, doofus,” himself-at-forty said, as if it were just that simple. “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,” Justin snarled. “I’m sure not having a good time, I’ll tell you.” He belched again. No surprise—how many Cokes had he poured down since he got to this place? Too many. With the carbonation, he tasted stale nacho cheese.

His older self took a deep breath, too, and said, “Look, chill for a while, okay? I’m doing fine.”

That only made Justin angrier. “Sure you are. You’re doing fucking great. What about me?”

“You’re fine. Chill. You’re on vacation,” himself-at-forty answered. If he didn’t know everything, he didn’t know he didn’t know everything. “Go ahead. Relax. Spend my money. That’s what it’s there for.”

When his older self mentioned the money, Justin forgot how chuffed he was, at least for a little while. “Where’d you get so much?” he asked. “What did you do, rob a bank?”

“It’s worth a lot more now than it will be then,” his older self told him. “Inflation. Have some fun. Just be discreet, okay?”

Which brought Justin back to square one. His older self kept trying to blow him off, and he didn’t want to put up with it. “You mean, get out of your hair.”

“In a word, yes.” Himself-at-forty sounded as if he was having trouble putting up with Justin, too.

“While you’re in Megan’s hair.” No, Justin had no trouble at all seeing pictures in his mind, pictures nastier than any he could have pulled off the Net. He sighed, trying to make them go away. “I don’t know, dude.”

“It’s for you,” himself-at-forty said. “It’s for her and you.”

That, goddammit, was the trump card. If Justin-now was fated to break up with Megan, he didn’t see that he had any choice other than letting his older self set things right. He hated the idea. Every minute he spent in this miserable apartment made him hate it more. But he couldn’t find any way around it. Get married and get divorced? That was worse. “Yeah,” he said, and hung up.

Every minute he spent in that miserable apartment . . . from then on, he spent as little time as he could there. That worked better than staring at the TV and the PowerBook’s monitor and, most of all, the four walls. When he was out and doing things, he didn’t think about himself-at-forty and Megan . . . so much.

Getting out would have worked better still if he’d been able to go to the places he really liked, the local malls and the movie theaters and coffeehouses and restaurants where he’d gone with Megan. But he didn’t dare. He couldn’t imagine what he’d do if he saw her and his older self together. And what would himself-at-forty do? And Megan? Those were all terrific questions, and he didn’t want to find out the answers to any of them.

So he went to places where he could be sure he wouldn’t run into Megan or anybody else he knew. He killed an afternoon at the Glendale Galleria. He killed a whole day at the enormous Del Amo mall down in Torrance, which was supposed to be the biggest shopping center this side of the Mall of America. By the time he’d trekked from one end of it to the other, he believed all the hype. He hadn’t come close to hitting all the stores that looked interesting.

He grabbed some pizza down there, and stayed for a movie after the shops closed. That turned out to be a mistake. Sitting in a theater by himself was the loneliest thing he’d ever done, much worse than watching a movie on the VCR without any company. All the other people there seemed to have somebody else to have a good time with, and he didn’t.

And he was sure Megan would have loved this flick. She’d have gone all slobbery over the male star, and he could have had a good time teasing her about it. And she would have told him he only went to movies for the special effects—and they were pretty damn special. And then they would have gone back to his place and screwed themselves silly.

He went back to the place that wasn’t his: a long haul up the San Diego Freeway, which had plenty of traffic even after eleven at night. When he got there, he masturbated twice in quick succession. It wasn’t the same—it wasn’t close to the same—but it let him fall asleep.

The next morning, he drove out Topanga Canyon Boulevard to the ocean and spent the day at Zuma Beach. That would have been better with Megan along, too, but it wasn’t so bad by itself, either: nothing to do but lie there and watch girls and keep himself well greased with sunscreen. It let him get through another day without being too unhappy.

But, in spite of all the sunscreen, he came home with a burn. He was so fair, he could sunburn in the moonlight. Hot and uncomfortable, he couldn’t fall asleep. Finally, he quit trying. He put on some shorts and a T-shirt and went out front to watch TV. That experiment didn’t last long: nothing there but crap of the purest ray serene. After about twenty minutes, he turned it off in disgust.

“Now what?” he muttered. He still wasn’t sleepy. He walked back into the bedroom and got his car keys. He was an L.A. kid, all right: when in doubt, climb behind the wheel.

Driving around with a Pulp cassette in the stereo and the volume cranked made Justin feel better for a while. But he wasn’t just driving around. His hands and feet figured that out a little before his head did. The conscious part of his mind was surprised to discover they’d sent him down his own street toward his own apartment building.

If he parked between the Acapulco and the building next to it, he could look between them and see his bedroom window, a foreshortened rectangle of light. The curtain was drawn, so light was all he could see, light and, briefly, a moving shadow. Was that his older self? Megan? Were they both there? If they were, what were they doing? Like I don’t know, Justin thought.

“I’ve got spare keys,” he told himself in conversational tones. “I could walk in there and . . . ”

Instead, he started up the car and drove away, fast. What would he do if he did walk in on himself-at-forty and Megan? He didn’t want to find out.

The sunburn bothered him enough the next day that staying in the apartment and being a lump suited him fine. The day after, though, he felt better, which meant he also started feeling stir-crazy. He went out and drove some more: west on the 118 into Ventura County. Simi Valley and Moorpark were bedroom communities for the Valley, the way the Valley had been a bedroom community for downtown L.A. when his parents were his age.

I could be going to Paris or Prague or Tokyo, he thought as he put the pedal to the metal to get on the freeway, and I’m going to Simi Valley? But, in fact, he couldn’t go to Paris or Prague or Tokyo, not without a passport, which he didn’t have. And he didn’t really want to. He just wanted to go on living the way he had been living. He’d spent his whole life in the Valley, and was in some ways as much a small-town kid as somebody from Kokomo or Oshkosh.

Justin didn’t think of himself like that, of course. As far as he was concerned, he stood at the top of the cool food chain. And so, when he’d pulled off the freeway and driven the couple of blocks to what his Thomas Brothers guide showed as the biggest shopping center in Simi Valley, he made gagging noises. “It’s not even a mall!” he exclaimed. And it wasn’t, not by his standards: no single, enormous, air-conditioned building in which to roam free. If he wanted to go from store to store, he had to expose his tender hide to the sun for two, sometimes three, minutes at a time.

He almost turned around and drove back to his apartment. In the end, with a martyred sigh, he parked the car and headed toward a little mom-and-pop software store. It turned out to be all PC stuff. He had Virtual PC, so he could run Windows programs on his Macs, but he left in a hurry anyway. They’d go okay on the iMac, which was a pretty fast machine, but they’d be glacial on the old PowerBook he had with him.

The Wherehouse a couple of doors down was just as depressing. Grunge, metal, rap, bands his parents had listened to—yeah, they had plenty of that stuff. British pop? He found one, count it, one Oasis CD, filed under the rest of o. Past that? Nada.

“Boy, this is fun,” he said as he stomped out in moderately high dudgeon. He spotted a Borders halfway across the shopping center and headed toward it. Even as he did, he wondered why he bothered. The way his luck was running, it would stock a fine assortment of computer magazines from 1988.

Behind him, somebody called, “Justin!” He kept walking. Half the guys in his generation—all the ones who weren’t Jasons—were Justins. But the call came again, louder, more insistent: “Hey, Justin!”

Maybe it is me, he thought, and turned around. A startled smile spread over his face. “Lindsey!” he said. Sure as hell, Lindsey Fletcher came running up to him, rubber-soled sandals scuffing on the sidewalk. He opened his arms. They gave each other a big hug.

“I can’t believe it,” Lindsey said. “What are you doing up here? You never come up here. I’ve never seen you up here, anyway.” She spoke as if one proved the other.

She’d always liked to talk, Justin remembered. He remembered the mole on the side of her neck, too. It was still there, a couple of inches above the top of her T-shirt. “How are you?” he said. “How’ve you been?”

“I’m fine.” She looked him up and down. “God, you haven’t changed a bit.”

“Yeah, well,” Justin said, a little uncomfortably. He knew how little he would change, too, which she didn’t.

“What are you doing up here?” Lindsey asked again.

“Whatever,” Justin answered. “A little shopping. Hanging out. You know.”

“Here? It’s a lot better in the Valley.” She looked astonished and sounded wistful.

“Yeah, well,” he said again: he’d already discovered that. “Something new.”

“Slumming,” Lindsey told him. “But as long as you’re here, that donut place over there isn’t too bad.” She pointed. “I mean, if you want to get something and, you know, talk for a little while.”

“Sure,” Justin said. Like a lot of the little donut shops in Southern California, this one was run by Cambodians: a middle-aged couple who spoke with accents and a teenage boy who talked just like Justin and Lindsey. Lindsey tried to buy; Justin wouldn’t let her, not with his older self’s money burning a hole in his wallet. They got jelly donuts and big fizzy Cokes, sat down at one of the half-dozen or so little tables in the shop, and proceeded to get powdered sugar all over their faces.

“What have you been up to?” Lindsey asked, dabbing at herself with a paper napkin.

“Finished my junior year at CSUN,” Justin answered, pronouncing it C-sun, the way anybody who went there would.

“What’s your major?”

“Computer science. It’s pretty interesting, and it’ll pay off, too—I’ve got a summer job at the Northridge CompUSA.” Which my older self is welcome to. Half a beat slower than he should have, Justin asked, “How about you?”

“I’ve been going to Moorpark Community College kind of on and off,” Lindsey said. “I’ve got a part-time job, too—pet grooming.”

“Ah, cool,” Justin said. “You always did love animals. I remember.”

She nodded. “Maybe I’ll end up doing that full-time. If I can save some money, maybe I’ll try and get into breeding one of these days.” She sipped at her Coke, then asked, “Do I want to know about your parents?”

“No!” Justin exclaimed. “God no! Let’s see . . . I think you’d already moved here when my mom came out of the closet.”

“Oh, Lord.” Lindsey’s eyes got big. “That must have been fun.”

“Yeah, right,” Justin said. “Somebody shoot me quick if I ever set out to discover myself.” He turned his mother’s favorite phrase into a curse.

Lindsey didn’t ask about his father. The bad news there had been obvious while she still lived in the Valley. After some hesitation, she did ask, “What about you? Are you . . . seeing anybody?”

Justin had just taken a big bite of jelly donut, so he didn’t have to answer right away. When he did, he did his best to make it sound casual: “Uh-huh.”

“Oh.” Lindsey looked disappointed, which was flattering. And Justin couldn’t have sounded too casual, because she asked, “Are you serious?”

“Well, it kinda looks that way,” he admitted. And then, not so much out of politeness as because he didn’t want to think about how he wasn’t seeing Megan right this minute and his older self was, he said, “What about you?”

Lindsey shook her head. A strand of her short blond hair—she’d worn it longer in high school—fell down onto her nose. She brushed it away with her hand. “Not right now. Not so it matters, anyhow, I mean. I’ve gone with a few guys since I got up here, but nobody I’d want to settle down with. You’re lucky.”

She sounded wistful again. She also sounded as if she really meant it. She’d never begrudged happiness to anybody else. Justin would have had trouble saying the same thing—he was mad as hell thinking about himself-at-forty having a good time with Megan. And how lucky was he if his older self had to come back from 2018 to try to straighten things out? But Lindsey didn’t—couldn’t—know about that, of course.

He finished the donut in a couple of big bites. “I better get going. I have to be at work before too long.” He could almost feel his nose getting longer, but the lie gave him an excuse to get away.

“Okay.” Lindsey stood up, too. “It was great to see you. I’m glad you’re doing so well.” She sounded as if she really meant that, too. Nope, not a mean bone in her body. She gave him another hug, this one a little more constrained than the one when they first ran into each other. “Listen, if you ever want to just talk or anything, I’m in the book.” She made a face. “I sorta wish I wasn’t, but I am. I get more damn telemarketers than you can shake a stick at.”

“Always at dinnertime, too,” Justin said, and she nodded. “They ought to do something about ’em.” He didn’t know who they were or what they could do, but that didn’t stop him from complaining. He headed for the door. “So long.”

“So long, Justin.” Lindsey followed, but more slowly, making it plain she wasn’t going to come with him once they got outside. He headed for his car. Lindsey walked in the direction of the Wherehouse he’d already found wanting. He looked back toward her once. She was looking toward him. They both smiled and waved. Justin pulled out his keys, unlocked the Toyota, and slid inside. Lindsey went into the Wherehouse. Justin drove back to the Valley. For some reason he couldn’t quite fathom, he didn’t feel so bad once he got there.

He kept feeling halfway decent, or even a little better than halfway decent, for a while afterwards. The driving need to call up either his older self or Megan and find out how things were going went away. What that amounted to, of course, was finding out whether anybody in the whole wide world cared if he was alive—and a good-sized fear the answer was no. Lindsey Fletcher cared. Justin didn’t think of it in those terms—on a conscious level, he hardly thought of it at all—but that was what it added up to.

And so, over about the next ten days, he found things to do and places to go that let him kill time without seeming to be doing nothing but killing time. He drove over to the Sherman Oaks Galleria, which had gone from the coolest place in the world to semi–ghost town in one fell swoop after the ’94 quake. He beat the parking hassles at the new Getty Museum looming over the San Diego Freeway by taking a cab there—spending my older self’s money, he thought, feeling half virtuous and half so there! He found a pretty good Japanese restaurant, Omino’s, on Devonshire near Canoga. It’d be a good place to take Megan once himself-at-forty got the hell back to 2018, where he belonged.

“Superstrings,” Justin muttered in the apartment that wasn’t his. He’d fought his way through his physics classes; he couldn’t say much more than that. He wished he knew more. His older self did, dammit. That was definitely something to think about when he planned his schedule for his senior year.

Before so very long, though, he started muttering other, more incendiary, things. His decent mood didn’t last, not least because he didn’t fully understand what had caused it in the first place. The apartment in the Yachtsman started feeling like a prison cell again. Going out stopped being fun. Minutes crawled past on hands and knees.

Justin thought about calling his older self to complain: he thought about it for a good second and a half, as a matter of fact. Then he laughed a bitter laugh that lasted a lot longer. He knew just what his older self would say. Live with it. He could tell himself that and save the price of a phone call. It wasn’t quite fuck off and die, but close enough for government work.

Besides, he didn’t really want to talk to himself-at-forty. He wanted to talk to Megan. His older self had given him all sorts of reasons why that wasn’t a good idea. Justin had only one reason why it was: he was going out of his tree because he couldn’t. Eventually, that swamped everything his older self had said.

He felt as if he’d just pulled off a jailbreak when he dialed her number. Her father answered the phone. “Hi, Mr. Tricoupis,” he said happily. “Can I talk to Megan, please?”

Instead of saying Sure or Hang on a second or anything like that, Megan’s father answered, “Well, I don’t know, Justin. I’ll see if she wants to talk to you.”

I’ll see if she wants to talk to you? Justin thought. What the hell’s going on here? But he couldn’t even ask, because a clunking noise meant Mr. Tricoupis had put the phone down. He could only wait.

After what seemed like forever but couldn’t have been more than half a minute, Megan said, “Hello?” He needed no more than the one word to hear that she didn’t sound happy.

But he felt something close to delirious joy at hearing her voice. “Hi!” he burbled. “How you doing?”

Another pause. Then, very carefully, Megan said, “Justin, didn’t I tell you last night not to call here for a while? Didn’t I say that?”

He knew what that meant. It meant his older self wasn’t as goddamn smart as he thought he was. By the look of things, it also meant he’d have to bail himself-at-forty out instead of the other way round. He wondered if he could. He and Megan hadn’t had any great big fights, which meant he had no sure feel for how to fix one.

Silly seemed a good idea. “Duh,” he said, the standard idiot-noise of the late ’90s, and then, “My big mouth.” That wasn’t just an apology; it was also the title of an Oasis song Megan liked.

“Your big mouth is right,” she said, but a little of the hard edge left her voice—either that or wishful thinking was running away with Justin. She wasn’t going to let him down easy, though; she went on, “Do you have any idea how far over the line you were? Any idea at all?”

“Definitely maybe,” he answered: an Oasis album title that had the added virtue of keeping him off the hook.

He wasn’t sure Megan had noticed the first title he used, but she definitely noticed the second; he heard her snort. “You’re funny now,” she said, as if fighting to stay mad. “You weren’t funny last night after the movie, believe me you weren’t.”

Which movie? Justin wondered. He could hardly ask; he was supposed to know. He couldn’t even waste any more time cursing his older self, not when he was trying to jolly Megan back into a good mood. “Charmless man, that’s me,” he said. It wasn’t just him—it was also a track on a recent Blur CD.

“Justin . . . ” But Megan was fighting back laughter now. “What am I supposed to do about you?”

“Roll with it, my legendary girlfriend,” Justin said: one Oasis song, one from Pulp. “I’m just a killer for your love. Advert.” Two from Blur. He didn’t know how long he could keep it up, but he was having fun while it lasted.

With that, Megan gave up the fight and giggled. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. I didn’t think you could do anything to make me forget last night, but you did. How did you manage?”

“Only tongue will tell,” he answered gravely. “Worked a miracle.” That set Megan off again. She recognized Trash Can Sinatras titles, sure enough, and there probably weren’t three other people in the San Fernando Valley who would have.

“I’ll see you soon, Justin,” she said, and hung up.

But she wouldn’t be seeing him, dammit. She’d be seeing his older self. Justin started to call his old apartment to tell himself-at-forty what he thought of him, but held off. He didn’t see what good it would do. He wasn’t quite ready to throw his older self out of his place on his ear, and nothing short of that would make a nickel’s worth of difference. I’ll wait, he thought. For a little while.

He didn’t have to wait long. Twenty minutes later, the phone rang. He hurried into the bedroom from the kitchen, hoping it was Megan. He’d just picked up the phone when he remembered she didn’t have the number here. By then, he was already saying, “Hello?”

“Oh, good. You’re home.” His older self sounded half disappointed Justin hadn’t walked in front of a truck.

“Oh, it’s you,” Justin answered, still wishing it were Megan. Throwing himself-at-forty out on his ear suddenly looked more attractive. He went on, “No, you’re home. I’m stuck here.” He looked around the little bedroom, feeling like a trapped animal again.

His older self had gone into dictator mode: “Didn’t I tell you to lay low till I was done here? 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,” Justin said. “She was my girl first, you know. I’ve got a right to talk with her.” As talking to Lindsey Fletcher out in the wilds of Simi Valley had, it reminded him he was alive.

But himself-at-forty didn’t want to hear any of that. Maybe he wasn’t a dictator; maybe he was just a grownup talking down to a kid. Whatever he was, he sure sounded like somebody convinced he knew it all: “Not if you want her to keep being your girl, you don’t. You’re the one who’s going to screw it up, remember?”

“That’s what you keep telling me.” Justin was getting sick of hearing it, too. “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.”

“Nobody has all the answers.” His older self sounded as if he believed that. Justin didn’t; like The X-Files, he was convinced the truth was out there, provided he could find it. And then, throwing gasoline on the fire, his older self added, “If you think you’ve got more of them than I do, you’re full of shit.”

That did it. Justin wanted to turn his head real fast to see if he had smoke coming out of his ears. “You want to be careful how you talk to me,” he ground out, biting off each word. “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.”

If that didn’t scare the crap out of himself-at-forty, Justin didn’t know what would. But if it did, his older self didn’t show it, damn him. Instead, he kicked back with both feet, like a mule: “Yeah, go ahead. Screw up your life for good. Keep going like this and you will.”

And that scared the crap out of Justin. Himself-at-forty had to know it would. It was the only weapon he had, but it was a nuke. Justin tried not to let on that he knew it, saying, “You sound pretty screwed up now. What have I got to lose?”

Maybe, for once, he got through to himself-at-forty, because his older self, also for once, stopped trying to browbeat him and started trying to explain: “I had something good, and I let it slip through my fingers. You wreck what I’m doing now, you’ll go through life without knowing what a good thing was.” And then he trotted out the ICBMs again. “You want that? Just keep sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong. You want to end up with Megan or not?”

There it was. Justin did want that. He wanted it more than anything else in the world, and he couldn’t let on that he didn’t. If himself-at-forty was bluffing, he’d just got away with it. “All right,” Justin said, though it was anything but all right, and he didn’t think he sounded as if it were. “I’ll back off—for now.”

He got the last word by hanging up. Then he masturbated again. It made him feel good, but it didn’t come close to making him feel better.

He rented Titanic and watched it several times over the next few days, which certainly went a long way toward keeping him out of circulation. He wasn’t watching it for the romance. Christ, no. Jack died. He wanted his life with Megan to go on and on, even if he couldn’t stand Celine Dion.

What he watched obsessively was the way the enormous liner took on water and sank after it hit the iceberg. Here in this apartment that wasn’t his, as far out of the loop as he could be, he felt he was taking on water, too.

Running into Lindsey Fletcher, sitting down with her and eating messy jelly donuts and talking, had let him believe for quite a while that he wasn’t alone in the world. He cared about Megan a lot more, but talking with her on the phone didn’t satisfy his people jones nearly as long. For one thing, talking on the phone was like looking at a picture of a great dinner—pretty, yeah, but not the real thing.

And, for another, he’d had the row with himself-at-forty just afterwards. He might have stayed happier longer if he hadn’t. The main reason—the only reason—he’d gone along with his older self and this whole craziness was that he couldn’t stand the idea of losing Megan, of having to go through a divorce. If his older self could smooth things out now, make sure that never happened, great.

But if his older self was fighting with Megan, was making her angry at him . . . Where the hell did that leave Justin? He’d already saved the day once, which made him want to gallop back into the scene like a knight in shining armor coming to rescue the fair maiden. Would he rescue her, though? Or would he gallop in and screw things up, the way his older self said?

He didn’t hop into his car—which was actually his older self’s car—and drive over and throw himself-at-forty out of his rightful apartment. But he couldn’t stand staying here and doing nothing, either, not for very long he couldn’t.

After a bit more sitting on his hands, he hit on a compromise—or, to look at it another way, he found an excuse for doing what he wanted to do anyhow. I’ll call Megan, Justin thought. I did some good the last time. Maybe I can do some more now. And then I’ll brief my older self on what we talked about, so he doesn’t get caught short.

Man is the rationalizing animal.

Justin felt good, felt alive, felt part of things again, as he dialed the phone. It rang a couple of times, then somebody picked it up. “Hello?” Hearing Megan’s voice made him smile big and wide. It also made him horny as hell.

“Hiya!” He gave her back her own favorite greeting.

Silence, about fifteen seconds’ worth, on the other end of the line. Then Megan said, “Justin, this is way over, I mean way over, the top. Didn’t I tell you not two hours ago that I didn’t want to see you any more, I didn’t want to talk to you any more, I didn’t want to have anything to do with you any more? Didn’t I?”

“But—” Justin heard the words, but he had a hard time making them mean anything.

Megan didn’t give him much of a chance, either. She went on, “Didn’t I tell you that if I ever changed my mind, I’d call you? Didn’t I? I don’t want to be on the phone with you any more, Justin, I mean I really don’t.” She sounded furious, big-time furious.

“Wait a minute,” Justin said frantically. “What—?”

He was trying to say, What are you talking about? but he never got the chance. Megan filled in the blank for him: “What about the sex? I already told you, I don’t care how good it was. I don’t care that it got better the last couple weeks, either. I don’t want you treating me like I was twelve years old, and I do care about that. Now get out of my life, goddammit. Goodbye!” The phone crashed down.

Slowly, like a man in shock—which he was—Justin hung up, too. I don’t care that it got better the last couple weeks, either? One day, when he had time to think about it, that would be a separate torment of its own. Right now, it was just part of the general disaster.

“What do I do?” he asked, as if the bedroom could tell him. What he wanted to do was call Megan back and explain, really explain, but that wasn’t gonna fly. If he got in even two words before she hung up on him, it’d be a miracle.

“E-mail!” he exclaimed, and ran for his PowerBook. He wrote the message. He sent it. Less than a minute later, it came back, with permanent fatal error at the top and an explanatory paragraph underneath saying that she was refusing all mail from his address. “Jesus!” he cried in real anguish. “I’ve been bozo-filtered!” That added insult to injury, and none of this, not one single thing, was his fault.

He knew whose fault it was, though. Anguish didn’t last. Rage replaced it.

The phone rang four times before his older self answered. “Hello?” He sounded groggy.

Justin didn’t much care how he sounded. “You son of a bitch,” he snarled. “You goddamn stupid, stinking, know-it-all son of a bitch.”

“I’m sorry,” himself-at-forty said. Of all the useless words in the world right now, those were the big two. “I tried to—”

“I just tried calling Megan,” Justin said, interrupting his older self the way Megan had interrupted him. “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.” He didn’t say anything about the refused e-mail. Somehow, that hurt even worse, too much to talk about.

“I’m sorry,” his older self said again. “I—”

“Sorry?” Justin yelled. If he hadn’t had a buzz cut, he might have pulled his hair. “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. You think you can get away with that, you’re full of—” He hung up on himself-at-forty even harder than Megan had hung up on him.

He hadn’t been in a fight since middle school, and he’d lost that one. It didn’t matter. He stormed out of the apartment, slamming the door behind him. He ran down to his car—no, to his older self’s car—and headed to his old apartment, his proper apartment, as fast as he could go.

That meant somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes. He was still incandescent when he got there. He turned the key in the lock to the security gate and drove into the Acapulco’s parking lot. His own car, the one himself-at-forty had been driving, was still in its space.

“You thought I was kidding, did you, you bastard?” Justin’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a savage smile. “I’ll show you who was kidding, asshole.”

Finding a parking space out on the street took another minute (a well-trained Southern Californian, he never thought to use one of the empty ones in the parking garage; those weren’t his). Then he stormed up the steps into the lobby, opened the security door, and charged toward his apartment.

Click! One key in the dead bolt. Click! The other in the lock. The door opened. Justin slammed it shut behind him. “All right, you fucker, now you’re gonna get it,” he growled.

No one answered. Justin strode into the bedroom. It was as empty of life—except his own—as the front room and kitchen had been. He checked the bathroom. He checked the closets. He checked under the bed. He didn’t take long to decide he was the only one in the place.

But his older self hadn’t taken his car. “He can’t have gone far,” Justin muttered: again, the Southern California assumption that nobody without wheels could do much. Justin scratched his head. Was himself-at-forty running for his life? Hopping a cab? Waiting for a bus? None of those made much sense.

But the chair in the bedroom was pulled a long way out from the desk. You couldn’t use the iMac with the chair out there. You could sure as hell use a laptop, though. What would a laptop from 2018 be able to do? Justin didn’t know, but the mere thought was plenty to make him salivate.

His older self had said coming back from then to now was a matter of good programming. If he had a machine like that, if he had the program on the hard drive, could he go back the way he’d come?

“How should I know?” Justin asked nobody in particular. But the apartment felt very, very empty. Maybe his older self had fled where he couldn’t hope to follow for nineteen years.

Or could he? He knew some things he wouldn’t have if his older self hadn’t come back and . . . And screwed up my life, Justin thought. He knew going back in time involved superstrings and programming. The combination wouldn’t have crossed his mind in a million years—no, in something close to nineteen years—if himself-at-forty hadn’t returned to 1999 to meddle.

And he knew the thing could be done in the first place. Knowing that was half the battle, maybe more than half. He’d never let himself get discouraged. No matter how bleak things looked, he wouldn’t give up and decide he was chasing something impossible.

And . . . A slow smile stole over his face. He had a nest egg now that he hadn’t had before, thanks to the cash his older self had left behind. He hadn’t blown very much of it. If he made some investments and they worked out, he could be sitting pretty by the time he got to the frontiers of middle age.

“Inflation,” he said, reminding himself. “Gotta watch out for inflation.” Himself-at-forty had said his stash of cash wouldn’t be worth nearly so much in 2018 as it was now. Whatever he put the money into, he’d have to make sure rising prices didn’t erode it into chump change.

What he had to do right now was get his hands on the cash, which was still sitting back at the other apartment. Then he’d have to figure out how to put it into his bank account without getting busted as a drug runner or money launderer. You could put only so much cash in at a time, or else the bank had to report you to the Feds. He knew that. But what was the upper limit? He had no idea. I’ll find out on the Net, he thought, and put it out of his mind for the time being.

As he drove over to the other apartment, something else struck him: I can get rid of this car. That’ll bring in some more money to help set me up.

All that assumed his older self wasn’t hanging around in 1999. Justin didn’t know himself-at-forty wasn’t, not for a fact. If his older self did remain here in the twentieth century, Justin still intended to punch his lights out the first chance he got.

He was loading twenties and fifties and hundreds into shopping bags, feeling a lot like a gangster, when he thought, I can move out of this apartment, too, and get back whatever security deposits my older self paid—part of them, anyway. In spite of the handfuls of greenbacks he was taking out of the drawer, every dollar felt important.

He wondered what his quarter from 2012 would be worth, and whether it would be worth anything at all. But then he shook his head. “I’ll keep it,” he declared, as if someone had told him not to. “It’ll remind me what I’m shooting for.”

More than a little nervously, he took the cash down to the car. He managed it without getting mugged. He didn’t think he’d ever driven so carefully in his life as on the trip back to the Acapulco. He’d never watched the rear-view mirror so much, either. Don’t want to get rear-ended now. Oh, Jesus, no.

As he parked in front of the apartment building, a nasty thought hit him. What’ll I do if he just walked away for a few minutes and now he’s back in my place? Punching his older self’s lights out still seemed like a good plan.

But the apartment was empty. With a sigh of relief, Justin stashed the bags of cash in the little closet in the hallway that led from the living room back to the bedroom. Then he put a couple of pans by the door. He’d have to get the locks changed, but in the meantime at least he’d have some warning if his older self was still around and tried to come in.

“Have to get the rest of my stuff out of that other place, too,” he said. But, for the time being, that could wait.

He quickly went through the apartment, looking for whatever his older self had left behind. Finding a laptop from 2018—if himself-at-forty had had one with him—would have been the grand prize. He didn’t. But he did find a statement from a bank he wouldn’t have patronized if a stagecoach had run over him. When he saw how much it was for, his eyes bugged out of his head: about as much as he had in those bags in the closet.

And it’s mine, too, he thought dazedly. If he’s gone, it’s mine. I can prove I’m Justin Kloster just as well as he could. I know my mother’s maiden name just as well as he did.

For a moment, thinking of only one thing at a time, he actually felt grateful toward his older self. A twenty-one-year-old guy with six figures’ worth of money in the bank and with a plan to get ahead . . . What couldn’t he do?

I can’t have Megan. His joy blew out. Cash was great, but without his girl? Whatever his older self had done there, he’d screwed it up big-time. And he’d said he’d never found anybody else who came close to her.

Maybe I can get her back, Justin thought. Maybe in a couple weeks, or when school starts again and I see her. Or something.

He shoved the thought aside. He couldn’t do anything about it now. Himself-at-forty had seen to that. Justin started getting angry all over again.

And he didn’t get any happier when he looked at what was in the refrigerator. It was all stuff he’d have to cook if he wanted to eat it: even worse stuff than had been in his older self’s other place when he first got there. What were you supposed to do with ginger root or hoisin sauce? He didn’t know, and he wasn’t interested in learning. But then he started to laugh. He could afford to eat out, by God.

Eat out he did. Yang Chow was odds-on the best Chinese place in this end of the Valley. He devoured kung-pao chicken and chili shrimp, with a Tsingtao beer to put out the fire from the peppers. No sign of his older self when he got back.

Justin called the other place. The phone rang and rang. After it had gone on ringing for more than a minute, he hung up again, nodding. His older self wasn’t there, either. The more he wasn’t there, the more convinced Justin was that he’d gone back to 2018.

“He should have stayed there, the son of a bitch,” Justin said. “Maybe Megan and me would have made it. Shit—even if we didn’t, I’d still have the good memories he did. What have I got now? Not one damn thing.”

Before he went to bed, he changed the sheets and bedspread. He didn’t even want to think about what had happened on the ones he threw in the clothes basket.

He slept late the next morning, which annoyed him. He had a lot of stuff he wanted to do that day: formally leave the other apartment, close his older self’s banking account and move the money to his own, sell that other Toyota and put the proceeds from the deal in the bank, too. He was just heading out the door when the phone rang.

“Jesus!” he said, and hurried back to the bedroom. Maybe it was his older self. That would screw things up. Or maybe it was Megan. That would do anything but. “Hello?”

It wasn’t himself-at-forty. It wasn’t Megan, either, dammit. It was his boss at CompUSA, and he sounded pissed to the max. “Where the hell are you, Kloster?” he shouted. “That graphic-design outfit is coming in this morning to order their new Macs, and they don’t want to deal with anybody but you.” He said something under his breath about “Macintosh prima donnas,” then went back to bellowing: “What are you doing there when you’re supposed to be here?”

Justin had forgotten all about his CompUSA job. Evidently, his older self had been holding it down pretty well. With all the money he had, he was tempted to tell his boss to stuff it, but he didn’t. That would look bad on a résumé. He gave the best excuse he could think of: “I must have forgotten to set my alarm last night. I’ll be right there.”

His boss promptly tempted him to regret his choice, roaring, “If they show up before you do, you’re toast!” and hanging up hard.

He did get there first, and had enough time to review things before the graphic designers trooped in. Before they trooped out again, they’d bought about fifty grand worth of computers and peripherals, and his boss was acting amazingly human. Said boss even took him to lunch at a Mexican place not nearly so good as Sierra’s—though he wouldn’t have wanted to go there now—and didn’t say boo when he ordered a margarita to go with his enchilada and rice and refried beans.

After lunch, he was upgrading system software on one of the iMac demos when he heard footsteps behind him. He turned around to see who it was; the Macintosh ministore inside the CompUSA didn’t get nearly the foot traffic he thought it deserved. “Lindsey!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”

“Well, you told me where you worked.” She looked nervous. “I just thought I’d come over and say hi. Hi!” She fluttered her fingers at him in an arch little wave, then quickly went on, “I don’t want to make trouble or anything. I know you said you were seeing somebody.” By the way she stood on the balls of her feet, she was poised to flee if Justin barked at her.

But that, right this second, was the last thing he wanted to do. “I was, yeah,” he answered, and watched her eyes widen at the past tense, “but we just broke up. Somebody came between us, I guess you’d say.”

“Oh, my God!” Lindsey exclaimed, and then frowned anxiously. “I hope you don’t mean me. She wasn’t, like, jealous ’cause you went up to Simi Valley and ran into me or anything? That’d be awful.”

“No, no, no,” Justin assured her. “Had nothing to do with you. It was another guy. An older guy.” The first and last parts of that were true, anyway. The middle? He wasn’t so sure.

“That’s terrible!” Lindsey said. “You must be all torn up inside.” She reached out and put a sympathetic hand on his arm.

“I was bummed,” he admitted—about as much as a male his age was likely to say. “It’s really nice, that you came all the way from Simi to see me.” They both laughed, even though Justin hadn’t quite made the joke on purpose. Lindsey smiled at him. He wasn’t always fast on the uptake, but something got through. He set his hand on hers. “Who knows?” he said. “Maybe it won’t work out too bad after all.”

Originally published in Analog, December 1999.

The Heart’s Filthy Lesson

Elizabeth Bear

The sun burned through the clouds around noon on the long Cytherean day, and Dharthi happened to be awake and in a position to see it. She was alone in the highlands of Ishtar Terra on a research trip, five sleeps out from Butler base camp, and—despite the nagging desire to keep traveling—had decided to take a rest break for an hour or two. Noon at this latitude was close enough to the one hundredth solar dieiversary of her birth that she’d broken out her little hoard of shelf-stable cake to celebrate. The prehensile fingers and leaping legs of her bioreactor-printed, skin-bonded adaptshell made it simple enough to swarm up one of the tall, gracile pseudofigs and creep along its smooth grey branches until the ceaseless Venusian rain dripped directly on her adaptshell’s slick-furred head.

It was safer in the treetops if you were sitting still. Nothing big enough to want to eat her was likely to climb up this far. The grues didn’t come out until nightfall, but there were swamp-tigers, damn-things, and velociraptors to worry about. The forest was too thick for predators any bigger than that, but a swarm of scorpion-rats was no joke. And Venus had only been settled for three hundred days, and most of that devoted to Aphrodite Terra; there were still plenty of undiscovered monsters out here in the wilderness.

The water did not bother Dharthi, nor did the dip and sway of the branch in the wind. Her adaptshell was beautifully tailored to this terrain, and that fur shed water like the hydrophobic miracle of engineering that it was. The fur was a glossy, iridescent purple that qualified as black in most lights, to match the foliage that dripped rain like strings of glass beads from the multiple points of palmate leaves. Red-black, to make the most of the rainy grey light. They’d fold their leaves up tight and go dormant when night came.

Dharthi had been born with a chromosomal abnormality that produced red-green color blindness. She’d been about ten solar days old when they’d done the gene therapy to fix it, and she just about remembered her first glimpses of the true, saturated colors of Venus. She’d seen it first as if it were Earth: washed-out and faded.

For now, however, they were alive with the scurryings and chitterings of a few hundred different species of Cytherean canopy-dwellers. And the quiet, nearly contented sound of Dharthi munching on cake. She would not dwell; she would not stew. She would look at all this natural majesty and try to spot the places where an unnaturally geometric line or angle showed in the topography of the canopy.

From here, she could stare up the enormous sweep of Maxwell Montes to the north, its heights forested to the top in Venus’s deep, rich atmosphere—but the sight of them lost for most of its reach in clouds. Dharthi could only glimpse the escarpment at all because she was on the “dry” side. Maxwell Montes scraped the heavens, kicking the cloud layer up as if it had struck an aileron, so the “wet” side got the balance of the rain. Balance in this case meaning that the mountains on the windward side were scoured down to granite, and a nonadapted terrestrial organism had better bring breathing gear.

But here in the lee, the forest flourished, and on a clear hour from a height, visibility might reach a couple of klicks or more.

Dharthi took another bite of cake—it might have been “chocolate”; it was definitely caffeinated, because she was picking up the hit on her blood monitors already—and turned herself around on her branch to face downslope. The sky was definitely brighter, the rain falling back to a drizzle, then a mist, and the clouds were peeling back along an arrowhead trail that led directly back to the peak above her. A watery golden smudge brightened one patch of clouds. They tore, and she glimpsed the full, unguarded brilliance of the daystar, just hanging there in a chip of glossy cerulean sky, the clouds all around it smeared with thick, unbelievable rainbows. Waves of mist rolled and slid among the leaves of the canopy, made golden by the shimmering, unreal light.

Dharthi was glad she was wearing the shell. It played the sun’s warmth through to her skin without also relaying the risks of ultraviolet exposure. She ought to be careful of her eyes, however: a crystalline shield protected them, but its filters weren’t designed for naked light.

The forest noises rose to a cacophony. It was the third time in Dharthi’s one hundred solar days of life that she had glimpsed the sun. Even here, she imagined that some of these animals would never have seen it before.

She decided to accept it as a good omen for her journey. Sadly, there was no way to spin the next thing that happened that way.

“Hey,” said a voice in her head. “Good cake.”

“That proves your pan is malfunctioning, if anything does,” Dharthi replied sourly. Never accept a remote synaptic link with a romantic and professional partner. No matter how convenient it seems at the time, and in the field.

Because someday they might be a romantic and professional partner you really would rather not talk to right now.

“I heard that.”

“What do you want, Kraken?”

Dharthi imagined Kraken smiling, and wished she hadn’t. She could hear it in her partner’s “voice” when she spoke again, anyway. “Just to wish you a happy dieiversary.”

“Aw,” Dharthi said. “Aren’t you sweet. Noblesse oblige?”

“Maybe,” Kraken said tiredly, “I actually care?”

“Mmm,” Dharthi said. “What’s the ulterior motive this time?”

Kraken sighed. It was more a neural flutter than a heave of breath, but Dharthi got the point all right. “Maybe I actually care.”

“Sure,” Dharthi said. “Every so often you have to glance down from Mount Olympus and check up on the lesser beings.”

“Olympus is on Mars,” Kraken said.

It didn’t make Dharthi laugh because she clenched her right fist hard enough that, even though the cushioning adaptshell squished against her palm, she still squeezed the blood out of her fingers. You and all your charm. You don’t get to charm me anymore.

“Look,” Kraken said. “You have something to prove. I understand that.”

“How can you possibly understand that? When was the last time you were turned down for a resource allocation? Doctor youngest-ever recipient of the Cytherean Award for Excellence in Xenoarcheology? Doctor Founding Field-Martius Chair of Archaeology at the University on Aphrodite?”

“The University on Aphrodite,” Kraken said, “is five Quonset huts and a repurposed colonial landing module.”

“It’s what we’ve got.”

“I peaked early,” Kraken said, after a pause. “I was never your rival, Dharthi. We were colleagues.” Too late, in Dharthi’s silence, she realized her mistake. “Are colleagues.”

“You look up from your work often enough to notice I’m missing?”

There was a pause. “That may be fair,” Kraken said at last. “But if being professionally focused—”

“Obsessed.”

“—is a failing, it was hardly a failing limited to me. Come back. Come back to me. We’ll talk about it. I’ll help you try for a resource voucher again tomorrow.”

“I don’t want your damned help, Kraken!”

The forest around Dharthi fell silent. Shocked, she realized she’d shouted out loud.

“Haring off across Ishtar alone, with no support—you’re not going to prove your theory about aboriginal Cytherean settlement patterns, Dhar. You’re going to get eaten by a grue.”

“I’ll be home by dark,” Dharthi said. “Anyway, if I’m not—all the better for the grue.”

“You know who else was always on about being laughed out of the Academy?” Kraken said. Her voice had that teasing tone that could break Dharthi’s worst, most self-loathing, prickliest mood—if she let it. “Moriarty.”

I will not laugh. Fuck you.

Dharthi couldn’t tell if Kraken had picked it up or not. There was a silence, as if she were controlling her temper or waiting for Dharthi to speak.

“If you get killed,” Kraken said, “make a note in your file that I can use your DNA. You’re not getting out of giving me children that easily.”

Ha-ha, Dharthi thought. Only serious. She couldn’t think of what to say, and so she said nothing. The idea of a little Kraken filled her up with mushy softness inside. But somebody’s career would go on hold for the first fifty solar days of that kid’s life, and Dharthi was pretty sure it wouldn’t be Kraken’s.

She couldn’t think of what to say in response, and the silence got heavy until Kraken said, “Dammit. I’m worried about you.”

“Worry about yourself.” Dharthi couldn’t break the connection, but she could bloody well shut down her end of the dialogue. And she could refuse to hear.

She pitched the remains of the cake as far across the canopy as she could, then regretted it. Hopefully, nothing Cytherean would try to eat it; it might give the local biology a bellyache.

It was ironically inevitable that Dharthi, named by her parents in a fit of homesickness for Terra, would grow up to be the most Cytherean of Cythereans. She took great pride in her adaptation, in her ability to rough it. Some of the indigenous plants and many of the indigenous animals could be eaten, and Dharthi knew which ones. She also knew, more important, which ones were likely to eat her.

She hadn’t mastered humans nearly as well. Dharthi wasn’t good at politics. Unlike Kraken. Dharthi wasn’t good at making friends. Unlike Kraken. Dharthi wasn’t charming or beautiful or popular or brilliant. Unlike Kraken, Kraken, Kraken.

Kraken was a better scientist, or at least a better-understood one. Kraken was a better person, probably. More generous, less prickly, certainly. But there was one thing Dharthi was good at. Better at than Kraken. Better at than anyone. Dharthi was good at living on Venus, at being Cytherean. She was more comfortable in and proficient with an adaptshell than anyone she had ever met.

In fact, it was peeling the shell off that came hard. So much easier to glide through the jungle or the swamp like something that belonged there, wearing a quasibiologic suit of superpowered armor bonded to your neural network and your skin. The human inside was a soft, fragile, fleshy thing, subject to complicated feelings and social dynamics, and Dharthi despised her. But that same human, while bonded to the shell, ghosted through the rain forest like a native and saw things no one else ever had.

A kilometer from where she had stopped for cake, she picked up the trail of a velociraptor. It was going in the right direction, so she tracked it. It wasn’t a real velociraptor; it wasn’t even a dinosaur. Those were Terran creatures, albeit extinct; this was a Cytherean meat-eating monster that bore a superficial resemblance. Like the majority of Cytherean vertebrates, it had six limbs though it ran balanced on the rear ones and the two forward pairs had evolved into little more than graspers. Four eyes were spaced equidistantly around the dome of its skull, giving it a dome of monocular vision punctuated by narrow slices of depth perception. The business end of the thing was delineated by a saw-toothed maw that split wide enough to bite a human being in half. The whole of it was camouflaged with long, draggled fur-feathers that grew thick with near-black algae, or the Cytherean cognate.

Dharthi followed the velociraptor for over two kilometers, and the beast never even noticed she was there. She smiled inside her adaptshell. Kraken was right: going out into the jungle alone and unsupported would be suicide for most people. But wasn’t it like her not to give Dharthi credit for this one single thing that Dharthi could do better than anyone?

She knew that the main Cytherean settlements had been on Ishtar Terra. Knew it in her bones. And she was going to prove it, whether anybody was willing to give her an allocation for the study or not.

They’ll be sorry, she thought, and had to smile at her own adolescent petulance. They’ll rush to support me once this is done.

The not-a-dinosaur finally veered off to the left. Dharthi kept jogging/​swinging/​swimming/​splashing/​climbing forward, letting the shell do most of the work. The highlands leveled out into the great plateau the new settlers called the Lakshmi Planum. No one knew what the aboriginals had called it. They’d been gone for—to an approximation—ten thousand years: as long as it had taken humankind to get from the Neolithic (agriculture, stone tools) to jogging through the jungles of an alien world wearing a suit of power armor engineered from printed muscle fiber and cheetah DNA.

Lakshmi Planum, ringed with mountains on four sides, was one of the few places on the surface of Venus where you could not see an ocean. The major Cytherean landmasses, Aphrodite and Ishtar, were smaller than South America. The surface of this world was 85 percent water—water less salty than Earth’s oceans because there was less surface to leach minerals into it through runoff. And the Lakshmi Planum was tectonically active, with great volcanoes and living faults.

That activity was one of the reasons Dharthi’s research had brought her here.

The jungle of the central Ishtarean plateau was not as creeper-clogged and vine-throttled as Dharthi might have expected. It was a mature climax forest, and the majority of the biomass hung suspended over Dharthi’s head, great limbs stretching up umbrella-like to the limited light. Up there, the branches and trunks were festooned with symbiotes, parasites, and commensal organisms. Down here among the trunks, it was dark and still except for the squish of loam underfoot and the ceaseless patter of what rain came through the leaves.

Dharthi stayed alert but didn’t spot any more large predators on that leg of the journey. There were flickers and scuttlers and fliers galore, species she was sure nobody had named or described. Perhaps on the way back she’d have time to do more, but for now she contented herself with extensive video archives. It wouldn’t hurt to cultivate some good karma with Bio while she was out here. She might need a job sweeping up offices when she got back.

Stop. Failure is not an option. Not even a possibility.

Like all such glib sentiments, it didn’t make much of a dent in the bleakness of her mood. Even walking, observing, surveying, she had entirely too much time to think.

She waded through two more swamps and scaled a basalt ridge—one of the stretching roots of the vast volcano named Sacajawea. Nearly everything on Venus was named after female persons—historical, literary, or mythological—from Terra, from the quaint old system of binary and exclusive genders. For a moment, Dharthi considered such medieval horrors as dentistry without anesthetic, binary gender, and being stuck forever in the body you were born in, locked in and struggling against what your genes dictated. The trap of biology appalled her; she found it impossible to comprehend how people in the olden days had gotten anything done, with their painfully short lives and their limited access to resources, education, and technology.

The adaptshell stumbled over a tree root, forcing her attention back to the landscape. Of course, modern technology wasn’t exactly perfect either. The suit needed carbohydrate to keep moving and protein to repair muscle tissue. Fortunately, it wasn’t picky about its food source—and Dharthi herself needed rest. The day was long and only half-over. She wouldn’t prove herself if she got so tired she got herself eaten by a megaspider.

We haven’t conquered all those human frailties yet.

Sleepily, she climbed a big tree, one that broke the canopy, and slung a hammock high in branches that dripped with fleshy, gorgeous, thickly scented parasitic blossoms, opportunistically decking every limb up here where the light was stronger. They shone bright whites and yellows, mostly, set off against the dark, glossy foliage. Dharthi set proximity sensors, established a tech perimeter above and below, and unsealed the shell before sending it down to forage for the sorts of simple biomass that sustained it. It would be happy with the mulch of the forest floor, and she could call it back when she needed it. Dharthi rolled herself into the hammock as if it were a scent-proof, claw-proof cocoon and tried to sleep.

Rest eluded. The leaves and the cocoon filtered the sunlight, so it was pleasantly dim, and the cocoon kept the water off except what she’d brought inside with herself when she wrapped up. She was warm and well supported. But that all did very little to alleviate her anxiety.

She didn’t know exactly where she was going. She was flying blind—hah, she wished she were flying. If she’d had the allocations for an aerial survey, this would all be a lot easier, assuming they could pick anything out through the jungle—and operating on a hunch. An educated hunch.

But one that Kraken and her other colleagues—and more important, the Board of Allocation—thought was at best a wild guess and at worst crackpottery.

What if you’re wrong?

If she was wrong . . . well. She didn’t have much to go home to. So she’d better be right that the settlements they’d found on Aphrodite were merely outposts, and that the aboriginal Cythereans had stuck much closer to the north pole. She had realized that the remains—such as they were—of Cytherean settlements clustered in geologically active areas. She theorized that they used geothermal energy, or perhaps had some other unknown purpose for staying there. In any case, Ishtar was far younger, far more geologically active than Aphrodite, as attested by its upthrust granite ranges and its scattering of massive volcanoes. Aphrodite—larger, calmer, safer—had drawn the Terran settlers. Dharthi theorized that Ishtar had been the foundation of Cytherean culture for exactly the opposite reasons.

She hoped that if she found a big settlement—the remains of one of their cities—she could prove this. And possibly even produce some clue as to what had happened to them all.

It wouldn’t be easy. A city buried under ten thousand years of sediment and jungle could go unnoticed even by an archaeologist’s trained eye and the most perspicacious modern mapping and visualization technology. And of course she had to be in the right place, and all she had to go on there were guesses—deductions, if she was feeling kind to herself, which she rarely was—about the patterns of relationships between those geologically active areas on Aphrodite and the aboriginal settlements nearby.

This is stupid. You’ll never find anything without support and an allocation. Kraken never would have pushed her luck this way.

Kraken never would have needed to. Dharthi knew better than anyone how much effort and dedication and scholarship went into Kraken’s work—but still, it sometimes seemed as if fantastic opportunities just fell into her lover’s lap without effort. And Kraken’s intellect and charisma were so dazzling . . . it was hard to see past that to the amount of study it took to support that seemingly effortless, comprehensive knowledge of just about everything.

Nothing made Dharthi feel the limitations of her own ability like spending time with her lover. Hell, Kraken probably would have known which of the animals she was spotting as she ran were new species, and the names and describers of all the known ones.

If she could have this, Dharthi thought, just this—if she could do one thing to equal all of Kraken’s effortless successes—then she could tolerate how perfect Kraken was the rest of the time.

This line of thought wasn’t helping the anxiety. She thrashed in the cocoon for another half hour before she finally gave in and took a sedative. Not safe, out in the jungle. But if she didn’t rest, she couldn’t run—and even the Cytherean daylight wasn’t actually endless.

Dharthi awakened to an animal sniffing her cocoon with great whuffing predatory breaths. An atavistic response, something from the brainstem, froze her in place even as it awakened her. Her arms and legs—naked, so fragile without her skin—felt heavy, numb, limp as if they had fallen asleep. The shadow of the thing’s head darkened the translucent steelsilk as it passed between Dharthi and the sky. The drumming of the rain stopped momentarily. Hard to tell how big it was from that—but big, she thought. An estimation confirmed when it nosed or pawed the side of the cocoon and she felt a broad blunt object as big as her two hands together prod her in the ribs.

She held her breath, and it withdrew. There was the rain, tapping on her cocoon where it dripped between the leaves. She was almost ready to breathe out again when it made a sound—a thick, chugging noise followed by a sort of roar that had more in common with trains and waterfalls than what most people would identify as an animal sound.

Dharthi swallowed her scream. She didn’t need Kraken to tell her what that was. Every schoolchild could manage a piping reproduction of the call of one of Venus’s nastiest pieces of charismatic megafauna, the Cytherean swamp-tiger.

Swamp-tigers were two lies, six taloned legs, and an indiscriminate number of enormous daggerlike teeth in a four-hundred-kilogram body. Two lies, because they didn’t live in swamps—though they passed through them on occasion, because what on Venus didn’t?—and they weren’t tigers. But they were striped violet and jade green to disappear into the thick jungle foliage; they had long, slinky bodies that twisted around sharp turns and barreled up tree trunks without any need to decelerate; and their whisker-ringed mouths hinged open wide enough to bite a grown person in half.

All four of the swamp-tiger’s bright blue eyes were directed forward. Because it didn’t hurt their hunting, and what creature in its right mind would want to sneak up on a thing like that?

They weren’t supposed to hunt this high up. The branches were supposed to be too slender to support them.

Dharthi wasn’t looking forward to getting a better look at this one. It nudged the cocoon again. Despite herself, Dharthi went rigid. She pressed both fists against her chest and concentrated on not whimpering, on not making a single sound. She forced herself to breathe slowly and evenly. To consider. Panic gets you eaten.

She wouldn’t give Kraken the damned satisfaction.

She had some resources. The cocoon would attenuate her scent, and might disguise it almost entirely. The adaptshell was somewhere in the vicinity, munching away, and if she could make it into that, she stood a chance of outrunning the thing. She weighed a quarter what the swamp-tiger did; she could get up higher into the treetops than it could, theoretically. After all, it wasn’t supposed to come up this high.

And she was, at least presumptively, somewhat smarter.

But it could outjump her, outrun her, outsneak her, and—perhaps most important—outchomp her.

She wasted a few moments worrying about how it had gotten past her perimeter before the sharp pressure of its claws skidding down the rip-proof surface of the cocoon refocused her attention. That was a temporary protection; it might not be able to pierce the cocoon, but it could certainly squash Dharthi to death inside of it, or rip it out of the tree and toss it to the jungle floor. If the fall didn’t kill her, she’d have the cheerful and humiliating choice of yelling for rescue or wandering around injured until something bigger ate her. She needed a way out; she needed to channel five million years of successful primate adaptation, the legacy of clever-monkey ancestors, and figure out how to get away from the not-exactly-cat.

What would a monkey do? The question was the answer, she realized.

She just needed the courage to apply it. And the luck to survive whatever then transpired.

The cocoon was waterproof as well as claw-proof—hydrophobic on the outside, a wicking polymer on the inside. The whole system was impregnated with engineered bacteria that broke down the waste products in human sweat—or other fluids—and returned them to the environment as safe, nearly odorless, nonpolluting water, salts, and a few trace chemicals. Dharthi was going to have to unfasten the damn thing.

She waited while the swamp-tiger prodded her again. It seemed to have a pattern of investigating and withdrawing—Dharthi heard the rustle and felt the thump and sway as it leaped from branch to branch, circling, making a few horrifically unsettling noises and a bloodcurdling snarl or two, and coming back for another go at the cocoon. The discipline required to hold herself still—not even merely still, but limp—as the creature whuffed and poked left her nauseated with adrenaline. She felt it moving away then. The swing of branches under its weight did nothing to ease the roiling in her gut.

Now or never.

Shell! Come and get me! Then she palmed the cocoon’s seal and whipped it open, left hand and foot shoved through internal grips so she didn’t accidentally evert herself into free fall. As she swung, she shook a heavy patter of water drops loose from the folds of the cocoon’s hydrophobic surface. They pattered down. There were a lot of branches between her and the ground; she didn’t fancy making the intimate acquaintanceship of each and every one of them.

The swamp-tiger hadn’t gone as far as she expected. In fact, it was on the branch just under hers. As it whipped its head around and roared, she had an eloquent view from above—a clear shot down its black-violet gullet. The mouth hinged wide enough to bite her in half across the middle; the tongue was thick and fleshy; the palate ribbed and mottled in paler shades of red. If I live through this, I will be able to draw every one of those seventy-two perfectly white teeth from memory.

She grabbed the safety handle with her right hand as well, heaved with her hips, and flipped the cocoon over so her legs swung free. For a moment, she dangled just above the swamp-tiger. It reared back on its heavy haunches like a startled cat, long tail lashing around to protect its abdomen. Dharthi knew that as soon as it collected its wits it was going to take a swipe at her, possibly with both sets of forelegs.

It was small for a swamp-tiger—perhaps only two hundred kilos—and its stripes were quite a bit brighter than she would have expected. Even wet, its feathery plumage had the unfinished raggedness she associated with young animals still in their baby coats. It might even have been fuzzy, if it were ever properly dry. Which might explain why it was so high up in the treetops. Previously undocumented behavior in a juvenile animal.

Wouldn’t it be an irony if this were the next in a long line of xenobiological discoveries temporarily undiscovered again because a scientist happened to get herself eaten? At least she had a transponder. And maybe the shell was near enough to record some of this.

Data might survive.

Great, she thought. I wonder where its mama is.

Then she urinated in its face.

It wasn’t an aimed stream by any means, though she was wearing the external plumbing currently—easier in the field, until you got a bladder stone. But she had a bladder full of pee saved up during sleep, so there was plenty of it. It splashed down her legs and over the swamp-tiger’s face, and Dharthi didn’t care what your biology was, if you were carbon-oxygen-based, a snoutful of ammonia and urea had to be pretty nasty.

The swamp-tiger backed away, cringing. If it had been a human being, Dharthi would have said it was spluttering. She didn’t take too much time to watch; good a story as it would make someday, it would always be a better one than otherwise if she survived to tell it. She pumped her legs for momentum, glad that the sweat-wicking properties of the cocoon’s lining kept the grip dry, because right now her palms weren’t doing any of that work themselves. Kick high, a twist from the core, and she had one leg over the cocoon. It was dry—she’d shaken off what little water it had collected. Dharthi pulled her feet up—standing on the stuff was like standing on a slack sail, and she was glad that some biotuning trained up by the time she spent running the canopy had given her the balance of a perching bird.

Behind and below, she heard the Cytherean monster make a sound like a kettle boiling over—one part whistle, and one part hiss. She imagined claws in her haunches, a crushing bite to the skull or the nape—

The next branch up was a half meter beyond her reach. Her balance on her toes, she jumped as hard as she could off the yielding surface under her bare feet. Her left hand missed; the right hooked a limb but did not close. She dangled sideways for a moment, the stretch across her shoulder strong and almost pleasant. Her fingers locked in the claw position, she flexed her biceps—not a pull-up, she couldn’t chin herself one-handed—but just enough to let her left hand latch securely. A parasitic orchid squashed beneath the pads of her fingers. A dying bug wriggled. Caustic sap burned her skin. She swung, and managed to hang on.

She wanted to dangle for a moment, panting and shaking and gathering herself for the next ridiculous effort. But beneath her, the rattle of leaves, the creak of a bough. The not-tiger was coming.

Climb. Climb!

She had to get high. She had to get farther out from the trunk, onto branches where it would not pursue her. She had to stay alive until the shell got to her. Then she could run or fight as necessary.

Survival was starting to seem like less of a pipe dream now.

She swung herself up again, risking a glance through her armpit as she mantled herself up onto the bough. It dipped and twisted under her weight. Below, the swamp-tiger paced, snarled, reared back and took a great, outraged swing up at her cocoon with its two left-side forepaws.

The fabric held. The branches it was slung between did not. They cracked and swung down, crashing on the boughs below and missing the swamp-tiger only because the Cytherean cat had reflexes preternaturally adapted to life in the trees. It still came very close to being knocked off its balance, and Dharthi took advantage of its distraction to scramble higher, careful to remember not to wipe her itching palms on the more sensitive flesh of her thighs.

Another logic problem presented itself. The closer she got to the trunk, the higher she could scramble, and the faster the adaptshell could get to her—but the swamp-tiger was less likely to follow her out on the thinner ends of the boughs. She was still moving as she decided that she’d go up a bit more first and move diagonally—up and out, until “up” was no longer an option.

She made two more branches before hearing the rustle of the swamp-tiger leaping upward behind her. She’d instinctively made a good choice in climbing away from it rather than descending, she realized—laterally or down, there was no telling how far the thing could leap. Going up, on unsteady branches, it was limited to shorter hops. Shorter . . . but much longer than Dharthi’s. Now the choice was made for her—out, before it caught up, or get eaten. At least the wet of the leaves and the rain were washing the irritant sap from her palms.

She hauled her feet up again and gathered herself to stand and sprint down the center stem of this bough, a perilous highway no wider than her palm. When she raised her eyes, though, she found herself looking straight into the four bright, curious blue eyes of a second swamp-tiger.

“Aw, crud,” Dharthi said. “Didn’t anyone tell you guys you’re supposed to be solitary predators?”

It looked about the same age and size and fluffiness as the other one. Littermates? Littermates of some Terran species hunted together until they reached maturity. That was probably the answer, and there was another groundbreaking bit of Cytherean biology that would go into a swamp-tiger’s belly with Dharthi’s masticated brains. Maybe she’d have enough time to relay the information to Kraken while they were disemboweling her.

The swamp-tiger lifted its anterior right forefoot and dabbed experimentally at Dharthi. Dharthi drew back her lips and hissed at it, and it pulled the leg back and contemplated her, but it didn’t put the paw down. The next swipe would be for keeps.

She could call Kraken now, of course. But that would just be a distraction, not help. Help had the potential to arrive in time.

The idea of telling Kraken—and everybody—how she had gotten out of a confrontation with two of Venus’s most impressive predators put a new rush of strength in her trembling legs. They were juveniles. They were inexperienced. They lacked confidence in their abilities, and they did not know how to estimate hers.

Wild predators had no interest in fighting anything to the death. They were out for a meal.

Dharthi stood up on her refirming knees, screamed in the swamp-tiger’s face, and punched it as hard as she could, right in the nose.

She almost knocked herself out of the damned tree, and only her windmilling left hand snatching at twigs hauled her upright again and saved her. The swamp-tiger had crouched back, face wrinkled up in distaste or discomfort. The other one was coming up behind her.

Dharthi turned on the ball of her foot and sprinted for the end of the bough. Ten meters, fifteen, and it trembled and curved down sharply under her weight. There was still a lot of forest giant left above her, but this bough was arching now until it almost touched the one below. It moved in the wind, and with every breath. It creaked and made fragile little crackling noises.

A few more meters, and it might bend down far enough that she could reach the branch below.

A few more meters, and it might crack and drop.

It probably wouldn’t pull free of the tree entirely—fresh Cytherean “wood” was fibrous and full of sap—but it might dump her off pretty handily.

She took a deep breath—clean air, rain, deep sweetness of flowers, herby scents of crushed leaves—and turned again to face the tigers.

They were still where she had left them, crouched close to the trunk of the tree, tails lashing as they stared balefully after her out of eight gleaming cerulean eyes. Their fanged heads were sunk low between bladelike shoulders. Their lips curled over teeth as big as fingers.

“Nice kitties,” Dharthi said ineffectually. “Why don’t you two just scamper on home? I bet Mama has a nice bit of grue for supper.”

The one she had peed on snarled at her. She supposed she couldn’t blame it. She edged a little farther away on the branch.

A rustling below. Now that’s just ridiculous.

But it wasn’t a third swamp-tiger. She glanced down and glimpsed an anthropoid shape clambering up through the branches fifty meters below, mostly hidden in foliage but moving with a peculiar empty lightness. The shell. Coming for her.

The urge to speed up the process, to try to climb down to it was almost unbearable, but Dharthi made herself sit tight. One of the tigers—the one she’d punched—rose up on six padded legs and slunk forward. It made a half dozen steps before the branch’s increasing droop and the cracking, creaking sounds made it freeze. It was close enough now that she could make out the pattern of its damp, feathery whiskers. Dharthi braced her bare feet under tributary limbs and tried not to hunker down; swamp-tigers were supposed to go for crouching prey, and standing up and being big was supposed to discourage them. She spread her arms and rode the sway of the wind, the sway of the limb.

Her adaptshell heaved itself up behind her while the tigers watched. Her arms were already spread wide, her legs braced. The shell just cozied up behind her and squelched over her outstretched limbs, snuggling up and tightening down. It affected her balance, though, and the wobbling of the branch—

She crouched fast and grabbed at a convenient limb. And that was more than tiger number two could bear.

From a standing start, still halfway down the branch, the tiger gathered itself, hindquarters twitching. It leaped, and Dharthi had just enough time to try to throw herself flat under its arc. Enough time to try, but not quite enough time to succeed.

One of the swamp-tiger’s second rank of legs caught her right arm like the swing of a baseball bat. Because she had dodged, it was her arm and not her head. The force of the blow still sent Dharthi sliding over the side of the limb, clutching and failing to clutch, falling in her adaptshell. She heard the swamp-tiger land where she had been, heard the bough crack, saw it give and swing down after her. The swamp-tiger squalled, scrabbling, its littermate making abrupt noises of retreat as well—and it was falling beside Dharthi, twisting in midair, clutching a nearby branch and there was a heaving unhappy sound from the tree’s structure and she fell alone, arm numb, head spinning.

The adaptshell saved her. It, too, twisted in midair, righted itself, reached out and grasped with her good arm. This branch held, but it bent, and she slammed into the next branch down, taking the impact on the same arm the tiger had injured. She didn’t know for a moment if that green sound was a branch breaking or her—and then she did know, because inside the shell she could feel how her right arm hung limp, meaty, flaccid—humerus shattered.

She was dangling right beside her cocoon, as it happened. She used the folds of cloth to pull herself closer to the trunk, then commanded it to detach and retract. She found one of the proximity alarms and discovered that the damp had gotten into it. It didn’t register her presence, either.

Venus.

She was stowing it one-handed in one of the shell’s cargo pockets, warily watching for the return of either tiger, when the voice burst into her head.

“Dhar!”

“Don’t worry,” she told Kraken. “Just hurt my arm getting away from a swamp-tiger. Everything’s fine.”

“Hurt or broke? Wait, swamp-tiger?”

“It’s gone now. I scared it off.” She wasn’t sure, but she wasn’t about to admit that. “Tell Zamin the juveniles hunt in pairs.”

“A pair of swamp-tigers?”

“I’m fine,” Dharthi said, and clamped down the link.

She climbed down one-handed, relying on the shell more than she would have liked. She did not see either tiger again.

At the bottom, on the jungle floor, she limped, but she ran.

Four runs and four sleeps later—the sleeps broken, confused spirals of exhaustion broken by fractured snatches of rest—the brightest patch of pewter in the sky had shifted visibly to the east. Noon had become afternoon, and the long Cytherean day was becoming Dharthi’s enemy. She climbed trees regularly to look for signs of geometrical shapes informing the growth of the forest, and every time she did, she glanced at that brighter smear of cloud sliding down the sky and frowned.

Dharthi—assisted by her adaptshell—had come some five hundred kilometers westward. Maxwell Montes was lost behind her now, in cloud and mist and haze and behind the shoulder of the world. She was moving fast for someone creeping, climbing, and swinging through the jungle, although she was losing time because she hadn’t turned the adaptshell loose to forage on its own since the swamp-tiger. She needed it to support and knit her arm—the shell fused to itself across the front and made a seamless cast and sling—and for the pain suppressants it fed her along with its prechewed pap. The bones were going to knit all wrong, of course, and when she got back, they’d have to grow her a new one, but that was pretty minor stuff.

The shell filtered toxins and allergens out of the biologicals it ingested, reheaving some of the carbohydrates, protein, and fat to produce a bland, faintly sweet, nutrient-rich paste that was safe for Dharthi’s consumption. She sucked it from a tube as needed, squashing it between tongue and palate to soften it before swallowing each sticky, dull mouthful.

Water was never a problem—at least, the problem was having too much of it, not any lack. This was Venus. Water squelched in every footstep across the jungle floor. It splashed on the adaptshell’s head and infiltrated every cargo pocket. The only things that stayed dry were the ones that were treated to be hydrophobic, and the coating was starting to wear off some of those. Dharthi’s cocoon was permanently damp inside. Even her shell, which molded to her skin perfectly, felt alternately muggy or clammy depending on how it was comping temperature.

The adaptshell also filtered some of the fatigue toxins out of Dharthi’s system. But not enough. Sleep was sleep, and she wasn’t getting enough of it.

The landscape was becoming dreamy and strange. The forest never thinned, never gave way to another landscape—except the occasional swath of swampland—but now, occasionally, twisted fumaroles rose up through it, smoking towers of orange and ochre that sent wisps of steam drifting between scalded, yellowed leaves. Dharthi saw one of the geysers erupt; she noticed that over it, and where the spray would tend to blow, there was a hole in the canopy. But vines grew right up the knobby accreted limestone on the windward side.

Five runs and five . . . five attempts at a sleep later, Dharthi began to accept that she desperately, desperately wanted to go home.

She wouldn’t, of course.

Her arm hurt less. That was a positive thing. Other than that, she was exhausted and damp and cold, and some kind of thick, liver-colored leech kept trying to attach itself to the adaptshell’s legs. A species new to science, probably, and Dharthi didn’t give a damn.

Kraken tried to contact her every few hours.

She didn’t answer because she knew if she did, she would ask Kraken to come and get her. And then she’d never be able to look another living Cytherean in the face again.

It wasn’t like Venus had a big population.

Dharthi was going to prove herself or die trying.

The satlink from Zamin, though, she took at once. They chatted about swamp-tigers—Zamin, predictably, was fascinated, and told Dharthi she’d write it up and give full credit to Dharthi as observer. “Tell Hazards, too,” Dharthi said, as an afterthought.

“Oh, yeah,” Zamin replied. “I guess it is at that. Dhar . . . are you okay out there?”

“Arm hurts,” Dharthi admitted. “The drugs are working, though. I could use some sleep in a bed. A dry bed.”

“Yeah,” Zamin said. “I bet you could. You know Kraken’s beside herself, don’t you?”

“She’ll know if I die,” Dharthi said.

“She’s a good friend,” Zamin said. A good trick, making it about her, rather than Kraken or Dharthi or Kraken and Dharthi. “I worry about her. You know she’s been unbelievably kind to me, generous through some real roughness. She’s—”

“She’s generous,” Dharthi said. “She’s a genius and a charismatic. I know it better than most. Look, I should pay attention to where my feet are, before I break the other arm. Then you will have to extract me. And won’t I feel like an idiot then?”

“Dhar—”

She broke the sat. She felt funny about it for hours afterward, but at least when she crawled into her cocoon that rest period, adaptshell and all, she was so exhausted she slept.

She woke up sixteen hours and twelve minutes later, disoriented and sore in every joint. After ninety seconds she recollected herself enough to figure out where she was—in her shell, in her cocoon, fifty meters up in the Ishtarean canopy, struggling out of an exhaustion and painkiller haze—and when she was, with a quick check of the time.

She stowed and packed by rote, slithered down a strangler vine, stood in contemplation on the forest floor. Night was coming—the long night—and while she still had ample time to get back to base camp without calling for a pickup, every day now cut into her margin of safety.

She ran.

Rested, she almost had the resources to deal with it when Kraken spoke in her mind, so she gritted her teeth and said, “Yes, dear?”

“Hi,” Kraken said. There was a pause, in which Dharthi sensed a roil of suppressed emotion. Thump. Thump. As long as her feet kept running, nothing could catch her. That sharpness in her chest was just tight breath from running, she was sure. “Zamin says she’s worried about you.”

Dharthi snorted. She had slept too much, but now that the kinks were starting to shake out of her body, she realized that the rest had done her good. “You know what Zamin wanted to talk to me about? You. How wonderful you are. How caring. How made of charm.” Dharthi sighed. “How often do people take you aside to gush about how wonderful I am?”

“You might,” Kraken said, “be surprised.”

“It’s hard being the partner of somebody so perfect. When did you ever struggle for anything? You have led a charmed life, Kraken, from birth to now.”

“Did I?” Kraken said. “I’ve been lucky, I don’t deny. But I’ve worked hard. And lived through things. You think I’m perfect because that’s how you see me, in between bouts of hating everything I do.”

“It’s how everyone sees you. If status in the afterlife is determined by praises sung, yours is assured.”

“I wish you could hear how they talk about you. People hold you in awe, love.”

Thump. Thump. The rhythm of her feet soothed her, when nothing else could. She was even getting resigned to the ceaseless damp, which collected between her toes, between her buttocks, behind her ears. “They love you. They tolerated me. No one ever saw what you saw in me.”

“I did,” Kraken replied. “And quit acting as if I were somehow perfect. You’ve been quick enough to remind me on occasion of how I’m not. This thing, this need to prove yourself . . . it’s a sophipathology, Dhar. I love you. But this is not a healthy pattern of thought. Ambition is great, but you go beyond ambition. Nothing you do is ever good enough. You deny your own accomplishments and inflate those of everyone around you. You grew up in Aphrodite, and there are only thirty thousand people on the whole damned planet. You can’t be surprised that, brilliant as you are, some of us are just as smart and capable as you are.”

Thump. Thump—

She was watching ahead even as she was arguing, though her attention wasn’t on it. That automatic caution was all that kept her from running off the edge of the world.

Before her—below her—a great cliff dropped away. The trees in the valley soared up. But this was not a tangled jungle: it was a climax forest, a species of tree taller and more densely canopied than any Dharthi had seen. The light below those trees was thick and crepuscular, and though she could hear the rain drumming on their leaves, very little of it dripped through.

Between them, until the foliage cut off her line of sight, Dharthi could see the familiar, crescent-shaped roofs of aboriginal Cytherean structures, some of them half-consumed in the accretions from the forest of smoking stone towers that rose among the trees.

She stood on the cliff edge overlooking the thing she had come half a world by airship and a thousand kilometers on foot to find, and pebbles crumbled from beneath the toes of her adaptshell, and she raised a hand to her face as if Kraken were really speaking into a device in her ear canal instead of into the patterns of electricity in her brain. The cavernous ruin stretched farther than her eyes could see—even dark-adapted, once the shell made the transition for her. Even in this strange, open forest filled with colorful, flitting, flying things.

“Love?”

“Yes?” Kraken said, then went silent and waited.

“I’ll call you back,” Dharthi said. “I just discovered the Lost City of Ishtar.”

Dharthi walked among the ruins. It was not all she’d hoped.

Well, it was more than she had hoped. She rappelled down, and as soon as her shell sank ankle deep in the leaf litter she was overcome by a hush of awe. She turned from the wet, lichen-heavy cliff, scuffed with the temporary marks of her feet, and craned back to stare up at the forest of geysers and fumaroles and trees that stretched west and south as far as she could see. The cliff behind her was basalt—another root of the volcano whose shield was lost in mists and trees. This . . . this was the clearest air she had ever seen.

The trees were planted in rows, as perfectly arranged as pillars in some enormous Faerie hall. The King of the Giants lived here, and Dharthi was Jack, except she had climbed down the beanstalk for a change.

The trunks were as big around as ten men with linked hands, tall enough that their foliage vanished in the clouds overhead. Trees on Earth, Dharthi knew, were limited in height by capillary action: how high could they lift water to their thirsty leaves?

Perhaps these Cytherean giants drank from the clouds as well as the soil.

“Oh,” Dharthi said, and the spaces between the trees both hushed and elevated her voice, so it sounded clear and thin. “Wait until Zamin sees these.”

Dharthi suddenly realized that if they were a new species, she would get to name them.

They were so immense, and dominated the light so completely, that very little grew under them. Some native fernmorphs, some mosses. Lichens shaggy on their enormous trunks and roots. Where one had fallen, a miniature Cytherean rain forest had sprung up in the admitted light, and here there was drumming, dripping rain, rain falling like strings of glass beads. It was a muddy little puddle of the real world in this otherwise alien quiet.

The trees stood like attentive gods, their faces so high above her she could not even hear the leaves rustle.

Dharthi forced herself to turn away from the trees, at last, and begin examining the structures. There were dozens of them—hundreds—sculpted out of the same translucent, mysterious, impervious material as all of the ruins in Aphrodite. But this was six, ten times the scale of any such ruin. Maybe vaster. She needed a team. She needed a mapping expedition. She needed a base camp much closer to this. She needed to give the site a name—

She needed to get back to work.

She remembered, then, to start documenting. The structures—she could not say, of course, which were habitations, which served other purposes—or even if the aboriginals had used the same sorts of divisions of usage that human beings did—were of a variety of sizes and heights. They were all designed as arcs or crescents, however—singly, in series, or in several cases as a sort of stepped spectacular with each lower, smaller level fitting inside the curve of a higher, larger one. Several had obvious access points, open to the air, and Dharthi reminded herself sternly that going inside unprepared was not just a bad idea because of risk to herself, but because she might disturb the evidence.

She clenched her good hand and stayed outside.

Her shell had been recording, of course—now she began to narrate, and to satlink the files home. No fanfare, just an upload. Data and more data—and the soothing knowledge that while she was hogging her allocated bandwidth to send, nobody could call her to ask questions, or congratulate, or—

Nobody except Kraken, with whom she was entangled for life.

“Hey,” her partner said in her head. “You found it.”

“I found it,” Dharthi said, pausing the narration but not the load. There was plenty of visual, olfactory, auditory, and kinesthetic data being sent even without her voice.

“How does it feel to be vindicated?”

She could hear the throb of Kraken’s pride in her mental voice. She tried not to let it make her feel patronized. Kraken did not mean to sound parental, proprietary. That was Dharthi’s own baggage.

“Vindicated?” She looked back over her shoulder. The valley was quiet and dark. A fumarole vented with a rushing hiss and a curve of wind brought the scent of sulfur to sting her eyes.

“Famous?”

“Famous?”

“Hell, Terran-famous. The homeworld is going to hear about this in oh, about five minutes, given light lag—unless somebody who’s got an entangled partner back there shares sooner. You’ve just made the biggest Cytherean archaeological discovery in the past hundred days, love. And probably the next hundred. You are not going to have much of a challenge getting allocations now.”

“I—”

“You worked hard for it.”

“It feels like . . . ” Dharthi picked at the bridge of her nose with a thumbnail. The skin was peeling off in flakes: too much time in her shell was wreaking havoc with the natural oil balance of her skin. “It feels like I should be figuring out the next thing.”

“The next thing,” Kraken said. “How about coming home to me? Have you proven yourself to yourself yet?”

Dharthi shrugged. She felt like a petulant child. She knew she was acting like one. “How about to you?”

“I never doubted you. You had nothing to prove to me. The self-sufficiency thing is your pathology, love, not mine. I love you as you are, not because I think I can make you perfect. I just wish you could see your strengths as well as you see your flaws—one second, bit of a squall up ahead—I’m back.”

“Are you on an airship?” Was she coming here?

“Just an airjeep.”

Relief and a stab of disappointment. You wouldn’t get from Aphrodite to Ishtar in an AJ.

Well, Dharthi thought. Looks like I might be walking home.

And when she got there? Well, she wasn’t quite ready to ask Kraken for help yet.

She would stay, she decided, two more sleeps. That would still give her time to get back to base camp before nightfall, and it wasn’t as if her arm could get any more messed up between now and then. She was turning in a slow circle, contemplating where to sling her cocoon—the branches were really too high to be convenient—when the unmistakable low hum of an aircar broke the rustling silence of the enormous trees.

It dropped through the canopy, polished-copper belly reflecting a lensed fish-eye of forest, and settled down ten meters from Dharthi. Smiling, frowning, biting her lip, she went to meet it. The upper half was black hydrophobic polymer: she’d gotten a lift in one just like it at Ishtar base camp before she set out.

The hatch opened. In the cramped space within, Kraken sat behind the control board. She half rose, crouched under the low roof, came to the hatch, held out her right hand, reaching down to Dharthi. Dharthi looked at Kraken’s hand, and Kraken sheepishly switched it for the other one. The left one, which Dharthi could take without strain.

“So I was going to take you to get your arm looked at,” Kraken said.

“You spent your allocations—”

Kraken shrugged. “Gonna send me away?”

“This time,” she said, “ . . . no.”

Kraken wiggled her fingers.

Dharthi took her hand, stepped up into the GEV, realized how exhausted she was as she settled back in a chair and suddenly could not lift her head without the assistance of her shell. She wondered if she should have hugged Kraken. She realized that she was sad that Kraken hadn’t tried to hug her. But, well. The shell was sort of in the way.

Resuming her chair, Kraken fixed her eyes on the forward screen. “Hey. You did it.”

“Hey. I did.” She wished she felt it. Maybe she was too tired.

Maybe Kraken was right, and Dharthi should see about working on that.

Her eyes dragged shut. So heavy. The soft motion of the aircar lulled her. Its soundproofing had degraded, but even the noise wouldn’t be enough to keep her awake. Was this what safe felt like? “Something else.”

“I’m listening.”

“If you don’t mind, I was thinking of naming a tree after you.”

“That’s good,” Kraken said. “I was thinking of naming a kid after you.”

Dharthi grinned without opening her eyes. “We should use my Y chromosome. Color blindness on the X.”

“Ehn. Ys are half-atrophied already. We’ll just use two Xs,” Kraken said decisively. “Maybe we’ll get a tetrachromat.”

Originally published in Old Venus edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois.

Twelve and Tag

Gregory Norman Bossert

“ . . . Twelve and Tag,” we shouted, and Cheung added, “You two know it?”

Zandt lowered his brows and frowned.

Adra shook her head, looked around at us. She did that, searching faces for clues about what was expected of her. “You mean tee-ay-gee like T-complete Associative Gestalt? Crew’s got the sort of money for neural backup?” she asked.

Cheung said, “Not tech. It’s a bar game. A slam, a rap.”

Zandt’s brows lowered further over pale eyes.

“An improvised impression. And then you tell stories, the worst thing, stupidest thing, most painful thing you’ve ever done.”

“Or kindest,” added Nava, back from the bar with drinks balanced in both hands. And to our chorus of complaints, “That’s the way we do it—”

“—on Mars,” we shouted, the crew of the Tethys. All but Adra and Zandt. They weren’t really crew yet, not until this was done.

“This ain’t Mars,” Orit said, and bounced her head off the window behind her, layers of clear composite and beyond it the flat flat beige of Europa, Jupiter’s fat belly propped on the horizon.

“Something we do,” Perelman rumbled.

“Breaks the ice,” Orit said, to groans. All we did was break the ice, down into the ocean that lay underneath Europa’s surface.

“It’s not just ice that breaks,” Cheung said, “doing what we do.” His fingers mimed something snapping. “It’s equipment, people, whole ships sometimes. Got to know each other.”

“Gotta trust,” Nava said. She was harpoonist, which these days meant piloting a remote vehicle on a two-kilometer cable, and, as if to make up for that, everything about her was sharp. She gave Adra a sharp smile now, then flicked it at Zandt.

Adra was second-shift pilot, had been for two months. Lean and grey, swept-back eyes so dark they seemed opaque, or empty. This was her first shore leave with us; she’d come in mid-mission after her predecessor had lost an arm in a blowout.

Our assayer had just lost his nerve after that. That’s the position Zandt had recently dropped into. Literally: he’d landed in-system that morning from who-knew-where, resume in hand, “ship = Tethys” scrawled in the margin. He hung over the table like Jupiter over the surface out the window, blond hair swept back onto broad shoulders, something in the hard lines of his face keeping him from easy handsomeness.

Adra and Zandt were already signed by the captain, but contracts could be revoked or applicants left stranded if the crew decided against the hire. That’s why we were here.

We? The crew. Perelman was mate, solid, methodical, the wall between the captain and the rest. He left the running of things to Cheung, he’s navigator, and Yu, she’s main-shift pilot. Even the captain deferred to those two. Cheung, he was always in motion, always quick to find the right words. Yu was always still, always looking Out into the deep, yet somehow saw everything anyway.

Orit was cook; that’s not a junior role, not on a ship that spends six months at a time under the ice. She was likely to be at the bottom of any trouble or atop another crewmember, but she always cleaned up her own messes.

Who else? Nava you already know. Patel was there, engineer, and most of the hands: Keita and Barb, Deighton and Sintra. We filled all the spots around the one long, battered table, driving the other patrons into the corners or up to the bar. It was all deep-ocean crew in this place. There were other bars for the spacers, administrators, tourists, and if any of these wandered in here, they’d be driven out soon enough by the noise and the roughhousing and the smell that clung of Europa’s strange secret ocean.

That ocean was thick: with alien viruses, with complex hydrocarbons that triggered fatal autoimmune reactions, with larger creatures that fed on the sludge, and on each other, and on us. We scooped the sludge, trapped the creatures, sold the lot to brokers who sold in turn to the universities and corporations. The Outer System was one big boomtown, bigger than the whole damn Inner System by orders of magnitude, by any metric.

“So we tell a story . . . ” Adra said.

“Two stories,” Yu said, “one of them true, one of them false.”

“And then we go around the table and vote on which was the lie.”

“A bet?” Zandt said.

“A confirmation,” Cheung said.

Perelman nodded, rumbled agreement.

“Though if we guess right, you buy a round,” Orit added.

Cheung said, “I’ll go first, so you know how it goes.” He laced his fingers together, closed his eyes, a beat, opened eyes and hands, took a breath. No Twelve and Tag for Cheung; the crew knew him too well. But if there had been, the tag would be “flight.” Fragile bones spread under his face like bird’s wings, bird’s eyes, too, black and always flitting, fingers light and fast on the ship consoles, on the table here. Hard to imagine him anywhere but Out, doing anything but Nav, but he’d been a singer back on Earth. The crew knew his stories.

“Stupidest, then,” Cheung started. “I was with the captain out at Saturn, a dozen years ago. Ice mining in the Rings. I was young, thought I knew the ship, thought I knew the system. So, we found a vein heavy with tholins.” A fleeting glance up at Zandt, who gave a slow nod.

“Natural organics, worth their weight in the Outer System for hydroponics, industry,” Zandt said.

Cheung nodded back. “We didn’t have processing facilities onship. Ice mining, you just grab hold of a piece, push it out to a moon or a station. Tholins, they’re dark, easy to see in the ice. If we had pulled up to Titan station with a twenty tonne chunk of that, the market would have been ready for us. They’d set a price before we even docked, lose us twenty percent, maybe more. So I had the idea to cut across to the research station around Enceladus, process there, ship the tholins back to Titan in tanks, hit the market and get out before they knew the score.

“Enceladus was far side of Saturn so we cut across the Rings, close above the clouds, serious v, flung ourselves out the far side.

“We hit something over the B Ring that didn’t show on sensors, probably just a dense pocket of dust, but we were moving fast. All I knew was, one minute I was watching the monitors, green down the board, and then woosh half the ship was gone. Main drivers, cargo. Seven crew. Left us in a spin that I couldn’t kill with the thrusters I had left. Left us on a course that didn’t go anywhere except Out.”

Orit shivered, and Yu got that far-gone look she got, straight through the wall and into the deep.

“Long range coms were gone. All we could do was hope Enceladus picked up our beacon, had someone in-station fast enough to catch us. Four days of that spin. Spin wouldn’t let you eat, wouldn’t let you sleep for more than a few minutes before you’d wake up, convinced you were falling. All we could do was watch the view, Saturn, Rings, stars, Saturn, Rings, stars. The captain and I and the one remaining crewmember: ‘I’m not backed up, I’ll be lost,’ she kept saying, round and round, until we had to sedate her.

“Thing was, I was backed up. A full T.A.G. back on Earth, nothing to be scared of, nothing to lose. I wasn’t scared, I was furious. I hadn’t had an update since I’d gotten to the Outer System. If I died and they brought me back, I’d lose a year, I’d lose those four days spinning across the Rings. And I couldn’t stand the idea of losing that view.”

Cheung’s lips twitched, a quick humorless grin.

“We’ll always want more than the tech can give us. And stupid masquerading as clever; that’s the worst kind.”

Adra looked around the table, looking for a hint from the crew. Some eyes met hers, some looked up at the low ceiling, sheet steel and pitted with rust, or out through the plexi at Jupiter.

“If you’re a restored copy, how do you know all this?” she asked, like an accusation.

Cheung shrugged. “Enceladus Station had been tracking us the entire time, got a tug out in time to snare us. That’s how the captain and I got into under-ice work, stuck on Enceladus without a ship. But the oceans here on Europa were deeper.” He took a sip, swallowed, and started his second story.

“A triangle is the strongest shape. Fact. People have known it for a long time, though it took Fuller back in the twentieth century to explain how that fact unfolds across what we know.

“I was twenty. Grad school in Hong Kong. That was right after the referendum, the Second Independence, the first successful neural-nano backups, and HK was the heart of everything that was . . . everything. I was singing all night, studying all day, drinking and drugging and dragging all night and day, no stop, no sleep. Had a boyfriend, Grant, kept me out of the worst of the trouble. Tall, always stooped over like he was looking for something he’d dropped. Couldn’t keep his glasses on straight. He was in the planetary navigation program with me, brilliant at it.”

Cheung turned his head, looked out across Orit and the window and the plains to Jupiter, a long quiet look for him.

“He was gentle in bed. Generous. Never minded my nights out, even though the nights were getting longer. Morning was our time. We’d tell each other that if we could ever afford to get T.A.G.ed, we’d just record one of those mornings and live in it forever.

“I was singing fado, it’d been an underground thing in Macau but suddenly HK was the right place, right time, and I was big. Advertising deals, guest spots on the telenovelas, corporate sponsorship from VanZ. I had company lawyers circling me like mad moons: sing here, be seen there, wear this, drink that, an endless supply of drugs, nano, people. Anything to keep me busy, anything to keep me there making money for them.

“So I got my own lawyer. Leslie. She was from Singapore. Tiny. Quiet. You’d be sitting in a room, forget she was there, and then she’d reach a hand out, touch your shoulder. Should have been a shock, but it was like . . . ”

Cheung’s fingers fluttered downward.

“ . . . rain falling, when you hadn’t realized you were hot and dry.

“Grant and Leslie, they started meeting evenings, talking, about me, mostly, and what I was in, and how to get me out of it. One day, Leslie was still there when I got home in the morning.

“Next five months . . . ”

His hands settled to the table.

“The next five months were perfect. Leslie broke deals, made new ones; suddenly I was getting paid for singing, money in the bank. Grant even came to the clubs to see me sing. He’d never risked the crowd on his own. The two of them would find a table near the front, and afterward I’d sit down with them, with no desire for anything, anyone, anywhere else.”

Adra leaned in, whispered to Nava, “Is this ‘kindest thing’? Because he already took ‘stupid.’ ”

Nava put a finger to her lips. Cheung gave Adra a glance. His fingers danced around the edge of his mug.

“Five months,” he continued, “and then Grant and I had our degrees. Nav certified, from UHK, any ship in the System would take us on. But Grant was talking about a PhD, teaching at the university. I’d sing, he said, and Leslie would make enough money to support the three of us, enough to get us T.A.G.ed. Nano-neural backups had only hit the market a couple of years before, but the startups were booming in HK and suddenly you only had to be filthy rich to get T.A.G.ed. Those VanZ billboards were everywhere; beautiful people doing beautiful things and then the image would freeze with one word splashed across it: Forever. That was before the hack on the Great Basin longstore, no reason to doubt that ‘Forever.’ ”

“I didn’t sleep for two nights after our certifications came through from the university. I walked, mostly, around and around the block. The HK night is too bright for stars and ships and moons, but I’d spent five years learning to do navigation in my head. No matter how I did the math, the course just led around that block again. ‘Forever.’

“So I transferred all the money I had to a bank on Mars. Took a shuttle up to orbit the next morning. When I left them, they were still asleep, Leslie laid perfectly straight as always, Grant sprawled diagonal, their heads together on the pillow.

“Triangles. Too perfect. Too strong for me. I had to fly then, go Out, or never leave.”

He looked at Adra. “So, worst thing.”

Adra said, “You’ve made it out this far, and Jupiter the sharp edge of things these days, and that’s the worst you’ve done? I don’t believe it. Regret for the view, I buy, but not for the leaving. The first story is the true one.” She looked around at the crew. Nava smiled, sharp teeth and narrow eyes.

Yu held her hands up, palms out. “We’ve heard his stories.”

Perelman said, “It’s your round, just the two of you.” And looked at Zandt.

Who bit his lip and looked at the table, where Cheung’s fingers had lit amongst the glasses. “You wouldn’t be the first to see the trap in neuro-nano memories,” he said, a deep voice, not Perelman’s rumble, higher pitched but full, like the pedal tone on an organ. “Wouldn’t be the first to hope the Out offered more. Anyway . . . ” He looked up, caught Cheung’s gaze in his own. “This crew wouldn’t take you if you’d lost the captain a ship. First one’s the lie.”

Claps and stomps, and Patel slapped Zandt on the shoulder; might as well have slapped a stone. Adra’s face fell flat, not so much a frown as indifference.

“Truth,” Yu said. “The first story? That’s mine. I was the surviving crewmember. It was the navigator who lost it, though, terrified about being restored from backup and losing those years, that view. We didn’t sedate her; she took the drugs herself, all of them, two days before the tug caught us. Not that I wouldn’t have helped her if I’d known. She was more worried about losing her memories than about losing seven crew, the arrogant shit.” Yu was staring Out, straight through Adra, breathless, still. “Captain and I were the only ones left then, three months on Enceladus, stumbling from bar to bar, still spinning, until we met Cheung and he took us down under the ice.”

Cheung’s fingers brushed the top of Yu’s hand, paused for a beat.

Yu took a breath then. “I was T.A.G.ed too,” she said. “Would have been glad to lose those months, get to rediscover the Outer system again, see those views again for the first time.” She shrugged, a millimeter motion against the ice out the window. “Missed that chance. My backup was at Great Basin. All gone now.”

Zandt pushed himself up from the table. His stick was leaning against the wall under the window; when he reached for it, it toppled away from him, clashed to the floor. Yu leaned down, picked it up, but Zandt had already turned to limp toward the toilet.

Cheung took the stick from Yu. It was proportioned to Zandt, long, thick, dark wood with a hint of grain. The head was massive, a dragon caught mid-snarl in stainless steel. Orit leaned across Adra, stuck her finger into the dragon’s mouth. “Shit!” she said, and sucked a drop of blood.

Nava laughed. “Always got to stick it into everything, Orit, don’t you?”

Orit leered around her mouthful of finger.

Cheung got up, set the stick by Zandt’s chair; it settled against the window edge with a thud. Cheung tapped Yu on the shoulder, and they went up to the bar.

“So. Adra,” Cheung said.

Adra looked back at him over the rim of her glass, drained it. “So,” she said, gave that same flat look to the rest of the crew.

“Twelve and Tag,” Perelman said, his checklist voice, and we sat up, quieted down. A round of looks, at each other and back to her.

Cheung said, “It goes like this. Someone throws out an adjective, someone matches with a noun, starts with the same sound, or at least hits it somewhere. Six pairs, then someone sums it up with the tag, one word. It’s all about impressions.”

“Gotta be fast,” Nava said.

“Gotta be true,” Perelman grumbled. “Who’s first?”

Orit said, “I got it.” A pause, an arm up, fingers spread—look at me, that was Orit—and then she slapped the table and started it round:

“Lank,”

Barb: “Leg, Tart,”

Sintra: “Tongue, Fast” (“yeah, you wish!”)

Patel: “Flat” (doubtful “huh” from Yu), “Trim,”

Nava: “Teat, Sharp” (“she always says ‘sharp’ ”)

Cheung: “Gash” (laughs, a whistle from Orit), “Sheer,”

Perelman: “Razor,”

And Yu tagged it with: “Lash.”

Adra followed the tag around the table, from face to face with that blank stare she got, as if trying to interpret some inexplicable foreign phrase, ended on Yu for a long while but Yu’s face gave her nothing but Yu’s own long look. Finally she shrugged, looked into Zandt’s heavy golden frown instead.

She said, “Before I came on the Tethys, I was pilot on the Laelaps out of Conamara. She’s not a hunter like Tethys, she’s a mapper, nine-tenths sonar systems and a single-shift crew, dull dull work. We were under the ice—”

“No,” Cheung said.

Adra froze, lips pulled thin against the sibilant “ice,” chin tucked into her shoulder to face Cheung, who was sat next to her.

“No stories set under the ice,” Cheung said.

“Not a good idea to lie about what goes on under the ice, not in this bar,” Nava said, one eyebrow raised, one pointed nail flicking—ting—against her glass.

“And we already know the truth of it,” someone said softly.

Adra shut her eyes, rolled them under her lids, opened them again on Cheung.

“Telenovelas, huh?” she said. “A story about telenovelas, that okay? Or are there more rules you haven’t mentioned?”

The corners of Cheung’s lips quirked up.

“Sure,” Nava said.

“That’s fine,” Yu clarified.

“Telenovelas, then, and the worst thing I ever did.” Adra said. “Passing someone else’s weakness off as my own.

“I used to play piano. I started when I was two, so in the earliest memories I have now, I was already playing piano, and I was already good. A prodigy. There were many prodigies in Taipei, many piano prodigies, many little girl piano prodigies. We all performed in our little dresses with little bows in our hair, an endless chain of competitions, and when we weren’t performing, we were practicing, or taking lessons, or reviewing video of our last recital, while she took apart my playing, note by note.”

Adra lifted her glass; it was empty. Yu filled it from her own bottle, local algae beer, pale green and bitter. Adra downed it and grimaced.

“My teacher, I mean. Cold-hearted bitch. Always pushing me, never satisfied. Not just about the playing, either, it was my posture, the way I walked across the stage, my clothing which I didn’t even fucking choose, but she complained about it anyway. Not that she’d ever gotten anywhere with her playing, not since some award when she was in grade school.

“My father was a Russian diplomat; Mother was a translator. They were both rich, family money, though she had more. Father must have always felt a little . . . weak, because of that. Russian men, they’re supposed to be strong, in charge, head of the family. But it was her city, her culture, even her apartment; we lived in one of her family’s places, in Dàan, took up two entire floors of the building.

“Maybe that’s why he started to beat me. I was something he could be in charge of. Any excuse would do: an A-minus on a school paper, having one sock pulled higher than the other, getting caught watching telenovelas out of HK, the ones with the awful pop music.”

Adra turned her flat stare on Cheung for a moment, blinked like she’d suddenly matched a memory.

“And I was such a damn good girl. I’d stand there and take it, and,” Adra paused, teeth tight, bobbed her head, “curtsy afterward. And go back to my fucking lessons.”

Yu had refilled Adra’s glass. She took another swig, a high-tide line of green scum on her lip. “What is this crap?” But she drank again, wiped her mouth.

“Eight years of that, then, practice and punishment, from those first, earliest memories until the day I came up with my plan. I woke up one morning, the idea in my head. I felt so buzzed. First time I thought I understood what people meant when they said ‘happy.’

“It was the telenovelas that gave me the idea. All that drama, every day a new disaster, another death, just because someone’s feelings were hurt. I watched them because they were funny. I’d lay there and laugh at the foolish people slipping on the same emotional banana peel over and over again. But what I realized that night was that those shows weren’t just funny, they were true. That’s what people are really like. That’s how they manipulate each other, rip each other apart with their own weakness, like Father and Mother. I could do that.

“The next months were all flubbed notes and bad posture, forgotten homework and crying fits. But it didn’t work. I was getting more criticism, more beatings, not less. No matter how hard I studied the videos, no matter how much I practiced in front of the mirror, I couldn’t quite get that vulnerability that let you hook people, draw them in and spin them round.

“And then one of the ’novelas did a story arc on neuro-nano. The illegal kind, pirated memories. This character got addicted, started acting like she was someone else entirely. That’s what I needed.

“Money was no problem; I’d been hacking my parents’ accounts since I was eight. Turns out supply was no problem, either; the big HK corporations do their manufacturing on Taiwan, just to piss off the mainland. The stuff leaked out onto the street. Literally, sometimes. The towns downwind of the plants got real strange, whole neighborhoods sharing the same strayed memory. Plenty of people willing to sell you a vial of someone else’s pitiful past, even if you were a kid in knee socks, as long as you could pay.

“Now I had every human failing at my fingertips, not faked but real, as real as memory.

“After that, there were no more beatings. Not for me. Punishments, yes, dinners denied, privileges suspended, and there was always the bamboo switch. But the real beatings, those stopped. It was like all those years, they hadn’t wanted perfection, they’d wanted weakness. The beatings stopped as soon as I started crying someone else’s tears.

“Stopped for me, that is, not for my mother. I’d hear them at night, the swish and smack and grunt, and see the bruises the next day, when a collar shifted or a sleeve rode up.

“When I was fourteen, I got a full scholarship to UHK, pilot program. A ship console’s not much different from the piano, really. Applied for parental emancipation the same day, walked out the door with what I had on, left all those little dresses behind in the closet. Never went back, never saw them again.”

Adra stretched her shoulders back, cracked her neck, folded her arms.

“Never had any regrets, either, but I know that after I left, Mother would be there alone with Father, and the beatings would never stop. So . . . worst thing.”

Crew was silent a beat. Yu and Cheung exchanged looks. Then Orit scraped her chair back. “Gotta pee.” And Patel followed, and Keita and Barb hit the bar for another round.

Orit had her mouth at Nava’s ear, whisper or tongue wasn’t clear from Nava’s sharp smile, and Deighton, mostly drunk, was asking Zandt something involved and disjointed about silicates. Perelman tapped the table, cleared his throat, a rumble like rocks falling, and said, “Adra. Second story.”

Adra had gotten something new from the bar, clear and steaming. She took a sip, frowned, said, “Most painful? That’s a difficult one. People let you down, and that never gets easier. But if I have to choose . . .

“I was flying shuttles, back and forth between the CSG, the Centre Spatial Guyanais, and Laplace Station. Dumb work, dull work, but the sort of thing that looks right on your CV if you are shooting for an Outer System contract.”

A nod from Yu.

“I had a lover downside, another upside, and switched one or the other out every few months, but I never felt,” she stabbed a palm with a fingertip, “satiated. Like eating crisps when you’re hungry. You fill your belly, but not your need. The problem was, I wasn’t hungry, I was thirsty.”

She took another sip, waved the glass; the liquid swirled but didn’t spill.

“Maybe ’s not a good analogy. Point is, I was looking for the wrong thing. Wasn’t sex. That I can handle all on my own.”

Chuckles, a scornful snort from Keita. Orit said, “Gotta give me a chance.”

“It took Tanja to show me what it was I needed,” Adra continued, “and then Tanja took it back.”

“I met her on a trip upside. She was Nav, first year, on her way up to a contract doing freight runs out of Laplace. We had a spare seat in the cockpit, gave her a lift. Hit the bar, after, talked late, talked the whole shift through, so I had to do the downside run on no sleep. Before I left, she took my hand—she was a tiny thing, her fingers barely wrapped around mine—and she pressed it against her face. Pressed it hard; when she let go, my fingers had left pale streaks from jaw to ear. ‘I’ll be here, next time you’re upside,’ she said, and though she’d been smiling all night, she wasn’t smiling then.

“That next trip, those first shifts together, you don’t need to know the details. Here’s what it was like, by the end. Here’s what she took from me.

“I’d get to Laplace, go straight from the docking ring to meet her, some trendy bar or new-thing restaurant. I’d be in my flight overalls, and she’d always have on some perfect little dress, killer shoes, makeup so good it was invisible. How she maneuvered low-g in those shoes, I never knew.

“We’d talk, catch up on the gossip; those low-earth orbit routes, everyone knows everyone.”

“Same out here,” said Nava, with her sharp-edged smile.

Adra gave her a flat look. “We’d eat and drink and talk for a couple of hours, and the whole time Tanja would be working it. She knew exactly when to cross her legs, or brush her hair back, or lean low to adjust the strap of her shoe. She could focus it like a laser. It was never someone local. But Laplace is a busy place, and there was always some random person in transit. Not really random, though. She’d pick the sort we both despised; the Earther businessman, sweaty and pink and trying to hide his low-g hard-on, or a rich bitch from one of the orbital colonies, with those stupid balloon implants inflated as far as they’d go. I’d watch her watch them, like she was slicing them into millimeter slabs for scanning. Sometimes she’d take a hit of nano, tweak herself to match their need—she had a bigger selection in that tiny purse than most dealers—but mostly she could hook them without that tweak. She’d catch their eye, look away. That was all it took. They’d sit down at our table, or she’d slip over to theirs, while I sat there unnoticed. She’d bought me this little switchblade in the Laplace gift shop; I’d carve little figures out of toothpicks, line them up like an audience to watch her work.

“At some point—there was never a signal, not that even I could tell—she’d just get up and walk out. The mark would sit there, waiting for her to return. If there was more than one of them, they’d joke about women and restrooms, or swap notes on her makeup. But after a while, they’d start to realize that she wasn’t coming back. You could see it, like their faces were hollowing out from the back; then they’d crack, and then they’d crumble. I sat and watched for that moment, when their faces fell away and all that was left was an empty, shallow shell.

“Tanja would be waiting for me at my apartment, dress and shoes in a heap by the door, head down over the console I’d bought her. In that half hour since she’d gotten back from the bar, she’d have already hacked their personal accounts. Just that one conversation she’d had with them, their name, their business, maybe a glance at their phone while they were at the bar, that was all it took for Tanja to hack their lives as thoroughly as she had hacked their so-called personalities.

“We didn’t steal from them, not money, anyway. Sometimes we’d delete a couple of photos, or a mailbox folder, something they wouldn’t miss for months, then miss very, very much. Sometimes we’d copy a file or two; Tanja was growing some sort of crazy database of identities. And sometimes there was just nothing worth deleting and we’d add a file instead, so they’d know we’d been there, had seen everything they had and were.

“Sometimes we fucked, after; sometimes I’d tell her what a bad, bad girl she was and spank her; sometimes we just held each other. No matter what, though, after, I was full. Content. Finally, satisfied. Because what she did, the way she wrapped the marks up in their own emotions, laid their lives at my feet, showed them up as the empty shells they were, she did that for me.

“And then, one day, no signal, no tell, she just got up and walked. She’d been working me all night. We did that sometimes, pretended we were strangers, all part of the game. It was hot in the bar, and she was sweaty, pushy, rude. I turned to order another round, and when I turned back, she was gone. Waited in the damn room all shift, stayed there right through my next scheduled trip, and the next. Got a demerit for that in my flight record. She left me there, cracked and crumbled. Just another mark.

“She took the console, the dress and shoes she was wearing that night, left everything else. I still have her crap in a storage locker on Laplace.

“Before I met her, I was always needing something, but I didn’t know what it was. After she left me, I knew what it was I needed. I just couldn’t have it.”

Adra looked around the table, ended on Cheung. “That’s pain.”

Orit said, “Second one’s the lie. You’re too lean to be a top, too strong.” She traced a finger down Adra’s arm. “Tops are weak.”

And Patel waggled battered fingers, echoed, “Second’s the lie.”

But Yu shook her head, small, economical motions, that was Yu, and said, “First one’s the lie. Her mother beat her, not her father, not the teacher. Beat the father, too, still does, if they’re both still alive.” Yu looked at Adra. “I know the type,” she said.

It went around the table, then, skipping Adra, six votes against the first, four against the second, until it came to Zandt.

Zandt stared ahead, off over Cheung’s shoulder, one long breath, two, then his head shifted, a huge effort to fight the inertia of that gaze, but it came around, ground to a stop on Perelman.

“What’s the rule when both stories are lies?” Zandt asked.

Perelman raised a brow, dropped the corner of his mouth to counter. That was the look he used when a diagnostic came up wrong, onship, or a sensor pinged, unexpectedly.

“You call ‘fault,’ ” Cheung answered.

Zandt swung that gaze over and down to the navigator. Cheung’s eyes flicked up into it, and away again.

“Fault, then,” Zandt said. “Both lies.”

“Makes it six to four against the first, then,” Nava said. She’d voted against the second. “We get it?”

Adra nodded, looked at Yu, looked into her glass. “It was Mother. She was my teacher. Beat my father, too, you got that right. He was weak, a fucking failure. Deserved it.”

She shoved back from the table. “My round. Someone help carry.”

A scrape and shuffle, some crew to the bar and some to the back, toilets and a stretching of legs gone stiff. Orit and Nava drifted to a dark corner, Nava’s grin gleaming over Orit’s shoulder.

Perelman and Cheung looked across the table at Zandt. Yu was standing by the window, looking out, but head turned, listening.

“Where was the lie?” Perelman asked.

“In the second story, he means,” Cheung explained, watching his own fingers trace the rim of a glass. “What was it you heard?”

Zandt turned his head, stared at a spot on Cheung’s chest. Finally, he said, “It was all false. Just a game to her. Stolen memories, appropriated emotions. Doesn’t mean it. Doesn’t feel it.”

Yu said, apparently to the window, “There are words for that. Sociopath is one.”

Perelman rumbled uncertainty. “A hard word, that.”

Yu said, “She’s still got those vials. Bootleg T.A.G. vectors. Hidden under a false bottom in her toiletries bag. The vials are labeled, things like ‘laughing,’ ‘kneecap,’ ‘bimbo,’ ‘uncertainty,’ ‘play stupid.’ ”

“Should have come to me,” Perelman said, a frown more hurt than angry.

“I just found out this morning, when we were getting prepped for shore leave. She didn’t see me sitting there in the head. I can be quiet.”

Perelman grunted.

“She unzipped the bottom of her bag, picked through the vials like she was choosing a shirt to wear. Guess she didn’t find one that fit her mood; she finally put them all back. I figured out the false bottom while she was in the shower. One vial was almost empty. It was labeled ‘trust.’ ”

“Trust her, or trust others?” Perelman asked. Yu was still looking out the window, so he turned to Cheung.

Whose fingers had pushed the clutter of mismatched bottles into a circle in the center of the table. “Trust the crew.” Cheung said. “Don’t have to be straight, under the ice. Don’t have to be all the way . . . human, not in the Outer System. Just have to fit. The crew will know.”

“Not all the way human,” Yu echoed. She’d spread her fingers against the plexiglass as if she could hold the view in her hand. “The T.A.G. capture process uses viral systems based on Europan organisms. I’ve got that in me. Just having a backup at all, does that really leave us human?”

“More or less,” Cheung said. Perelman blinked in confusion. Yu laughed softly, looked over her shoulder at the chatter of glass on glass.

Zandt had retrieved his glass from Cheung’s circle—just tap water, he’d been drinking—and drained it. “Two years since the hack, since the Great Basin longstore was erased,” he said. “So where does that leave you?”

“Here,” Cheung said.

We tumbled back to the table, red and raucous. Deighton had his shirt off, was wringing it out. “What goes down must come up,” Barb said, and Sintra added, “Man, he spewed.”

Patel was sent to the corner with a glass of ice water to break up Orit and Nava, who spluttered and laughed and joined Deighton in the shirt-wringing.

Perelman tapped the table again. “Zandt.”

Zandt was opposite Cheung and Adra, pinned between the window and the next table. Everyone shuffled their chairs, made him center.

“Twelve and Tag,” Orit said, “I got—”

But Perelman rumbled right over her:

“Mass”

Sintra: “Moves, Thick”

Cheung: “Thigh, Sweet” (Orit and Nava elbow each other)

Barb: “Swung, Hung” (cheers)

Patel: “Head, Coil”

Nava: “Crown, Blunt” (a sharp look from Cheung)

Orit: “Brow”

And Adra, slumped in her chair, tagged it with: “Black.”

Zandt looked at her for a long time, his eyes skin hair all a flat tarnished gold in the Jupiter-light. The crew was caught in that heavy silence, all except Cheung’s fingers amongst the glasses.

“Don’t know if this is worst, stupidest, most painful. Not sure it matters.

“Something I do know. I’m an addict. Don’t use, haven’t for twelve years, still an addict. Dad was, too, alcohol for him. Made it himself, like most out there in the Free State. Southern African Republic, part of the old South Africa, and the Boer State before that. Empty place.

“Had a sister, half-sister, Teeje, we called her. Teeje was five years younger, daughter of my stepmother. My mother died bearing me.

“Teeje was tiny, dark, like my stepmother, Indian, but she got her blood from my father. The need. Nano, with her. I could never stand it. Machines in your brain, tracing out someone else’s memories. I wanted less to think about, not more.

“We’d found an outbuilding on the range, relay station for remote harvesters, made it our own, scavenged furniture, my music, Teeje’s console, my bioprinter with the latest drug and her hacked nano. She’d be laughing, not even looking, it seemed, but the needle would slip in true and her head would go back and her laughter go deep and wild.

“Mrs. Van Zandt, we tried to stay out of her way, much as Dad would allow that. Which wasn’t much. We lived in the main house, ate at the main table with them. ‘They’re mine,’ he’d tell his wife. We were his like the house was his, like the land and the folks who worked it and Mrs. bloody Van Zandt. Teeje and I, we were a little more his than the rest, though. He’d had us T.A.G.ed, when I was thirteen and Teeje was just seven.”

Nava interrupted with a snort. “Can’t back up a kid.” We groaned, and Orit punched her in the shoulder for bollixing the game. Nava did that sometimes, harpoonist reflexes. “It’s in the U.N. neural rights charter,” Nava grumbled.

But Cheung was shaking his head, an odd look on his face. “You can if you have enough money and the right connections. You can T.A.G. anyone you want, if you own the technology.”

Yu nodded her small slow nod. “Van Zandt. VanZ Inc.”

“Half the boats under the ice got a contract with VanZ,” Perelman said.

Yu said, “VanZ is material science, nano, patents for smartcloth, adaptive armor. Weapons.” She looked at Cheung. “T.A.G. tech.”

Cheung was very still. “The Grand Basin longstore,” he said.

“Not a lot of rules in the Free State,” Zandt said. And when no one else interrupted, he continued.

“Dad was the only Van Zandt. We were just Zandts. And he had us, body and soul, and the souls locked away at Grand Basin out of reach. ‘Forever.’

“Teeje was my sanity, all through those years. She was my soul. No matter how high she got, how out there, she was my center. Every moment we had away from the work, from my father, we were together. Out in our hideaway, out of our heads, out in one of those shared immersion games on her console. I’d just stagger around staring at the scenery and Teeje, she’d have hacked the environment, argyle skies and faces floating like clouds, staring back down at us like Dad did when we were little. Scare the crap out of the other players, she’d hack their accounts as well, put their own parents’ faces up there too, or whatever would shake them hardest. She could hack people like she hacked machines.

“One day, I was eighteen, I came in from a two-day trip out mending fences, and she was gone. She’d left everything. Left me a note. Not going to tell you what it said. Guess this isn’t ‘most painful’ I’m telling, because that was the most painful moment, then, and I am not yet done.

“ ‘I got her T.A.G.,’ Dad said. ‘Little bitch won’t last long out there, and if she goes underground I’ll have her declared dead. Then I restore a copy, and this copy I’ll take special care of.’

“Doesn’t mean he wasn’t furious. I was too big to beat, by that time, so he took it out on Mira, that was Teeje’s mother. She left him, after that. We all did, eventually, steal our selves from him. Even if he had our souls.”

A pause, then. Orit leaned into Nava’s ear, but Nava stopped her with a hand, wrapped her arm around Orit’s shoulders to hold her still.

“I stuck there another year and a half, got my certificate in soil science from the technical school, turned that into a scholarship in Capetown, three year program in mining, turned that into a research grant from a Outer System mining consortium. A year of study on Luna, then a free ticket Out, dust the Earth off my feet and never look back.

“Because I knew that’s where Teeje would be. Out. She was always sure, always fearless, was what I thought. The way she could suck down other people’s memories, she’d be hungry for her own. And she’d studied. We were teleschooled, and those hours in the outbuilding while I was listening to tunes and drifting, she’d have her tablet on her lap, out of her head into someone else’s, but still studying. ‘Learning is just hacking my own brain,’ she’d say. ‘Easy.’ It was, for her.

“So, all that time in Capetown and Chicago, catching up with my classes, I was trying to catch up with her. She’d be pilot, or nav, something like that, university program or military. Only a couple of dozen schools on Earth do that sort of training, should have been easy to find her. Wasn’t. I’d have figured she was dead, if it wasn’t for the messages every few months. The whole family got them, and copies to the T.A.G. Board and the Free State court, but they were always addressed to Dad. Each one signed with a notarized DNA hash, each one untraceable, each one just a single word: ‘alive.’ ”

Orit made a sound like a hiccup. Nava turned her head with a sharp look ready, saw Orit’s face and wrapped her other arm around her instead.

“I was on Laplace station, on my way back to Luna after a seminar in Chicago. Walked into a dark, crowded bar, smaller, tighter than this place here . . . ”

Zandt looked at Yu’s shoulder, seeing something else.

“We shouldn’t have been able to recognize each other. I was ten centimeters taller, wider, she was thinner, wouldn’t have seemed possible, her dark skin gone that dull space-tan and bruises under the makeup. But I saw her, soon as I walked in there, I knew her, she knew me.

“I’d been right about the Nav degree. Wrong about the course. She was training under a corporate contract, slogging through it the slow way like I was.

“I was also wrong about the sure and fearless. She was strong, yeah, but it was our father’s sort of strength, stubborn and thin. I’d quit the drugs when she’d left. Was no high without her. But she was still using, the new stuff coming out of Luna, synthetic memories, psychotic break in a bottle. I thought she’d be headed Out, but she was just going deeper in.

“She was using another way, too, using people, selling herself to afford the stuff. She’d done tricks, she told me, to get through training, but she’d found a better way, got herself a sugar-momma up on Laplace, all the money she needed, a place to crash. A place to use. It’s stable, she said, it’s safe, it’s just like the outbuilding, back at home, and all it cost was bruises, a little blood. Just like back at home.

“Dad’s blood, didn’t just have the need in it, had the anger too. I shouted, called her a fool, called her his daughter, worst thing I knew how to say, told her she had to come with me, back to Luna, get clean. My company had open positions; always open positions for the Outer System. She’d come back to Luna with me, and then we’d go Out together.

“Stood there at the dock the next shift, sure I’d blown it, sure she wouldn’t come. But she did. No suitcase, just a purse full of memory sticks, wearing a little black dress and useless shoes.

“First month on Luna, I thought things were good. She was in a program, detox, had paper signed with my company for work in the Belt once we got certified, not my same division but we’d be seeing each other once a month or so. She spent all her money on a new console, on a crazy expensive intersystem network node, but I was making enough to cover rent and food for us both.

“Came home early one shift, she was passed out on her console, needle in her hand. Set her in the shower, got her conscious, shouted at her. Kept my hands down, felt proud of myself for that. She was just a wisp you’d snap like that, hadn’t been eating. I’d thought it’d been the detox but it was just the nano again.

“We shouted a while, and then we talked, and then we shouted again. ‘I’m using it,’ she kept saying. ‘I’m almost in.’ ‘What “in”?’ I said. ‘We’re going Out.’ ‘So go, Dad,” she said, and plugged into her console.

“Wasn’t going to be my dad. Wasn’t. So I put my hands in my pockets and I went.

“I found a place to crash by the shuttle port, food out of the vending machines and no booze, just a lot of thinking. Remembering those days in our hideaway back home. Remembering the sound of her laughter. Decided that’s what I’d tell her, that I didn’t own her, no one did. Tell her that all I wanted was to hear her laugh again, and anything else she did wasn’t my business.

“Even after I figured that out, I didn’t go back to the apartment, not right away. I went through what I was going to say, what she might say back, practiced until I was sure I could get it right, could handle anything she came back with without getting mad.

“It was almost three weeks later I went back to the apartment. April 7, 2084.”

Yu said something too quiet for us to hear.

“Of course she wasn’t there when I got back. Just her console. The display was flashing and I thought it might be a message for me. That’s what I told myself, anyway, to justify plugging in and scrolling back through the history buffer. When I realized what I was seeing, I pulled the console apart and fed it a handful at a time into the garbage disposal.”

Silence. Yu and Cheung exchanged a long, sad look. And then Cheung explained it for the rest of us. “That’s the date of the hack on the Grand Basin longstore. Every T.A.G. in the system was scrambled beyond recovery.”

Adra fumbled amongst the bottles, found one with something left in it and downed it, leaned back again, hands in pockets.

“Station security called while I was still sweeping up the pieces. They’d found her outside an airlock, no suit, just that little dress, those shoes. She’d made it two, three steps. Out.”

Zandt straightened, a ponderous unfolding, his focus coming in from somewhere far to land straight across the table at Adra. “I booked a ticket back to Earth, to the Free State, but Dad was already dead by the time I got there. Massive stroke. Took that corporate contract then, been working Outer System ever since. Been searching again, too. Knew Teeje’s new name by then, made it easier to track where she’d been. Korteweg, Tanja Korteweg. Teeje had found a way Out that I couldn’t follow. Least I could do was track down her god forever damned sugar-momma from Laplace, the soulless sociopathic bitch who’d held the door open for her.”

Everything hung. Yu stared at Adra. Nava held Orit. Cheung looked at Zandt and said “No.”

Adra pushed back, pulled her hands out of her pockets. A flash of something in the Jupiter-light.

Zandt stood. His chair tipped, clattered against the table behind. A blur of steel, a slap of wood on flesh as he flipped his cane, grabbed it by the end. The table scraped forward as he leaned into it; glasses tipped, cracked, crashed to the floor.

The cane went up and around and down, a second when it looked like those dragon teeth would end up buried in Adra’s temple, but Cheung had seen it coming, raised a hand. Fingers cracked, flapped, didn’t stop the stick, no way to stop that stick. But he slowed it, and Adra shoved her long legs down and got a shoulder up. There was a wet smack of ligament displaced and skin torn, a hiss as if her breath had been forced out of her by the blow. She continued the motion, foot up on her chair, spiraling up and around. Her hip crunched glass as she came down across the table. There was a gleam as her fist connected with Zandt’s ear, a meaty scrunch, and then Adra half-slid, half-rolled off the table and to her feet.

Zandt stood for a second, not volition but inertia. Then he toppled forward into the ruin of the table. A short black hilt protruded from his ear, a finger’s width of steel switchblade.

A bottle hit the floor, rolled to a stop under the window.

Perelman was the only one still sitting. He looked at Adra, where she stood at the end of the table, arm hung limp at her side. “Leave,” he said, “before station security arrives.”

She stared at him, held up a bloody hand. “My arm, I need—”

“—to leave,” Perelman said. “Europa. Jupiter. Go Out or In, nothing for you here anymore.”

“Stories have a way of getting around,” Nava said.

“It was self defense,” she said.

But Perelman shook his head. Adra looked at the crew, one at a time, still trying to figure us out, us humans.

Cheung, broken fingers cradled fluttering against his chest, explained, almost gently, “You’d need someone to testify on your behalf.”

“You’d need backup,” Orit said, with what was almost a laugh.

Adra looked toward the bar; no one there returned her gaze. She nodded, then, blinked down at the body. “Fucked up as his sister. Must run in the blood.”

She turned toward the door, and didn’t look back.

Nava picked slivers of glass off her shirt. “Gotta have words with the captain,” she said. “He missed something there, hiring those two. Sure didn’t want either of them on our crew.”

Yu tilted her head, her own small shrug, and said, “Captain trusts us to catch the deep stuff. Why we’re here.”

Nods all around.

Looking down at Cheung’s shattered hand, Yu added, “Can’t catch everything, though. Sometimes you just have to get out of the way.”

Cheung grimaced, shook his head. “I’ve tried that before and it didn’t work. Anyway, she was crew, up until she pulled the knife.”

Orit spread her fingers out over the body and said, “Too bad he didn’t get to his second story.”

Perelman got to his feet, shook his head, rumbled, “He did.”

Nava said, “Stupidest, for sure.”

And Cheung tagged it: “Fault. They were both true.”

Originally published in Asimov’s March 2015.

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.

Elizabeth Bear (elizabethbear.com)

Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell Award winning author of twenty-seven novels (The most recent is Karen Memory, a Weird West adventure from Tor) and over a hundred short stories. She lives in Massachusetts with her partner, writer Scott Lynch.

Gregory Norman Bossert (gregorynormanbossert.com)

Gregory Norman Bossert started writing fiction in 2009 at the age of 47, and sold his first story to Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine that same year. His short story “The Telling” won the 2013 World Fantasy Award, and “Bloom” was a finalist for the 2014 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. He lives just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, and wrangles spaceships and superheroes for the legendary Visual Effects company Industrial Light & Magic, where his recent projects include Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and Steven Spielberg’s upcoming adaptation of Ready Player One.

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 lastest anthology, Galactic Empires, was published last 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.