Issue 28, May 2017

© Wyrm Publishing, 2017
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forever-magazine.com

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the May 2017 issue of Forever Magazine!

April was a whirlwind month for me. I fell ill again, this time for nearly two weeks, and was left unable to focus on much of anything. Considering that I had just returned from a week on the road, a small mountain awaited me when I finally recovered. The rest of the month, I was fully immersed in reading slush for Clarkesworld, android stories for my next reprint anthology, More Human Than Human, business tasks, and somehow squeezed in a day trip to Chicago to talk with students about publishing. If this happened a few months ago, digging out would have been near impossible.

Also on my agenda was rethinking the future of this magazine. No, I’m not shutting it down, but we seem to have reached one of those subscriber plateaus, which means, among other things, I need to renew my marketing efforts. At times, Forever can feel like the forgotten child in the shadow of Clarkesworld and the anthologies. Conceptually, this magazine is rather simplistic in approach, so perhaps it’s time to shake it up a little. Forever will stay focused on fiction, but given that this started as an experiment, I’m surprised I haven’t tinkered with the formula since launch. Last month, I asked for feedback on whether or not people would mind if I occasionally swapped out the novella for extra stories and/or other features. That will probably change this year. This is your last chance to let me know if there are things I should not be tinkering with, or should be.

Until next month . . .

-Neil

Sea Change, With Monsters

Paul J. McAuley

She made it clear that she was taking the job as a favor.

Vlad Simonov pretended to be slighted by her reluctance. He said, “But Indira, what’s the problem? It’s a fantastic job, and it’s not as if you are working.”

“I have been working,” Indira said. “Now I’m resting.”

She had spent two weeks supervising the clearance of an infestation of urchins at the perimeter of a farm collective. It had been difficult, dangerous, tiring work, and she had nearly been killed in almost exactly the same way she had nearly been killed on her first job, when she hadn’t really known what she had been doing. She had come full circle. She was beginning to believe that she had killed enough monsters.

Vlad snapped his fingers and leaned close to the camera of his phone. “After that picayune little job, you need to rest? That kind of thing, I do as an exercise. I do it for relaxation! I do it in my sleep, after a proper day’s work. Listen, Indira, I would take this job myself, it is so good, except already I am committed to three others. So I give it to you. With my usual commission of course, but the terms are so generous you will not notice the little I have kept to take home to feed my children.”

Vlad’s restless, good-humored energy was apparent even over the phone. Indira laughed.

He said chidingly, “Indira, Indira. You are getting old. You are getting bored. Urchins, spinners, makos, they’re all the same to you. Routine, routine, routine. It hurts me to see you like this. So, I put some pep in your life. To make you think again. To make you love life. Say yes. You will have fun, I promise.”

“Vlad . . . we are all getting old.”

“Not the monsters. While you sit around in your nice, warm, comfortable apt, the monsters are swimming in the cold and the dark, pumping sulfides, getting strong. Indira, this is a very exciting job, and the people who commission it are some kind of funny monks who know nothing about the value of money. You will be rich, even after my tiny percentage is removed. They claim it is a dragon, Indira. You have never hunted a dragon, but I know you can do it. That is why I ask only you.”

“And that’s why I’m taking it as a favor to you, Vlad. Because I know no one else will do it.”

Indira had started out as an apprentice to Vlad Simonov; now she freelanced for him. He was one of the first generation of hunters, one of the few to have survived the early days of tracking the biowar macroforms, the monsters, which had been set loose during the Quiet War. Vlad liked to project a buccaneering image. He had two wives and five children. He drank brandy and smoked huge cigars. He had a wild mane of black hair with little lights spidering inside its curls. But there was no safer or more cautious hunter in all of Europa’s ocean.

She said, “A dragon.”

“Perhaps a dragon. Are you scared?”

“I’m always scared.”

A pod of urchins had ambushed her toward the end of the last job. She had been finning down a long flaw in pure water ice, leading her diving buddy, a nervous farm worker. The flaw had been polished smooth by methane seep. It had reflected her lights in a blue-white glare that had prevented her seeing very much of what was ahead. The urchins had fallen down on her from a crevice. She had doubled up, knocking two urchins off her face mask—their spines left deep scratches in the glass—and had started firing her flechette pistol even as she kicked backward. Her diving buddy had been frozen in fear, blocking her escape; the urchins had bobbed toward her through a dancing dazzle of reflected light. She had coldly and methodically killed every one of them in a Zen-like calm that had thawed to violent trembling as soon as the slaughter was over.

She told Vlad, “I can’t go solo against a dragon. If it is a dragon.”

He said, “You won’t need to go solo. The monks have a big weed farm and their workers will help you. Anyway, it’s probably no more than a mako. No one has seen a dragon for years—they’re probably extinct. The monks see something lurking just beyond their perimeter and make it bigger than it is. Let me tell you what I know.”

Indira’s daughter, Alice, came in two hours later. She found her mother in the workshop, with the luggage pod open on the floor. She said, “You only just came home.”

“I know, sweet.”

Alice stood in the doorway, bouncing up and down as gently as a tethered balloon. Seven years old, smart and determined. She wore baggy shorts and a nylon vest with many pockets and an iridescent flared collar that rose above her head like a lizard’s ruff. Fluorescent tattoos braided her thin brown arms. She had changed them since she had gone off to school that morning. They had been interlocking lizards and birds then; now they were long fluttering banners, red and violet and maroon. Her hair was done up in tight cornrows and decorated with little tags that flashed in random patterns of yellow and green.

Alice said, “Have you told Carr yet?”

Indira didn’t look up. She was concentrating on fitting her dry suit into the pod, taking great care not to crease it. She said, “He’ll be home soon. How was school?”

“I’m doing a project.”

“You must tell me all about it.”

“It’s a secret.”

A pause. Indira knew that her daughter had been down to the service levels of the city again, at the bottom of the ice. She had beeped Alice’s location after she had finalized the contract with Vlad. And Alice knew that she knew. She watched solemnly as her mother checked the weapon cases. They were flat metal shells with foam plastic bedding inside. The smallest contained three kinds of specific neurotoxin in glass snap-top vials. Indira made very sure that these were packed properly.

At last, Alice said, “Did you know that the city once had another name?”

“Of course.”

“It was called Minos. Why was that?”

“Because Minos was one of the sons of Europa. Of Europa and Zeus.”

When Alice stamped her foot, she bounced a meter into the air. “I know that! It means creature of the moon. He was the king who built a maze under his palace. But why did it change?”

“Politics.”

“Oh. You mean the war.”

Alice had been born ten years after the Quiet War. Like all of her generation, she couldn’t understand why the adults around her spent so much time talking about it when it clearly made them so unhappy.

“Yes, the war. Where did you find this out?”

“I saw a sign.”

“A sign? In school?”

Alice shook her head. “Of course not in school. The Goonies—” which was the latest nickname for the soldiers of the Three Powers Occupying Force—“have changed all the signs they know about. But they don’t know everything.”

“Then where was it?”

Alice said, “Carr will be cross because you’re going away again so soon.”

“That’s because he loves me almost as much as he loves you. Where was this sign, Alice?”

“It’s to do with my project. So it’s a secret until my project’s finished.”

Indira closed the luggage pod. It made a little whirring noise as it sealed itself up. She didn’t want an argument just before she went away, but she didn’t want Alice to think that she could disobey her. She said, “I think we had better have a little talk, you and I.”

Later, Carr said, “There’s nothing to harm her down there.”

“Don’t take sides,” Indira said.

“I’m not. I’m trying to be realistic. Kids go down there all the time. They like staring out into the dark.”

“She dresses like a Ring smuggler. Those lights in her hair . . . ”

“All the kids her age dress like that. They get it from the sagas. It’s harmless.”

“Why are you so fucking reasonable?”

“It’s a talent I have.”

Indira snuggled closer to him. They had just made love, and were both sweating on the big bed, beneath a simulated starscape. Carr liked to keep their room warm and humid. Bamboos and ferns and banana plants surrounded them. The walls were set to show misty distances above a moonlit rainforest. Carr had been born on Earth. His family had migrated from Greater Brazil to Europa a few years before the Quiet War. He was one of the ecological maintenance team of the city; once upon a time, he would have been called a gardener. He was a strong, solid, dependable man. He and Indira had been a couple for nine years now; several months ago, they had started to buy tickets in the child lottery for the second time.

Carr said, “I think it’s nice that she wants to make gardens under the ice. A little bit of me, a little bit of you. Did she show you her drawings?”

“Of course she did. Once we had made up after the argument about her going down to the service levels. All those friendly crabs and fish.”

Carr stretched luxuriously and asked the bed’s treacher for a glass of water. “Citrus, fizzy, ice.” He told Indira, “She wants to think that one day there might be a world without monsters.” He took a sip of water. He said, “She wants to be a gengineer.”

“She wanted to be a tractor driver last week.”

“That was two months ago. She has been asking all sorts of questions about gengineering. She asked me why there weren’t any fish out there in the ocean. You know, I think sometimes she tells me things because she knows I’ll tell you.”

“She’s smart.”

Carr sipped his water. After a while he said, “Why do you have to go away so soon?”

“Because of a monster. One of the angry fish Alice wants to replace with happy, smiling fish.”

“There are other hunters.”

“You knew what I did when we met, Carr. That hasn’t changed. And we need the money to pay for the lottery tickets.”

Carr put his water down and folded his arms around her. The hand which had held the glass was cool on her flank. He said, “I didn’t even know there was a nunnery on Europa.”

“It’s a monastery. For monks. Male nuns. Vlad was a bit vague about them and I can’t find anything about them on the net. They’re some kind of Christians, but not of any of the mainstream sects.”

“Whatever. Tell me again why they can’t kill this monster for themselves.”

“I think they tried.” A silence. She took a deep breath and said, “I haven’t told you everything, and it’s only fair that you know. Vlad thinks it might be a dragon.”

Carr said, “They’re extinct, aren’t they?”

“The last time one was killed was over ten years ago. No one has seen one since. But absence of evidence—”

“—is not evidence of absence. So Vlad the Impaler wants to send you out against a dragon all by yourself.”

“We’re not certain it is a dragon. And I won’t exactly be alone. There will be the monks.”

Indira had met Vlad Simonov almost twenty years before, just after the end of the Quiet War. She had been a construction diver then, helping build the city’s first weed farm. Biowar macroforms were getting past the sonar and electrical barriers that were supposed to keep them away from the city’s underside, and Vlad had been hired to clear out a nest of urchins. The things had learned to passively drift through the barriers on currents and reactivate in the lights of the construction site. They were etching away support pylons, and in those days there were still a few of the kind of urchin that manufactured explosives in their cores. Two construction divers had been killed.

Indira volunteered to assist Vlad, and they quickly located the place where the urchins were breeding. It was five kilometers east of the weed farm, downstream of the currents driven by the upwelling plume. It was an area of rotten ice eroded by the relatively warm water of the upwelling, riddled with caves and crevices and half-collapsed tunnels, rich in precipitated sulfides. Indira didn’t panic when urchins started dropping out of crevices in the ice. They seemed like harmless toys, spiny, fist-sized black balls that wobbled this way and that on pulsed jets of water. She forgot that some could be carrying explosive charges and coolly and methodically killed them with neurotoxin-tipped flechettes, not wasting a shot. Afterward, Vlad said that he liked her style, and that evening they got drunk together to celebrate their victory. She thought no more about it, but a few weeks later he called her up to ask if she would like to help out again.

The gengineered biowar macroforms had been delivered to Europa’s ocean by penetrator probes during the Quiet War. Viruses had destroyed the food yeasts (and incidentally had caused the extinction of the indigenous microbes that had lived around the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean); the macroforms had wrecked the yeast reactors, the mines and the cargo submarines, the heat exchangers and the tidal generators.

Earth had not expected to win the Quiet War quickly. The Three Powers Occupying Force had no plans to decommission the monsters they had set loose, and no one knew how many there were now. They reproduced by parthenogenesis, like certain insects, and they had contained dormant embryos when they had been released. Hunters like Vlad Simonov were the only reliable line of defense against their depredations.

The second job was against a mako that had been systematically destroying mine intakes at Taliesin. Vlad and Indira spent a dozen hours hanging by the probe of one intake, following it as, like a giant articulated proboscis, it moved this way and that in the black water, tracking mineral-rich currents. The mako came in hard and fast out of the darkness, straight at Indira. She held steady and Vlad hit it with his second shot. Afterward, he offered her a permanent job, and she accepted.

She discovered a talent for killing. She got no pleasure from it, except to do it as cleanly and professionally as possible, and it did not diminish the guilt she felt because she had survived the Quiet War and her parents had not. Only time did that. But she was good at killing monsters. She cleaned out hundreds of urchin nests, destroyed infestations of fireworms that had wrapped themselves around electrical cables and caused crippling over-voltages, went up against and killed makos and mantas and spinners. But she had never before had to face a dragon, the smartest and most dangerous of all the monsters.

Indira took the railway west from Phoenix, along Phineus Linea to Cadmus. The scarp stood to the north, an endless fault wall half a kilometer high. It was one of the highest features of Europa’s flat surface. Mottled terrain stretched away to the south, textured by small hills and cut by numerous dikes and fracture lines. Lobes of brown and grey ice flows were fretted by sublimation and lightly spattered with small craters. This was one of the oldest landscapes of Europa. The ice here was almost five kilometers thick.

It was early morning, four hours after sunrise. Europa’s day was exactly the length of its orbit around Jupiter, and so, from any point on Europa’s subjovian hemisphere, Jupiter hung in the same spot in the sky, waxing and waning through the eighty-five hour day. At present, Jupiter was completely dark, a glowering circular black hole in the sky that was nearly thirty times as big as Earth’s moon. Indira was in the train’s observation car, sipping iced peach tea and watching the beginning of the day’s eclipse. It would last three hours, and was the nearest thing to true night on the sub-jovian hemisphere, for when the Sun set, Jupiter was full, and there was almost always one or more of the other three Galilean moons in the sky.

There was a sudden flash of light that briefly defined Jupiter’s lower edge as the diamond point of the Sun disappeared behind it. Darkness swept across the ice plain; stars suddenly bestrode the sky in their rigid patterns. As her eyes adapted, Indira could make out the flicker of a lightning storm near the upper edge of Jupiter’s black disc—a storm bigger than Europa.

Indira talked with Carr. She talked with Alice and told her what she could see, and tried to patch up the row they’d had.

“Carr misses you already,” Alice said. She was on one of the slideways of the city’s commercial center. “He says he’s going to change your room. It’s a surprise.” She didn’t want to talk about her project. When Indira tried to press her about it, she said, “I have to go. This is where I should be.”

The train was full of miners. They were all flying on some drug or other. This was their last chance to get high before they returned to work. They were native Europans, originally from South Africa. They wore leather jackets and fancy high-topped boots over pressure suit liners. One of them played a slow blues on a steel-bodied guitar; another, egged on by his comrades, tried to chat up Indira. He was a young man, tall and very handsome, with very black skin and chiseled cheekbones. He spent more time looking at his reflection in the diamond window of the observation car, ghosting over the speeding, star-lit landscape, than he did looking at Indira. His name was Champion Khumalo. Indira thought that it was a nickname, but no, all his friends had names like that, or names out of the Bible. Trinity Adepoju. Gospel Motloheloa. Ruth and Isaac Mahlungu.

Once Champion gave up his half-hearted attempt to sweet-talk Indira, they all became friends. Indira learnt that two of Champion’s brothers went to the same school as Alice. They passed around a bottle of pear brandy and tubes of something called haze. It smelt sharply of ketones and delivered an immediate floating feeling of bonhomie.

The miners were fascinated by her profession. “To clean all the ocean of monsters,” Gospel Motloheloa said, “is a noble calling!”

“Well, I don’t see why we need to go into the world below,” Isaac Mahlungu said. “I have been a miner for thirty years and I have never needed to go there. This is our land, the world all around us.”

“But the ocean is part of our world,” Gospel said. She was the oldest of the miners. Her iron-grey hair was done up in medusa ropes wound with plastic wire. There were keloid scars on her forehead; because they spent their working lives on the surface, most miners suffered from radiation-induced cancers. She said, “The ocean makes the land what it is, and so it is important to get rid of the monsters that infest it.”

“The monsters are from Earth,” Trinity Adepoju said. “That’s why we have to get rid of them.” He was the guitar player, a tall man even for a Europan, with a ready smile and fingers so long they seemed to have several extra joints as he moved them idly up and down the neck of his guitar.

Indira remembered a conversation she had once had with Alice. She had been trying to explain to her daughter why Earth had won the Quiet War.

“They have more wealth, more processing power, more people. They have used up their world and now they want to use up all the others.”

“Then we’ll have to do things they can’t,” Alice had said, so solemnly that Indira had laughed.

Champion said, “Even with the monsters gone, we will still live on Earth’s sufferance.”

His friends nodded, and began to tell Indira their war stories. Many of the miners had been on Europa throughout the Quiet War. Although the population of the capital, then called Minos (the miners called it that still), had at last been evacuated to Ganymede, the miners had been left in their camps. Most had managed to synthesize enough oxygen from water ice, but there had not been enough food.

“We were so hungry,” Gospel told Indira, “that we were thinking of eating our boots at the end of it.”

Ruth Mahlungu said, “What are you talking about, woman! You are so vain that you would starve to death and be buried in your boots rather than eat them!”

The others laughed. It was true: Gospel’s boots were extraordinary, even for a miner, green suede decorated with intricate patterns made from little bits of mirror and red and gold thread.

There were stories of cannibalism. Several camps had been vaporized by the nuclear device that had broken through the crust to allow the penetrators containing the biowar organisms to reach the ocean. This was at Tyre Macula, on Europa’s anti-jovian hemisphere. Although the area had been lightly populated, the blast had killed more than a hundred miners and had left a flat plain of radioactive ice and radial grooves hundreds of kilometers long: a bright sunburst scar on Europa’s mottled brown face.

Indira had heard all these stories before; it seemed that Europans would never tire of telling and retelling stories about the war. She had stories of her own, but they were all too sad to bear telling. The death of her family, the two years she had spent as an orphaned refugee on Ganymede. At last, she managed to steer the conversation to the monastery.

Champion grinned. “You’re going there? That’s a good joke!”

The miners exchanged words in a language full of glottal clicks. They all laughed, but the young miner would not tell Indira what they found funny.

“They’re very rich there, those people,” Champion said, “They have a very big weed farm. They supply fixed carbon to half the mines.”

“Their leader is a gengineer,” Gospel said.

Trinity said, “He calls himself Rothar. I don’t think it’s his real name. They say he ran from Earth because they caught him doing something illegal. He’s probably doing something illegal out there, too.”

“Maybe making more monsters,” Champion said. “Maybe he makes one monster too many and wants you to kill it.”

“They are strange people,” Gospel said. “Not Christian at all, although they claim to be. They call themselves Adamists.”

This was more than Indira had managed to glean about the monastery from the net. The miners didn’t know many hard facts, but they had plenty of gossip. Their talk grew lively and wild. Three hours after the beginning of the eclipse, the double star of Earth and Venus rose above Jupiter’s dark bulk, and then the Sun followed and flooded the ice plain with its light. Trinity took up his guitar again and had half the observation car singing along by the time the train reached Cadmus.

Cadmus was an industrial settlement, several clusters of stilt buildings, storage tanks, a big spaceport that was essentially an ice field pitted with black exhaust blasts, the long track of a mass driver. Indira caught a few hours rest in a rented cubicle. Before she fell asleep, she talked with Carr about the small change of his day. Alice was sleeping. She missed her mother, Carr said.

“I miss her, too.”

“Be careful,” Carr said.

Soldiers of the Three Powers Occupying Force were much in evidence. Two officers were talking loudly in the canteen where Indira ate breakfast, oblivious to the resentful stares of the miners around them, and she had to endure a fifteen-minute interrogation before she could board the rolligon bus that would carry her to the monastery of Scyld Shield.

The journey took ten hours. As the bus traveled west, the diamond point of the Sun descended ahead of it, while Jupiter hung low in the east—Indira had traveled a long way, a quarter of the way around the icy little moon. Jupiter was almost full, banded vertically with the intricately ruffled yellow and whites of his perpetual storms. Their slow churning was visible if Indira watched long enough. Io’s yellow disc fell below the horizon and an hour later rose, renewed.

The road was a single track raised on an embankment above a wide plain of crustal plates. Some were more than ten kilometers across; most were much smaller.

Changes in currents in Europa’s ocean had broken the plates apart again and again, rafting them into new positions. It was like crossing the shaken pieces of a jigsaw puzzle of simple Euclidean shapes. You could see here that the surface of Europa was a thin skin of ice over the ocean, as fragile as the craquelure on an ancient painting. Triplet ridge and groove features cut across the plates. They were caused by the upwelling of water through stress fractures. The ridges were breccia dikes, ice mixed with mineralized silicates, complexly faulted and folded; the grooves between them were almost pure water-ice. They were like a vast freeway system half-built and abruptly abandoned, cut across where the ice plates had fractured or had been buried by blue-white icy flows that had spewed from newer fissures.

The road the bus was following crossed a groove so wide that the ridge on one side disappeared over the horizon before the ridge on the far side appeared. Beyond it, geysers powered by convective upwellings had built clusters of low hills that shone amidst patches of darker material.

Like Io, Europa’s core was kept molten by heat generated by tidal distortions that pulled it this way and that as the moon orbited Jupiter, heat leaking through underwater vents and volcanoes kept the ocean from freezing beneath its icy crust and drove big cellular currents from bottom to top. Cadmus was at the edge of the Nemo Chaos, where a huge upwelling current kept the ice crust less than a kilometer thick. The same upwelling currents that eroded and shaped the icy crust brought up minerals from the bottom of the ocean. It was why the miners were there. Indira saw a solitary cabin crawling away toward the horizon, its red beacon flashing. Every twenty or thirty kilometers, the bus passed the drill-head of a mine, with one or two or three cabins raised high on stilts like so many copies of Baba Yaga’s hut. The mines pumped mineral-rich water into huge settling basins. Vacuum organisms grew on the ice and extracted metals, and the miners harvested them.

Alice called Indira. She was enthusiastic about her project. Indira pretended to be enthusiastic, too, but she resolved that she would talk with Alice’s monitors when this was over. Her daughter’s education was taking a direction she didn’t like.

“Spend some time with Carr,” Indira told Alice. “Help him out.”

“I don’t like the flowers. Some of them make me sneeze. And the light is too bright in the greenhouses.”

“It helps them grow.”

“The weeds don’t need light.”

“That’s because they don’t photosynthesize.”

“I know that. They’re—” Alice scrunched up her face and said slowly and carefully—“chemolithotrophs. They absorb the chemicals in the water and make biomass, which we eat.”

They talked about the metabolism of the weeds for a while. Alice promised that she would ask Carr about photosynthesis. She said that she was doing some gene splicing in the garden labs, using the cell gun. Indira was encouraging. The more time Alice spent in the labs and the gardens, the less she spent skulking around the lower levels of the city.

The bus had low priority and had to keep pulling into laybys to allow trucks to pass. Indira was its only passenger, and its first for several weeks. It seemed that very few people went to Scyld Shield. The bus grumbled that the monks weren’t friendly.

“They tell me to be quiet, and it is a long drive out. I like to talk. It’s part of my personality design.” The bus paused. It added, “I hope you don’t mind talking with me.”

“What do you know about the monastery?”

“It was a mine, before the war. The monks have built around the old shaft. But of course, I have never been inside. They don’t have a garage. If I broke down, someone would have to come all the way out from Cadmus. It’s irresponsible, but that’s the way things are these days in the free market economy. No one wants to pay for the upkeep of publicly owned infrastructure.”

Someone had probably dumped a bunch of anti-libertarian propaganda in the bus’s memory. Indira was sympathetic, but hastily told it that she wasn’t interested in discussing politics. There was a silence. At last the bus said:

“Many of the trucks come from the monastery. They supply huge amounts of cheap fixed carbon. Glycogens, proteins, cellulose, starches. They supply the bioreactors of most of the mines in this region.”

“There must be a lot of monks in the monastery.”

“I wouldn’t know,” the bus said. “Only two of them regularly travel to and from Cadmus. The rest keep themselves to themselves.”

Which was what the dispatcher at the bus garage had told Indira. She could have called Vlad Simonov, of course, but she had her pride.

The Sun set. Jupiter’s hard yellow light spread across the ice plains. Io had disappeared behind him; a few of the brightest stars had come out. Ahead, something briefly glittered on the horizon, vanishing before Indira could see what it was. The bus crawled on, and an hour later, Indira saw the fugitive glitter again, much closer now. A plume of gas, shining in Jupiter’s sullen light.

“There she blows,” the bus said.

“What is it?”

“Scyld Shield’s methane vent,” the bus said. “Most of the mines around here have them.”

“Of course.”

Methane bubbled up from the hydrothermal vents and collected under the ice crust, occasionally breaking the rafts apart as it escaped through fault lines. Mines vented excess methane to keep themselves stabilized. The methane dispersed, of course, for at—150°C Europa’s surface was just above its triple point, but the vent had deposited drifts of dirty white water snow across a huge polygonal plate. The monastery was on a ridge of brecciated ice beyond.

It was not as large as Indira expected, no more than a single silvered dome. The bus took a spur off the main road. It climbed a winding switchback up the face of the ridge and dived into a wide apron hacked out of an ice bench, where half a dozen tanker trucks were parked in front of a mass of insulated pipes, presumably taking on loads of raw biomass. The bus reversed onto a airlock coupling and said goodbye to Indira.

“I’ll be back in three days,” it said. “I come here every three days even when there isn’t anyone who wants to ride. That is, if I don’t break down. Perhaps you can tell me about the monastery when I take you back to Cadmus.”

The luggage pod followed Indira through the freezing cold flexible coupling into a big, echoing, brightly lit room. Two monks were waiting there. Both wore black robes and a kind of cowl around their heads, topped with square headdresses. Both had untrimmed patriarchal beards, with big pectoral crosses hung over them. The older monk was impassive, but the younger was the first man Indira had ever seen do a double-take in real life.

They had been expecting a man. Sending Indira had been Vlad Simonov’s idea of a joke.

The two monks left Indira with her luggage pod in the middle of the big, empty space. There were marks on the concrete floor that suggested that it had once been partitioned into many small rooms. A gutted air compressor sat in one corner. She sat down on the pod and tried to call Carr, but her phone wasn’t getting any signal. It was so cold that the smoke of each breath crystallized into a floating frost with a tiny tinkling sound, too cold to sit still and wait.

She began to prowl around. The empty room took up half the dome; a corridor looped around the other half, with little rooms opening off on either side. None showed any sign of recent habitation. There were two service tunnels. One led downward, curving out of sight; she had just opened the door of the other, its ribbed wall rimed with ice and stopped with a locked hatch, when the older of the two monks found her. It seemed that Brother Rothar, the abbot of the monastery, would talk with her.

The old monk’s name was Halga. Indira asked him about the other tunnel as they walked down, and he said that it led to the old mine structure, which had sunk into the ice after it had been abandoned during the war.

“We cut a tunnel to it to see what we could salvage. Now we use it for storage.”

“I didn’t mean to pry. I was just looking around and wondering where I should stow my gear.”

“I think you should talk with Brother Rothar,” the old monk said.

“Is there a problem?”

“Brother Rothar will explain.”

The tunnel wound down a long way. Indira realized that the monastery was like a pin piercing the ice—a pin a kilometer long, with the dome at its head and a winding series of chambers and passages built around its shaft. Brother Halga explained that the whole structure had been synthesized from glass and silicates extracted from the brecciated ice and bound together by diamond wire. Indira wondered how often they had to adjust the shaft because of stress in the icy crust, and Brother Halga told her that the monastery was built on a breccia intrusion that went almost all the way down to the ocean.

“The surface is covered with ice, but a hundred meters below the surface it is quite stable.”

The old monk had a mild, diffident manner. He did not look at her when he spoke.

She said, “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable by asking all these questions.”

“We are not used to people like you. To women, I mean.” His brown face, framed by the black cowl, darkened. He was blushing.

They walked on in silence, and at last took a side corridor whose walls, floor, and ceiling were covered in thick red fur. The air was at blood heat. Double doors at the end were covered in some kind of hide, dyed the same red as the fur. Brother Halga opened them, ushered her in, and announced her to the man who stood at the far end of the dimly lit room.

“Brother Rothar,” the old monk whispered, and stepped backward and pulled the double doors shut behind him.

On one side of the room, shelves holding printed books stepped up into darkness. On the other, a stone wall was muffled by an ancient tapestry: an enlarged reproduction of a section of the ceiling of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, God reaching out from the clouds to a casually reclining Adam. At the far end of the room, a man was standing in front of a huge fireplace, watching a bank of holos that floated in the darkness to one side. The fireplace was as big as an emergency shelter and held an actual, real fire. The flames crackled and danced above a bed of white-hot pressed carbon chunks and sent little licks of aromatic smoke curling over the monumental lintel, and firelight beat over the Persian carpets that layered the floor.

Indira had been told that the monastery was wealthy, but she had not realized how wealthy.

“Welcome,” the man said. His voice was subtly amplified. It boomed and rolled, mellow as good whisky, around the corners of the sumptuous room.

He was an old man, thin and straight-backed, with a shrewd, hawkish face. His dusty white skin was marked with dark blotches. He wore the same black robes as the monks, but instead of a cowl, his bald pate was covered with a black skullcap on which molecular shapes were embroidered in gold wire. Heavy gold rings extended the lobes of his large, papery ears.

“I have arranged for some food,” he said.

He crossed to the side of the fireplace, tracked by a spotlight that came on somewhere high above, and pulled a Florentine chair from a little burred walnut table. A plastic tray of food was set on the table: a sloppy puree of some kind of green leaf; a slab of gelatin seamed with chunks of uncooked vegetable; dry salty biscuits. A plastic beaker held pure water.

Rothar watched Indira push the puree around and said, “The same food is served in our refectory. We are an ascetic order.”

He gestured, and one of the holos floating to the side of the fireplace inflated. It showed a view looking down on a refectory in which about a hundred black-robed monks sat in rows, ten by ten, along white plastic tables.

She said, “I ate at Cadmus, and then on the bus. This isn’t quite—”

“What you expected? No. It is not what I expected, either. And there is the problem.”

The holo shrank back into the array. Others showed views of a weed farm that seemed to stretch forever. Indira realized that Rothar was showing off. This room; his army of monks; the vast farm.

Rothar said, “I have been trying to talk with Vlad Simonov about this . . . problem. But he is nowhere on the net.”

He was rubbing his hands over each other. She noticed that when he thought she wasn’t looking at him, he made little grabby glances at her body. She wished that she had worn something over the skintight suit liner.

She said, “Vlad is working at a mine on the anti-jovian hemisphere. He’s probably under the ice. What is this problem? When do I start to work? Perhaps I can see the echo traces, and any video you have.”

When Rothar looked at her for a moment, she added, “Of the monster. The monster I’ve come to kill.”

“Ah. Now. I’m afraid that there has been a misunderstanding.”

“A misunderstanding? You have reported a Dragon Class biowar macroform in your area. You made a contract with Vlad Simonov, and Vlad sent me.”

“There is the misunderstanding. You see, we did not expect him to send us a woman.”

“One of Vlad’s little jokes.”

“A very embarrassing joke for both of us, Ms. Dzurisin.”

“That’s between you and him. Meanwhile, I have a job to do.”

“I’m afraid not, Ms. Dzurisin. I am revoking your contract.”

Indira sat back in the chair and stared at Rothar, who still would not meet her gaze. It came out slowly. Rothar did not want her to hunt the dragon. The monastery was forbidden to women. The bus would return in three days; she would leave then.

“Meanwhile, we cannot work our farm,” Rothar said. “It will cost us a great deal of money. We are very angry with Mr. Simonov.”

He did not seem angry; he had not raised or varied his voice at any time during the interview. He added, “I have arranged for accommodation. Breakfast will be brought to you tomorrow. Expect it at six o’clock.”

“You really do want me out of here.”

“We are a contemplative order. We rise early. By the time you receive your breakfast, we will have already celebrated our first service. We will serve you at the same time that we eat.”

She said, “I need to tell my family about the change of plan, but my phone isn’t working.”

“Something to do with the structure, I understand.”

“Then perhaps I could plug into your net. Or are you cut off here?”

“I suppose that you could go outside,” Rothar said. A pause. He added, “You will be quite safe here. We have been freed of the normal Satanic lust that blinds men. Not by chemical or physical castration. Both are unreliable and have unsatisfactory side-effects. And, of course, chemical castration would involve use of those very hormones that taint you and your kind. No. We have all submitted to nanosurgery that has isolated the neurons that control the lordotic response. We are incapable of being tempted because we are incapable of arousal.”

Indira stared at him. “I see,” she said, although she did not understand why he had told her this. Unless it was another form of boasting. At last she said, “I still want my fee.”

“Of course. We would not dream of reneging on the contract. Goodbye, Ms. Dzurisin.”

Rothar made no signal, but at the far end of the room, Brother Halga opened the big double doors.

The old monk took Indira back up the helical tunnel and left her in one of the dome’s empty cells. It was as spartan as the room in which Indira had lived with her foster parents in the refugee center on Ganymede, three meters long and two wide, a bare concrete floor and fiberboard walls sprayed with thick resin, the only furniture a fold-down shelf bunk and a combination shower and shit-stool. Brother Halga assured her that it was like all the other cells in the monastery. If that was true, then no wonder Rothar could afford a real fire, all those old books, the ostentatious decor. Like any other pseudo-religious sect, the devotees did the work and the leader got the geld.

Her phone still wasn’t working. And she could not lock the door of the cell. She left the luggage pod outside and told it to keep watch, but found that she could not sleep. It was too cold and she could not switch off the light, only dim it. And something somewhere in the dome made a roaring noise at unpredictable intervals, shutting off with an explosive bang and a dying series of rattles that emphasized the unnatural silence that followed.

Memories of hiding in the city’s service tunnels crept around the edges of her consciousness. She resisted them.

The whole thing was ridiculous. An order of misogynist monks, a megalomaniac leader who was quite possibly a mad scientist, a secret passage. And a monster, of course, haunting the vast dark ocean at the basement of the monastery . . . It was like one of those old gothic sagas.

The monks had some kind of religious phobia about women. Fine. Europa was big enough for all kinds of eccentrics. The original charter, drawn up by the first settlers and suspended but not revoked after the Quiet War, had expressly allowed freedom of belief and speech. Let them get on with their devotions; maybe they could keep off the monster by prayer alone.

It was nothing to do with her. And yet, of course, it was. Rothar’s cold indifferent dismissal had cut her deeper than she liked to admit.

She tried the phone again. Still no luck. It was two in the morning, and she knew that she would not sleep now. She decided to go outside and try her luck with the phone there, and opened the door and told the luggage pod that she needed her pressure suit.

Indira supposed that the airlock was monitored, but found that she didn’t care. She crossed the brightly lit apron, where the trucks squatted over their shadows all in a row, like supplicants, and left the road and climbed to the top of the ridge. Jupiter sat at the eastern horizon, exactly where he had been sitting when the bus had arrived. A crescent of darkness was eating into the bottom of his disc. His yellow light tangled long shadows across the rough, dark ice.

The phone still wasn’t working. Indira went a long way, in long easy lopes that barely touched the ground, until, about two kilometers out, the phone suddenly woke and started scanning channels. She had to go another kilometer before she could get a steady signal.

It was half past three in the morning. It was half past three in the morning all over Europa. No one had been able to divide the moon’s 85.2-hour day in a sensible way, so Europans kept universal time. Indira left a message with Carr’s avatar, saying that she was fine but the job hadn’t panned out, and she would be coming back in a couple of days. She put a priority call to Vlad, and his avatar made various excuses until she cut it off and said, “This is an emergency. I’m flying the black flag.”

Which was the ridiculous piratical code phrase that gave access to the less public of the avatar’s functions.

The avatar, which looked exactly like Vlad, down to the tiny lights crawling in its bushy black hair, suddenly froze in the little window in the upper right-hand corner of her helmet’s visor, then reformatted. It said, in a voice that was clipped and neutral, now not Vlad’s at all, “Of course, druzhok. What do you wish me to do?”

The avatar could not contact Vlad—he really was working—but it was able to give her some more information about the Adamists. As the miners had told her, Rothar was some kind of gengineer. His birth name was Gregory Janes. He had been born in Canberra. Presently he was claiming asylum as a political refugee in the occupied territory of the Outer System. He had been working for the government of Earth’s Pacific Community, but precisely on what was obscured by contradictory rumors, most of which were almost certainly black propaganda. There was speculation that he had worked on the biowar macroforms before the Quiet War, and that the monastery was able to supply so much biomass because he had improved on the productivity and growth of standard weeds.

Rothar had not founded the Adamists, but had taken them over after the death of the charismatic mystic whose acolyte he had become—another crime lurking there, perhaps. The Adamists were an extremist separatist group, the kind that only the pressure cooker of Earth could have evolved. Their creed was simple. They believed that God had created Adam and Lilith as the first of a race who would worship God on Earth as angels did in Heaven. But Lilith had been murdered by Satan, who had then created Eve by ripping a rib from Adam while he had been sleeping. All men since Adam had been tainted by Satan’s mark, fallen but redeemable; all women were the handmaidens of Satan. The avatar told Indira that much of the Adamists’ creed was mixed up with considerable misuse of genetics, involving the Y chromosome and homeoboxes, and asked her if she wanted a precis. She told the avatar to skip it. She had heard enough to know that she was glad Rothar didn’t want her to work for him.

“And tell Vlad that I’ll see him when I get back,” she said. “We’ll have a lot to talk about.”

She had kept walking as she talked with the avatar, along a folded ridge above the silver dome that capped the monastery’s shaft (and the shape of the monastery, she thought, was as graphically symbolic as the tapestry in Rothar’s palatial office). The regolith here was gravelly, marked with tracks and the cleated prints of boots, scored and ridged with fretted humps of bare ice. She had begun to follow a road, she realized, a wide road that had once taken a lot of traffic.

Europa’s surface was one of the youngest in the Solar System. Every part had been flooded and reflooded by eruptions of water and slush ice from the ocean that covered the moon from pole to pole beneath its icy crust; Europa had very few craters because most had been buried or eroded by the constant resurfacing. The landscapes of Mars were billions of years old and the planet was covered in gardened regolith—debris from meteorite strikes—to a depth of more than a kilometer. Ganymede’s much younger regolith was merely meters deep; Europa’s was no more than a few centimeters. But like any moon with almost no atmosphere, the ordinary processes of erosion were so slow that they might as well be non-existent. A footprint could last a million years before it was erased by micrometeorite bombardment.

And so it was here. Indira had stumbled upon the road that had served the original mine. All around, the surface was marked by dozens of years of activity. Parts of the road had been worn through to ice; the ice had been eroded into knobs and long slides, shot through with cracks and columns of bubbles frozen into place. They glittered like diamonds in the helmet light of Indira’s pressure suit, diamonds glittering up at her wherever she looked.

She still had a couple of hours before she was due to be woken. She did not relish spending it in the spartan cell of the creepily uninhabited dome. Instead, she decided to explore.

The suit’s radar soon gave her the location of the old mining station; it was below her, buried in the ice. It had probably been built on some kind of insulated raft with superconducting thread dispersing waste heat to radiators in the ocean far below, and its systems must have been left running when it had been abandoned. Presumably, its owners had expected to return in a few weeks. But something—perhaps a quake caused by the Tyre Macula nuclear device—had deflated its insulating raft, and perhaps some biowar macroform had destroyed its heat sink. The dome had sunk slowly through ice melted by its own waste heat.

Indira was tracing the perimeter of the dome when her proximity alarm beeped. A moment later she saw a figure duck behind a fold of ice. Someone was following her.

She circled around, keeping as low as the pressure suit would allow. No sign of the figure, either visually or on radar. She crossed the old road again, crept in toward the place where she had last seen the figure.

A square hole had been cut into the ice, and steps led down into darkness.

The monks had excavated the old entrance and later reburied it, but a stress fracture had collapsed and partly reopened the long, steep shaft. Indira climbed over a flow of glassy ice and found the airlock.

It was still operational.

The mysterious figure could be behind the door. What the hell. She cycled through.

The airlock walls had been deformed by the pressure of the ice into which it had slowly sunk, but someone had sealed up the cracked seams with swathes of black resin. There was air beyond it, the usual seven hundred millibar nitrox mix of Europan habitats, but Indira kept her suit sealed. It was very cold, — 50°C, although not as cold as the surface. If the monks had wanted to store things, they could have just left them outside the dome. Unless they were things that would be damaged by vacuum ablation. Unless they were things that the monks didn’t want others to see.

Speculating about just what those things might be, senses alert for any sign of the person she had followed, Indira wandered through the old mining base.

It had been abandoned in a hurry. Perhaps its crew had spotted the incoming missile whose nuclear warhead had blown a hole in the crust to the northwest.

Metal equipment lockers lined the corridor that led away from the airlock. Their locks had been cut out and their doors hung open. There was a big rec room in what must be the center of the dome. Food boxes were stacked along one wall; broken furniture along another. Ice crystals had gathered here and there in little drifts, crunching under her pressure suit’s boots like dry beach sand. Overhead, the curved ceiling groaned and creaked: the structure was compressed all around by the ice into which it had sunken.

The dormitory corridor was littered with paper and infoneedles. The rooms were as small as the cell Indira had been assigned. She looked into one. It was half-filled with a shocking intrusion of ice, its surface glistening blue-white and smoothly sculptured like a muscle flayed of skin, its depths dirty with suspended silicates. In the next room, bedclothes were frozen with the impress of the man who had last slept there twenty years ago. His clothes were still scattered on the floor, stiff and sparkling with frost. Posters of lithe young women scaled the wall. One pin-up stirred against a feeble backglow. She cupped her breasts and began to say something, then froze and rastered back to the beginning of her cycle and stirred again.

As she turned away, Indira heard something above the poster’s scratchy entreaties and the creaking of the stressed dome. Footsteps were coming along the curving corridor—then a beam of light slashed through the air, turning suspended ice crystals into fugitive diamonds! Somehow, the person she had been following had managed to get behind her.

Fearing a trap, Indira dodged clumsily back into the room. In her bulky pressure suit, she was like a monster intruding on a child’s bedroom. The poster lit up again, and she tore it down and wadded it in her stiff gloves until its scratchy voice died. She killed her helmet’s light and hunkered inside her suit, listening intently, her heart beating quickly and lightly.

She had hidden from the soldiers of the Three Powers Occupation Force when they had begun to evacuate Minos. She had been eleven, as stubborn then as Alice was now. The city had been a prime target for the biowar macroforms. Its heat exchangers and its turbines had been destroyed, its yeast reactors had been poisoned. With no food, no power except feeble battery power, and its environmental cycling running out of control, Minos had surrendered while the rest of Europa was still notionally at war. Indira had hidden during the evacuation because she had been possessed with the romantic notion that she would join rebels who in reality were little more than an invention of the Occupation Force’s black propaganda unit.

She had been found, of course, but she had missed boarding the heavy lifter that had evacuated the rest of her family. And which, in the long slow orbit between Europa and Ganymede, had been crippled by an explosion in its antimatter pod and lost all power. Its crew and passengers had either suffocated or died of cold. Indira hadn’t known about that until she had arrived at Ganymede. She had spent the two years as a refugee convinced that she had killed her parents.

Now her suit’s microphone picked up the sound of footsteps, boots rattling loudly on plastic tiles whose adhesive had given way in the intense cold. Going past, dying away.

Indira stayed in the dark for two minutes, then cracked the door. Dark and silence beyond. She used infrared to track the footprints of whoever had been following her. One set, leading away down the curving corridor.

The airlock must have been alarmed. Someone had come to check. To look for her.

A new section of corridor had been roughly welded to an opening cut in the dome’s skin. Metal stairs led down. As Indira descended, her suit reported that it was growing warmer, a strange inversion given that warm air should rise. But then she reached the high-ceilinged corridor at the foot of the stairwell and discovered the heat engines that crouched on either side, humming laboriously, their coils shining with frost. Heat was being pumped out of the dome and transferred . . . where?

To somewhere behind a dog-latched door with the universal trefoil symbol for biological hazard in black on fluorescent orange.

Indira hesitated only for a moment. She was still fully suited. If she was exposed to any biological agent she could sterilize her suit by returning to the near-vacuum and — 150°C of Europa’s surface.

The heavy metal door was latched but not locked. Its seals gave only momentary resistance. It swung open on its massive hinges and she stepped over the sill.

It was an airlock. She waited while it cycled. When the door on the far side opened, her suit’s temperature sensor registered a sudden rise of fifty degrees as air gusted unfelt around her, and lamps came on in the big room beyond. They hung from chains under the high ceiling. They registered only in the infrared. Indira swept the beam of her helmet’s light from side to side. Beneath the lamps were rows of big square tanks linked by grey plastic pipework, crusted with yellowish salts and holding various levels of still, black water. Seawater, she realized, the salty, sulfurous water of Europa’s ocean. The temperature was just above zero. The air was 90 percent nitrogen and 10 percent carbon dioxide, with traces of hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide, and hydrogen.

All of the tanks were empty. The recirculating pumps were switched off; the incubators ranked along one wall held only racks of flaccid salt-crusted plastic sleeves. The tiled workbench that ran along one wall was marked with chemical stains and the places where machines had once rested. A brown glass vial had fallen behind a strut; Indira turned it over in her clumsy gloves, smudged frost from its label. It had held the mixture of restriction nucleases and DNA ligases that was commonly used to insert genes into bacterial plasmids for cloning, either for identification of gene product or use in gengineering.

Indira secured a sample of water from one of the tanks and went out through the lock on the other side of the room. It cycled her into a long, rising corridor. At its far end, she stepped through an open hatch and found herself in the curved corridor of the dome which capped the monastery. Down the curve of the corridor, a red light flashed insistently. It was the emergency beacon of her luggage pod.

Without prompting, the luggage pod said, “Several people came after you left. They tried to open me. I responded with a class two defense as specified in subsection two paragraph three of the—”

Indira set the helmet of her pressure suit on the floor and said, “What did you do, exactly?”

“I activated my alarm and gave two warnings. After these were ignored, I passed a high amperage, low voltage current through my outer frame. One of the men who was trying to force me open was rendered unconscious.”

“Did they manage to open you?”

“Of course not. After I defended myself, they went away.” The pod added, “Two of them had to carry the man who had been incapacitated.”

“By incapacitated, do you mean dead?”

“The shock was sufficient to cause unconsciousness but not death in a healthy adult human, as specified in subsection—”

“You’ve probably landed me in a whole world of shit.”

The pod said that it did not understand this remark.

“Trouble.”

“I am sorry,” the pod said. “I had believed that I had contained the problem.”

“Open up. I need to stow mv pressure suit.”

By the time Brother Halga appeared, to announce that Rothar would speak with her again, Indira had desuited and run the sample of water through her chemical sniffer. Brother Halga did not mention the attempt to open the luggage pod; neither did Indira.

As before, Rothar was standing in front of the roaring fire. If the room was a symbol of his power, then the fire was its focus. Her breakfast waited for her on the little table. Gruel, watery coffee, and a sticky, pale yellow liquid that was, Rothar said, mango juice.

Her pressure suit could supply better food, but she drank the coffee to be polite. It was weaker than any of the excuses she had made up, as she had walked down the helical corridor with Brother Halga, to try and explain why she had trespassed in the old mining station.

“You will work for me after all,” Rothar said. “There have been . . . developments.”

“I’m not sure that I want to. And surely a man would be better than a mere woman.”

“Ah. You have been researching us.”

“A little. But I only need to know a little to realize how much I dislike the entire idea of you and your crew.”

Rothar smiled. He had small, widely spaced teeth, like those of a young boy prematurely grown up. He said, “We do not despise women. We pity them, as we pity all of humanity. We are a contemplative order that prays for redemption from the mark of Satan that is imprinted in each of our cells.”

“That’s very nice of you.”

His smile went away. “You will work for us, Ms. Dzurisin. Or forfeit the penalty clauses of the contract you have already signed.”

“From which you released me.”

“Only verbally. Do you have a recording? I thought not. Then you have no proof that it ever took place.”

“For a holy man, you don’t set much store by the truth.”

“None of us are holy, child. And besides, a small lie will sometimes serve a higher truth.”

Which could justify anything, Indira thought. No wonder religions had caused so much trouble on Earth.

Rothar said, “It should not take long. You are an experienced hunter, and I will provide experienced divers to help you. We have men here from all trades. We aim to be self-sufficient. By the way, I hope our laboratory impressed you.”

Indira looked at Rothar but said nothing. If he wanted to accuse her, she could accuse him of trying to tamper with her equipment. She had a pretty good idea of what the monks had been after. And there was the matter of what she had found in the water sample from the laboratory.

“We no longer use that facility,” Rothar said, “but it has provided the basis of our farm’s profitability. Which is why—” his smile came back—“we will have to search you thoroughly after you have finished. Whether you catch the monster or not.”

“Oh, I’ll catch it.”

Meaning, I’ll show you what a woman can do, and shame you for your presumption that I’m less than you are merely because of my sex.

She didn’t put the two things together. Her discovery, Rothar’s about-face. After all, the story about the weed was entirely plausible; he couldn’t know that she had evidence that he must be lying. She thought that it was a matter of pride. His. Hers.

The two men who had been assigned to accompany her, Brother Fergus and Brother Finn, were competent and professional, but did not bother to hide their disgust at having to work with a woman. Fergus was dark and wiry and nervous; Finn was blond and burly and quiet, and one of the tallest men Indira had seen, overtopping her by half a meter. His head, covered with the hood of his dry suit so that only his face showed, was as big and bumpy as a boulder. His beard was white, and as fine as cornsilk; like Fergus’s, it was done up in a kind of net. Both monks made it quite clear that they thought that this duty was an insult to their dignity. Neither offered any information about the dragon. No sonar signals, no video grabs, no chemical traces.

“We know it is there,” Finn said.

“Still, I would like to see what evidence you have,” Indira said. “It would confirm that it is a dragon. The neurotoxins I use are class specific.”

“It is a terrible monster,” Fergus said. “That’s all you need to know. We can no longer work the farm because of it.”

He folded his arms defiantly. They were suited up and sitting in the pressure chamber. Finn and Fergus wore black dry suits and black stabilization jackets; Indira’s suit was white, her stab jacket yellow. Their scooters made the chamber crowded; they had to rest their feet on them. They were ready to go, but Indira insisted on talking first. She wanted to establish a plan of action and emphasize that they must stick to it. She did not trust them. She had filled her air-tanks herself, and done all her suit checks alone.

Finn said, “We know where its lair is.”

“Lair?”

None of the big macroforms lived in the ice. They were creatures of the open water, spending long periods drifting in upwelling plumes, fixing carbon and storing energy for their attacks. And occasionally reproducing. They had been designed to operate for years—overdesigned, as it turned out. The Quiet War had been a rout.

“It lives in the ice,” Finn said.

“Near the farm,” Fergus said.

They were a double act. The idea appeared to be to give away as little information as possible. It didn’t matter. Indira had worked with less—although of course she had never worked against a dragon.

“We can do most of the work,” Fergus said.

“In fact,” Finn said, “if you give us the neurotoxins we can do it all.”

Neurotoxins were the major expense of hunting monsters. They had been tailored to specific classes of biowar macroforms by the wizards who had gengineered them. They were bought on license from the Three Powers Occupying Force, and only hunters were licensed to use them. Grey chemists had tried to isolate the specifics, but they were mixed with several thousand closely related chemicals. Indira had guessed that the vials of neurotoxin were what the monks had been trying to take from her luggage pod when it had zapped one of them. Having failed to get the neurotoxins, they were stuck with her.

“I have already caught and killed one like it,” Finn said, deadpan.

“She doesn’t need to hear that,” Fergus said, with sudden violence. “You were told—”

Finn punched him on the side of the head and the little monk banged against the steel wall of the airlock and shut up, although he glared at Finn with genuine hatred. But Finn was smiling at Indira. He had about a hundred teeth, as gleaming white as an ice cliff. His blue eves glittered with psychotic intensity.

He said, “I really did. Do you want to know how?”

Indira laughed.

“You’re making a fool of yourself,” Fergus said, and flinched when Finn stuck his massive fist in front of his face.

Finn said, “I didn’t have any fancy gear. No nets or shock bombs or toxins. I fought it one on one. We fought for days. The water boiled with the fury of our struggle. It took me down to the bottom of the ocean, thinking it would crush me and drown me. But I was too strong. It tried to escape then, but I held onto it. I broke open a vent and seared off its fins and its teeth with the lava that spewed out.”

As he spoke, in a low voice as monotonous as Rothar’s, he brought his face closer and closer to Indira’s. His pupils were huge, so that his eyes were all black and white. Sweat stood out like oily droplets on his smooth, pale skin. His breath smelled bad: acetone, butanol, sweet rot.

Indira was sure that he was flying on something. Perhaps drugs were part of the devotions of these strange, sinister monks. She said, as calmly as she could, “That’s a good story.”

“It’s the truth,” Finn said. “You don’t believe it but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

“We don’t know how many are out there,” Fergus said. “No one knows how often they reproduce. There could be hundreds out there. Thousands.”

“We don’t need to bring anyone in,” Finn said, still staring at Indira. “I can handle it.”

Indira thought of the tanks in the laboratory under the old mining camp. The analysis had showed traces of metabolites and degradation products consistent with the presence of animal metabolism, although her sniffer had not been able to identify the type of animal. Perhaps Finn had caught a monster. Perhaps they had kept it in one of the tanks they had used to develop their strains of weed, although she doubted that it had been a dragon. A spinner, perhaps a juvenile mako. But not a dragon; even a newborn dragon would have torn up the lab. But why hadn’t they simply killed it? What had they used it for?

Fergus leaned over and dared touch Indira’s knee. His black eyes were liquid with what Indira thought was genuine concern. “He gets wired up,” he said. “Don’t worry. We’ll look after you.”

Finn said, “No more talk. We go.”

Indira told him to wait. She had already checked her equipment, but now she wanted to check it again in front of the two monks, to show them what she had, to show them that she meant business, to puncture their contempt. The spear gun with its hollow tipped spears. The taser. The percussion bomblets, the sticky bomblets, the flares. The diamond mesh drift nets. The sonar. The motion detector. The sniffer.

Both monks watched her closely, but said nothing. They carried nothing but ordinary spear guns and knives; a pouch of the kind of explosive charges used by construction workers hung from Finn’s harness.

“All right,” she said at last. “Let’s do it.”

Fergus allowed a little water in. Although it was filtered to remove its chemical load, it still had the rotten egg stench of hydrogen sulfide. Indira could feel its cold through the layers of her suit.

They busied themselves in the small space, rinsing their face masks in the water and then spitting in them and rubbing the spittle over the inside of the glass of the visors so they would not fog up, checking the seals of their hoods and the straps that fastened the fins to their feet, their weight-belts and the harnesses that held their tanks, putting on their face masks and adjusting regulator mouthpieces.

Fergus carried a little video rack and he switched on its lamp for a moment; harsh light flooded the chamber, bleaching out all colors. Then he opened the valve all the way and water gushed from the floor vent, filling the chamber in a few moments.

The water of Europa’s ocean was at an average temperature of minus ten degrees centigrade. Although its freezing point was reduced because of its heavy concentration of salts, much of the water beneath the icy crust was half frozen into slush: grease ice and firn ice; brash ice and bergy bits. In places, though, currents driven by plumes from hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the sea, fifty kilometers below the surface, carried relatively warm, mineral-rich water to the bottom of the ice crust. Sometimes, currents driven by especially active vents melted the ice crust, and water and slush spilled across the surface of Europa like lava.

Mines and farms were built over vent plumes. Mines sucked up the mineral-rich water; farms grew gengineered weed in the Europa equivalent of tropical seawater enriched with fertilizer.

Even so, the water that flooded the chamber was at a freezing two degrees centigrade. As it rose around Indira, an intense ring of cold gripped her body, rising with the water and inducing a terrific headache right between her eyes. It was as if she had gulped down a liter of ice cream. The cold of the water was already sucking heat through her thin gloves. It stung the little bits of exposed skin where the seal of her face mask did not quite meet the seal of her hood; then the skin went numb. She bit down hard on the soft plastic regulator that filled her mouth and concentrated on her breathing until the first agony of immersion passed. The air that hissed through the regulator at each breath was dry and metallic.

Fergus was staring at a little hand-held videoscreen. It switched every two seconds to show different views of black water under ice. His voice said in her earpiece, “Looks clear.”

Finn said impatiently, “They said it was clear. They switched on the lights to make sure that it was clear.”

“But the thing can travel fast.”

Their voices were thin and muffled and flat, sub-vocalizations picked up by throat mikes and processed for clarity.

Indira said, “I hope it does come to us. Then we won’t have to go far.”

“We’ll find it,” Finn said, and hit a big red button with his fist.

The chamber rotated with a grinding noise. They spilled out into the black water, dragging their scooters with them.

They were in a wide shaft. The bottom of the shaft loomed above, a massive blister of steel studded with grab rails and red and green lights. Someone moved behind one of the thick bullseye ports. The two men angled away and Indira followed. The white vee of her scooter hummed, its vents pushing out water in muscular streams on either side of her, pulling her toward the open water below.

The two men were heading straight out at a fast clip past the finned radiators that bled waste heat into the ocean. They had not waited for her. It was a challenge, a typical male gesture. Indira paused to gauge the current, chose a long flat curve that would carry her ahead of them, and throttled up her scooter’s reaction motor.

She had expected the farm to be big, but it was more than twice the size of her wildest estimate. The maintenance lights were on, and she could see that racks of weed stretched away on all sides of the bottom of the shaft, hundreds upon hundreds of them. Each rack was thirty meters long and five meters wide, bolted to its neighbors in a hexagonal array with orange flotation buoys at each corner, each array was linked at its six points to neighboring arrays and to pylons fixed in the ice roof of the ocean. Weed dangled down from ropes attached to the wire stretchers of the racks, filmy ribbons that in the weak lights glistened violet or purplish red or the reddish brown of dried blood. Mature weeds were a hundred meters long. The whole—weed, racks, rack arrays—flexed sinuously in the current, like the hide of a gently breathing beast. A haze of molecular sulfur, the waste product of the weeds’ carbon fixation, smoked off it.

Unlike the green plants that decorated Phoenix’s public and private spaces, weeds did not need light to grow; the lights were for the workers who maintained the rafts and cropped mature blades. Green plants harvested light energy and used it to transfer hydrogen ions and electrons from water to carbon dioxide, forming the simple sugar glucose, with oxygen as a byproduct. But no light penetrated Europa’s kilometers-thick ice crust and there was no free oxygen in all its deep ocean: a fish would drown as quickly as a human. Like the indigenous microbes of Europa and chemolithotrophic bacteria of Earth, the weed used reduced inorganic compounds containing nitrogen or sulfur or iron instead of water and light to turn carbon dioxide into sugars.

Most available carbon on Europa was in the form of carbon dioxide dissolved in the ocean beneath its thick icy crust. There had been proposals to crash a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid onto Europa to supply carbon that could be processed by vacuum organisms, but no one had been able to work out how to do this without splitting the crust and resurfacing half the moon. Shortly before the Quiet War, there had been a half-hearted attempt to reach agreement between the five inhabited moons to establish a carbon-mining facility at one of Jupiter’s Lagrangian points, but the plan had foundered in acrimonious arguments about sharing the start-up costs of purchasing mining rights to a suitable asteroid and moving it into orbit.

Before the war, Europans had augmented their expensive greenhouses by drawing up water and using it to grow gengineered yeasts in big tanks, utilizing metabolic pathways copied from the indigenous microbes that grew in the crushing blackness at the bottom of the ocean, around the hydrothermal vents that opened along ridge faults. The Europan vent microbes had been the only known extant life-forms in the Solar System other than those of Earth. Their genetic code had been based on triplet base sequences strung on a DNA double helix, reinforcing the modified Hoyle-Wickramasinghe panspermia hypothesis that all life in the Solar System, including the long-extinct Martian microflora, had a common ancestor. On Earth, certain bacteria had combined and evolved into multicellular eukaryotes, into plants and fungi and animals. Perhaps this step required an oxygen atmosphere and the more efficient energy-generating metabolic pathways it could support; in Europa’s anaerobic ocean, nothing had evolved beyond the level of colonial microbes, which had formed crusts and sheets, lacework baskets and vases, and vast beds of long filaments, around the hot, black, mineral-rich water that issued from the vents. Life had not spread from these refugia; the rest of the ocean had been a sterile desert.

Tailored biowarfare viruses released in the Quiet War had destroyed the industrial yeasts and the native microflora. Afterward, a Pacific Community cartel had introduced licensed strains of chemolithotrophic weed. Even with the premium license tax, the weeds were a cheaper source of fixed carbon than algal ponds or hydroponic greenhouses. Those supplied luxury food items; the weed provided the base input of fixed carbon to Europa’s expanding population, just as vacuum organisms growing on the methane and carbon monoxide ices and tars of carbonaceous chondrites supplied fixed carbon to the new Kuiper Belt settlements.

In the midst of the monastery’s huge weed farm, Indira overtook Finn and Fergus and turned her scooter to face them as they vectored toward her. Her arms ached slightly and she worked one and then the other. Her headache had crept downward, a mantle of numbing cold that penetrated the dry suit and its three underlayers—a fleece liner, a quilted undersuit with a little skull cap, the liner from her vacuum suit. Her fingertips were numb inside the thin gloves; the little bits of exposed skin between hood and face mask were slivers of stinging pain. This would not go away. This would get worse. Yet she felt a thrill of elation vibrating in her core. She was here. She was doing her job. The close possibility of death made her more alive than at any other time. It was not something she could talk about, even with Carr. Only other hunters could understand it.

Above was a rippling ceiling of hexagonal arrays of racks, with blades of weed trailing down like hair; below, fifty kilometers of black water. No sign of any movement down there on her sonar. The chemical sniffer that sampled water every few seconds showed no trace of metabolites specific to biowar macroforms. Her regulator valve rattled; dry air hissed. She checked the elapsed time on her mask’s head-up display—she had six hours of air in the two tanks she carried on her back, another hour in the emergency bottle clipped to the scooter.

“I think she’s made a point,” Fergus’s thin, processed voice said in her earpiece, as the two monks swung in beside her.

Boys’ games.

She said, “I want to look at the damage this monster did.”

Finn: “That’s where we’re going.”

Fergus: “It’s at the southern edge of the farm.”

Finn: “You follow us. Enough hot-dogging.”

Yes, boys’ games.

She let the men lead.

They traveled a long way through the cold and the dark. Two kilometers, three. An endless skimming fall below waving ranks of weed. It occurred to Indira that she had seen no one working the farm’s racks. Surely there should be at least a hundred people out here, harvesting mature plants and stringing new ropes thick with sporelings. When she asked, Fergus said, “That’s because of the monster. Which is why we’re out here.”

“You must have a lot of pressure chambers to handle the traffic.”

“We manage.”

Was that Finn or Fergus? Now she began to wonder how the monastery managed such a huge farm. Where were the facilities for servicing the huge numbers of divers that must be needed? Rothar had shown her the refectory filled with monks as a demonstration of his power—but there had been no more than a hundred men. Did all of them work the farm?

The creepy feeling, which she had shed as soon as she had powered out into the cold dark water of the ocean, began to return.

At last, an hour after they had set out, they finally reached the damaged section. It was near the edge of the farm. It was extensive: at least a hectare. Lights were blown or dimmed to a greenish glow. Whole sections of racks had been twisted free of the supporting pylons, and dangled disjointedly. Other sections were completely missing; presumably they had fallen away to crushing darkness at the bottom of the deep ocean.

Weed grew over broken racks and twisted wire stringers, made complex knotted barricades that waved to and fro in a strong southerly current. Indira had to keep blipping her scooter’s throttle to stay in place. There were patches in the weed that looked as if they had been harvested very recently. It had been done by someone who knew not to cut at the gnarly node where the weed gripped the rope, knew to leave a length of blade to allow swift regeneration. The cuts were fresh, no more than two or three days old. Had the monks tried to salvage their crop after the monster had wrecked this section? If so, then why hadn’t they salvaged all of it?

She said at last, “I’ve only seen pictures of what a dragon can do, but the damage to the racks is consistent.”

“I told you,” Finn said. “I told you that I caught one.”

Indira ignored this. She repeated what she had told them when they had first met. “This is a snoop dive. We’ll look around and then we’ll go back and make plans. It should take no more than another hour.”

“She feels the cold,” Finn said.

“I feel the cold,” Fergus said, and switched on his lights and took shots of Indira against the wreckage, moving around her with dainty frog-kicks. “Just for the record,” he said, when she protested that they were wasting time.

“We do waste time,” Finn said. “We go to its lair. Time to finish this. One way or the other.”

“Not here,” Fergus said. The thin synthesized voice somehow conveyed alarm.

“I know not here. Come.”

And then the big man was powering off into the dark beyond the wrecked edge of the farm. Indira followed hard on his heels, riding the smooth water in his scooter’s wake to conserve her own scooter’s power. She did not believe the story about a lair, but she knew that she would have to look. And then she could begin to make her own plans. She would kill the monster today or tomorrow, and then she could go home.

Another long fall through black cold water. Once, she looked over her shoulder to check that Fergus was following, and saw that already the lights of the farm had dwindled far behind: a linear constellation of little sparks set in the vast cold night of the ocean. They were skimming along just beneath the icy roof. It was not flat, but undulated in long smooth swales, eroded by the relatively warm upwelling current. It glistened blue and green in the wide beam of the lamp of Indira’s scooter. Fringes of ferny platelet ice hung down everywhere, delicate growths that softened the swelling contours of the ice.

Now the roof angled down—a smooth intrusion in the undulating ice, an upside-down hill. Indira followed Finn down the long slope. Her depth gauge pinged at every twenty-meter contour. She had nanoformed scavengers in her blood that prevented both nitrogen narcosis caused by high pressure and bubble formation caused by too-swift ascents, but the scavengers only worked within certain limits.

They went down almost two hundred meters; then the slope steepened into a vertical wall, and they dragged below its inverted crest. Beyond was a chaos of slab ice where part of the crust had broken away and reformed. Habitat-sized chunks of ice stuck out at all angles, transparent blue ice shot through with white stress marks, like a jumble of giant, rough-cut gems. Finn slowed and Indira slowed, too. They drifted beneath the jagged chaos and came to a stop near a black rift that led back into the ice—a long gently curving slot like a grinning mouth.

“This is where they went.”

Indira did not know if Finn or Fergus had spoken—the distortion of their treated subvocalizations and a sudden surge of adrenaline in her blood obliterated the subtle distinction.

“We will get them back.”

Was that the same voice? Fergus had drifted a little way beneath Finn, who was shining a strong lamp into the rift. Fluted ice reflected its red light in a thousand splinters.

“We finish the matter now.”

That was definitely Finn.

Indira’s chemical sniffer was flashing urgently. She called up the display. Strong metabolic traces, but no positive identification. Were there several types of macroform here? She started the sniffer’s analytical program and said, “There’s something in there. In a few minutes I’ll know what it is.”

She turned up all her lights and cautiously edged into the mouth of the rift. A faint but steady current issued from it. The sniffer’s HPLC kicked in and started to flash spiky lines as it separated the unknown metabolites. She called up the chemical signature of a dragon as an overlay. And there it was buried amongst traces of other complex chemicals which the sniffer was unable to match against its library.

“Got you,” she said, and something flew past her, a quick flash leaving a wake of bubbles that rose around her like a silvery rope.

Her backbrain recognized what it was and she turned away in reflex before she realized that someone—Finn or Fergus—had fired some kind of self-propelled explosive charge into the rift.

Then it exploded.

The pressure wave clamped around Indira, lifted her, shoved her against the roof of the rift, took her again and dragged her down amongst the glistening smooth hummocks of its floor. Big chunks of ice fell with her, through a haze of chips and fragments that washed to and fro in the cross-hatched froth of aftershock currents.

Someone was shouting, a thin voice like tearing metal. “Not this way! Not yet!”

Somehow, Indira had kept hold of her scooter. She killed her lights and crouched amongst ice rubble. Strong, freezing cold currents washed back and forth over her. There were lights hung beyond the slot of the rift’s mouth, two clusters of lights, shining their high beams here and there. She realized that she had been set up. They would kill her here and blame the monster. Because of what she had seen, even if she did not understand what she had seen. Because she was a woman who had dared to trespass on men’s territory.

And then something big shot past her. Someone screamed and one of the clusters of lights went out.

It was the dragon.

It doubled back, quick as thought. Indira tried to untangle her spear gun. She had an impression of something black and sleek, with two big fins or flippers that curled around a man-sized bundle.

Then it was past, swimming strongly into the depths of the rift. Gone.

It had taken Finn. Fergus’s small figure hung some distance from the entrance. “Keep away,” he said, as she angled toward him. “Keep away. I’m armed.”

She kept going. A spear shot wide, disappearing into the black water to her right. She gunned her scooter and slammed into Fergus before he could recock his gun, spun him around, uncoupled the air hose from his face mask.

His masked face was obscured by a sudden flood of silvery bubbles. He waved his arms in blind panic. She counted to ten and stuck the hose in his hand. “All right,” he said, when he had it back in place. “All right.”

“You wanted me dead.”

“Rothar said it was necessary. He said you would be bait for the monster.”

“You were going to video it. You thought I would be almost certainly killed by the dragon. After all, I’m only a woman. And if I had killed it, you would have killed me, and made up a story.”

Fergus didn’t deny it. He said, “Finn wouldn’t wait.”

“He was a coward. Well, he’s dead now. That’s what dragons do.”

“It has our workers,” Fergus said, pointing toward the rift. It was just visible as a shadow crescent cut into the ice blocks of the tumbled roof, at the edge of the overlapping circles of their lights.

Indira said, “If it took them in there, then they’re as dead as Finn.”

How many had the dragon killed? There were about a hundred monks now, but many more than that would have been needed to maintain the farm . . . . Indira was very cold, and found it hard to follow any thought to its conclusion. Every few seconds, a tremor passed over her entire skin. That sleek black shape. Bigger and faster than anything she had ever seen before . . .

Fergus made a choking, squealing noise. It was laughter, translated by his throat mike. “Oh no,” he said. “At least, they were alive a couple of days ago. They came out to feed. The dragon was with them. They ripped up the perimeter of the farm and disappeared before we could get them. You, you’re one of the dead, though. Rothar has seen to it.”

Then he kicked out with surprising strength and broke free. She let him go. If Rothar was determined to kill her, one little monk wouldn’t be much of a bargaining chip.

Fergus was a solitary star dwindling through the ocean’s black volume toward the distant constellation of the farm. His voice came faintly to her.

He said, “Finn really did kill one. It was small, but he killed it.”

And then: “Don’t try to follow me. You don’t have enough air . . . .”

Indira had almost used up one of her two air-tanks. Apprehensive alarm suddenly fluttered in her chest. She switched to the second. Gas hissed through the regulator but there was no oxygen, and suddenly she couldn’t get her breath. Nitrogen. The fuckers had somehow filled her second tank with nitrogen! She switched back as red and black began to blot out her vision. She had about half an hour’s worth of air left, and the trip back would take at least an hour and a half. She had insisted on filling her air-tanks herself, but Finn or Fergus must have done some kind of switch, changing the compressor’s inlet from the standard nitrox mix to pure nitrogen. She checked the emergency bottle in her scooter, but she already knew. It had been filled with nitrogen, too.

She did not have enough air to get back, but there was one place within reach where she could get air. The two men had not planned on the monster killing one of them. Finn’s scooter with its emergency bottle was gone, still falling toward the true surface of Europa, a fifty-kilometer fall that might take three days. But perhaps his main tanks were still intact.

She had no other choice. And there was the mystery of the workers. Still alive, Fergus had said. Something had harvested patches of weed. Something was producing the chemical traces that overlay the dragon’s metabolic signature.

She realized then what the workers must be. What the laboratory had been used for.

She turned and powered back into the rift.

Finn’s explosive charge had brought down a big ice fall, but the dragon had punched a hole in the middle of it. Indira shot straight through the ragged gap. She didn’t have time to waste.

The passage went a long way, rising in a gentle left-handed curve. It was as smooth as a gullet. The gleaming ice walls confused Indira’s sonar, and she switched it off. The sniffer told her all she needed to know: increasing concentrations of the complex mixture of metabolic exudations, including the dragon’s fingerprint of methylmalonic acid semialdehyde, α-ketoisovaleric acid, and a triple peak of phosphatidic acids.

When the passage suddenly opened out on all sides, Indira slewed to a stop and fired off a fan of flares. They ignited as they floated away, a string of harsh white stars that starkly illuminated the lower half of a vast chamber. Indira’s heart was beating quickly and lightly, driven by anticipation and dread. If this was not the monster’s lair, then she was fucked. She didn’t have enough air to get back out into open water.

The flares floated higher. The chamber was easily twice the size of the Buddhist Temple in Phoenix. Chambers like this were common in the lower part of Europa’s icy crust, opened by stress flow and carved wider by intrusive currents until they grew too big, even in Europa’s low gravity, and collapsed. It was floored with chunks of ice that had fallen from the ceiling high above and fans of ice rubble slumped from the fluted walls. The chunks had been worn as smooth as pebbles by currents of relatively warm water.

Movement at the edge of the shifting shadows cast by the string of floating flares sharpened the quick beat of her heart. Belatedly, she remembered to switch on her sonar. A cluster of small signals, things the size of a human child. Had the monster reproduced, then? Yes, but not more than once. That was why it had killed Finn. As for these . . .

She guessed what they must be a moment before she worked out that the regular signal beyond the cluster of child-sized creatures was that of a set of racks bolted to the ceiling of the chamber. Of course. They had started their own weed farm; the currents that flowed through the chamber were as rich in sulfides and ammonium as those in the open water.

Then a big signal was suddenly coming straight at her, angling down like a guided missile, brushing through the picket line of flares and sending them spinning. She barely had time to get out her spear gun and aim it. There was a very fine tremor in her arms, but now that it was happening she was quite calm.

The thing came on and she did not fire. It was so very fast! She did not fire, and at the last moment revved the scooter and shot under the monster as it swept over her.

She rolled in its wake and brought up her spear gun again as she came around. The dragon had already turned. It hung there in the glare of her lights and the drifting stars of the flares.

She had seen pictures and brief video sequences of dragons, but she had never seen one in real life. No one had seen one in real life for more than ten years. Until now, she had not realized how beautiful they were.

The dragon’s body was streamlined and compact, a long wedge of muscle twice her length, gloved in a flexible carapace of long black bony scales. Its fused rear flippers fanned out horizontally like a whale’s fluke, far wider than the span of her arms. Its pectoral fins were stretched out like bat’s wings. Three of the long fingers grew through the thick membrane they supported; they were tipped with long, sharp, black claws. Its mouth was wide and had a shark’s humorless grin, with several rows of backward-tilted ripsaw teeth. Not for feeding—it had no digestive system, fueling itself by pumping sulfide-rich water through internal lamellae dense with symbiotic carbon-fixing bacteria—but for attack. It was gaping wide now. Its forehead was humped and swollen, with a band of warty protrusions, electrical sensory organs on which it relied more than sight, although it kept one rolling blue eye on Indira. That eye was unnervingly human; she had the uncanny impression that someone was buried inside the monster’s carapace, peering out at her.

No, not at her, she realized. At the spear gun and the spear racked ready for firing, at the spear’s explosive hypodermic tip, its charge of tailored neurotoxin. Even if it discharged into the water, the neurotoxin would be enough to paralyze the dragon, perhaps for long enough to kill it. If it could not pump sulfide-rich water over its symbionts, it could not generate energy, and after all this activity, it must have depleted the stored energy in its battery muscles. It would quickly die.

Indira raised the spear gun and watched the dragon shift with precise flicks of its winglike pectoral fins, keeping its rolling blue eye on the tip of the cocked spear. For the first time in her life, she saw her quarry not as a monster, but as another thinking creature.

Carefully, slowly, she inverted in the water and laid the spear gun amongst water-smoothed ice rubble on the floor. Came back right-side-up.

The dragon hung there, watching her. Smaller shapes gathered high above and behind it, shadows moving to and fro against the guttering light of the flares, which had floated up amongst the hanging blocks of the ceiling. She could hear a faint chirruping of cross-talk.

Still moving with dreamlike slowness, she took the emergency bottle from her scooter and vented it. The dragon sculled backward from the column of bubbles. Oxygen was poisonous to its symbiotic bacteria. But this was only nitrogen, and the dragon eased back to its original position.

Still moving slowly, Indira took off her harness. She was careful not to tangle the hose that led from the one functional air-tank to the regulator in her face mask. She vented nitrogen from the second tank. This time the dragon did not shy back.

It knew.

The regulator valve rattled more deeply each time she drew a breath. The air-tank was almost exhausted. She hung there in front of the monster, staring at its blue eye, small under the ridge of its swollen bony forehead. It must know that she was not like its enemies. Her dry suit was white and her stab jacket was yellow: compared to the monks’ utilitarian black, she was a tropical bloom. And all biowar macroforms had a good sense of taste. It must be able to tell that she was releasing a different set of chemical signals into the cold water, that she was not a man.

The regulator rattled, and suddenly she could not breathe. It rattled again and her rib cage fully inflated, but she could not draw any air. She tried not to panic. She knew that she could hold her breath for more than three minutes. She tapped the regulator, tapped the air-tank.

The monster watched, immobile, unfathomable.

Indira stripped off her face mask, spat out her regulator and clamped her lips against the pressure of the freezing water. She wanted so much to breathe.

A rapid fire of clicks and chirps.

The cold salty water stung her eyes when she opened them. Something shot down, swooped between her and the dragon, dropped something, and shot away.

Finn’s harness and his air-tanks.

Indira dove for it. The mouthpiece of the regulator was half-bitten through, and the air-tank it drew on was empty. She prayed that Finn had not switched over to his second tank before the dragon had killed him, jammed the regulator in her mouth, tasting Finn’s blood and sputum, twisted the valve to the second tank, and drew a deep shuddering breath.

A bullet of freezing cold sulfurous water hit the back of her throat. She choked on it, bubbles leaking from her mouth, and then realized that she was breathing again.

More clicks tapped through the water. Small figures swooped down out of the darkness beyond and above the dragon. They hung in the black water on either side of its smooth bulk, gazing down as she hooked the hose of Finn’s air-tank to her face mask and turned it on full to purge the mask of water as she fastened it over her face. They were half her size—Alice’s size. Thick smooth coats of lustrous grey fur, sad brown human eyes, long vibrissae on either side of snouts swollen to the size of melons—they must rely on echo location as much as sight. They had the long, half-fused rear flippers of seals, but short, stout human arms where their pectoral flippers should be. Their hands were long-fingered, spread wide to show the webs between.

The farm workers. The creatures Rothar had gengineered and used as slaves to increase the wealth of the monastery. The creatures that the dragon had freed.

They clicked to each other using the flat, grinding teeth in their narrow jaws. They did not have the symbionts that fed the biowar macroforms. They needed to eat weed. They had to stay near the farm. But the dragon had shown them how they could live free. They could steal racks of weed and use them to start their own farm.

The dragon moved forward. The long terminal finger of one of its pectoral fins scratched something on a table of ice. And then it flicked its body like a whip and shot away into the darkness. The workers trailed after it, kicking strongly through the water. One hovered for a moment, watching Indira, and then a sharp chorus of clicks sounded and it turned and followed its companions.

Indira was alone. Cold and dark pressed all around the little bubble of light cast by her scooter’s lamp. She finned over to the flat table of ice, traced the crude but legible letters the monster had gouged with its clawed finger.

No more war.

Indira got back to the lock with less than an hour of air left. They had to let her in. She showed Finn’s explosive charges to the cameras and mimed slapping them against the hatch to make it clear that she would blow her way in if she had to.

Rothar came to her as soon as she had cycled through. A burly monk stood just behind him. Indira was cold and exhausted, and her dry suit stank of hydrogen sulfide, but she straightened her back and looked right at Rothar. She did not bother to look at the bodyguard.

She said, “Finn is dead.”

“I know.”

“The dragon killed him. Your workers were with it. They gave me Finn’s air-tank. That’s how I survived your attempt to kill me.”

She glared at Rothar defiantly. He was looking at a point somewhere behind her left shoulder. The dark blotches on his white face were vivid in the red light of the chamber. Only a slight tremor in his jaw betrayed the effort with which he was suppressing his emotions.

Indira said in an angry rush, “You tried to steal my neurotoxins, but when you failed, you knew you would have to let me go after the dragon. And you wanted me out of the way after I saw the laboratory, but you couldn’t just get rid of me—too many people knew I was here. So you sent me out without enough air. The plan was that either the dragon would kill me and Finn would take my spear gun and kill the dragon, or I would kill the dragon and run out of air, and Finn would mutilate my body to make it look like I’d been fatally wounded by the dragon.”

Rothar told his bodyguard to stand outside the door, and said mildly, “If you had given us the neurotoxins or let us take them, none of this would have happened.”

“You had to kill me after I found the laboratory.”

“Not at all. We tried to open your luggage pod as soon as you went outside to use your phone. But it was too well-defended and I had to implement a second plan. The only way to get your neurotoxins was to take them from you in the ocean, and the only way to take them from you was to kill you. I let you find the laboratory so that my community would condone your death because you had discovered our secrets.”

Indira was too tired to feel either hatred or fear. She said, “You were certain the dragon would kill me. You expected it. After all, I’m only a woman. Fergus was supposed to video my death. And if I did kill the dragon, then I couldn’t be allowed to live because it would make a mockery of your creed. Either way, I had to die.”

Rothar did not deny it.

“Instead, the dragon took Finn because he had killed one of its scions. I don’t know what happened to his body.”

“We will hold a service in memory of his soul.”

“Your workers have escaped you. They will start their own farm.”

Rothar said, “They will have to come back. They need certain vitamins and amino acids that the weed cannot provide. They know this.”

Perhaps they had eaten Finn’s body. Or perhaps they had taken it with them. It would take a long time to even begin to decay in the cold anaerobic ocean. She said, “I don’t think they’ll be back.”

“Then I will raise some more.”

“And meanwhile, your farm will fail. And perhaps your new workers will escape, too. How intelligent did you make them?”

Rothar smiled. “Intelligent enough.” He paused. He said, “Not as intelligent as the dragons.”

She understood. She said, “You were a gengineer, on Earth.”

Rothar looked at her for a moment, looked away. He said, “I was part of a team, Ms. Dzurisin. Unfortunately, I was not working on the dragons, or I would not have needed your neurotoxin.”

“But you used that knowledge to gengineer your workers when you came here. Those blotches on your face—they’re from some kind of accident, aren’t they? You couldn’t get it treated, because then people would know that you had been working illegally. Finn killed a dragon, a juvenile. At first, I thought you caught it because you wanted to learn the secret of how the macroforms can live off the ocean, but now I think he killed it because he could.”

“Finn was a useful man, but his propensity for violence could not always be contained. I did not need to learn any secret, Ms. Dzurisin. I alrcady know how the dragons and the other biowar macroforms live. My workers are a type of macroform that was not used in the Quiet War. I altered their genotype to make them dependent on the weed they grow, but otherwise they are just as they were designed.”

“The dragon that sired the one Finn killed came here looking for its scion. And found the workers.” Indira stared right at Rothar. She said, “I didn’t kill it. But you’ll want to pay me anyway.”

Rothar said, with a note of amusement, “I don’t think so.”

“I think so. I found the dragon but I didn’t kill it, and that’s why you’ll need me to negotiate with it.”

Rothar folded his arms. He said, “We will talk, in my study. Get changed, Ms. Dzurisin. Get warm. Think about what story you will tell your colleagues once you leave here.”

She knew then that she had won.

The bus pulled away from the monastery and began to descend the road that switchbacked down toward the plain. By human clocks, it was the middle of the night; on the surface of Europa, at 2°S 84 °W, it was just after dawn. The small, shrunken Sun stood just above the flat eastern horizon. Above it, Jupiter showed a wide, narrow crescent, a bow of yellow light bent toward Europa. Out there, on the plain of ice plates cross-hatched by triple-banded ridges, everything had two shadows.

The bus said, “Did you find the monster? Did you kill it?”

“I found something else,” Indira said.

She thought of her daughter and her dreams of sea gardens full of benign animals. She thought of all the children of Phoenix, staring with avid fascination into the darkness of the ocean. She thought of the workers, and the monster that had adopted them. It was smarter than its makers knew. Perhaps it had learned wisdom in the black depths of the sea. Who knew what thoughts, what philosophies, the dragons spun as they hung in the cold and the dark and pumped life-giving water through symbiont-rich lamellae? Perhaps one day, Alice and her generation would find out.

Indira would have to talk with the other hunters. There must be no more hunting for dragons. No more war. Perhaps they could help the workers, set up feeding stations where the creatures could get their dietary supplements of vitamins and essential amino acids. Perhaps they could learn the workers’ chattering patois. Make contact. Cooperate. And begin to make the ocean a place in which to live.

Indira said, “I think I might have found something that Earth can’t do.”

The bus didn’t understand. Indira wasn’t sure that she did, either, but it didn’t matter. Alice and all the other children would.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, September 1998.

Life on the Preservation

Jack Skillingstead

Wind buffeted the scutter. Kylie resisted the temptation to fight the controls. Hand light on the joystick, she veered toward the green smolder of Seattle, riding down a cloud canyon aflicker with electric bursts. The Preservation Field extended half a mile over Elliot Bay but did not capture Blake or Vashon Island nor any of the blasted lands.

She dropped to the deck. Acid rain and wind lashed the scutter. The Preservation Field loomed like an immense wall of green jellied glass.

She punched through, and the sudden light shift dazzled her. Kylie polarized the thumbnail port, at the same time deploying braking vanes and dipping steeply to skim the surface of the bay.

The skyline and waterfront were just as they’d appeared in the old photographs and movies. By the angle of the sun she estimated her arrival time at late morning. Not bad. She reduced airspeed and gently pitched forward. The scutter drove under the water. It got dark. She cleared the thumbnail port. Bubbles trailed back over the thick plexi, strings of silver pearls.

Relying on preset coordinates, she allowed the autopilot to navigate. In minutes the scutter was tucked in close to a disused pier. Kyle opened the ballast, and the scutter surfaced in a shadow, bobbing. She saw a ladder and nudged forward.

She was sweating inside her costume. Jeans, black sneakers, olive drab shirt, rain parka. Early twenty-first century urban America: Seattle chic.

She powered down, tracked her seat back, popped the hatch. The air was sharp and clean, with a saltwater tang. Autumn chill in the Pacific Northwest. Water slopped against the pilings.

She climbed up the pitchy, guano-spattered rungs of the ladder.

And stood in awe of the intact city, the untroubled sky. She could sense the thousands of living human beings, their vitality like an electric vibe in her blood. Kylie was nineteen and had never witnessed such a day. It had been this way before the world ended. She reminded herself that she was here to destroy it.

From her pocket she withdrew a remote control, pointed it at the scutter. The hatch slid shut and her vehicle sank from view. She replaced the remote control. Her hand strayed down to another zippered pocket and she felt the outline of the explosive sphere. Behind it, her heart was beating wildly. I’m here, she thought.

She walked along the waterfront, all her senses exploited. The sheer numbers of people overwhelmed her. The world had ended on a Saturday, November nine, 2004. There were more living human beings in her immediate range of sight than Kylie had seen in her entire life.

She extracted the locator device from her coat pocket and flipped up the lid. It resembled a cellular phone of the period. A strong signal registered immediately. Standing in the middle of the sidewalk, she turned slowly toward the high reflective towers of the city, letting people go around her, so many people, walking, skateboarding, jogging, couples and families and single people, flowing in both directions, and seagulls gliding overhead, and horses harnessed to carriages waiting at the curb (so much life), and the odors and rich living scents, and hundreds of cars and pervasive human noise and riot, all of it continuous and—

“Are you all right?”

She started. A tall young man in a black jacket loomed over her. The jacket was made out of leather. She could smell it.

“Sorry,” he said. “You looked sort of dazed.”

Kylie turned away and walked into the street, toward the signal, her mission. Horns blared, she jerked back, dropped her locator. It skittered against the curb near one of the carriage horses. Kylie lunged for it, startling the horse, which clopped back, a hoof coming down on the locator. No! She couldn’t get close. The great head of the animal tossed, nostrils snorting, the driver shouting at her, Kylie frantic to reach her device.

“Hey, watch it!”

It was the man in the leather jacket. He pulled her back, then darted in himself and retrieved the device. He looked at it a moment, brow knitting. She snatched it out of his hand. The display was cracked and blank. She shook it, punched the keypad. Nothing.

“I’m really sorry,” the man said.

She ignored him.

“It’s like my fault,” he said.

She looked up. “You have no idea, no idea how bad this is.”

He winced.

“I don’t even have any tools,” she said, not to him.

“Let me—”

She walked away, but not into the street, the locator a useless thing in her hand. She wasn’t a tech. Flying the scutter and planting explosives was as technical as she got. So it was plan B, only since plan B didn’t exist it was plan Zero. Without the locator she couldn’t possibly find the Eternity Core. A horse! Jesus.

“Shit.”

She sat on a stone bench near a decorative waterfall that unrolled and shone like a sheet of plastic. Her mind raced but she couldn’t formulate a workable plan B.

A shadow moved over her legs. She looked up, squinting in the sun.

“Hi.”

“What do you want?” she said to the tall man in the leather jacket.

“I thought an ice cream might cheer you up.”

“Huh?”

“Ice cream,” he said. “You know, ‘You scream, I scream, we all scream for ice cream’?”

She stared at him. His skin was pale, his eyebrows looked sketched on with charcoal, and there was a small white scar on his nose. He was holding two waffle cones, one in each hand, the cones packed with pink ice cream. She had noticed people walking around with these things, had seen the sign.

“I guess you don’t like strawberry,” he said.

“I’ve never had it.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Okay, I’m lying. Now why don’t you go away. I need to think.”

He extended his left hand. “It’s worth trying, at least once. Even on a cold day.”

Kylie knew about ice cream. People in the old movies ate it. It made them happy.

She took the cone.

“Listen, can I sit down for a second?” the man said.

She ignored him, turning the cone in her hand like the mysterious artifact it was. The man sat down anyway.

“My name’s Toby,” he said.

“It’s really pink,” Kylie said.

“Yeah.” And after a minute, “You’re supposed to lick it.”

She looked at him.

“Like this,” he said, licking his own cone.

“I know,” she said. “I’m not an ignoramus.” Kylie licked her ice cream. Jesus! Her whole body lit up. “That’s—”

“Yeah?”

“It’s wonderful,” she said.

“You really haven’t had ice cream before?”

She shook her head, licking away at the cone, devouring half of it in seconds.

“That’s incredibly far-fetched,” Toby said. “What’s your name? You want a napkin?” He pointed at her chin.

“I’m Kylie,” she said, taking the napkin and wiping her chin and lips. All of a sudden she didn’t want any more ice cream. She had never eaten anything so rich. In her world there wasn’t anything so rich. Her stomach felt queasy.

“I have to go,” she said.

She stood up, so did he.

“Hey, you know the thing is, what you said about not having tools? What I mean is, I have tools. I mean I fix things. It’s not a big deal, but I’m good and I like doing it. I can fix all kinds of things, you know? Palm Pilots, cell phones, laptops. Whatever.”

Kylie waved the locator. “You don’t even know what this is.”

“I don’t have to know what it is to make it go again.”

Hesitantly, she handed him the locator. While he was turning it in his fingers, she spotted the Tourist. He was wearing a puffy black coat and a watch cap, and he was walking directly towards her, expressionless, his left hand out of sight inside his pocket. He wasn’t a human being.

Toby noticed her changed expression and followed her gaze.

“You know that guy?”

Kylie ran. She didn’t look back to see if the Tourist was running after her. She cut through the people crowding the sidewalk, her heart slamming. It was a minute before she realized she’d left the locator with Toby. That almost made her stop, but it was too late. Let him keep the damn thing.

She ran hard. The Old Men had chosen her for this mission because of her youth and vitality (so many were sickly and weak), but after a while she had to stop and catch her breath. She looked around. The vista of blue water was dazzling. The city was awesome, madly perfect, phantasmagoric, better than the movies. The Old Men called it an abomination. Kylie didn’t care what they said. She was here for her mother, who was dying and who grieved for the trapped souls.

Kylie turned slowly around, and here came two more Tourists.

No, three.

Three from three different directions, one of them crossing the street, halting traffic. Stalking toward her with no pretense of human expression, as obvious to her among the authentic populace as cockroaches in a scatter of white rice.

Kylie girded herself. Before she could move, a car drew up directly in front of her, a funny round car painted canary yellow. The driver threw the passenger door open, and there was the man again, Toby.

“Get in!”

She ducked into the car, which somehow reminded her of the scutter, and it accelerated away. A Tourist who had scrabbled for the door handle spun back and fell. Kylie leaned over the seat. The Tourist got up, the other two standing beside him, not helping. Then Toby cranked the car into a turn that threw her against the door. They were climbing a steep hill, and Toby seemed to be doing too many things at once, working the clutch, the steering wheel, and radio, scanning through stations until he lighted upon something loud and incomprehensible that made him smile and nod his head.

“You better put on your seatbelt,” he said. “They’ll ticket you for that shit, believe it or not.”

Kylie buckled her belt.

“Thanks,” she said. “You came out of nowhere.”

“Anything can happen. Who were those guys?”

“Tourists.”

“Okay. Hey, you know what?”

“What?”

He took his hand off the shifter and pulled Kylie’s locator out of his inside jacket pocket.

“I bet you I can fix this gizmo.”

“Would you bet your soul on it?”

“Why not?” He grinned.

He stopped at his apartment to pick up his tools, and Kylie waited in the car. There was a clock on the dashboard. 11:45 A.M. She set the timer on her wrist chronometer.

Twelve hours and change.

They sat in a coffee bar in Belltown. More incomprehensible music thumped from box speakers bracketed near the ceiling. Paintings by some local artist decorated the walls, violent slashes of color, faces of dogs and men and women drowning, mouths gaping.

Kylie kept an eye open for Tourists.

Toby hunched over her locator, a jeweler’s kit unrolled next to his espresso. He had the back off the device and was examining its exotic components with the aid of a magnifying lens and a battery operated light of high intensity. He had removed his jacket and was wearing a black sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up. His forearms were hairy. A tattoo of blue thorns braceleted his right wrist. He was quiet for a considerable time, his attention focused. Kylie drank her second espresso, like the queen of the world, like it was nothing to just ask for coffee this good and get it.

“Well?” she said.

“Ah.”

“What?”

“Ah, what is this thing?”

“You said you didn’t need to know.”

“I don’t need to know, I just want to know. After all, according to you, I’m betting my immortal soul that I can fix it, so it’d be nice to know what it does.”

“We don’t always get to know the nice things, do we?” Kylie said. “Besides, I don’t believe in souls. That was just something to say.” Something her mother had told her, she thought. The Old Men didn’t talk about souls. They talked about zoos.

“You sure downed that coffee fast. You want to go for three?”

“Yeah.”

He chuckled and gave her a couple of dollars and she went to the bar and got another espresso, head buzzing in a very good way.

“It’s a locator,” she said, taking pity on him, after returning to the table and sitting down.

“Yeah? What’s it locate?”

“The city’s Eternity Core.”

“Oh, that explains everything. What’s an eternity core?”

“It’s an alien machine that generates an energy field around the city and preserves it in a sixteen-hour time loop.”

“Gotcha.”

“Now can you fix it?”

“Just point out one thing.”

She slurped up her third espresso. “Okay.”

“What’s the power source? I don’t see anything that even vaguely resembles a battery.”

She leaned in close, their foreheads practically touching. She pointed with the chipped nail of her pinky finger.

“I think it’s that coily thing,” she said.

He grunted. She didn’t draw back. She was smelling him, smelling his skin. He lifted his gaze from the guts of the locator. His eyes were pale blue, the irises circled with black rings.

“You’re kind of a spooky chick,” he said.

“Kind of.”

“I like spooky.”

“Where I come from,” Kylie said, “almost all the men are impotent.”

“Yeah?”

She nodded.

“Where do you come from,” he asked, “the east side?”

“East side of hell.”

“Sounds like it,” he said.

She kissed him, impulsively, her blood singing with caffeine and long-unrequited pheromones. Then she sat back and wiped her lips with her palm and stared hard at him.

“I wish you hadn’t done that,” she said.

“Me.”

“Just fix the locator, okay?”

“Spooky,” he said, picking up a screwdriver with a blade not much bigger than a spider’s leg.

A little while later she came back from the bathroom and he had put the locator together and was puzzling over the touchpad. He had found the power button. The two-inch-square display glowed the blue of cold starlight. She slipped it from his hand and activated the grid. A pinhead hotspot immediately began blinking.

“It work okay?” Toby asked.

“Yes.” She hesitated, then said, “Let’s go for a drive. I’ll navigate.”

They did that.

Kylie liked the little round canary car. It felt luxurious and utilitarian at the same time. Letting the locator guide her, she directed Toby. After many false turns and an accumulated two point six miles on the odometer, she said:

“Stop. No, keep going, but not too fast.”

The car juddered as he manipulated clutch, brake, and accelerator. They rolled past a closed store front on the street level of a four-story building on First Avenue, some kind of sex shop, the plateglass soaped and brown butcher paper tacked up on the inside.

Two men in cheap business suits loitered in front of the building. Tourists.

Kylie scrunched down in her seat.

“Don’t look at those guys,” she said. “Just keep driving.”

“Whatever.”

Later on they were parked under the monorail tracks eating submarine sandwiches. Kylie couldn’t get over how great everything was, the food, the coffee, the damn air. All of it the way things used to be. She could hardly believe how great it had been, how much had been lost.

“Okay,” she said, kind of talking to herself, “so they know I’m here and they’re guarding the Core.”

“Those bastards,” Toby said.

“You wouldn’t think it was so funny if you knew what they really were.”

“They looked like used car salesmen.”

“They’re Tourists,” Kylie said.

“Oh my God! More tourists!”

Kylie chewed a mouthful of sub. She’d taken too big a bite. Every flavor was like a drug. Onions, provolone, turkey, mustard, pepper.

“So where are the evil tourists from?” Toby asked. “California?”

“Another dimensional reality.”

“That’s what I said.”

Kylie’s chronometer toned softly. Ten hours.

Inside the yellow car there were many smells and one of them was Toby.

“Do you have any more tattoos?” she asked.

“One. It’s—”

“Don’t tell me,” she said.

“Okay.”

“I want you to show me. But not here. At the place where you live.”

“You want to come to my apartment?”

“Your apartment, yes.”

“Okay, spooky.” He grinned. So did she.

Some precious time later the chronometer toned again. It wasn’t on her wrist anymore. It was on the hardwood floor tangled up in her clothes.

Toby, who was standing naked by the refrigerator holding a bottle of grape juice, said, “Why’s your watch keep doing that?”

“It’s a countdown,” Kylie said, looking at him.

“A countdown to what?”

“To the end of the current cycle. The end of the loop.”

He drank from the bottle, his threat working. She liked to watch him now, whatever he did. He finished drinking and screwed the cap back on.

“The loop,” he said, shaking his head.

When he turned to put the bottle back in the refrigerator she saw his other tattoo again: a cross throwing off light. It was inked into the skin on his left shoulder blade.

“You can’t even see your own cross,” she said.

He came back to the bed.

“I don’t have to see it,” he said. “I just like to know it’s there, watching my back.”

“Are you Catholic?”

“No.”

“My mother is.”

“I just like the idea of Jesus,” he said.

“You’re spookier than I am,” Kylie said.

“Not by a mile.”

She kissed his mouth, but when he tried to caress her she pushed him gently back.

“Take me someplace.”

“Where?”

“My grandparents’ house.” She meant “great” grandparents, but didn’t feel like explaining to him how so many decades had passed outside the loop of the Preservation.

“Right now?”

“Yes.”

It was a white frame house on Queen Anne Hill, sitting comfortably among its prosperous neighbors on a street lined with live oaks. Kylie pressed her nose to the window on the passenger side of the Vee Dub, as Toby called his vehicle.

“Stop,” she said. “That’s it.”

He tucked the little car into the curb and turned the engine off. Kylie looked from the faded photo in her hand to the house. Her mother’s mother had taken the photo just weeks before the world ended. In it, Kylie’s great grandparents stood on the front porch of the house, their arms around each other, waving and smiling. There was no one standing on the front porch now.

“It’s real,” Kylie said. “I’ve been looking at this picture my whole life.”

“Haven’t you ever been here before?”

She shook her head. At the same time her chronometer toned.

“How we doing on the countdown?” Toby asked.

She glanced at the digital display.

“Eight hours.”

“So what happens at midnight?”

“It starts up again. The end is the beginning.”

He laughed. She didn’t.

“So then it’s Sunday, right? Then do you countdown to Monday?”

“At the end of the loop it’s not Sunday,” she said. “It’s the same day over again.”

“Two Saturdays. Not a bad deal.”

“Not just two. It goes on and on. November ninth a thousand, ten thousand, a million times over.”

“Okay.”

“You can look at me like that if you want. I don’t care if you believe me. You know something, Toby?”

“What?”

“I’m having a really good day.”

“That’s November ninth for you.”

She smiled at him, then kissed him, that feeling, the taste, all of the sensation in its totality.

“I want to see my grandparents now.”

She opened the door and got out but he stayed in the car. She crossed the lawn, strewn with big colorful oak leaves, to the front door of the house, stealing backward glances, wanting to know he was still there waiting for her in the yellow car. Her lover. Her boyfriend.

She started to knock on the door but hesitated. From inside the big house she heard muffled music and laughter. She looked around. In the breeze an orange oak leaf detached from the tree and spun down. The sky blew clear and cold. Later it would cloud over and rain. Kylie knew all about this day. She had been told of it since she was a small child. The last day of the world, perfectly preserved for the edification of alien Tourists and anthropologists. Some people said what happened was an accident, a consequence of the aliens opening the rift, disrupting the fabric of reality. What really pissed everybody off, Kylie thought, was the dismissive attitude. There was no occupying army, no invasion. They came, destroyed everything either intentionally or accidentally, then ignored the survivors. The Preservation was the only thing about the former masters of the Earth that interested them.

Kylie didn’t care about all that right now. She had been told about the day, but she had never understood what the day meant, the sheer sensorial joy of it, the incredible beauty and Tightness of it. A surge of pure delight moved through her being, and for a moment she experienced uncontainable happiness.

She knocked on the door.

“Yes?” A woman in her mid-fifties with vivid green eyes, her face pressed with comfortable laugh lines. Like the house, she was a picture come to life. (Kylie’s grandmother showing her the photographs, faded and worn from too much touching.)

“Hi,” Kylie said.

“Can I help you?” the live photograph said.

“No. I mean, I wanted to ask you something.”

The waiting expression on her face so familiar. Kylie said, “I just wanted to know, are you having a good day, I mean a really good day?”

Slight turn of the head, lips pursed uncertainly, ready to believe this was a harmless question from a harmless person.

“It’s like a survey,” Kylie said. “For school?”

A man of about sixty years wearing a baggy wool sweater and glasses came to the door.

“What’s all this?” he asked.

“A happiness survey,” Kylie’s great grandmother said, and laughed.

“Happiness survey, huh?” He casually put his arm around his wife and pulled her companionably against him.

“Yes,” Kylie said. “For school.”

“Well, I’m happy as a clam,” Kylie’s great grandfather said.

“I’m a clam, too,” Kylie’s great grandmother said. “A happy one.”

“Thank you,” Kylie said.

“You’re very welcome. Gosh, but you look familiar.”

“So do you. Good-bye.”

Back in the car Kylie squeezed Toby’s hand. There had been a boy on the Outskirts. He was impotent, but he liked to touch Kylie and be with her, and he didn’t mind watching her movies, the ones that made the Old Men sad and angry but that she obsessively hoarded images from in her mind. The boy’s hand always felt cold and hony. Which wasn’t his fault. The nicest time they ever had was a night they had spent in one of the ruins with a working fireplace and enough furniture to burn for several hours. They’d had a book of poems and took turns reading them to each other. Most of the poems didn’t make sense to Kylie but she liked the sounds of the words, the way they were put together. Outside, the perpetual storms crashed and sizzled, violet flashes stuttering into the cozy room with the fire.

In the yellow car, Toby’s hand felt warm. Companionable and intimate.

“So how are they doing?” he said.

“They’re happy.”

“Great. What’s next?”

“If you knew this was your last day to live,” Kylie asked him, “what would you do?”

“I’d find a spooky girl and make love to her.”

She kissed him. “What else?”

“Ah—”

“I mean without leaving the city. You can’t leave the city.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’d just get stuck in the Preservation Field until the loop restarted. It looks like people are driving out but they’re not.”

He looked at her closely, searching for the joke, then grinned. “We wouldn’t want that to happen to us.”

“No.”

“So what would you do on your last day?” he asked.

“I’d find a spooky guy who could fix things and I’d get him to fix me up.”

“You don’t need fixing. You’re not broken.”

“I am.”

“Yeah?”

“Let’s drive around. Then let’s have a really great meal, like the best food you can think of.”

“That’s doable.”

“Then we can go back to your apartment.”

“What about the big countdown?”

“Fuck the countdown.” Kylie pushed the timing stud into her chronometer. “There,” she said. “No more countdown.”

“You like pizza?” Toby said.

“I don’t know. What is it?”

After they made love the second time, Kylie fell into a light doze on Toby’s futon bed. She was not used to so much rich stimulation, so much food and drink, so much touching.

She woke with a start from a dream that instantly disappeared from her consciousness. There was the sound of rain, but it wasn’t the terrible poisonous rain of her world. Street light through the window cast a flowing shadow across the foot of the bed. It reminded her of the shiny fountain at the waterfront. The room was snug and comforting and safe. There was a clock on the table beside the bed but she didn’t look at it. It could end right now.

She sat up. Toby was at his desk under a framed movie poster, bent over something illuminated by a very bright and tightly directed light. He was wearing his jeans but no shirt or socks.

“Hello,” she said.

He turned sharply, then smiled. “Oh, hey Kylie. Have a nice rest?”

“I’m thirsty.”

He got up and fetched her a half-depleted bottle of water from the refrigerator. While he was doing that she noticed her locator in pieces on the desk.

“We don’t need that anymore,” she said, pointing.

“I was just curious. I can put it back together, no problem.”

“I don’t care about it.” She lay back on the pillows and closed her eyes.

“Kylie?”

“Hmmm?” She kept her eyes closed.

“Who are you? Really.”

“I’m your spooky girl.”

“Besides that.”

She opened her eyes. “Don’t spoil it. Please don’t.”

“Spoil what?”

“This. Us. Now. It’s all that matters.”

Rain ticked against the window. It would continue all night, a long, cleansing rain. Water that anybody could catch in a cup and drink if they wanted to—water out of the sky.

Toby took his pants down and slipped under the sheet next to her, his body heat like a magnetic field that drew her against him. She pressed her cheek to his chest. His heart beat calmly.

“Everything’s perfect,” she said.

“Yeah.” He didn’t sound that certain.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Only—this is all pretty fast. Don’t you think we should know more about each other?”

“Why? Now is what matters.”

“Yeah, but I mean, what do you do? Where do you live? Basic stuff. Big stuff, too, like do you believe in God or who’d you vote for for president?”

“I want to go for a long walk in the rain. I want to feel it on my face and not be afraid or sick.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re spoiling it. Please, let’s make every second happy. Make it a day we’d want to relive a thousand times.”

“I don’t want to live any day a thousand times.”

“Let’s walk now.”

“What’s the hurry?”

She got out of bed and started dressing, her back to him.

“Don’t be mad,” he said.

“I’m not mad.”

“You are.”

She turned to him, buttoning her shirt. “Don’t tell me what I am.”

“Sorry.”

“You practically sleepwalk through the most important day of your life.”

“I’m not sleepwalking.”

“Don’t you even want to fall in love with me?”

He laughed uncertainly. “I don’t even know your name.”

“You know it. Kylie.”

“I mean your last name.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me,” Toby said. “You matter to me.”

Finished with her shirt, she sat on the edge of the bed to lace her shoes. “No you don’t,” she said. “You only care about me if you can know all about my past and our future. You can’t live one day well and be happy.”

“Now you sound like Hemingway.”

“I don’t know what that means and I don’t care.” She shrugged into her parka.

“Where are you going?”

“For a walk. I told you what I wanted.”

“Yeah, I guess I was too ignorant to absorb it.”

She slammed the door on her way out.

She stood under the pumpkin-colored light of the street lamp, confused, face tilted up to be anointed by the rain. Was he watching her from the apartment window, his heart about to break? She waited and waited. This is the part where he would run to her and embrace her and kiss her and tell her that he loved, loved, loved her.

He didn’t come out.

She stared at the brick building checkered with light and dark apartment windows, not certain which one was his.

He didn’t come out, and it was spoiled.

A bus rumbled between her and the building, pale indifferent faces inside.

Kylie walked in the rain. It was not poison but it was cold and, after a while, unpleasant. She pulled her hood up and walked with her head down. The wet sidewalk was a palette of neon smears. Her fingers touched the shape of the explosive in her pocket. She could find the building with the papered windows. Even if the Tourists tried to stop her she might still get inside and destroy the Eternity Core. It’s what her mother wanted, what the Old Men wanted. But what if they caught her? If she remained in the loop through an entire cycle she would become a permanent part of it. She couldn’t stand that, not the way she hurt right now. She didn’t know what time it was. She didn’t know the time. She had to reach her scutter and get out.

A horn went off practically at her elbow. Startled, she looked up. A low and wide vehicle, a boy leaning out the passenger window, smirking.

“Hey, you wanna go for a ride?”

“No.”

“Then fuck you, hitch!” He cackled, and the vehicle accelerated away, ripping the air into jagged splinters.

She walked faster. The streets were confusing. She was lost. Her panic intensified. Why couldn’t he have come after her and be sorry and love her? But it wasn’t like the best parts of the movies. Some of it was good, but a lot of it wasn’t. Maybe her mother had been right. But Kylie didn’t believe in souls, so wasn’t it better to have one day forever than no days? Wasn’t it?

Fuck you, bitch.

She turned around and ran back in the direction from which she’d come. At first she didn’t think she could find it, but there it was, the apartment building! And Toby was coming out the lobby door, pulling his jacket closed. He saw her, and she ran to him. He didn’t mean it and she didn’t mean it, and this was the part where they made up, and then all the rest of the loop would be good—the good time after making up. You had to mix the good and bad. The bad made the good better. She ran to him and hugged him, the smell of the wet leather so strong.

“You were coming after me,” she said.

He didn’t say anything.

“You were,” she said.

“Yeah.”

Something clutched at her heart. “It’s the best day ever,” she said.

“I give it a seven point five.”

“You don’t know anything,” she said. “You got your spooky girl and you had an adventure and you saved the whole world.”

“When you put it that way it’s a nine. So come on. I’ll buy you a hot drink and you can tell me about the tourists from the fifth dimension.”

“What time is it?” she asked.

He looked at his watch. “Five of eleven.”

“I don’t want a hot drink,” she said. “Can you take us some place with a nice view where we can sit in the Vee Dub?”

“You bet.”

The city spread out before them. The water of Elliot Bay was black. Rain whispered against the car and the cooling engine ticked down like a slow timer. It was awkward with the separate seats, but they snuggled together, Kylie’s head pillowed on his chest. He turned the radio on—not to his loud noise-music but a jazz station, like a complement to the rain. They talked, intimately. Kylie invented a life and gave it to him, borrowing from stories her mother and grandmother had told her. He called her spooky, his term of endearment, and he talked about what they would do tomorrow. She accepted the gift of the future he was giving her, but she lived in this moment, now, this sweet inhalation of the present, this happy, happy ending. Then the lights of Seattle seemed to haze over. Kylie closed her eyes, her hand on the explosive sphere, and her mind slumbered briefly in a dark spun cocoon.

Kylie punched through, and the sudden light shift dazzled her.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2006.

Laws of Survival

Nancy Kress

My name is Jill. I am somewhere you can’t imagine, going somewhere even more unimaginable. If you think I like what I did to get here, you’re crazy.

Actually, I’m the one who’s crazy. You—any “you”—will never read this. But I have paper now, and a sort of pencil, and time. Lots and lots of time. So I will write what happened, all of it, as carefully as I can.

After all—why the hell not?

I went out very early one morning to look for food. Before dawn was safest for a woman alone. The boy-gangs had gone to bed, tired of attacking each other. The trucks from the city hadn’t arrived yet. That meant the garbage was pretty picked over, but it also meant most of the refugee camp wasn’t out scavenging. Most days I could find enough: a carrot stolen from somebody’s garden patch, my arm bloody from reaching through the barbed wire. Overlooked potato peelings under a pile of rags and glass. A can of stew thrown away by one of the soldiers on the base, but still half full. Soldiers on duty by the Dome were often careless. They got bored, with nothing to do.

That morning was cool but fair, with a pearly haze that the sun would burn off later. I wore all my clothing, for warmth, and my boots. Yesterday’s garbage load, I’d heard somebody say, was huge, so I had hopes. I hiked to my favorite spot, where garbage spills almost to the Dome wall. Maybe I’d find bread, or even fruit that wasn’t too rotten.

Instead I found the puppy.

Its eyes weren’t open yet and it squirmed along the bare ground, a scrawny brown-and-white mass with a tiny fluffy tail. Nearby was a fluid-soaked towel. Some sentimental fool had left the puppy there, hoping . . . what? It didn’t matter. Scrawny or not, there was some meat on the thing. I scooped it up.

The sun pushed above the horizon, flooding the haze with golden light.

I hate it when grief seizes me. I hate it and it’s dangerous, a violation of one of Jill’s Laws of Survival. I can go for weeks, months without thinking of my life before the War. Without remembering or feeling. Then something will strike me—a flower growing in the dump, a burst of birdsong, the stars on a clear night—and grief will hit me like the maglevs that no longer exist, a grief all the sharper because it contains the memory of joy. I can’t afford joy, which always comes with an astronomical price tag. I can’t even afford the grief that comes from the memory of living things, which is why it is only the flower, the birdsong, the morning sunlight that starts it. My grief was not for that puppy. I still intended to eat it.

But I heard a noise behind me and turned. The Dome wall was opening.

Who knew why the aliens put their Domes by garbage dumps, by waste pits, by radioactive cities? Who knew why aliens did anything?

There was a widespread belief in the camp that the aliens started the War. I’m old enough to know better. That was us, just like the global warming and the bio-crobes were us. The aliens didn’t even show up until the War was over and Raleigh was the northernmost city left on the East Coast and refugees poured south like mudslides. Including me. That’s when the ships landed and then turned into the huge gray Domes like upended bowls. I heard there were many Domes, some in other countries. The Army, what was left of it, threw tanks and bombs at ours. When they gave up, the refugees threw bullets and Molotov cocktails and prayers and graffiti and candlelight vigils and rain dances. Everything slid off and the Domes just sat there. And sat. And sat. Three years later, they were still sitting, silent and closed, although of course there were rumors to the contrary. There are always rumors. Personally, I’d never gotten over a slight disbelief that the Dome was there at all. Who would want to visit us?

The opening was small, no larger than a porthole, and about six feet above the ground. All I could see inside was a fog the same color as the Dome. Something came out, gliding quickly toward me. It took me a moment to realize it was a robot, a blue metal sphere above a hanging basket. It stopped a foot from my face and said, “This food for this dog.”

I could have run, or screamed, or at the least—the very least—looked around for a witness. I didn’t. The basket held a pile of fresh produce, green lettuce and deep purple eggplant and apples so shiny red they looked lacquered. And peaches . . . My mouth filled with sweet water. I couldn’t move.

The puppy whimpered.

My mother used to make fresh peach pie.

I scooped the food into my scavenger bag, laid the puppy in the basket, and backed away. The robot floated back into the Dome, which closed immediately. I sped back to my corrugated-tin and windowless hut and ate until I couldn’t hold any more. I slept, woke, and ate the rest, crouching in the dark so nobody else would see. All that fruit and vegetables gave me the runs, but it was worth it.

Peaches.

Two weeks later, I brought another puppy to the Dome, the only survivor of a litter deep in the dump. I never knew what happened to the mother. I had to wait a long time outside the Dome before the blue sphere took the puppy in exchange for produce. Apparently the Dome would only open when there was no one else around to see. What were they afraid of? It’s not like PETA was going to show up.

The next day I traded three of the peaches to an old man in exchange for a small, mangy poodle. We didn’t look each other in the eye, but I nonetheless knew that his held tears. He limped hurriedly away. I kept the dog, which clearly wanted nothing to do with me, in my shack until very early morning and then took it to the Dome. It tried to escape but I’d tied a bit of rope onto its frayed collar. We sat outside the Dome in mutual dislike, waiting, as the sky paled slightly in the east. Gunshots sounded in the distance.

I have never owned a dog.

When the Dome finally opened, I gripped the dog’s rope and spoke to the robot. “Not fruit. Not vegetables. I want eggs and bread.”

The robot floated back inside.

Instantly I cursed myself. Eggs? Bread? I was crazy not to take what I could get. That was Law of Survival #1. Now there would be nothing. Eggs, bread . . . crazy. I glared at the dog and kicked it. It yelped, looked indignant, and tried to bite my boot.

The Dome opened again and the robot glided toward me. In the gloom I couldn’t see what was in the basket. In fact, I couldn’t see the basket. It wasn’t there. Mechanical tentacles shot out from the sphere and seized both me and the poodle. I cried out and the tentacles squeezed harder. Then I was flying through the air, the stupid dog suddenly howling beneath me, and we were carried through the Dome wall and inside.

Then nothing.

A nightmare room made of nightmare sound: barking, yelping, whimpering, snapping. I jerked awake, sat up, and discovered myself on a floating platform above a mass of dogs. Big dogs, small dogs, old dogs, puppies, sick dogs, dogs that looked all too healthy, flashing their forty-two teeth at me—why did I remember that number? From where? The largest and strongest dogs couldn’t quite reach me with their snaps, but they were trying.

“You are operative,” the blue metal sphere said, floating beside me. “Now we must begin. Here.”

Its basket held eggs and bread.

“Get them away!”

Obediently it floated off.

“Not the food! The dogs!”

“What to do with these dogs?”

“Put them in cages!” A large black animal—German shepherd or boxer or something—had nearly closed its jaws on my ankle. The next bite might do it.

“Cages,” the metal sphere said in its uninflected mechanical voice. “Yes.”

“Son of a bitch!” The shepherd, leaping high, had grazed my thigh; its spittle slimed my pants. “Raise the goddamn platform!”

“Yes.”

The platform floated so high, so that I had to duck my head to avoid hitting the ceiling. I peered over the edge and . . . no, that wasn’t possible. But it was happening. The floor was growing upright sticks, and the sticks were growing crossbars, and the crossbars were extending themselves into mesh tops . . . . Within minutes, each dog was encased in a cage just large enough to hold its protesting body.

“What to do now?” the metal sphere asked.

I stared at it. I was, as far as I knew, the first human being to ever enter an alien Dome, I was trapped in a small room with feral caged dogs and a robot . . . what to do now?

“Why . . . why am I here?” I hated myself for the brief stammer and vowed it would not happen again. Law of Survival #2: Show no fear.

Would a metal sphere even recognize fear?

It said, “These dogs do not behave correctly.”

“Not behave correctly?”

“No.”

I looked down again at the slavering and snarling mass of dogs; how strong was that mesh on the cage tops? “What do you want them to do?”

“You want to see the presentation?”

“Not yet.” Law #3: Never volunteer for anything.

“What to do now?”

How the hell should I know? But the smell of the bread reached me and my stomach flopped. “Now to eat,” I said. “Give me the things in your basket.”

It did, and I tore into the bread like a wolf into deer. The real wolves below me increased their howling. When I’d eaten an entire loaf, I looked back at the metal sphere. “Have those dogs eaten?”

“Yes.”

“What did you give them?”

“Garbage.”

“Garbage? Why?”

“In hell they eat garbage.”

So even the robot thought this was Hell. Panic surged through me; I pushed it back. Surviving this would depend on staying steady. “Show me what you fed the dogs.”

“Yes.” A section of wall melted and garbage cascaded into the room, flowing greasily between the cages. I recognized it: It was exactly like the garbage I picked through every day, trucked out from a city I could no longer imagine and from the Army base I could not approach without being shot. Bloody rags, tin cans from before the War, shit, plastic bags, dead flowers, dead animals, dead electronics, cardboard, eggshells, paper, hair, bone, scraps of decaying food, glass shards, potato peelings, foam rubber, roaches, sneakers with holes, sagging furniture, corn cobs. The smell hit my stomach, newly distended with bread.

“You fed the dogs that?”

“Yes. They eat it in hell.”

Outside. Hell was outside, and of course that’s what the feral dogs ate, that’s all there was. But the metal sphere had produced fruit and lettuce and bread for me.

“You must give them better food. They eat that in . . . in hell because they can’t get anything else.”

“What to do now?”

It finally dawned on me—slow, I was too slow for this, only the quick survive—that the metal sphere had limited initiative along with its limited vocabulary. But it had made cages, made bread, made fruit—hadn’t it? Or was this stuff grown in some imaginable secret garden inside the Dome? “You must give the dogs meat.”

“Flesh?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

No change in that mechanical voice, but the “no” was definite and quick. Law of Survival #4: Notice everything. So—no flesh-eating allowed here. Also no time to ask why not; I had to keep issuing orders so that the robot didn’t start issuing them. “Give them bread mixed with . . . with soy protein.”

“Yes.”

“And take away the garbage.”

“Yes.”

The garbage began to dissolve. I saw nothing poured on it, nothing rise from the floor. But all that stinking mass fell into powder and vanished. Nothing replaced it.

I said, “Are you getting bread mixed with soy powder?” Getting seemed the safest verb I could think of.

“Yes.”

The stuff came then, tumbling through the same melted hole in the wall, loaves of bread with, presumably, soy powder in them. The dogs, barking insanely, reached paws and snouts and tongues through the bars of their cages. They couldn’t get at the food.

“Metal sphere—do you have a name?”

No answer.

“Okay. Blue, how strong are those cages? Can the dogs break them? Any of the dogs?”

“No.”

“Lower the platform to the floor.”

My safe perch floated down. The aisles between the cages were irregular, some wide and some so narrow the dogs could reach through to touch each other, since each cage had “grown” wherever the dog was at the time. Gingerly I picked my way to a clearing and sat down. Tearing a loaf of bread into chunks, I pushed the pieces through the bars of the least dangerous–looking dogs, which made the bruisers howl even more. For them, I put chunks at a distance they could just reach with a paw through the front bars of their prisons.

The puppy I had first brought to the Dome lay in a tiny cage. Dead.

The second one was alive but just barely.

The old man’s mangy poodle looked more mangy than ever, but otherwise alert. It tried to bite me when I fed it.

“What to do now?”

“They need water.”

“Yes.”

Water flowed through the wall. When it had reached an inch or so, it stopped. The dogs lapped whatever came into their cages. I stood with wet feet—a hole in my boot after all, I hadn’t known—and a stomach roiling from the stench of the dogs, which only worsened as they got wet. The dead puppy smelled especially horrible. I climbed back onto my platform.

“What to do now?”

“You tell me,” I said.

“These dogs do not behave correctly.”

“Not behave correctly?”

“No.”

“What do you want them to do?”

“Do you want to see the presentation?”

We had been here before. On second thought, a “presentation” sounded more like acquiring information (“Notice everything”) than like undertaking action (“Never volunteer”). So I sat cross-legged on the platform, which was easier on my uncushioned bones, breathed through my mouth instead of my nose, and said, “Why the hell not?”

Blue repeated, “Do you want to see the presentation?”

“Yes.” A one-syllable answer.

I didn’t know what to expect. Aliens, spaceships, war, strange places barely comprehensible to humans. What I got was scenes from the dump.

A beam of light shot out from Blue and resolved into a three-dimensional holo, not too different from one I’d seen in a science museum on a school field trip once (no, push memory away), only this was far sharper and detailed. A ragged and unsmiling toddler, one of thousands, staggered toward a cesspool. A big dog with a patchy coat dashed up, seized the kid’s dress, and pulled her back just before she fell into the waste.

A medium-sized brown dog in a guide-dog harness led around someone tapping a white-headed cane.

An Army dog, this one sleek and well-fed, sniffed at a pile of garbage, found something, pointed stiffly at attention.

A group of teenagers tortured a puppy. It writhed in pain, but in a long lingering close-up, tried to lick the torturer’s hand.

A thin, small dog dodged rocks, dashed inside a corrugated tin hut, and laid a piece of carrion beside an old lady lying on the ground.

The holo went on and on like that, but the strange thing was that the people were barely seen. The toddler’s bare and filthy feet and chubby knees, the old lady’s withered cheek, a flash of a camouflage uniform above a brown boot, the hands of the torturers. Never a whole person, never a focus on people. Just on the dogs.

The “presentation” ended.

“These dogs do not behave correctly,” Blue said.

“These dogs? In the presentation?”

“These dogs here do not behave correctly.”

“These dogs here.” I pointed to the wet, stinking dogs in their cages. Some, fed now, had quieted. Others still snarled and barked, trying their hellish best to get out and kill me.

“These dogs here. Yes. What to do now?”

“You want these dogs to behave like the dogs in the presentation.”

“These dogs here must behave correctly. Yes.”

“You want them to . . . do what? Rescue people? Sniff out ammunition dumps? Guide the blind and feed the hungry and love their torturers?”

Blue said nothing. Again I had the impression I had exceeded its thought processes, or its vocabulary, or its something. A strange feeling gathered in my gut.

“Blue, you yourself didn’t build this Dome, or the starship that it was before, did you? You’re just a . . . a computer.”

Nothing.

“Blue, who tells you what to do?”

“What to do now? These dogs do not behave correctly.”

“Who wants these dogs to behave correctly?” I said, and found I was holding my breath.

“The masters.”

The masters. I knew all about them. Masters were the people who started wars, ran the corporations that ruined the Earth, manufactured the bioweapons that killed billions, and now holed up in the cities to send their garbage out to us in the refugee camps. Masters were something else I didn’t think about, but not because grief would take me. Rage would.

Law of Survival #5: Feel nothing that doesn’t aid survival.

“Are the masters here? In this . . . inside here?”

“No.”

“Who is here inside?”

“These dogs here are inside.”

Clearly. “The masters want these dogs here to behave like the dogs in the presentation.”

“Yes.”

“The masters want these dogs here to provide them with loyalty and protection and service.”

No response.

“The masters aren’t interested in human beings, are they? That’s why they haven’t communicated at all with any government.”

Nothing. But I didn’t need a response; the masters’ thinking was already clear to me. Humans were unimportant—maybe because we had, after all, destroyed each other and our own world. We weren’t worth contact. But dogs: companion animals capable of selfless service and great unconditional love, even in the face of abuse. For all I knew, dogs were unique in the universe. For all I know.

Blue said, “What to do now?”

I stared at the mangy, reeking, howling mass of animals. Some feral, some tamed once, some sick, at least one dead. I chose my words to be as simple as possible, relying on phrases Blue knew. “The masters want these dogs here to behave correctly.”

“Yes.”

“The masters want me to make these dogs behave correctly.”

“Yes.”

“The masters will make me food, and keep me inside, for to make these dogs behave correctly.”

Long pause; my sentence had a lot of grammatical elements. But finally Blue said, “Yes.”

“If these dogs do not behave correctly, the masters—what to do then?”

Another long pause. “Find another human.”

“And this human here?”

“Kill it.”

I gripped the edges of my floating platform hard. My hands still trembled. “Put me outside now.”

“No.”

“I must stay inside.”

“These dogs do not behave correctly.”

“I must make these dogs behave correctly.”

“Yes.”

“And the masters want these dogs to display . . . ” I had stopped talking to Blue. I was talking to myself, to steady myself, but even that I couldn’t manage. The words caromed around in my mind—loyalty, service, protection—but none came out of my mouth. I couldn’t do this. I was going to die. The aliens had come from God-knew-where to treat the dying Earth like a giant pet store, intrigued only by a canine domestication that had happened ten thousand years ago and by nothing else on the planet, nothing else humanity had or might accomplish. Only dogs. The masters want these dogs to display—

Blue surprised me with a new word. “Love,” it said.

Law #4: Notice everything. I needed to learn all I could, starting with Blue. He’d made garbage appear, and food and water and cages. What else could he do?

“Blue, make the water go away.” And it did, just sank into the floor, which dried instantly. I was fucking Moses, commanding the Red Sea. I climbed off the platform, inched among the dog cages, and studied them individually.

“You called the refugee camp and the dump ‘hell.’ Where did you get that word?”

Nothing.

“Who said ‘hell’?”

“Humans.”

Blue had cameras outside the Dome. Of course he did; he’d seen me find that first puppy in the garbage. Maybe Blue had been waiting for someone like me, alone and nonthreatening, to come close with a dog. But it had watched before that, and it had learned the word “hell,” and maybe it had recorded the incidents in the “presentation.” I filed this information for future use.

“This dog is dead.” The first puppy, decaying into stinking pulp. “It is killed. Non-operative.”

“What to do now?”

“Make the dead dog go away.”

A long pause: thinking it over? Accessing data banks? Communicating with aliens? And what kind of moron couldn’t figure out by itself that a dead dog was never going to behave correctly? So much for artificial intelligence.

“Yes,” Blue finally said, and the little corpse dissolved as if it had never been.

I found one more dead dog and one close to death. Blue disappeared the first, said no to the second. Apparently we had to just let it suffer until it died. I wondered how much the idea of “death” even meant to a robot. There were twenty-three live dogs, of which I had delivered only three to the Dome.

“Blue—did another human, before you brought me here, try to train the dogs?”

“These dogs do not behave correctly.”

“Yes. But did a human not me be inside? To make these dogs behave correctly?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to him or her?”

No response.

“What to do now with the other human?”

“Kill it.”

I put a hand against the wall and leaned on it. The wall felt smooth and slick, with a faint and unpleasant tingle. I removed my hand.

All computers could count. “How many humans did you kill?”

“Two.”

Three’s the charm. But there were no charms. No spells, no magic wards, no cavalry coming over the hill to ride to the rescue; I’d known that ever since the War. There was just survival. And, now, dogs.

I chose the mangy little poodle. It hadn’t bit me when the old man had surrendered it, or when I’d kept it overnight. That was at least a start. “Blue, make this dog’s cage go away. But only this one cage!”

The cage dissolved. The poodle stared at me distrustfully. Was I supposed to stare back, or would that get us into some kind of canine pissing contest? The thing was small but it had teeth.

I had a sudden idea. “Blue, show me how this dog does not behave correctly.” If I could see what it wasn’t doing, that would at least be a start.

Blue floated to within a foot of the dog’s face. The dog growled and backed away. Blue floated away and the dog quieted but it still stood in what would be a menacing stance if it weighed more than nine or ten pounds: ears raised, legs braced, neck hair bristling. Blue said, “Come.” The dog did nothing. Blue repeated the entire sequence and so did Mangy.

I said, “You want the dog to follow you. Like the dogs in the presentation.”

“Yes.”

“You want the dog to come when you say ‘Come.’”

“Love,” Blue said.

“What is ‘love,’ Blue?”

No response.

The robot didn’t know. Its masters must have had some concept of “love,” but fuck-all knew what it was. And I wasn’t sure I knew anymore, either. That left Mangy, who would never “love” Blue or follow him or lick his hand because dogs operated on smell—even I knew that about them—and Blue, a machine, didn’t smell like either a person or another dog. Couldn’t the aliens who sent him here figure that out? Were they watching this whole farce, or had they just dropped a half-sentient computer under an upturned bowl on Earth and told it, “Bring us some loving dogs”? Who knew how aliens thought?

I didn’t even know how dogs thought. There were much better people for this job—professional trainers, or that guy on TV who made tigers jump through burning hoops. But they weren’t here, and I was. I squatted on my haunches a respectful distance from Mangy and said, “Come.”

It growled at me.

“Blue, raise the platform this high.” I held my hand at shoulder height. The platform rose.

“Now make some cookies on the platform.”

Nothing.

“Make some . . . cheese on the platform.”

Nothing. You don’t see much cheese in a dump.

“Make some bread on the platform.”

Nothing. Maybe the platform wasn’t user-friendly.

“Make some bread.”

After a moment, loaves tumbled out of the wall. “Enough! Stop!”

Mangy had rushed over to the bread, tearing at it, and the other dogs were going wild. I picked up one loaf, put it on the platform, and said, “Make the rest of the bread go away.”

It all dissolved. No wonder the dogs were wary; I felt a little dizzy myself. A sentence from a so-long-ago child’s book rose in my mind: Things come and go so quickly here!

I had no idea how much Blue could, or would, do on my orders. “Blue, make another room for me and this one dog. Away from the other dogs.”

“No.”

“Make this room bigger.”

The room expanded evenly on all sides. “Stop.” It did. “Make only this end of the room bigger.”

Nothing.

“Okay, make the whole room bigger.”

When the room stopped expanding, I had a space about forty feet square, with the dog cages huddled in the middle. After half an hour of experimenting, I got the platform moved to one corner, not far enough to escape the dog stench but better than nothing. (Law #1: Take what you can get.) I got a depression in the floor filled with warm water. I got food, drinking water, soap, and some clean cloth, and a lot of rope. By distracting Mangy with bits of bread, I got rope onto her frayed collar. After I got into the warm water and scrubbed myself, I pulled the poodle in. She bit me. But somehow I got her washed, too. Afterwards she shook herself, glared at me, and went to sleep on the hard floor. I asked Blue for a soft rug.

He said, “The other humans did this.”

And Blue killed them anyway.

“Shut up,” I said.

The big windowless room had no day, no night, no sanity. I slept and ate when I needed to, and otherwise I worked. Blue never left. He was an oversized, all-seeing eye in the corner. Big Brother, or God.

Within a few weeks—maybe—I had Mangy trained to come when called, to sit, and to follow me on command. I did this by dispensing bits of bread and other goodies. Mangy got fatter. I didn’t care if she ended up the Fat Fiona of dogs. Her mange didn’t improve, since I couldn’t get Blue to wrap his digital mind around the concept of medicines, and even if he had I wouldn’t have known what to ask for. The sick puppy died in its cage.

I kept the others fed and watered and flooded the shit out of their cages every day, but that was all. Mangy took all my time. She still regarded me warily, never curled up next to me, and occasionally growled. Love was not happening here.

Nonetheless, Blue left his corner and spoke for the first time in a week, scaring the hell out of me. “This dog behaves correctly.”

“Well, thanks. I tried to . . . no, Blue . . . ”

Blue floated to within a foot of Mangy’s face, said, “Follow,” and floated away. Mangy sat down and began to lick one paw. Blue rose and floated toward me.

“This dog does not behave correctly.”

I was going to die.

“No, listen to me—listen! The dog can’t smell you! It behaves for humans because of humans’ smell! Do you understand?”

“No. This dog does not behave correctly.”

“Listen! How the hell can you learn anything if you don’t listen? You have to have a smell! Then the dog will follow you!”

Blue stopped. We stood frozen, a bizarre tableau, while the robot considered. Even Mangy stopped licking her paw and watched, still. They say dogs can smell fear.

Finally Blue said, “What is smell?”

It isn’t possible to explain smell. Can’t be done. Instead I pulled down my pants, tore the cloth I was using as underwear from between my legs, and rubbed it all over Blue, who did not react. I hoped he wasn’t made of the same stuff as the Dome, which even spray paint had just slid off of. But, of course, he was. So I tied the strip of cloth around him with a piece of rope, my fingers trembling. “Now try the dog, Blue.”

“Follow,” Blue said, and floated away from Mangy.

She looked at him, then at me, then back at the floating metal sphere. I held my breath from some insane idea that I would thereby diminish my own smell. Mangy didn’t move.

“This dog does not be—”

“She will if I’m gone!” I said desperately. “She smells me and you . . . and we smell the same so it’s confusing her! But she’ll follow you fine if I’m gone, do you understand?”

“No.”

“Blue . . . I’m going to get on the platform. See, I’m doing it. Raise the platform very high, Blue. Very high.”

A moment later my head and ass both pushed against the ceiling, squishing me. I couldn’t see what was happening below. I heard Blue say, “Follow,” and I squeezed my eyes shut, waiting. My life depended on a scrofulous poodle with a gloomy disposition.

Blue said, “This dog behaves correctly.”

He lowered my platform to a few yards above the floor, and I swear that—eyeless as he is and with part of his sphere obscured by my underwear—he looked right at me.

“This dog does behave correctly. This dog is ready.”

“Ready? For . . . for what?”

Blue didn’t answer. The next minute the floor opened and Mangy, yelping, tumbled into it. The floor closed. At the same time, one of the cages across the room dissolved and a German shepherd hurtled toward me. I shrieked and yelled, “Raise the platform!” It rose just before the monster grabbed me.

Blue said, “What to do now? This dog does not behave correctly.”

“For God’s sakes, Blue—”

“This dog must love.”

The shepherd leapt and snarled, teeth bared.

I couldn’t talk Blue out of the shepherd, which was as feral and vicious and unrelenting as anything in a horror movie. Or as Blue himself, in his own mechanical way. So I followed the First Law: Take what you can get.

“Blue, make garbage again. A lot of garbage, right here.” I pointed to the wall beside my platform.

“No.”

Garbage, like everything else, apparently was made—or released, or whatever—from the opposite wall. I resigned myself to this. “Make a lot of garbage, Blue.”

Mountains of stinking debris cascaded from the wall, spilling over until it reached the dog cages.

“Now stop. Move my platform above the garbage.”

The platform moved. The caged dogs howled. Uncaged, the shepherd poked eagerly in the refuse, too distracted to pay much attention to me. I had Blue lower the platform and I poked among it, too, keeping one eye on Vicious. If Blue was creating the garbage and not just trucking it in, he was doing a damn fine job of duplication. Xerox should have made such good copies.

I got smeared with shit and rot, but I found what I was looking for. The box was nearly a quarter full. I stuffed bread into it, coated the bread thoroughly, and discarded the box back onto the pile.

“Blue, make the garbage go away.”

It did. Vicious glared at me and snarled. “Nice doggie,” I said, “have some bread.” I threw pieces and Vicious gobbled them.

Listening to the results was terrible. Not, however, as terrible as having Vicious tear me apart or Blue vaporize me. The rat poison took all “night” to kill the dog, which thrashed and howled. Throughout, Blue stayed silent. He had picked up some words from me, but he apparently didn’t have enough brain power to connect what I’d done with Vicious’s death. Or maybe he just didn’t have enough experience with humans. What does a machine know about survival?

“This dog is dead,” Blue said in the “morning.”

“Yes. Make it go away.” And then, before Blue could get there first, I jumped off my platform and pointed to a cage. “This dog will behave correctly next.”

“No.”

“Why not this dog?”

“Not big.”

“Big. You want big.” Frantically I scanned the cages, before Blue could choose another one like Vicious. “This one, then.”

“Why the hell not?” Blue said.

It was young. Not a puppy but still frisky, a mongrel of some sort with short hair of dirty white speckled with dirty brown. The dog looked liked something I could handle: big but not too big, not too aggressive, not too old, not too male. “Hey, Not-Too,” I said, without enthusiasm, as Blue dissolved her cage. The mutt dashed over to me and tried to lick my boot.

A natural-born slave.

I had found a piece of rotten, moldy cheese in the garbage, so Blue could now make cheese, which Not-Too went crazy for. Not-Too and I stuck with the same routine I used with Mangy, and it worked pretty well. Or the cheese did. Within a few “days” the dog could sit, stay, and follow on command.

Then Blue threw me a curve. “What to do now? The presentation.”

“We had the presentation,” I said. “I don’t need to see it again.”

“What to do now? The presentation.”

“Fine,” I said, because it was clear I had no choice. “Let’s have the presentation. Roll ’em.”

I was sitting on my elevated platform, combing my hair. A lot of it had fallen out during the malnourished years in the camp, but now it was growing again. Not-Too had given up trying to jump up there with me and gone to sleep on her pillow below. Blue shot the beam out of his sphere and the holo played in front of me.

Only not the whole thing. This time he played only the brief scene where the big, patchy dog pulled the toddler back from falling into the cesspool. Blue played it once, twice, three times. Cold slid along my spine.

“You want Not-Too . . . you want this dog here to be trained to save children.”

“This dog here does not behave correctly.”

“Blue . . . How can I train a dog to save a child?”

“This dog here does not behave correctly.”

“Maybe you haven’t noticed, but we haven’t got any fucking children for the dog to practice on!”

Long pause. “Do you want a child?”

“No!” Christ, he would kidnap one or buy one from the camp and I would be responsible for a kid along with nineteen semi-feral dogs. No.

“This dog here does not behave correctly. What to do now? The presentation.”

“No, not the presentation. I saw it, I saw it. Blue . . . the other two humans who did not make the dogs behave correctly . . . ”

“Killed.”

“Yes. So you said. But they did get one dog to behave correctly, didn’t they? Or maybe more than one. And then you just kept raising the bar higher. Water rescues, guiding the blind, finding lost people. Higher and higher.”

But to all this, of course, Blue made no answer.

I wracked my brains to remember what I had ever heard, read, or seen about dog training. Not much. However, there’s a problem with opening the door to memory: you can’t control what strolls through. For the first time in years, my sleep was shattered by dreams.

I walked through a tiny garden, picking zinnias. From an open window came music, full and strong, an orchestra on CD. A cat paced beside me, purring. And there was someone else in the window, someone who called my name and I turned and—

I screamed. Clawed my way upright. The dogs started barking and howling. Blue floated from his corner, saying something. And Not-Too made a mighty leap, landed on my platform, and began licking my face.

“Stop it! Don’t do that! I won’t remember!” I shoved her so hard she fell off the platform onto the floor and began yelping. I put my head in my hands.

Blue said, “Are you not operative?”

“Leave me the fuck alone!”

Not-Too still yelped, shrill cries of pain. When I stopped shaking, I crawled off the platform and picked her up. Nothing seemed to be broken—although how would I know? Gradually she quieted. I gave her some cheese and put her back on her pillow. She wanted to stay with me but I wouldn’t let her.

I would not remember. I would not. Law #5: Feel nothing.

We made a cesspool, or at least a pool. Blue depressed part of the floor to a depth of three feet and filled it with water. Not-Too considered this a swimming pool and loved to be in it, which was not what Blue wanted (“This water does not behave correctly”). I tried having the robot dump various substances into it until I found one that she disliked and I could tolerate: light-grade motor oil. A few small cans of oil like those in the dump created a polluted pool, not unlike Charleston Harbor. After every practice session I needed a bath.

But not Not-Too, because she wouldn’t go into the “cesspool.” I curled myself as small as possible, crouched at the side of the pool, and thrashed. After a few days, the dog would pull me back by my shirt. I moved into the pool. As long as she could reach me without getting any liquid on her, Not-Too happily played that game. As soon as I moved far enough out that I might actually need saving, she sat on her skinny haunches and looked away.

“This dog does not behave correctly.”

I increased the cheese. I withheld the cheese. I pleaded and ordered and shunned and petted and yelled. Nothing worked. Meanwhile, the dream continued. The same dream, each time not greater in length but increasing in intensity. I walked through a tiny garden, picking zinnias. From an open window came music, full and strong, an orchestra on CD. A cat paced beside me, purring. And there was someone else in the window, someone who called my name and I turned and—

And woke screaming.

A cat. I had had a cat, before the War. Before everything. I had always had cats, my whole life. Independent cats, aloof and self-sufficient, admirably disdainful. Cats—

The dog below me whimpered, trying to get onto my platform to offer comfort I did not want.

I would not remember.

“This dog does not behave correctly,” day after day.

I had Blue remove the oil from the pool. But by now Not-Too had been conditioned. She wouldn’t go into even the clear water that she’d reveled in before.

“This dog does not behave correctly.”

Then one day Blue stopped his annoying mantra, which scared me even more. Would I have any warning that I’d failed, or would I just die?

The only thing I could think of was to kill Blue first.

Blue was a computer. You disabled computers by turning them off, or cutting the power supply, or melting them in a fire, or dumping acid on them, or crushing them. But a careful search of the whole room revealed no switches or wires or anything that looked like a wireless control. A fire in this closed room, assuming I could start one, would kill me, too. Every kind of liquid or solid slid off Blue. And what would I crush him with, if that was even possible? A piece of cheese?

Blue was also—sort of—an intelligence. You could kill those by trapping them somewhere. My prison-or-sanctuary (depending on my mood) had no real “somewheres.” And Blue would just dissolve any structure he found himself in.

What to do now?

I lay awake, thinking, all night, which at least kept me from dreaming. I came up with two ideas, both bad. Plan A depended on discussion, never Blue’s strong suit.

“Blue, this dog does not behave correctly.”

“No.”

“This dog is not operative. I must make another dog behave correctly. Not this dog.”

Blue floated close to Not-Too. She tried to bat at him. He circled her slowly, then returned to his position three feet above the ground. “This dog is operative.”

“No. This dog looks operative. But this dog is not operative inside its head. I cannot make this dog behave correctly. I need a different dog.”

A very long pause. “This dog is not operative inside its head.”

“Yes.”

“You can make another dog behave correctly. Like the presentation.”

“Yes.” It would at least buy me time. Blue must have seen “not operative” dogs and humans in the dump; God knows there were enough of them out there. Madmen, rabid animals, druggies raving just before they died or were shot. And next time I would add something besides oil to the pool; there must be something that Blue would consider noxious enough to simulate a cesspool but that a dog would enter. If I had to, I’d use my own shit.

“This dog is not operative inside its head,” Blue repeated, getting used to the idea. “You will make a different dog behave correctly.”

“Yes!”

“Why the hell not?” And then, “I kill this dog.”

“No!” The word was torn from me before I knew I was going to say anything. My hand, of its own volition, clutched at Not-Too. She jumped but didn’t bite. Instead, maybe sensing my fear, she cowered behind me, and I started to yell.

“You can’t just kill everything that doesn’t behave like you want! People, dogs . . . you can’t just kill everything! You can’t just . . . I had a cat . . . I never wanted a dog, but this dog . . . she’s behaving correctly for her! For a fucking traumatized dog and you can’t just—I had a dog I mean a cat I had . . . I had . . . ”

—from an open window came music, full and strong, an orchestra on CD. A cat paced beside me, purring. And there was someone else in the window, someone who called my name and I turned and—

“I had a child!”

Oh, God no no no . . . It all came out then, the memories and the grief and the pain I had pushed away for three solid years in order to survive . . . Feel nothing . . . Zack Zack Zack shot down by soldiers like a dog Look, Mommy, here I am Mommy look . . .

I curled in a ball on the floor and screamed and wanted to die. Grief had been postponed so long that it was a tsunami. I sobbed and screamed; I don’t know for how long. I think I wasn’t quite sane. No human should ever have to experience that much pain. But of course they do.

However, it can’t last too long, that height of pain, and when the flood passed and my head was bruised from banging it on the hard floor, I was still alive, still inside the Dome, still surrounded by barking dogs. Zack was still dead. Blue floated nearby, unchanged, a casually murderous robot who would not supply flesh to dogs as food but who would kill anything he was programmed to destroy. And he had no reason not to murder me.

Not-Too sat on her haunches, regarding me from sad brown eyes, and I did the one thing I told myself I never would do again. I reached for her warmth. I put my arms around her and hung on. She let me.

Maybe that was the decision point. I don’t know.

When I could manage it, I staggered to my feet. Taking hold of the rope that was Not-Too’s leash, I wrapped it firmly around my hand. “Blue,” I said, forcing the words past the grief clogging my throat, “make garbage.”

He did. That was the basis of Plan B; that Blue made most things I asked of him. Not release, or mercy, but at least rooms and platforms and pools and garbage. I walked toward the garbage spilling from the usual place in the wall.

“More garbage! Bigger garbage! I need garbage to make this dog behave correctly!”

The reeking flow increased. Tires, appliances, diapers, rags, cans, furniture. The dogs’ howling rose to an insane, deafening pitch. Not-Too pressed close to me.

“Bigger garbage!”

The chassis of a motorcycle, twisted beyond repair in some unimaginable accident, crashed into the room. The place on the wall from which the garbage spewed was misty gray, the same fog that the Dome had become when I had been taken inside it. Half a sofa clattered through. I grabbed Not-Too, dodged behind the sofa, and hurled both of us through the onrushing garbage and into the wall.

A broken keyboard struck me in the head, and the gray went black.

Chill. Cold with a spot of heat, which turned out to be Not-Too lying on top of me. I pushed her off and tried to sit up. Pain lanced through my head and when I put a hand to my forehead, it came away covered with blood. The same blood streamed into my eyes, making it hard to see. I wiped the blood away with the front of my shirt, pressed my hand hard on my forehead, and looked around.

Not that there was much to see. The dog and I sat at the end of what appeared to be a corridor. Above me loomed a large machine of some type with a chute pointed at the now-solid wall. The machine was silent. Not-Too quivered and pressed her furry side into mine, but she, too, stayed silent. I couldn’t hear the nineteen dogs on the other side of the wall, couldn’t see Blue, couldn’t smell anything except Not-Too, who had made a small yellow puddle on the floor.

There was no room to stand upright under the machine, so I moved away from it. Strips ripped from the bottom of my shirt made a bandage that at least kept blood out of my eyes. Slowly Not-Too and I walked along the corridor.

No doors. No openings or alcoves or machinery. Nothing until we reached the end, which was the same uniform material as everything else. Gray, glossy, hard. Dead. Blue did not appear. Nothing appeared, or disappeared, or lived. We walked back and studied the overhead bulk of the machine. It had no dials or keys or features of any kind.

I sat on the floor, largely because I couldn’t think what else to do, and Not-Too climbed into my lap. She was too big for this and I pushed her away. She pressed against me, trembling.

“Hey,” I said, but not to her. Zack in the window Look, Mommy, here I am Mommy look . . . . But if I started down that mental road, I would be lost. Anger was better than memory. Anything was better than memory. “Hey!” I screamed. “Hey, you bastard Blue, what to do now? What to do now, you Dome shits, whoever you are?”

Nothing except, very faint, an echo of my own useless words.

I lurched to my feet, reaching for the anger, cloaking myself in it. Not-Too sprang to her feet and backed away from me.

“What to do now? What bloody fucking hell to do now?”

Still nothing, but Not-Too started back down the empty corridor. I was glad to transfer my anger to something visible, real, living. “There’s nothing there, Not-Too. Nothing, you stupid dog!”

She stopped halfway down the corridor and began to scratch at the wall.

I stumbled along behind her, one hand clamped to my head. What the hell was she doing? This piece of wall was identical to every other piece of wall. Kneeling slowly—it hurt my head to move fast—I studied Not-Too. Her scratching increased in frenzy and her nose twitched, as if she smelled something. The wall, of course, didn’t respond; nothing in this place responded to anything. Except—

Blue had learned words from me, had followed my commands. Or had he just transferred my command to the Dome’s unimaginable machinery, instructing it to do anything I said that fell within permissible limits? Feeling like an idiot, I said to the wall, “Make garbage.” Maybe if it complied and the garbage contained food . . .

The wall made no garbage. Instead it dissolved into the familiar gray fog, and Not-Too immediately jumped through, barking frantically.

Every time I had gone through a Dome wall, my situation had gotten worse. But what other choices were there? Wait for Blue to find and kill me, starve to death, curl up and die in the heart of a mechanical alien mini-world I didn’t understand. Not-Too’s barking increased in pitch and volume. She was terrified or excited or thrilled . . . . How would I know? I pushed through the gray fog.

Another gray metal room, smaller than Blue had made my prison but with the same kind of cages against the far wall. Not-Too saw me and raced from the cages to me. Blue floated toward me . . . . No, not Blue. This metal sphere was dull green, the color of shady moss. It said, “No human comes into this area.”

“Guess again,” I said and grabbed the trailing end of Not-Too’s rope. She’d jumped up on me once and then had turned to dash back to the cages.

“No human comes into this area,” Green repeated. I waited to see what the robot would do about it. Nothing.

Not-Too tugged on her rope, yowling. From across the room came answering barks, weirdly off. Too uneven in pitch, with a strange undertone. Blood, having saturated my makeshift bandage, once again streamed into my eyes. I swiped at it with one hand, turned to keep my gaze on Green, and let Not-Too pull me across the floor. Only when she stopped did I turn to look at the mesh-topped cages. Vertigo swooped over me.

Mangy was the source of the weird barks, a Mangy altered not beyond recognition but certainly beyond anything I could have imagined. Her mange was gone, along with all her fur. The skin beneath was now gray, the same gunmetal gray as everything else in the Dome. Her ears, the floppy poodle ears, were so long they trailed on the floor of her cage, and so was her tail. Holding on to the tail was a gray grub.

Not a grub. Not anything Earthly. Smooth and pulpy, it was about the size of a human head and vaguely oval. I saw no openings on the thing but Mangy’s elongated tail disappeared into the doughy mass, and so there must have been at least one orifice. As Mangy jumped at the bars, trying to get at Not-Too, the grub was whipped back and forth across the cage floor. It left a slimy trail. The dog seemed oblivious.

“This dog is ready,” Blue had said.

Behind me Green said, “No human comes into this area.”

“Up yours.”

“The human does not behave correctly.”

That got my attention. I whirled around to face Green, expecting to be vaporized like the dead puppy, the dead Vicious. I thought I was already dead—and then I welcomed the thought. Look, Mommy, here I am Mommy look . . . . The laws of survival that had protected me for so long couldn’t protect me against memory, not anymore. I was ready to die.

Instead, Mangy’s cage dissolved, she bounded out, and she launched herself at me.

Poodles are not natural killers, and this one was small. However, Mangy was doing her level best to destroy me. Her teeth closed on my arm. I screamed and shook her off, but the next moment she was biting my leg above my boot, darting hysterically toward and away from me, biting my legs at each lunge. The grub, or whatever it was, lashed around at the end of her new tail. As I flailed at the dog with both hands, my bandage fell off. Fresh blood from my head wound blinded me. I stumbled and fell and she was at my face.

Then she was pulled off, yelping and snapping and howling.

Not-Too had Mangy in her jaws. Twice as big as the poodle, she shook Mangy violently and then dropped her. Mangy whimpered and rolled over on her belly. Not-Too sprinted over to me and stood in front of me, skinny legs braced and scrawny hackles raised, growling protectively.

Dazed, I got to my feet. Blood, mine and the dogs’, slimed everything. The floor wasn’t trying to reabsorb it. Mangy, who’d never really liked me, stayed down with her belly exposed in submission, but she didn’t seem to be badly hurt. The grub still latched onto the end of her tail like a gray tumor. After a moment she rolled onto her feet and began to nuzzle the grub, one baleful eye on Not-Too: Don’t you come near this thing! Not-Too stayed in position, guarding me.

Green said—and I swear its mechanical voice held satisfaction, no one will ever be able to tell me any different—“These dogs behave correctly.”

The other cages held grubs, one per cage. I reached through the front bars and gingerly touched one. Moist, firm, repulsive. It didn’t respond to my touch, but Green did. He was beside me in a flash. “No!”

“Sorry.” His tone was dog-disciplining. “Are these the masters?”

No answer.

“What to do now? One dog for one . . . ” I waved at the cages.

“Yes. When these dogs are ready.”

This dog is ready, Blue had said of Mangy just before she was tumbled into the floor. Ready to be a pet, a guardian, a companion, a service animal to alien . . . what? The most logical answer was “children.” Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, Benji, Little Guy. A boy and his dog. The aliens found humans dangerous or repulsive or uncaring or whatever, but dogs . . . You could count on dogs for your kids. Almost, and for the first time, I could see the point of the Domes.

“Are the big masters here? The adults?”

No answer.

“The masters are not here,” I said. “They just set up the Domes as . . . as nurseries-slash-obedience schools.” And to that statement I didn’t even expect an answer. If the adults had been present, surely one or more would have come running when an alien blew into its nursery wing via a garbage delivery. There would have been alarms or something. Instead there was only Blue and Green and whatever ’bots inhabited whatever place held the operating room. Mangy’s skin and ears and tail had been altered to fit the needs of these grubs. And maybe her voice box, too, since her barks now had that weird undertone, like the scrape of metal across rock. Somewhere there was an OR.

I didn’t want to be in that somewhere.

Green seemed to have no orders to kill me, which made sense because he wasn’t programmed to have me here. I wasn’t on his radar, which raised other problems.

“Green, make bread.”

Nothing.

“Make water.”

Nothing.

But two indentations in a corner of the floor, close to a section of wall, held water and dog-food pellets. I tasted both, to the interest of Not-Too and the growling of Mangy. Not too bad. I scooped all the rest of the dog food out of the trough. As soon as the last piece was out, the wall filled it up again. If I died, it wasn’t going to be of starvation.

A few minutes ago, I had wanted to die. Zack . . .

No. Push the memory away. Life was shit, but I didn’t want death, either. The realization was visceral, gripping my stomach as if that organ had been laid in a vise, or . . . There is no way to describe it. The feeling just was, its own justification. I wanted to live.

Not-Too lay a short distance away, watching me. Mangy was back in her cage with the grub on her tail. I sat up and looked around. “Green, this dog is not ready.”

“No. What to do now?”

Well, that answered one question. Green was programmed to deal with dogs, and you didn’t ask dogs “what to do now.” So Green must be in some sort of communication with Blue, but the communication didn’t seem to include orders about me. For a star-faring advanced race, the aliens certainly weren’t very good at LANs. Or maybe they just didn’t care—how would I know how an alien thinks?

I said, “I make this dog behave correctly.” The all-purpose answer.

“Yes.”

Did Green know details—that Not-Too refused to pull me from oily pools and thus was an obedience-school failure? It didn’t seem like it. I could pretend to train Not-Too—I could actually train her, only not for water rescue—and stay here, away from the killer Blue, until . . . until what? As a survival plan, this one was shit. Still, it followed Laws #1 and #3: Take what you can get and never volunteer. And I couldn’t think of anything else.

“Not-Too,” I said wearily, still shaky from my crying jag, “sit.”

“Days” went by, then weeks. Not-Too learned to beg, roll over, bring me a piece of dog food, retrieve my thrown boot, lie down, and balance a pellet of dog food on her nose. I had no idea if any of these activities would be useful to an alien, but as long as Not-Too and I were “working,” Green left us alone. No threats, no presentations, no objections. We were behaving correctly. I still hadn’t thought of any additional plan. At night I dreamed of Zack and woke in tears, but not with the raging insanity of my first day of memory. Maybe you can only go through that once.

Mangy’s grub continued to grow, still fastened onto her tail. The other grubs looked exactly the same as before. Mangy growled if I came too close to her, so I didn’t. Her grub seemed to be drying out as it got bigger. Mangy licked it and slept curled around it and generally acted like some mythical dragon guarding a treasure box. Had the aliens bonded those two with some kind of pheromones I couldn’t detect? I had no way of knowing.

Mangy and her grub emerged from their cage only to eat, drink, or shit, which she did in a far corner. Not-Too and I used the same corner, and all of our shit and piss dissolved odorlessly into the floor. Eat your heart out, Thomas Crapper.

As days turned into weeks, flesh returned to my bones. Not-Too also lost her starved look. I talked to her more and more, her watchful silence preferable to Green’s silence or, worse, his inane and limited repertoires of answers. “Green, I had a child named Zack. He was shot in the war. He was five.” “This dog is not ready.”

Well, none of us ever are.

Not-Too started to sleep curled against my left side. This was a problem because I thrashed in my sleep, which woke her, so she growled, which woke me. Both of us became sleep-deprived and irritable. In the camp, I had slept twelve hours a day. Not much else to do, and sleep both conserved energy and kept me out of sight. But the camp was becoming distant in my mind. Zack was shatteringly vivid, with my life before the war, and the Dome was vivid, with Mangy and Not-Too and a bunch of alien grubs. Everything in between was fading.

Then one “day”—after how much time? I had no idea—Green said, “This dog is ready.”

My heart stopped. Green was going to take Not-Too to the hidden OR, was going to—“No!”

Green ignored me. But he also ignored Not-Too. The robot floated over to Mangy’s cage and dissolved it. I stood and craned my neck for a better look.

The grub was hatching.

Its “skin” had become very dry, a papery gray shell. Now it cracked along the top, parallel to Mangy’s tail. She turned and regarded it quizzically, this thing wriggling at the end of her very long tail, but didn’t attack or even growl. Those must have been some pheromones.

Was I really going to be the first and only human to see a Dome alien?

I was not. The papery covering cracked more and dropped free of the dog’s tail. The thing inside wiggled forward, crawling out like a snake shedding its skin. It wasn’t a grub but it clearly wasn’t a sentient being, either. A larva? I’m no zoologist. This creature was as gray as everything else in the Dome but it had legs, six, and heads, two. At least, they might have been heads. Both had various indentations. One “head” crept forward, opened an orifice, and fastened itself back onto Mangy’s tail. She continued to gaze at it. Beside me, Not-Too growled.

I whirled to grab frantically for her rope. Not-Too had no alterations to make her accept this . . . thing as anything other than a small animal to attack. If she did—

I turned just in time to see the floor open and swallow Not-Too. Green said again, “This dog is ready,” and the floor closed.

“No! Bring her back!” I tried to pound on Green with my fists. He bobbed in the air under my blows. “Bring her back! Don’t hurt her! Don’t . . . ” do what?

Don’t turn her into a nursemaid for a grub, oblivious to me.

Green moved off. I followed, yelling and pounding. Neither one, of course, did the slightest good. Finally I got it together enough to say, “When will Not-Too come back?”

“This human does not behave correctly.”

I looked despairingly at Mangy. She lay curled on her side, like a mother dog nursing puppies. The larva wasn’t nursing, however. A shallow trough had appeared in the floor and filled with some viscous glop, which the larva was scarfing up with its other head. It looked repulsive.

Law #4: Notice everything.

“Green . . . okay. Just . . . okay. When will Not-Too come back here?”

No answer; what does time mean to a machine?

“Does the other dog return here?”

“Yes.”

“Does the other dog get a . . . ” A what? I pointed at Mangy’s larva.

No response. I would have to wait.

But not, apparently, alone. Across the room another dog tumbled, snarling, from the same section of wall I had once come through. I recognized it as one of the nineteen left in the other room, a big black beast with powerful-looking jaws. It righted itself and charged at me. There was no platform, no place to hide.

“No! Green, no, it will hurt me! This dog does not behave—”

Green didn’t seem to do anything. But even as the black dog leapt toward me, it faltered in mid-air. The next moment, it lay dead on the floor.

The moment after that, the body disappeared, vaporized.

My legs collapsed under me. That was what would happen to me if I failed in my training task, was what had presumably happened to the previous two human failures. And yet it wasn’t fear that made me sit so abruptly on the gray floor. It was relief, and a weird kind of gratitude. Green had protected me, which was more than Blue had ever done. Maybe Green was brighter, or I had proved my worth more, or in this room as opposed to the other room, all dog-training equipment was protected. I was dog-training equipment. It was stupid to feel grateful.

I felt grateful.

Green said, “This dog does not—”

“I know, I know. Listen, Green, what to do now? Bring another dog here?”

“Yes.”

“I choose the dog. I am the . . . the dog leader. Some dogs behave correctly, some dogs do not behave correctly. I choose. Me.”

I held my breath. Green considered, or conferred with Blue, or consulted its alien and inadequate programming. Who the hell knows? The robot had been created by a race that preferred Earth dogs to whatever species usually nurtured their young, if any did. Maybe Mangy and Not-Too would replace parental care on the home planet, thus introducing the idea of babysitters. All I wanted was to not be eaten by some canine nanny-trainee.

“Yes,” Green said finally, and I let out my breath.

A few minutes later, eighteen dog cages tumbled through the wall like so much garbage, the dogs within bouncing off their bars and mesh tops, furious and noisy. Mangy jumped, curled more protectively around her oblivious larva, and added her weird, rock-scraping bark to the din. A cage grew up around her. When the cages had stopped bouncing, I walked among them like some kind of tattered lord, choosing.

“This dog, Green.” It wasn’t the smallest dog but it had stopped barking the soonest. I hoped that meant it wasn’t a grudge holder. When I put one hand into its cage, it didn’t bite me, also a good sign. The dog was phenomenally ugly, the jowls on its face drooping from small, rheumy eyes into a sort of folded ruff around its short neck. Its body seemed to be all front, with stunted and short back legs. When it stood, I saw it was male.

“This dog? What to do now?”

“Send all the other dogs back.”

The cages sank into the floor. I walked over to the feeding trough, scooped up handfuls of dog food, and put the pellets into my only pocket that didn’t have holes. “Make all the rest of the dog food go away.”

It vaporized.

“Make this dog’s cage go away.”

I braced myself as the cage dissolved. The dog stood uncertainly on the floor, gazing toward Mangy, who snarled at him. I said, as commandingly as possible, “Ruff!”

He looked at me.

“Ruff, come.”

To my surprise, he did. Someone had trained this animal before. I gave him a pellet of dog food.

Green said, “This dog behaves correctly.”

“Well, I’m really good,” I told him, stupidly, while my chest tightened as I thought of Not-Too. The aliens, or their machines, did understand about anesthetic, didn’t they? They wouldn’t let her suffer too much? I would never know.

But now I did know something momentous. I had choices. I had chosen which room to train dogs in. I had chosen which dog to train. I had some control.

“Sit,” I said to Ruff, who didn’t, and I set to work.

Not-Too was returned to me three or four “days” later. She was gray and hairless, with an altered bark. A grub hung onto her elongated tail, undoubtedly the same one that had vanished from its cage while I was asleep. But unlike Mangy, who’d never liked either of us, Not-Too was ecstatic to see me. She wouldn’t stay in her grub-cage against the wall but insisted on sleeping curled up next to me, grub and all. Green permitted this. I had become the alpha dog.

Not-Too liked Ruff, too. I caught him mounting her, her very long tail conveniently keeping her grub out of the way. Did Green understand the significance of this behavior? No way to tell.

We settled into a routine of training, sleeping, playing, eating. Ruff turned out to be sweet and playful but not very intelligent, and training took a long time. Mangy’s grub grew very slowly, considering the large amount of glop it consumed. I grew, too; the waistband of my ragged pants got too tight and I discarded them, settling for a loin cloth, shirt, and my decaying boots. I talked to the dogs, who were much better conversationalists than Green since two of them at least pricked up their ears, made noises back at me, and wriggled joyfully at attention. Green would have been a dud at a cocktail party.

I don’t know how long this all went on. Time began to lose meaning. I still dreamed of Zack and still woke in tears, but the dreams grew gentler and farther apart. When I cried, Not-Too crawled onto my lap, dragging her grub, and licked my chin. Her brown eyes shared my sorrow. I wondered how I had ever preferred the disdain of cats.

Not-Too got pregnant. I could feel the puppies growing inside her distended belly.

“Puppies will be easy to make behave correctly,” I told Green, who said nothing. Probably he didn’t understand. Some people need concrete visuals in order to learn.

Eventually, it seemed to me that Ruff was almost ready for his own grub. I mulled over how to mention this to Green but before I did, everything came to an end.

Clang! Clang! Clang!

I jerked awake and bolted upright. The alarm—a very human-sounding alarm—sounded all around me. Dogs barked and howled. Then I realized that it was a human alarm, coming from the Army camp outside the Dome, on the opposite side to the garbage dump. I could see the camp—in outline and faintly, as if through heavy gray fog. The Dome was dissolving.

“Green—what—no!”

Above me, transforming the whole top half of what had been the Dome, was the bottom of a solid saucer. Mangy, in her cage, floated upwards and disappeared into a gap in the saucer’s underside. The other grub cages had already disappeared. I glimpsed a flash of metallic color through the gap: Blue. Green was halfway to the opening, drifting lazily upward. Beside me, both Not-Too and Ruff began to rise.

“No! No!”

I hung onto Not-Too, who howled and barked. But then my body froze. I couldn’t move anything. My hands opened and Not-Too rose, yowling piteously.

“No! No!” And then, before I knew I was going to say it, “Take me, too!”

Green paused in mid-air. I began babbling.

“Take me! Take me! I can make the dogs behave correctly—I can—you need me! Why are you going? Take me!”

“Take this human?”

Not Green but Blue, emerging from the gap. Around me the Dome walls thinned more. Soldiers rushed toward us. Guns fired.

“Yes! What to do? Take this human! The dogs want this human!”

Time stood still. Not-Too howled and tried to reach me. Maybe that’s what did it. I rose into the air just as Blue said, “Why the hell not?”

Inside—inside what?—I was too stunned to do more than grab Not-Too, hang on, and gasp. The gap closed. The saucer rose.

After a few minutes, I sat up and looked around. Gray room, filled with dogs in their cages, with grubs in theirs, with noise and confusion and the two robots. The sensation of motion ceased. I gasped, “Where . . . where are we going?”

Blue answered. “Home.”

“Why?”

“The humans do not behave correctly.” And then, “What to do now?”

We were leaving Earth in a flying saucer, and it was asking me?

Over time—I have no idea how much time—I actually got some answers from Blue. The humans “not behaving correctly” had apparently succeeding in breaching one of the Domes somewhere. They must have used a nuclear bomb, but that I couldn’t verify. Grubs and dogs had both died, and so the aliens had packed up and left Earth. Without, as far as I could tell, retaliating. Maybe.

If I had stayed, I told myself, the soldiers would have shot me. Or I would have returned to life in the camp, where I would have died of dysentery or violence or cholera or starvation. Or I would have been locked away by whatever government still existed in the cities, a freak who had lived with aliens none of my story believed. I barely believed it myself.

I am a freak who lives with aliens. Furthermore, I live knowing that at any moment Blue or Green or their “masters” might decide to vaporize me. But that’s really not much different from the uncertainty of life in the camp, and here I actually have some status. Blue produces whatever I ask for, once I get him to understand what that is. I have new clothes, good food, a bed, paper, a sort of pencil.

And I have the dogs. Mangy still doesn’t like me. Her larva hasn’t as yet done whatever it will do next. Not-Too’s grub grows slowly, and now Ruff has one, too. Their three puppies are adorable and very trainable. I’m not so sure about the other seventeen dogs, some of whom look wilder than ever after their long confinement in small cages. Aliens are not, by definition, humane.

I don’t know what it will take to survive when, and if, we reach “home” and I meet the alien adults. All I can do is rely on Jill’s Five Laws of Survival:

#1: Take what you can get.

#2: Show no fear.

#3: Never volunteer.

#4: Notice everything.

But the Fifth Law has changed. As I lie beside Not-Too and Ruff, their sweet warmth and doggie-odor, I know that my first formulation was wrong. “Feel nothing”—that can take you some ways toward survival, but not very far. Not really.

Law #5: Take the risk. Love something.

The dogs whuff contentedly and we speed toward the stars.

Originally published in Jim Baen’s Universe, December 2007.

About the Artist and Authors

Ron Guyatt (ronguyatt.com)

Ron Guyatt is a self-taught artist and professionally-taught graphic designer from Toronto Canada. He attended George Brown College for Design Foundation where he completed with Honors and then followed with his three-year diploma in graphic design at George Brown College.

Inspired by Art Deco, film and science fiction he loves to design posters & create illustrations. His work as been featured in magazines such as Games TM, Level, and Playstation Magazine and worked with clients like EA, Digital Devolver and Bioware.

His Forever cover art is available for purchase as part of his space poster series at: fabledcreative.bigcartel.com/category/space-posters

Paul J. McAuley

Paul McAuley is the author of more than twenty novels, several collections of short stories, a Doctor Who novella, and a BFI Film Classic monograph on Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. His fiction has won the Philip K Dick Memorial Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W Campbell Memorial Award, the Sidewise Award, the British Fantasy Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His latest novel, Austral, set in post-global warming Antarctica, was published in 2017.

Jack Skillingstead

Since 2003, Jack Skillingstead has sold more than forty short stories to major science fiction and fantasy publications. His work has been translated into Russian, Polish, Czech, French, Spanish, Chinese and Vietnamese. In 2013, his novel Life On The Preservation was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. Jack has also been a finalist for the Sturgeon Award. He lives in Seattle with his wife, writer Nancy Kress.

Nancy Kress

Nancy Kress is the author of twenty-seven novels, three books on writing, four short story collections, and over a hundred works of short fiction. Her fiction has won six Nebulas (for “Out of All Them Bright Stars,” “Beggars in Spain,” “The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” “Fountain of Age,” “After the Fall, Before the Fall, and During the Fall,” and “Yesterday’s Kin”), two Hugos (for “Beggars in Spain” and “The Erdmann Nexus”), a Sturgeon (for “The Flowers of Aulit Prison”), and a John W. Campbell Memorial Award (for Probability Space). Her work has been translated into Swedish, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Danish, Polish, Croatian, Korean, Lithuanian, Chinese, Romanian, Japanese, Russian, and Klingon, none of which she can read. Nancy lives in Seattle, Washington with her husband, writer Jack Skillingstead.

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 The SFWA Bulletin; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a five-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His anthologies include Upgraded, Galactic Empires, and the Best Science Fiction of the Year series, volume 2 of which was recently published by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.