Issue 30, July 2017

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

Table of Contents

Introduction

by Neil Clarke

A History of Terraforming

a novella by Robert Reed

Mating Habits of the Late Cretaceous

a novelette by Dale Bailey

The Lost Xuyan Bride

a novelette by Aliette de Bodard

About the Artist and Authors

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the July 2017 issue of Forever Magazine!

Five years ago, this month, I nearly died from a widow-maker heart attact that happened at Readercon. Oddly enough, it’s an anniversary I look forward to every year. It was a horrible event, but I survived and going through that gauntlet changed my life for the better. Had it not happened, I might still be stuck in a job I had long-since fallen out of love with. I might not have launched this magazine, expanded Clarkesworld, or taken on any anthologies. I’d still be hanging onto old baggage and thinking I had all the time in the world.

This month, I once again return to the scene of the crime, to be with a group of people that were so supportive of my family and I, it would be difficult not to go. This is the month I remind myself just how fortunate I am to be alive, have great friends and family, and each day to enjoy it. Sounds a bit sappy, but hey, why not? Things are never perfect, so enjoy what you have and make some time for yourself.

Until next month . . .

-Neil

A History of Terraforming

Robert Reed

MARS

Simon’s father started talking about nuts on walls, about how the seeds he was working with looked very much like wall nuts. Then he winked, handing over the wonder that he had been carrying in his big palm. “What do you think of this, Simon?” But before the boy could answer, his father cautioned him to use both hands and be especially careful. “Not because you might damage the seed,” the man said. “Or because it would ever hurt you. But certain objects are important, sometimes even sacred, and they deserve all the consideration and respect that we can possibly show for them.”

Considering how small it was, the seed was exceptionally heavy. It was black and hard as diamond but covered with small, sharp-edged pits. Against his bare palms, the object felt warm. Maybe the heat was leftover from where the seed was kept, or maybe it was warm in the same way that little boys were warm. Either answer might be true. He didn’t ask. He just held the object in his cupped hands and stared, wondering what would happen if the impossible occurred, if the seed decided to awaken now.

For one person, time passed.

Then his father asked again, “What do you think, Simon?”

The boy’s thoughts were shifting quickly, clinging to no single idea. He was telling himself that he wasn’t even three-years-old. But on the earth he would already be four, and every four-year-old that he knew enjoyed large, impressive opinions. But if he lived near Neptune, he wouldn’t be a month old and his father would never take him riding along on his working trips. And if this were Mercury, then Simon would be many years old, and because of certain pernicious misunderstandings about calendars and the passage of time, he believed that on Mercury he would be an adult. He was remembering how people said that he was going to grow up tall and handsome. It was as if adults had the power to peer into the future. They didn’t admit to children that they had this talent, but the truth often leaked out in careless words and unwanted glimpses. Simon liked the idea of peering into the future. Right now, he was trying to imagine himself living in some important, unborn century. The nearly three-year-old boy wanted to be a grown man entrusted with some very important job. But for the time being, riding with his father seemed important enough. That’s what he was thinking when he handed back that precious and very expensive seed, grinning as he said, “It’s delicious, Dad.” He had never been happier than he was just then.

“Do you know how it works?”

“Yes,” the boy claimed.

“No, you don’t,” his father warned. “It’s my job to find homes for these little buggers, and I barely understand them.”

That admission of ignorance made a deep impression. Quietly, Simon asked, “What do floor nuts look like?”

Puzzled, his father blinked and said nothing.

Simon pointed at the seed. “I’ve never seen a wall look like that.”

His father said, “Oh,” and then softly laughed. “It’s not two words. ‘Walnut’ is one word. It’s the seed made by a species of earth tree.”

“I know what trees are,” the boy boasted.

“You’ve seen the pictures, at least.” His father turned away, setting the heavy black wonder back into its important drawer. Then as he walked to the front of the rover, he added, “Here’s something else to think about: One of my seeds is quite a bit more complicated than any unborn tree. There’s more information packed inside that hull than normal DNA can hold. And considerably more power than roots and leaves would ever show on their own.”

Simon walked behind his father, looking through the wide windows. Mars was rocky and pale red, last night’s frost hiding in the coldest shade. The ground couldn’t have been rougher, yet the rover walked without rocking or lurching or jumping. High clouds and at least three mirrors looked down on them from the purple sky, and the skyhook known as Promise was straight ahead. Today the wind was blowing, moving hard enough to throw the smallest bits of dust. Dust was dangerous. The cold was dangerous. Mars liked to kill people, particularly careless children who didn’t listen to their fathers and other wise voices.

But the world wouldn’t be dangerous much longer, Simon thought.

For a long while, they rode toward Promise, but the slender tower didn’t come any closer. Then the AI driver took them around the flank of a low hill and over the lip of a worn-out crater, and suddenly they were looking into a wide basin filled with brilliant water ice.

“Is this the lake?” Simon asked.

His father was busy reading two different screens.

This must be their goal, the boy decided. But he thought it was best not to interrupt, his father busy with something that could only be important.

He sat on the nearest chair, watching everything.

The rover walked down to the shoreline. Out on the ice stood a little tower and another rover, and somebody was moving slowly in one direction, then another. The stranger was wearing a big lifesuit, the kind used by people planning to be outside for a long time. Someday Simon wouldn’t need a suit to walk in the open. Adults promised that in the future, he would be a tall, good-looking man and wear nothing but clothes and good shoes, and Mars would be the second earth, but even better.

Simon would live for hundreds of years. Everybody said so. And that was even if he counted his birthdays in Martian years.

“This isn’t right,” his father muttered.

The boy stood up and eased close to his father.

With a sigh, the man said, “They shouldn’t be here.”

“Who shouldn’t be?”

Father didn’t answer. Opening a channel, he identified his employer before asking, “What’s the hold up. You’re supposed to be gone.”

“Hey, John,” said a woman’s voice. “You’re talking to Lilly.”

Father’s name was John. “No,” he said quietly, but not softly. There was sharpness to that single tiny word. Then he sighed and reopened the channel, halfway smiling as he said, “I’m here with my son, Lilly.”

She said nothing.

Simon touched his father’s shoulder.

The man smiled at him and winked, and he was still smiling when he said, “I thought you went off on leave.”

“Came back early,” the woman said.

His father wasn’t looking at either screen or what was ahead. He was still smiling, but something had changed about his face.

“How old is little Simon now?” the woman asked.

“Four.” People born on the earth used their old calendar. That was one reason Simon had trouble understanding what time meant.

“Where’s his mother?”

“Waiting at home. It’s just him and me.”

There was a brief silence. Then the woman said, “Understood.”

Father sat back. “Lilly? I was told your rig was going to be gone by now.”

“I’ve had some lousy troubles, John.”

The man’s face looked patient but not happy. “Troubles?”

“Two bits went bad on me. I’ve had one bit get contaminated at the site before, but never two.”

Their rover was walking on its crab legs, quickly marching across the frozen face of the lake. Simon imagined liquid water hiding under the thick white surface ice, and he thought of the cold mud beneath the water. Then he remembered the guppies he left at home with his mother and baby sister. Someday he would take those fish and their babies and set them free. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing? In his mind, he saw the ice turn to warm water and the sky was blue like on earth, and there were hundreds and millions of guppies swimming everywhere, all of their mouths begging for food.

“Are you close to finished?”

“Still drilling,” the woman reported.

“How deep are you?”

“Five kilometers, nearly,” she said.

His father mouthed one exceptionally bad word. Then with an angry tone, he said, “I’m sorry, Lilly.”

“You can’t wait one more day?”

“I’ve got my own schedule here.”

The woman didn’t respond.

After a minute, Father said, “I would, if I could. You know that. But they want me finishing this run in a week, and the kid has to get back.”

Still, the woman didn’t talk.

Father looked at Simon, preparing to tell him something.

But then Lilly’s voice returned. “I just put in a call to the Zoo.”

Father shook his head. Then softly and a little sadly, he said, “That won’t do any good, and you know it.”

“What are you talking about?” Simon asked.

Father closed the channel and said, “Shush,” and then opened it again. “All right, Lilly. The Zoo can get their lawyers working. We’re going to be official here. But why don’t you start pulling your bit? If you win your delay, I’ll let you put it back in and finish.”

“So your boy’s really there, is he?”

“Sure is.”

She asked, “Can he hear me?”

“Why?” Father asked, reaching for a button.

Then all of the sudden, she said, “Hello, Simon. Hi! I’m your dad’s very, very good friend, Lilly!”

There were rules about being alone. Alone inside a rover meant touching nothing except what belonged to him and what couldn’t be avoided. The AI driver watched Simon when his father was absent, and it watched his father when he worked outside. If something bad happened, the driver would find some way to help. But Mars was dangerous, and the worst things were always ready to happen. Before they left on this journey, Simon’s mother said exactly that to his father. “A seal fails, or you puncture your suit,” she said. Mom thought her boy was asleep, and even if he wasn’t, Simon couldn’t hear her talking at the far end of the tiny apartment. With a quiet urgent voice, she reminded her husband that one misstep might leave their son half-orphaned and two hundred kilometers from home. And what would happen then?

“The driver knows what to do,” his father had promised. “It sends out a distress call and starts walking toward the nearest settlement.”

“With Simon inside,” she said. “Terrified, and all by himself.”

“No need to mention I’m dead,” said his father. “Though that seems like the larger tragedy, if you ask me.”

“I don’t want the boy scarred,” she said.

Father didn’t respond.

“Scarred,” she repeated. And then again, she said, “Scarred.”

Simon didn’t want to be scarred, but he was definitely worried. His father walked slowly across the frozen landscape, wearing a lifesuit whiter than the ice beneath his boots. His clean-shaven head showed through the back of the helmet. His father’s friend stood beside her drill rig. Lilly was watching Simon at the window. A pair of small robots stood nearby, doing nothing. The drill was still digging, the clean bit clawing its way into the deep warm rock. Simon watched the cable twisting, and then he noticed his father waving a hand, and Lilly smiled at her friend and said words. Father turned, and Simon could see his mouth now. The adults were sharing a private channel, and both were talking at the same time. Then they quit talking. Several minutes passed where nothing was said. It felt like forever. Maybe they were waiting for something to happen. Maybe what would happen was something very bad. Simon remembered the story of a Zoo collector who cut into a cave filled with methane and water, and the foamy gas blew out of the hole and picked up one of his robots and flung it at him, killing him with the impact.

Just then, with chilling clarity, Simon understood that his father was about to die. Straightening his back, he made himself ready for the moment. Yet nothing happened. Nothing changed. The two adults resumed talking and then stopped talking, and Simon was desperately bored. So he dropped into the chair reserved for him, playing a game. He was the blue team; his enemies were purple. He started in one corner of the board, feeding and dividing and then spreading, and when he nudged against the purple blobs, he fought for position and the chance to make more blues.

When he stood again, his father was walking toward the rover. Simon had never seen anybody move that fast in a lifesuit. And Lilly had vanished. Where did she go? Then the airlock began to cycle, and Simon put down his game and sat again, staring at the little door at the back end of the cabin.

Even after a thorough cleaning, the woman’s suit smelled of peroxides and ancient dust. She stepped into the cabin smiling, helmet tucked under one arm. The woman was pretty. She was darker than most of the people that he’d seen before. In the cabin air, her voice sounded warm and kind and special, and the first words she said to him were, “You look a fine smart young man.”

He liked this woman.

“Simon is a wonderful name,” she said.

He nodded and smiled back at her.

“Your father’s told me quite a lot about you,” she offered. Then her face changed, and she said, “He’s being very unreasonable, you know.”

Once again, the airlock started through its cycle.

“Simon,” she began. “Has anyone told you about the Zoo project?”

The boy nodded before he considered the question. But luckily, yes, he knew about the bug people. “My mom explained them to me.”

Lilly said nothing.

“They’re good-hearted soft souls,” he continued.

Slowly, she said, “I guess we are,” and then she added, “I’d like to believe we’re doing something good. Saving what Martians we can save before their world is gone forever.”

“Mars isn’t leaving,” he said.

“But their habitats will vanish. Some soon, and then the rest.”

“But we’re Martians too,” he said, repeating what he heard from every other adult.

“Except the native microbes were first,” she mentioned.

Simon shrugged, unsure how that mattered.

“They’re under us right now,” she began.

The airlock was pressurized, jets and determined vacuums struggling to clean his father’s mostly clean suit.

“Beneath us is a wonderland, Simon. A paradise.” Lilly’s voice was quick and serious. “Heat and flowing water and nutrients, plus fractures in the bedrock that are prime growing surfaces for thousands of native species. Pseudoarchaea and nanobacteria, viral cysts and maybe the largest population of hunter-molds anywhere. What I’m sampling is the Martian equivalent of a tropical rainforest. It’s a fabulous treasure, unique in the universe, and do you know what’s going to happen to it?”

Some of her words made no sense. But one new word piqued his curiosity, which was why Simon asked, “What’s a rain-forest?”

Lilly hesitated. “What do you think it is?”

“Water falling on trees,” he offered.

“That’s it.”

“Never stopping.”

“It rains a lot, yes.”

“That sounds awful,” he offered.

Now the airlock stopped cleaning its contents, and the inner door popped open. Father entered the room quickly, his gloves unfastening his helmet, eyes big and his mouth clamped into a hard long line.

“We’re talking about rain-forests,” Simon reported. Then to his new friend, he asked, “How can trees grow under falling water?”

“It isn’t like that,” she sputtered. Then she turned. “Hey, John. Hear back from the attorneys?”

“Not yet.” Father stopped and with a slow voice asked his son, “What else have you talked about?”

“Nothing,” Lilly said.

“The Zoo,” corrected Simon.

“Yeah, the Zoo,” she allowed. “I was just asking this fine young man what he knew about my work, and he reports that his mother says I’m soft but that I have a good heart.”

Was that what he told her? Simon didn’t think so.

Father looked at their faces, one and then the other.

“That’s all,” Lilly said cheerfully.

Father’s suit was bright and clean. He looked hot, which made little sense. He even seemed tired, although they hadn’t done anything today.

Finally, with a quiet little voice, he said, “Don’t.”

Simon couldn’t tell which one of them he was talking to.

Or was he saying, “Don’t,” to himself?

But with a tight, almost angry voice, Lilly asked, “Why would I? Why would I even think that? I have this sterling good heart that doesn’t wish ill on anybody, bacterial or otherwise.”

Simon still liked Lilly, but adults could be very peculiar. Was Lilly one of those peculiar adults?

Neither adult wanted to talk, and they wouldn’t look at each other. The floor seemed to be the most interesting area in the room, and they stared at it for a time, their mouths small and their eyes empty and both of them breathing quickly.

To break the silence, Simon announced, “I got to hold one of the seeds today. Dad let me do that.”

Even then, nobody spoke.

“Seeds are machines,” the boy reported. “They explode like bombs, and they’re very powerful, and inside them? They’ve got these little sacks, and the sacks get flung out into the hole made by the bomb, and they’re full of good young bugs that can do all sorts of neat, important things. Like growing fast and building these little, little roots that carry power like wires do, and the roots make it possible to heat up the crust fast and change the rocks to make our kinds of life happy.”

Without warning, Lilly said one awful word.

Father set his hand on her suit, on the back of her shoulder.

“Don’t touch me, John.”

Then Father said, “Leave us alone, Lilly.”

Four words, and none were loud. But Simon had never heard the man angrier than he sounded then.

“Suit up and go,” he told the woman.

But Lilly just shook her head. Then putting on a big peculiar smile, she said, “Simon? Want to hear something funny about your father and me?”

The boy wanted any reason to laugh. “Sure.”

“No,” said Father, stepping between them. “Suit up and go do your work, Lilly. I’ll tell my bosses something’s wrong at my end, that I’m not ready to plant. Do what you need. Is that fair enough for you?”

She said, “No.”

“What?”

Lilly kept watching Simon, the wild smile building on her pretty dark face. “I want you to help me, John. With the drilling, with the sampling. All of it.”

Father didn’t speak.

Then Lilly said, “Hey, Simon. You want your father to have a good heart, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said.

“So what should he do? Help me or hurt me?”

“Help her, Dad,” the boy begged. “You’ve got to, Dad. What else can you do?”

624 Hektor

A little bird warned Simon about the impending rebellion.

Jackie was part African gray, with a good deal of genetic retooling and enough bio-linked circuitry to lift the parrot’s IQ to vote-worthy levels. Her job functions included companionship and extra eyes with which to keep watch over the sprawling farm, and she was excellent at both duties. But every living thing possesses its unsuspected skills. Wasn’t that what Simon’s professors warned when they addressed each new class of would-be atums? No matter how simple the genetics, an organism’s mind or the culture in which it was immersed, every created entity contained its fair share of surprises, flaws as well as those few talents that would, if they were too spectacular, screw up anyone’s blooming career.

“Warning signs are marching,” Jackie reported. “Small warnings, I’ll grant you. But I can’t shake the premonition of disasters on the loose.”

“Is it our sun?” Simon asked. Which wasn’t an unreasonable question, what with their reactor running past the prescribed one hundred and five percent rating. “You think the light’s about to fail?”

In twenty years, there had been two prolonged blackouts. Neither was Simon’s fault, though both were major disasters for the farm—two incidents that left cancerous reprimands tucked inside his life-file.

But the parrot clucked at his concerns, saying, “No, it’s not our sun.”

“Meat troubles?” Viruses, he feared. A herpes strain hitching rides on the nervous systems of new immigrants, most likely.

“No, the ribs-and-hearts are growing well. And the bacon is ahead of schedule.”

Nonetheless, Simon studied the terrain before them: The ancient crater was capped with a diamond dome, and fixed to the dome’s apex was a blazing fire that winked out for only a few minutes each day. Otherwise the basin was flooded with a simple but brilliant light. Limiting the radiant frequencies allowed for the efficient consumption of energy. The black-green foliage stank of life, healthy and always growing. Tallest were the pond-pods—sprawling low-gravity trees endowed with countless trunks holding up bowl-shaped basins filled with clean water, each pond infested with shrimp and fish, each covered with thin living skins so that the jostling of wind and animals never spilling what lay inside. As a young man, Simon helped design the first pond-pods, and since his arrival on Hektor, he had overseen countless improvements that allowed them to thrive in the carbonaceous soil. No accomplishment made him prouder. By contrast, the rib-and-hearts and bacons were routine commercial species, ugly by any aesthetics he cared to invoke. There were long days when the master of this farm wished he could cull and enhance according to his own tastes, creating something more satisfying than an efficient but bland food factory.

Patiently but forcefully, he asked again, “What’s wrong, Jackie?”

“Two humans were passing through,” the bird reported. “They were keeping under the canopy but avoiding the main trails. I didn’t recognize their faces, but they wore miner uniforms.”

“What did the miners do? Steal food?”

“They did nothing,” she said. “Nothing wrong, at least. But they didn’t sound like miners.”

Simon waited.

“They talked about fire.”

“Tell me,” he coaxed.

Against every stereotype, Jackie was an awful mimic. But she knew her limitations and didn’t try to reproduce either stranger’s voice. Instead, she summarized. “One said something about being worried, and then the other said it was going to happen soon, in thirty-three hours. He told his companion that the dogs were sleeping and the fire was set, and even if the chiefs knew about the plan, at this point nobody could stop what couldn’t be stopped.”

“I don’t understand any of that,” Simon confessed.

“Why am I not surprised?” One of Jackie’s unanticipated talents was for sarcasm. “At first, I wasn’t bothered. But fire scares me and I thought that mentioning the chiefs was worrisome.”

Simon agreed. In principle, every aspect of the colony was under their control, and if something was unknown to them—

“That’s why I followed the miners,” the bird volunteered.

“You said they weren’t miners.”

“Because they were strong. Two exceedingly muscular human beings.”

Only soldiers and recent immigrants retained their muscle tone. Simon had a willow-boned shape that came from minimal gravity and limited calories. “What else did they say?”

“Except for one time, they didn’t speak again,” she said. “But just before leaving the farm, the man turned to the woman and told her to smile. He said that McKall knows what he’s doing, and she should please damn well stop wasting her energy by imagining the worst.”

Simon said nothing.

Then Jackie pointed out, “You know McKall, don’t you?”

“I do,” he admitted. “In fact, he’s the atum who gave me this post.”

Two dark reddish asteroids lay snug against each other, producing 624 Hektor. The little world orbited the sun 60 degrees ahead of Jupiter, in that sweet Lagrange zone where a multitude of Trojan asteroids had swum for billions of years. Hektor was an elongated body spinning once in less than seven hours, and Simon had always believed that it was an ugly world. It didn’t help his opinion that he was living on the fringe of settled space, serving the chiefs and various corporations as little more than a farmer. In school, his test scores were always ample; he graduated as a qualified, perhaps even gifted atum—the professional name borrowed from the Egyptian god whose task it was to finish the unfinished worlds. But good minds only took their bodies so far. More coveted posts were earned through useful friendships and powerful mentors, and Simon’s career to date proved that he had neither. Anywhere else in the solar system would have been a happier fate: Mars was a dream, and the sunward asteroids and the moons of Jupiter were busy, important realms. Plus there was Luna now, and preliminary teams were plotting the terraforming of Venus. In contrast, Hektor was an isolated mining station, and not even a complete station at that. Once its facilities were finished, it would supply water and pure carbon to the inner system. But it was never intended to become an important destination, much less a site of major colonization. Barely fifty thousand intelligent souls lived on and inside its gloomy body, and the humans were a minority, most of them deemed also-rans and lost souls.

The main settlement had an official name, but locals referred to it as Crashtown—a grimy dense chaotic young city resting on the impact zone where two D-class asteroids were joined together. Riding beside a load of freshly harvested bananas and boneless minnows, Simon rode down to Crashtown. But he wasn’t sure of his intentions, his mind changing again and again. Then the police robot suddenly asked for his destination.

“The home of Earnest McKall,” Simon heard himself reply.

But that wasn’t good enough. For no obvious reason, security protocols had been heightened. The robot haughtily demanded to know a purpose for this alleged visit.

“I found his lost dog,” the young atum declared.

No dog was present, but the answer seemed to satisfy. Simon continued kicking his way into an exclusive tunnel, past robust gardens basking under earth-bright lights, endless arrays of flowers and cultured animal flesh repaying their considerable energy by making rainbow colors and elaborate perfumes.

“What if McKall isn’t at home?” Simon asked himself.

But he was, and the much older atum seemed pleased to find this unexpected guest waiting at his front door. “Come in, my boy. I was just about to enjoy an evening drink.”

“I don’t want to bother you,” Simon lied.

“No bother at all. Come in here!” McKall had always been a bony person. Simon once found a ninety-year-old image of him—a lean, shaggy boy of eight, bright eyes staring at the camera while the mouth looked smug and a little too full, as if he had just eaten something that wasn’t proper food. The grown-up version of that boy retained his youthful air, but the hair was a second or third crop, and it had come in thin and amazingly black. Most of McKall’s life had been spent on tiny worlds, and the lack of gravity along with a Methuselan diet had maintained the scrawny elegance of that lost child.

“Wine?” McKall offered.

“Thank you, no,” Simon responded.

The chief atum on Hector stood beside an elaborate bar—a structure trimmed with rare metals, in the middle of a huge room designed for nothing but entertaining. Yet he hadn’t bothered reaching for empty bottles, much less filling them. What he was doing was staring at Simon, and smiling, and something about that look and the silence told the guest that his presence was not unanticipated.

“My dog, is it?” asked McKall.

Simon flinched.

The smile sharpened. The man kicked closer, his voice flat and smooth and decidedly unrushed. “What do you know, my boy?”

Simon was nearly fifty, his own boyhood beyond reach.

“Hear some news, did you?”

“About dogs,” he reported.

McKall shrugged. “And what else?”

“Something is going to happen.”

“Happenings are inevitable. Do you have specifics?”

“Twenty-eight hours from now—”

“Stop.” A small hand lifted, not quite touching Simon on the chest. “No, you know nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

“Your dogs are sleeping,” Simon continued.

His host refused to speak. Waiting.

“And there’s something about a fire, too.”

The smile shrank, but the voice was friendlier. Curious. Perhaps even amused. “What about fire?”

“I’ve studied your writings, sir.” Habit forced Simon to nod slightly, admitting his lower status. “You like to equate metabolic activity with fire.”

“I’m not the only voice to use that allusion.”

“But as a young atum, you spent a great deal of time and energy complaining about the limits to our work. Every atum is shackled by draconian laws, you claimed. You said that life as we made it was just a smoldering flame. Your hope was to unleash the powers of the organic. Novel biochemistries, unique genetics, and ultraefficient scavenging the dead and spent. You were one of the loudest advocates of suspending the outmoded Guidelines, and only then would our young profession be able to produce a firestorm of life that would run wild across the universe.”

“I see.” McKall laughed quietly. Then again, he said, “I see.”

“What can’t the chiefs stop?”

Instead of answering the question, the atum posed his own. “Why do you believe that a skilled researcher—a man with major accomplishments—willingly came to this very remote place? Why would Earnest McKall ignore every lucrative offer, traveling all the way out here to this little chunk of trash and ice water?”

Simon said nothing.

“There are dogs,” McKall admitted. “Soon to be awakened, in fact. Decades of research and a series of camouflaged laboratories have produced more than a few revolutions, both in terms of productivity and plasticity.”

“You did this?”

“Not alone.” The atum shook his head, the rich black hair waving in the air. “I have a dozen brilliant associates working beside me, plus collaborators on twenty other worlds. Yes, I have a fine confident mind, but I’m not crazy with pride.”

“I’m one of your associates,” Simon pointed out.

“You are not, no. I would have included you, young man. In fact, that’s why I steered several likely employers away from your class’s hatch. I believed I could use your talents out here with me.”

“But I haven’t done anything.”

“Nothing at all,” McKall agreed. “Which was a surprise for me, I’ll admit. After your arrival, I kept careful watch over your work, and in particular, how you responded to authority. Honestly, I wasn’t impressed. I need boldness, genius. Competency without inspiration is fine for the commercial world, but not for souls dreaming the big dream.”

If Simon had been slapped, his face wouldn’t have felt warmer. He breathed heavily and slowly, and then despite every reserve of self-control, he began to weep, tears scattering from his reddened checks.

“But I like you anyway,” McKall continued. “And since you have no specific knowledge about my plans, and there’s no way to stop what is soon to begin, I will give you a gift. Use this chance to slip away. A transport leaves Hektor in four hours. There will be empty berths, and I advise that you take one.”

Simon turned as if to leave, then hesitated.

“You plan to take control over Hektor?” he muttered.

McKall laughed. “Haven’t you been paying attention? My goals are far more ambitious than this two-headed rock!”

Expecting to be stopped—by restraining hands or murderous weapons—Simon nonetheless hurried to Crashtown’s civil house. The highest-ranking chief seemed to be waiting for his arrival. He shook both of Simon’s hands and ushered him into a tiny office, and before Simon could speak, the chief told him, “Don’t worry. And certainly don’t panic. We know all about their plans.”

“You do? For how long?”

“Days now.” The chief shrugged. Feigning confidence, he reported, “We have McKall in sight, plus all of his lieutenants. And our security teams are minutes away from taking out both of his private labs.”

“Good,” Simon offered.

And that was when the chief quit smiling. Turning grim, he said to the farmer, “But I am curious: Why did you go to the atum’s home before coming to us?”

“I didn’t know anything,” Simon said.

“You were fishing for information?”

With as much conviction as he could manage, he said, “Yes. If I was going to report a crime that hadn’t happened, I needed details. Some reason for you to believe me.”

“A good enough answer,” the chief replied. “At least for the moment.”

Simon felt cold and weak. What mattered to him now was returning to his farm, to Jackie, and provided this trouble vanished, he would again take up his pivotal role in feeding this very small world. He was practically shaking with worries. “May I leave?” he risked asking.

“Until we know for certain, you cannot.”

Simon swallowed. “Until you know what for certain?”

That brought a tiny laugh, and then the ominous words, “Everything, of course. Everything.”

The attacks on the laboratories were launched, each blundering into carefully laid traps. McKall’s mercenaries were ready, and the parallel attempt to capture the ringleaders ended up netting nothing but holo images and robotic mimics. Then the rebels took over the local com-system. Their own attack would proceed on schedule, and simple decency demanded fair warning to civilians and the opportunity to escape by any means available. But the chiefs banned all travel. They quickly gathered their remaining forces, generating new plans up until that moment when the rumored “dogs” appeared. Secret tunnels reached deep inside Hektor’s smaller half, and out of them came hot-blooded monsters moving as blurs, eating flesh and laser bolts as they ran wild through Crashtown.

The ensuing chaos allowed Simon to escape. At the farm, he discovered three civil robots quickly setting up a small fusion bomb. “We cannot leave this resource for the enemy,” one machine reported. Simon didn’t care anymore. He collected Jackie and a few possessions before racing to the auxiliary port, and while the ground beneath him shook and split open, thousands of panicked souls abandoned Hektor, riding whatever was marginally spaceworthy, accepting any risk to take the long fall back toward the sun.

For the next several weeks, Simon was interrogated by a string of distant voices—military minds and politicians who wanted any and all glimpses into McKall’s nature. Simon offered what insights he had, trying to steer clear of his own considerable embarrassment. Once Simon’s transport passed into Martian orbit, the refugees were herded into quarantine on New Phobos. Who knew what new diseases MaKall could have slipped into their blood? Between the tests and more interviews, his childhood world teased Simon with glimpses of its cold blue seas and dense, mostly artificial atmosphere. The harsh desert landscape had vanished, the world’s rapid transformation producing feelings of pride and sorrowful loss. But despite all of the brilliant plans and the trillions of invested euros, the terraforming process was far from perfect. From forty thousand kilometers high, Simon identified lakes where the acids still ruled and forests of withering trees, and there were rumors that the new ecosystem was proving far less stable than the public voices liked to proclaim.

Fifteen months later, Simon was free of quarantine, and he watched the updates as a fleet of powerful military vessels assaulted 624 Hektor. Robots and shock troops landed in the empty crater that had been Simon’s farm. The fearsome dogs were melted and frozen. Every battle was won; victory was in hand. But then the war took an abrupt, unexpected turn. A blue-white blast tore through the asteroid. Since the rebellion, the smaller portion of Hektor had been thoroughly transformed. A transport ship of unprecedented size was hiding inside the reddish crust, and the explosion flung away great chunks of its companion while slaughtering the invaders. Half of the asteroid dropped out of its ancient orbit, crude engines firing, maintaining a near-collision course with Jupiter. Momentum was stolen away from giant planet. Then uncontested, the ship pushed into the outer solar system, swinging close enough to Saturn to enjoy an even larger kick.

Five years later, an improved set of star engines came to life. By then, McKall’s plans were common knowledge. No one was planning to chase after him, much less continue the war. What would be the point? A forever-changing, increasingly strange body of organized carbon and silicon and fusion-heated water was streaking away from the sun, away from humanity, aiming this newborn revolution straight for the three Centauri sisters.

VENUS

Eventually Simon’s personal history became public knowledge. Strangers suddenly knew his name, and they would smile at him in that special sad way people used in uncomfortable circumstances. Acquaintances began to treat him as if he were important, laughing easily at his rare jokes, wishing him a good day or good evening or sweet, delightful dreams. His workmates, the fellow atums, embraced one of two inadequate strategies: Either they were quick to tell him how sorry they were and then ask if they could do anything, anything at all, or they seemed to take offense that Simon hadn’t confided with them before now. “Dear god, you lost most of your family,” one man exclaimed incorrectly, but with passion. “I wish I’d known. I look like the fool. I thought we were friends, at least . . . ”

Simon did have a few scattered friends, and they knew better. When he didn’t mention the unfolding disaster on Mars, they patiently respected his privacy. As the situation worsened, he sought out mood-leveling drugs and other cheats that allowed him to manage, if only barely. He cried, but only when he was alone. During the worst days, he volunteered for solitary assignments, carefully avoiding professional chatter about past mistakes and the mounting casualties. He thought he was succeeding, taking a grim pride in his talent for enduring these personal trials, but afterwards, when the situation had finally stabilized, he crossed paths with an acquaintance from childhood. Ignorant as a bug, the fellow asked, “What about your family, Simon? They got out of that nightmare in time, didn’t they?”

His parents never tried to escape. They were two old people living at opposite ends of an unfinished, critically flawed world, and they hadn’t spoken to one another in nearly forty years. But as the blizzards struck and the air turned to poison, they left their homes, riding and then marching through the chaos and slaughter, finally reaching an isolated habitat overlooking Hellas where they lived together for their final eight days and nights.

As for Simon’s sister and various half-siblings, all but two escaped before the ecosystem collapsed. But where they would live tomorrow was an endless problem, for them and for the solar system at large. Millions of refugees were crammed onboard the ten New Moons and a fleet of rescue ships, plus various ad hoc habitats contrived out of inflated bladders and outmoded life support systems. It was a tough, dirty and problematic life, though far superior to being one of the fifty million bodies left behind on the anaerobic, peroxide-laced surface of Mars. Where would these souls live tomorrow? Faced with this conundrum, the atums had a ready solution: Terraform Mars all over again, and do it as quickly as possible, but use every trick in their rapidly evolving arsenal.

“This time, we’ll build a conservatory,” one young atum declared. “That’s how it should have been done in the first place. And again, Simon, I’m so very sorry for your tragedies.”

Naomi was a pretty youngster who used her beauty and a charming, obvious manner to win favors and fish for compliments. She liked to talk. She loved listening to her own smart, insistent voice. Rumor had it that her body was equipped with artificial openings and deployable prods, leaking intoxicating scents and wondrous doses of electricity. Simon was curious about her body, but he didn’t have the rank or adequate desire to pursue his base urges. Watching one of Naomi’s performances was as close as he wanted to be. Most of his colleagues felt threatened by her promise. But even when the girl spoke boldly about her incandescent future, Simon couldn’t take offense. His second century had brought with it a tidy and quite useful epiphany: Everyone would eventually fail, and if their failures were long-built, then the subsequent collapses would be all the more dramatic.

At this particular moment, the atums were chanting the usual praises about conservatories.

“Oh, I’m not convinced,” said Simon quietly.

Naomi laughed, and with a patronizing tone asked, “Oh my, why not?”

“A roof wouldn’t have helped. In the end, nothing would have changed.”

She couldn’t let that statement go unchallenged. “But if we’d had a lid over the sky, we’d have controlled the weather more effectively. The sunlight, the upper atmosphere’s chemistry. All the inflows would have belonged to us.”

“But not four and half billion years of geologic habit,” he countered.

“Geologic habit,” she muttered, as if she couldn’t quite understand the phrase.

That’s when the chief atum interjected her presence into the conversation. With a loud breezy voice, she summarized both positions. Then after putting her own opinion into jargon-laded terms, she added, “Too much of the Mars business depended on biological means. That’s where they went wrong. Don’t trust life; it doesn’t care about you. The physical realm is what matters, and conservatories are wonderful tools. They’re sure to be the last word in our business.”

Every face but one nodded, the matter settled.

Yet despite all of this polished certainty, only one world-encompassing conservatory was close to being finished, and that was a special circumstance. Luna was the easiest world to enclose inside a semi-transparent bubble: The low gravity; the proximity of earth; thriving local industries; and the absence of weather and political troubles. Its roof would hold any new atmosphere close. Double panes of diamond, transparent and strengthened with nanofibers, would keep space at bay. The engineering was straightforward, and construction should be relatively easy. But “should be” often proved illusionary. The Luna project was already forty percent over-budget, the critical water from asteroids and comets was being chased by other terraforming projects, including Venus, and even in the most favorable scenario warned that twenty more years would pass before the first soft winds of an oxygen-neon atmosphere began to blow across the dusty plains of Nearside.

Simon’s doubts could be misplaced. Indeed, he hoped he was wrong. But still, this one-time Martian was suffering a nagging yet familiar sense of standing at the brink of another precipice.

The other atums had happily left Simon behind. The topic of the moment, and the passion of their professional lives, was Venus. Small projects were being discussed. Most of their work involved the atmosphere and heat dissipation, the obvious solutions offered and debated and then rejected, soon to be replaced with other equally satisfactory answers. When he bothered to listen, Simon could tell who was sleeping with Naomi and who was maneuvering to take their place. It would have been funny, if not for the grave consequences lashed to animal lust. He didn’t believe in Great Deities, but if the gods were watching, they would surely laugh to see how tiny hormones and glands smaller than hands could manipulate the future of entire planets.

Presiding over this working lunch was the chief atum for the Third District, High Atmosphere and Future Climate Department. She was ten years Simon’s junior but much more successful, and when she spoke, the room fell silent. Though that didn’t mean people were listening. This group wasn’t large or diverse, but within its ranks were enough opinions and rampant ego that no authority could rule, much less orchestrate the thoughts of so many well-trained, singularly focused minds.

Venus was the topic, but the planet existed only as numbers and one staggeringly complicated model. Except for tug of gravity and the specifics in the numbers, this could have been any meeting of atums sitting inside any windowless room, on Luna or Callisto or Pallas, or any other portion of the solar system being relentlessly and utterly transformed.

When the official business was finished, at last, the chief looked longingly at Naomi. “Good job, and thank you,” she told everybody.

Everybody wanted out of the room.

But without warning, the chief said Simon’s full name and caught his eyes, not quite smiling when she said, “You have a new assignment. For the time being, you’re off the hydrological team.”

A colleague must have accused him of being difficult or incompetent, or perhaps both. It had happened before. He might be a 128 year-old man, but he always felt like a little boy when he was embarrassed or shamed.

Except that nothing was wrong, at least on this occasion. The chief smiled, admitting, “It’s because we have a visitor coming. A representative from . . . ” She hesitated. “From the Zoo Project.”

“Another collection mission?” Simon inquired.

“Oh, these darlings always have another mission,” the chief complained.

Simon nodded, waiting.

“I need you to help with her hunting and keep tabs on whatever she finds.” The chief stared at him, smiling suspiciously. “Do you know a woman named Lilly?”

Too quickly, Simon said, “No.”

“That’s odd,” the chief mentioned. “She requested you by name.”

There were myriad routes to achieving a long healthy lifespan. Simon preferred small measures left invisible to the naked, unmodified eye. But the woman beside him wasn’t motivated by tradition. Native flesh would always be perishable, and the cosmetically proper synthetics were usually too fragile to last more than a few years. What proved most durable were colonies of engineered microbes, metabolically efficient and quick to repair themselves—a multitude of bacteria infusing the perpetually new skin with sensitive, high adaptable neural connections. There were popular tools among the very young and the determined elderly. Yet Simon couldn’t remember ever meeting anyone who had endowed herself with such a vibrant, elaborate exterior.

“I’m sorry,” the very colorful woman began.

Just why she was sorry, Simon didn’t know. But he nodded politely, resisting the urge to ask.

For the next few minutes, they sat in silence. The sky-driver continued on its programmed course, little to see and nothing to do for the present. Most of the world’s air lay beneath them. The sun was low on their left, the only inhabitant of the nearly black sky, slowly descending toward its retrograde setting. The conservatory was a grayish-green plain far below them, absolutely smooth and comfortingly bland. Venus was not Luna, and this project was far more complicated than erecting a high roof above a compliant vacuum. Only limited sections had been completed—barely nine percent of the eventual goal—and even that portion was little more than the scaffolding meant to support arrays of solar-power facilities and filters and spaceports and cities of robots that would do nothing but repair and improve this gigantic example of artless architecture. Was his guest full of questions? Most visitors wanted to hear about the nano-towers rooted in the rigid Venusian crust, holding these expensive gigatons far above the dense, dangerous atmosphere. People might know the facts, but it soothed them to learn about the marvelous engineering. Everyone was the center of his own important story. Everybody secretly feared that if some piece of the conservatory failed, it would happen beneath his own important, tragically mortal feet.

At last, the silence ended. Lilly touched Simon for the first time. Hot orange fingertips brushed against his forearm. “I am sorry,” she said again. “He was a good father, I know. I’m sure you miss him terribly.”

Simon’s reaction surprised both of them. Turning toward gaudy woman, he remarked sharply, “My mother was the good parent. Dad spent his life collecting lovers, and I didn’t like his girls at all.”

The violet face was bright and hot, full of fluids more complicated than blood. Perhaps the woman was insulted. Maybe she wanted to turn the sky-driver back, ready to exchange this atum for one less difficult. But nothing about her seemed hurt or even surprised. She smiled for a few moments. Saying nothing, she let her glassy dark eyes absorb everything about the old man beside her. Then her hand gripped his wrist, a wave of heat threatening to burn his pale, dry skin.

“Nonetheless, I’m sorry,” she said.

Simon pulled his arm back.

“I didn’t treat either of you fairly. At the lake . . . when I was drilling . . . all I cared about was saving the natives, by whatever means . . . ”

Here was the central problem, Simon realized. It wasn’t that this woman and his father had an affair, or even that they might have loved one another. What rankled was that she had willfully used him as a tool.

“How are the Martians?” he inquired.

“Happily sleeping inside a thousand scattered laboratories.”

“That’s sad,” he thought aloud.

“Really? Why?”

“Life should be busy,” Simon proposed. “Not hibernating inside common freezers.”

Now Lilly took offense. She said nothing, but her back stiffened and she maintained her silence until it was obvious that she didn’t accept any complaints about her life’s work. They were approaching their destination. As the sky-driver began its descent, Simon risked mentioning, “I’m probably mistaken. But I thought the Zoo already grabbed up every species of air-plankton.”

The native Venusians had had a robust ecosystem, but compared even to Martians, they were an uncomplicated lot.

“We have every native in bottles,” she said stiffly, nursing her wounds.

“And the native populations have crashed here,” he pointed out. “No light gets through, except for some infrared, and the sulfuric clouds are dispersed and too cold by a long measure.”

“True enough,” she agreed.

Then she touched herself, her face growing brighter as it warmed with enthusiasm. “But new species are evolving every day, and isn’t that exciting news?”

It was boring news, but a truce had been declared. The old man and even older woman stopped mentioning their differences and histories. They were professionals, each quietly pursuing a quick and narrow mission. The sky-driver set down and linked up with a large dome filled with sleeping machines and assorted elevators. Donning lifesuits, they boarded a small elevator and descended ten kilometers. Simon watched Venus through the monitors. Lilly busied herself by readying a suitcase-sized apparatus that would inhale and filter the carbon-dioxide atmosphere, pulling every viable microbe from the mayhem of dust and industrial pollution. The nano-tower was more air than structure—hexagons of webs and sturdy legs, each side nearly a kilometer in length, its feet firmly planted on the slopes of Aphrodite Terra. Their final destination was a platform intended as a hive for robots waiting to repair what was rarely damaged. There was no visible light, but there was wind and a stubborn atmosphere still centuries away from collapsing into a newborn ocean of soda water. Obviously Lilly had done similar work on other towers. She moved with purpose. Her machine walked next to her, waiting patiently as she investigated one site and then another. Experience or perhaps intuition allowed her to decide where the best results would be found. Then she told the machine, “Deploy,” and it gladly grabbed the railing with three arms and flung its body over the edge, exploding into a purposeful tangle of ribbons and funnels and other twisting shapes.

“How long?” Simon asked.

“Do we wait?” She looked up at him, her features illuminated by the backscattered light from her helmet. “An hour, at least. Maybe longer.”

Venus lay before them, vast and bathed in darkness.

“What kinds of creatures are out here?”

“Chemoautotrophes, naturally.” Staring out into the same night, she explained, “The UV photosynthesizers are still here, of course. They like to find crevices in our towers, places where they can sleep, probably waiting for our roof to collapse.”

He let that anthropomorphism go unchallenged.

“These natives are odd, adaptable species, all descended from plankton in the boiled-away seas. It’s astonishing what they’ve kept inside their very peculiar DNA. Today, some of them are utilizing industrial solvents and lost nano products. Where there’s heat, energy can be harvested.” She turned, showing her face again. “There’s no reason to worry yet, and maybe never. But a few of these bugs have found ways to creep inside our robots, using them as shelters. If one of them ever learns how to steal an electrical current, everything changes. Probably in a matter of a month or two.”

“That quickly?”

“Venusians are fertile and promiscuous. With these winds, a successful strain can be everywhere in days.”

Simon had never studied the beasts. Would it pay to invest an hour a week in digesting the existing literature?

“But odds are, that won’t happen,” his companion allowed. “I do love these little things. But life, even at its most spectacular, has limits.”

“It does have limits,” he said tactfully.

Lilly’s face was pretty and never more human—a consequence of the indirect light washing across their features, and their solitude, and Simon’s nagging, seemingly eternal sense of loneliness in a universe filled with an increasingly strange humanity.

“Does it ever bother you?” she asked.

He waited for the rest of the question.

“Terraforming is a horribly destructive act,” Lilly stated. “Obliterating one order for another. Or in the sad case of Mars, destroying a quiet and stable world to replace it with a doomed weakling . . . and then after all of that inflicted misery, not learning enough to give up the fight.”

“It isn’t meant to be a fight,” he declared.

But of course it was. Perhaps never so clearly, Simon realized that they were standing on the ramparts of a great fortress, an endless war waging around them. Simon listened to the wind and felt it push against him, and he took pleasure from his heart hammering away inside a chest that would never feel ancient. And then he was smiling, realizing that even a quiet disappointment of a soul—the sort of person that Simon was—could take a keen, unembarrassed pleasure from the battles that he had helped win, small and otherwise.

IAPETUS

“I know you worry. I worry too, Simon. Neither of us is strong at politics, and even if I were a marvel at making alliances and handling cross-purposed personalities, this would be a difficult place. This earth would be. But as knowing voices say, and with good reason, ‘There’s only one Stanford.’ Perhaps the Farside Academy is its equal, at least when it comes to creating prominent astronomers. But Stanford still ranks first in my field, and it has for half a millennia, and my degree will get me noticed by wise entities and doubting coworkers at all ends of the solar system. And since I’m not gifted at winning admirers through my simple charm, being in this university will help me quite a lot.”

Simon paused the transmission—this wasn’t his first viewing—and spent the next several minutes studying the face that filled the screen. What had changed? The mouth, the bright yellow eyes. That artful crest of green feathers—a jaunty hat in appearance, and one of Jackie’s last obvious links to the world of her ancestors. No, she looked exactly the same. To casual eyes, she might be some species of human, her genetics modified for the most normal of reasons. She wasn’t much larger than when he had first met the parrot, which put her well inside the restrictions imposed on visiting students. The bio-taxing laws were perfectly reasonable; earth had always been too crowded. Even six hundred years ago, when Simon was a scrawny Martian with dust in his breath, the home world had suffered from too many bodies standing on too little land, farms working hard to make food for a population that wouldn’t age, and in most cases, stubbornly refused to die. Immortality was the norm everywhere, and who didn’t want children to share the bliss? That’s why bodies and minds continued to grow smaller and smaller, cheating the restrictions of nature by shrewdly redefining the rules.

In appearance, the earth hadn’t changed Jackie. Perhaps her voice was a little too formal, too staged, but cameras always made her self-conscious. He knew this creature well enough to know she wasn’t holding anything back. One fib today, he feared, and that would be the end. They had barely begun their long separation, and here she was, making time to call home. Simon assured himself that no conspiracy of ambition or seduction would steal away the love that had taken him by surprise, one patient century at a time.

Again, he let the message run. Jackie listed classes and spoke about the tiny quarters she shared with three other happy graduate students, and she mentioned that the stars came out on clear nights, but of course they were illusions. Earth’s conservatory was finished two hundred years ago—a marvelous semi-permeable membrane that strictly controlled what fell from above and what slipped away into the cosmos. Today, the mother world was a rigorously controlled room where a trillion sentient entities lived on and inside the old continents and throughout the watery reaches. It was a beautiful world, still and all. But it was a decidedly alien realm, forever changing, and some corners of that room were famous for criminal mischief and random psychopathic rage.

Yes, he was worried.

Absolutely, Simon wished Jackie had stayed with him after her sudden change of careers. Saturn’s major moons had quality universities, and even noble, haughty Stanford offered virtual classes to anyone with money. Why not accept a longer, safer path to her degree? Time wasn’t in short supply, Simon had argued. And by staying where they were, Jackie would have remained immune to the hazards of so many close-packed souls.

The transmission continued. “I’m sure you know this,” Jackie said. “I’ve probably told you this before. But did you realize there isn’t one working telescope on the entire campus? We have a facility forty kilometers above us, perched on the conservatory roof, but it’s filled with museum pieces and curious tourists.” She was thrilled, her flexible mouth giving each word an accent that was purely hers. “Stanford’s telescopes—my telescopes—are everywhere but on the bright busy earth. Luna and the Jovian Trojans, and there’s a beautiful new mirror that just came on line in Neptune’s Lagrange. And because I’m here, that’s my mirror. It’s my best eye. Think of the honor! If I was at home with you, I’d be little more than a technician pointing these machines at targets that only the true Stanford students would be allowed to see.”

Yes, she made the right decision. Simon had always known it, though these little mental exercises helped convince him again.

What a silly little ape he was.

“But I didn’t tell you this incredible news,” Jackie said in conclusion. “I just found this out. Long, long ago, Stanford had a mascot, and it was a bird! Can you imagine the odds?”

Simon froze the image and kissed the lips. Then he filed the transmission in places guaranteed to be safe for an eternity, and feeling weepy, he went on with his comfortably busy day.

Even orbiting Saturn, where space was cheap and food easy to come by, people were acquiring small modern bodies. Simon hadn’t been this tiny since he was one-year-old. These new metabolisms were efficient and reliable, and where the human mind would eventually decay, cortexes made of crystalline proteins were denser and far sturdier, thoughts washing through them quickly enough to double an atum’s natural talents and increase his memory twenty-fold.

But every atum underwent similar transformations, which meant that when it came to his professional life, remarkably little had changed. Simon and his colleagues had kept their old ranks and ratings, only with greater responsibilities and larger workloads. A significant medical investment had changed very little. “Treading water,” he dubbed his job—a weak play on words, since what he did was manage the nutrient flows in the newborn sea. But really, he had no compelling reason to complain, and in any given year, he didn’t waste more than a moment or two wondering what other course his life might have run, if only.

He was a quietly happy soul.

And despite few promotions or pay increases, his work had challenges as well as moments of total, child-like joy.

Pieces of Iapetus now belonged to Luna and Venus. But those decades of throwing water ice and hydrocarbons sunward were finished. The original mining camps had evolved into cities. Multitudes lived on Titan and Rhea and the other moons, and nobody was in the mood to share their wealth. Luna would remain a damp stony sponge, while Venus was a clean dry world, its ecology being redesigned to endure the boundless drought, its citizens more machine than meat. No matter how stupid or stubborn recent governments had been, the mathematics were brutally simple: From this point forward, it would be easier to terraform each world where it already danced, just as it was far cheaper to ship extra humans and other sentients out to these empty new homes.

Light washed through the new Iapetus, and the water was warm and salted, and the neutral-buoyant reefs were magnificent structures of calcium and silica wrapped around bubbles of hydrogen gas. The ancient moon had been melted, from its crust to the core, and great pumps were churning up that single round ocean, producing carefully designed currents meant to keep every liter oxygenated and illuminated by the submerged suns. Trillions of watts of power made the little world glow from within. Larger than the oceans of the original earth, but without the dark cold depths where life had to putter and save itself on hopes of a scrap of food, his home would eventually become jammed with coral forests and bubble cities and fish suitable for a garden, lovely and delicious to any tongue.

Nutrients were Simon’s boring, absolutely essential expertise. When he wasn’t dreaming of Jackie, he would dream about the day’s conversations with sensors and AI watchers, the home-mind and various colleagues scattered across other, more highbrow departments. Only a tiny fraction of moon was settled. A few floating cities on the surface, and there was an industrial complex digesting and dispersing the tiny core of stone and metal impurities. But what this atum needed to do, at least in his tiny realm, was create a cycle of nutrients that would ignore disruptions and random shifts in current, leaving all of the water as bright and clear as the finest tidal pool on some long-vanished earthly beach.

Because she was interested, Simon’s ended his days with updates to his lover. Every evening, as the nearest sun began to dim, he would craft a little message laid down on cool, bloodless data. But because he was nervous, he inevitably confessed that he was thinking of her constantly and that he loved her, his face and tone saying what he didn’t allow from his words: That he was scared to lose her to some student of promise, or worse, a professor of certified genius who would sweep his darling bird off to realms far more exotic than his beautiful but quite tiny pond.

The message began with news from earth. With a quick joyful voice, Jackie talked about classes and the lab that she was teaching solo—“I’m so terrified, and the students love it when I shake”—and she twice mentioned rumors about a mild plague tearing through some of the coastal algae farms. “There’s talk about shortfalls,” she admitted. “Since they run their ecosystem with minimal reserves, shortages are inevitable. Too many citizens, plus all those others who slipped in unnoticed.” Then guessing he would be frightened, she added, “Oh, it isn’t serious. Everybody’s just going to have to go a mouthful or two short at dinner. And Stanford has its own emergency supplies, so it’s nothing. Nothing at all.” Then she grinned with her lovely toothless mouth, and showing nothing but delight, she announced, “I have something to show you, darling. By the way.”

And with that, her face froze and her voice stopped long enough that Simon began troubleshooting his equipment.

But she moved again, speaking with a quiet, conspiratorial tone. “Nobody sees me, darling. ‘Nobody’ meaning everybody else. You didn’t know my little secret, but I seeded our home-mind with some elaborate security protocols. Not as good as some, but strong enough to keep away prying eyes.”

“Prying at what?” he muttered.

Jackie’s message was enormous, and it included interactive functions. The program heard him, and with Jackie’s voice it said, “Soon enough, darling. You’ll see. But let me show you a few other marvels first. All right?”

He nodded happily, a sense of adventure lending the moment its fresh, welcome edge.

Jackie continued. “You’ve seen these places. But I can’t remember when, and the new mirrors are so much more powerful. I’m including portraits of five hundred thousand worlds, each one supporting life.”

Except for their clarity, the pictures were familiar. Life was a relatively common trick performed by the galaxy. Sophisticated, earth-like biospheres did happen on occasion, but not often and not where they were expected to arise. By and large, the normal shape of life was tiny and bacterial. Mars and Venus, the European seas and the vivid clouds of Jupiter were typical examples. By contrast, multicellular life was an exceptionally frail experiment. Asteroid impacts and supernovae and the distant collisions of neutron stars happened with an appalling frequency, annihilating everything with a head and tail. Only the slow-living slime at the bottom of a deep sea would survive, or the patient cold bug ten kilometers beneath some poisoned landscape. At the end of the Permian, the earth itself barely escaped that fate. But even accounting for those grand disasters, the earth-equivalents proved a thousand times too scarce. Jackie’s once-young professors had a puzzle to play with, and their answer was as sobering as anything born from science.

Now and again, interstellar clouds and doomed suns would fall into the galaxy’s core. If the inflow were large enough, the massive black hole responded with a kind of blazing horror that effectively ended fancy life almost everywhere. Since the Cambrian, the galaxy had detonated at least three times, and the fortunate earth had survived only because it was swimming inside dense clouds of dust and gas—a worthy conservatory that was light-years deep, built by the gods of Whim and Caprice.

Simon wandered through the transmission, glancing at a few hundred random planets. Then he asked his home-mind to pull out the most exceptional. Within those broad parameters, he found several dozen images of cloudy spheres orbiting suns within a hundred light-years of his comfortable chair. When he came across the closest world, Jackie returned.

“Alpha Centauri B’s largest world,” she said in her most teacherly voice. “The planet that some mentally impoverished soul named New Earth, back when all we knew was that it had liquid water and a living atmosphere.”

Simon had never been so close to that alien body. The image was that clear, that astonishing. Simon felt as if he was floating in low orbit above a shallow black sea. Microbes accounted for the dark water—multitudes of tiny relentless organisms that ate sunlight and spat out just enough oxygen to be noticed by astronomers centuries ago. But the tectonics of New Earth were radically different than those back home, and for a host of reasons, the alien atmosphere could never support a flame, much less a vibrant ecosystem.

“To date,” Jackie continued, “our full survey has found nine million and forty thousand living worlds. That number and these images won’t be made public for another few months. We’re not done, and we expect several million more. But to date, Simon . . . as of this moment . . . only eighteen planets show unmistakable signs of multicellular life and intelligence. Of course we might be missing something small. But after this long, with these incredible tools and nothing closer to us than eight thousand light-years distance . . . well, darling, it makes a curious mind wonder if intelligence is a cosmic fluke, or worse, God’s best joke . . . ”

“I hope not,” he muttered.

Jackie nodded in agreement. “Now for my fine surprise,” she went on. “One tiny portion of the sky is off-limits. Did you know that? The Powers-That-Be have rules. Nobody but them can look along one exceptionally narrow line. And we didn’t look, at least not intentionally. Except there was an accident last week, and supposedly nothing was seen and of course we recorded nothing. But I thought you’d appreciate a glimpse of what nothing looks like, provided you keep this in a very safe place.”

Against the stars, a tiny glow was visible—like a comet, but burning hotter than the surface of any sun.

“It’s Hektor,” Jackie reported. “Dr. McKall is still out there, still charging forward. Another ten thousand years, and your old colleague will finally get where he’s going.”

Simon was discussing salt contents with an irritable sensor on the far side of the moon, and then his home-mind interrupted. “There has been an incident,” it reported. “On earth, and specifically, on the campus—”

“Jackie?”

“I know nothing about her,” the voice admitted. “Stanford and the surrounding area are temporarily out of reach. A riot is in progress. There’s still a good deal of fighting. I can’t offer useful insights.”

“A riot?” he asked incredulously.

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“There was a story, only a rumor.” The mind was designed to show sorrow, but in tidy amounts. And no outrage, which was why it stated flatly, “According to the rumor, the Stanford community was holding back foodstuffs, and approximately one million citizens organized a flash-protest that mutated into violence, and the civil authorities reacted with perhaps too much force—”

“What about Jackie?”

“I have lists of the dead and injured, sir. The tallies are being constantly updated. Eighty-three are confirmed dead, with perhaps another hundred to be found. But I will tell you when I find her, wherever I find her.”

Simon refused to worry. The odds of disaster falling on one eager graduate student were remote. Tens of thousands attended that big old school, and no, letting his mind turn crazy was a waste of time. That was the conviction that he managed to hold on to for eight minutes of determined, rapidly forgotten work. Then he cut off the sensor in mid-sentence, and to his house he said, “Any word, contact me.”

“Of course, sir.”

His home—Jackie’s home, and his—was the only building on a tiny green island of buoyant coral floating on the moon’s surface. What seemed critical at that moment was to escape, separating himself from whatever reminded him of her. Alone, he jetted above the oil-restrained surface of the sea, scaring up birds and rainbow bats. Then he docked at a web-tower and boarded an elevator that quietly asked for a destination.

“Up,” he snapped. “Just up.”

The Iapetus roof was much more elaborate than those covering the inner worlds. It was blacker than any space, and it was dense and durable, and if civilization vanished today, it would likely survive intact until the sun was a cooling white ember. That durability was essential. Simon rode the elevator past the final ceiling, emerging on the moon’s night side but with dawn slowly approaching. He stopped the elevator before it reached the overhead port. Then he gazed at the sun’s emergence—a tiny fierce fleck of nuclear fire that was dwarfed by a thousand lasers pointed at this one modest moon of Saturn.

A coalition of ice-belt nations had joined forces. Mercury, long considered too expensive to terraform, had been purchased and partly destroyed, doctored rock and iron fashioned into a fleet of enormous orbiting solar collectors that collected energy that was pumped into beams of light that could have destroyed ships and cities and even whole worlds. Could but never would, what with their elaborate programming and too many safeguards to count. But it was the sun’s focused power that slammed into the tough black conservatory, and it was the conservatory that captured and channeled this resource into the artificial suns that made Iapetus glow to its core. This was a cheaper, sweeter solution than building and maintaining fleets of fusion reactors. Every photon was absorbed, and as a result, life had warm bright happy water—a place where he wanted to live forever.

Jackie had always enjoyed this part of the ascent; that’s why Simon stopped here now. Stopped and waited, knowing that she was alive and well, but wasn’t it the right thing to do, worrying as he did?

The situation on earth was always chaotic.

He understood that Jackie had friends and colleagues to help before she could send word his way, and she might not be able to do that for a long time, considering the riot and the normal censorship demanded by the Powers-That-Be.

No, he wasn’t sick with worry.

Then the home-mind called out, “Sir.”

Its voice was tinged with sorrow.

More than anything else, what surprised Simon was how quickly he severed all contact with the universe. Before another word was offered, his small sharp mind had made its decision and cut the channel to his home-mind, never bothering to tell him of its intentions.

If Simon knew nothing, then Jackie was alive; and that would remain true for as long as he could endure the cold boundless space about him and the sound of his breathing coming again and again in deep, useless gasps.

MAKEMAKE

“Sir, please. Please. What generosity may I offer you? I have marvelous teas, strong and sweet, or weak and sublime.”

“Something sublime.”

“And once again, sir, I apologize for any intrusion. For your time and sacrifices, I will be eternally grateful.”

Simon nodded and smiled blandly, asking nothing of his host. The Suricata were bright social entities famous for rituals and reflexive politeness. Answers would come soon enough, and knowing these people, he was certain that he wouldn’t much like what he was about to learn.

The tea was served cold in tiny ceremonial bowls.

“You continue to do marvelous work for us, sir.”

“And I hear praising words about you,” Simon replied. “Wiser minds than me say that our mob has never enjoyed a more efficient or responsible security chief.”

The narrow face seemed pleased. But the chief’s four hands gripped his bowl too firmly, long black nails scrapping against the white bone china.

Simon finished his drink and set it aside.

The chief did the same, and then with a portentous tone said, “Perhaps you heard about the refugee transport that arrived yesterday. Of course you have, who hasn’t? Eleven hundred and nine survivors, each one a victim of this monstrous war, and all now quarantined at the usual site.”

One hundred kilometers above their heads stood a roughly camouflaged, utterly filthy ice dome—the same jail-like dumping site where Simon had lived for his first three months after his arrival.

“My problem,” the chief began. Then the bright black eyes smiled, and he said, “Our problem,” as a less than subtle reminder of everyone’s civic responsibilities. “More than one thousand sentient entities wish to find shelter with us, but before that can happen, we must learn everything about these individuals. The political climate might be improving, but tempers and grudges remain in full force. Our neutrality is maintained at a great cost—”

“Who is our problem?”

Simon’s interruption pleased the chief. At least he sighed with what seemed like relief, watching a creature twice his size and older than anyone else on this world. “We have found a war criminal,” the chief admitted. “A much-sought individual, and I believe a colleague of yours from long ago. According to reliable accounts, she was complicit in the Martian genocide, a consultant in two slaughters on the earth, and her role in the Ganymede struggles has been rigorously documented.”

“We’re discussing Naomi?”

Embarrassed, the little face dipped until the rope-like body lay on the carpeted floor. “One of her names, yes. She attempted to hide her identity, but what was a clever and thorough disguise the day she left Titan has become old and obvious.” The Suricata were lovely creatures, their dense fur softer than sable, warming fats and fantastic metabolism keeping them comfortable inside their icy tunnels. The chief stood again, hands fidgeting with readers and switches while his tail made a quick gesture, alerting his guest to the importance of his next words. “We are quite certain. This is the infamous Naomi. We find ourselves holding perhaps the most notorious atums still at large.”

“From the Blue Camp,” Simon added.

Eight Camps exited at the war’s outset. Attrition and political necessities had shrunk the field to two Camps, and the Blue was officially extinct.

Politely but firmly, the chief cautioned, “As far as the Kuiper neutrals are concerned, there are no Camps. There is us, and there is the War. At no time have we taken sides in this ridiculous conflict, which means that we must remain immune to favoritism and even the most tentative alliances.”

In other words, to save their peace, they had to be ruthless.

Simon nodded. “Why here?”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“I understand why Naomi would want to escape. Of course she’d try to flee. But the woman I knew had a talent for guessing where the tunnel would turn next. Throwing everything into a long journey out to the edge of inhabited space . . . well, coming all of the way out to Makemake strikes me as desperate, at best. And at worst, suspicious.”

An unwelcome question had been asked. The chief responded by invoking his rank, stiffening his tail while the hands became fists. “Desperation is the perfectly normal response now. Sir. You don’t see the intelligence reports that I am forced to endure. You don’t study the elaborate simulations and their predictions for continuing troubles. At least ninety percent of the solar system’s population has been extinguished. At least. Worlds have been ruined, fortunes erased, but sitting inside this careful peace of ours, you cannot appreciate how miserable and frantic and sick these minds are . . . those tortured few who have managed to survive until this moment.”

Charitably, Simon said, “I agree. I don’t know how it would feel.”

The chief sighed. Regretting the present tone, he admitted, “I have nothing but respect for you, sir. Respect wrapped around thanks. What would we have done without your talents? What if you had found your way to another Kuiper world . . . to Varuna, perhaps? Today they would have a great atum working miracles with limited resources, and we would have to turn aside every soul for lack of room and food and precious air?”

Varuna had been a disaster—too many refugees overtaxing the barely-begun terraforming work. But Makemake, and Suricata society in particular, had endured this nightmare rather well. Simon knew this game. With feigned conviction, he said, “You would have done fine without me. You are a marvelous and endlessly inventive people.”

His host smiled too long.

“May I ask another question?”

“Yes, sir,” said the security chief.

“Why am I here? You’ve identified your prisoner. And since I haven’t seen her for at least eight hundred years—”

“Nine hundred and five Martian years,” the chief interjected.

“I don’t see any role for me to play.” Simon stroked the small gray beard that covered half of his thoroughly human face. “Unless of course you want my testimony at the trial.”

“No,” the chief blurted.

Simon waited, his patience fraying.

“The trial was concluded several hours ago. The judges’ have announced the sentence. Nothing remains now but the execution of the prisoner.”

“Ah.” Simon nodded. “You brought me here as a courtesy?”

The black eyes gazed at him, hoping to say nothing more.

But despite many decades of living among these souls, the atum couldn’t quite piece together the clues. What would have been obvious to any native citizen of this cold, isolated world was invisible to him. Finally, with honest confusion, Simon confessed, “I don’t know what you want.”

“It is what the prisoner wants.”

“Which is?”

“Naomi has memorized our laws,” the chief confessed. “And she somehow learned that you were living here.”

The atum began to feel ill.

“She has invoked a little-used code, naming her executioner.”

“I won’t,” said Simon.

But the Suricata was a deeply social species. Choice did not exist in their civil code. Duty to their city and their world was seamless. And no less could be expected from those who came to live in their cathedrals of ice and bright air.

“If you refuse this honor,” the chief said flatly, “then we will be forced to begin banishment procedures.”

Simon took a moment to let the possibilities eat at him.

“She wants me to kill her,” he muttered quietly.

“To my mind,” the chief replied stiffly, “the woman is already dead. With this gesture, you will be completing the act.”

In a multitude of places, including inside at least one atum’s mind, there were precise and effective plans for the transformation of this little world. Makemake was named for a Polynesian god of creation. Specifically, for a deity worshipped by the isolated citizens of Easter Island, which as landmasses went, was arguably the most remote portion of the earth colonized by the first human species. If the war hadn’t erupted during the last century, Makemake’s transformation would have begun. A dozen artificial suns were delivered while Mars was dying again. They were in orbit, patiently waiting orders to ignite. This early step could easily be taken: Turning methane snows into a thin atmosphere clinging to a body barely half the size of Pluto. But even that modest step brought danger. Why make yourself a prize to distant but vicious enemies? Eight decades of unmatched struggle had ravaged richer worlds, and if not for the thin traffic of refugees that still managed to limp their way out into this cold, lightless realm, there wouldn’t be any traffic whatsoever.

The ranking atum thought about these weighty matters, and he considered his own enormous luck—not just to survive the War, but to then discover a life that gave him authority and privilege beyond any that he’d ever known.

Simon usually took pleasure from his walks on the surface. There was majesty to this realm of cold and barren ice. The black sky was unmarred by clever lights and ship traffic, giving it an enduring appeal. The glimmers and flashes of great weapons weren’t visible any longer. Neither surviving Camp was able to marshal those kinds of monstrosities today. Which was why the determined mind could forget, looking at the ember that was the sun and seeing nothing else but the faint dot that was Jupiter, believing any story but the miserable one where almost every life was destroyed, and every world, including the earth, was at the best only barely, painfully habitable.

“What are you doing?” asked a sharp, impatient voice.

“As little as I can,” he admitted to his companion.

“Focus,” she implored.

“I should.”

“You haven’t changed at all, have you, Simon? You still can’t make yourself do the distasteful work.”

“That’s my finest flaw,” he replied.

The humor was ignored, such as it was. Her own focus was relentless, her shrewdness undiminished, and as always, Naomi had her sights locked on some self-important goal. Stopping abruptly, she told him, “I didn’t select you just because we were once friends and colleagues. No, Simon. I picked you because you are perhaps the most consistent creature that I’ve ever known.”

“What do you want, Naomi?”

“Not yet,” she teased. Then she began to walk again, marching vigorously toward the small, undistinguished crater where for years now prisoners like her had been executed.

Naomi and Simon were the same size, give or take a few grams. But in a calculated bid to ingratiate herself with her now-defeated Camp, she long ago surrendered every hint of her human form. The woman resembled a scorpion, complete with the jointed limbs and an elaborate, supremely graceful tail folded up beneath her lifesuit. Her carapace was designed to withstand a hard vacuum, but not the cold. Her suit was heated, and a simple recyke system kept her green blood fully oxygenated. Disable either, and she would die slowly and without fuss. The chief and various experts had advised Simon to cripple both systems and hasten the act. But ice crystals and suffocation were astonishingly violent acts, if only at the cellular level. Simon held his own opinions about how to commit murder, and much as he hated this wicked business, he would carry out the execution however he damn well pleased.

Seemingly without fear, the scorpion scuttled across the ice.

Ignorant eyes might imagine Simon as the doomed soul. And indeed, many eyes were watching their approach. Cameras supplied by both Camps had been unpacked and activated for this singular occasion. The machines were witnesses, hardened links and a multitude of security safeguards linking them to the solar system. In principle, nobody could be fooled by what happened next, unless what they wanted was to be fooled.

Simon took longer strides, catching the prisoner just short of the crater wall.

And Naomi slowed abruptly, her adrenalin or its equivalent suddenly failing her. Eerily human eyes glanced up at Simon, and on their private channel, she said, “I’ve always liked you.”

He was startled but careful not to show it.

“I know how that sounds, and I know you don’t believe me. But from the first time we met, I have held the greatest respect for your abilities.”

“Where was that?” he asked.

“The first time?”

“I’m old,” he admitted. “Remind me.”

She didn’t simply mention about Venus. With astonished detail, Naomi described a dry meeting between members of an air-plankton team—the kind of routine nonevent that Simon would forget in a week, at most. “You made skeptical comments about our work. Perceptive, illuminating comments, when you look back at the moment now.”

“That impressed you?”

“In a peculiar fashion, you seemed more secure than the rest of us. More honest, less willing to compromise yourself with the politics.”

He shrugged, saying nothing.

“I’m sure you took notice: I was a flirt and shameless when it came to working the rooms. And I don’t think that ten Simons would have held as much ambition as I carried around in those times.”

“Probably not,” he conceded.

“Did you ever want to sleep with me?”

“No,” he lied.

But she didn’t seem to care, eyes closing while the hard face nodded wistfully. “If I’d paid attention to you . . . if I had let myself learn from you . . . my life would have turned out quite a bit better, I think.”

It might have been a different life, or perhaps not. Simon realized long ago that no matter how creative or well informed the soul might be, there was no way to see the future that rose even from the wisest of decisions: Ignorance as epiphany, and with that, freedom from regret.

They reached the lip of the crater together—two tiny entities on the brink of a neat flat-bottomed bowl. Suddenly he was in the lead, his pseudo-adrenalin rising out of a gland that was among his youngest. With a dry, tight voice, he said, “You named me. You claim that there’s a reason. And if you don’t tell me why, I’ll be happy.”

“But I have to tell you,” Naomi replied.

“I can’t help you,” he warned. “Maybe you think that I’ve got power here, but I don’t. Or that I’m not strong enough to do this, and I’ll lose my will, and then the Suricata would give up trying to punish you—”

“I don’t expect your help or your weakness,” she interrupted. “You are a soft-hearted creature. But that isn’t why I selected you.”

“Soft-hearted,” he heard, and the image mysteriously gnawed at him.

Naomi continued, saying, “The two of us, Simon . . . we atums seen a great deal during our extraordinary careers.”

He took a long bounce, ending up on a flat stretch of rock-hard water ice. “I suppose we have, yes.”

“My career,” she began.

He forced himself to slow, glancing up at the cameras hovering against the eternal night sky.

“Being an atum is a blessing, and I feel blessed. I know how it looks now, the insanity that drove us into the Camps. Using our knowledge about building worlds to kill the worlds instead. But think of the history that these eyes have witnessed. The geniuses that I’ve known and our important work, and the foolish tragedies too . . . everything that comes with remolding and giving life to dozens and hundreds of worlds, little and great . . . ”

“What is it, Naomi?”

“I kept a diary,” she muttered.

“Many do.”

“But my diary is far more complete than the others,” she maintained. “From the first entry, I’ve used only the best methods, the most thorough tricks. This isn’t just text and images, Simon. I underwent scans of my mind, uploaded memories, censoring nothing. Nothing. And then I employed a military-grade AI to act as an overseer and voice. This is my life, the splendid as well as the awful, and I don’t think any citizen in any venue has ever achieved the scale that I’ve managed.”

“And my role?”

“I’ll tell you where I hid it,” she admitted. “You’re good and decent, Simon, and you can appreciate the value of this kind of testimony. Ten thousand years from today, won’t the citizens be hungry to understand the people who shaped their history—those who first colonized the solar system?”

He glanced up at the sun and that feeble band of dust riding on the ecliptic, much of it created by explosions and obliterating impacts. “You’re certain there’s going to be an audience then?”

“We’ve made our mistakes,” she conceded. “But this war will end. And shouldn’t we give our descendants every lesson possible? ‘Don’t do as we did,’ we will tell them.”

“I did nothing too terrible,” he maintained.

Suddenly Naomi ran short of praise for her executioner. With her voice breaking, she pointed out, “No, you’re just as guilty as me, Simon.”

“Despite my good opinions,” he countered.

“A billion clever insights accomplish nothing, if the voice that mutters them isn’t compelling enough to change one action.”

They were near the crater’s center, the execution ground defined by a neat black circle as well as pits made by the blasts of weapons and warm bodies rapidly growing cold. Reach that line, and their private line would fail. Only an unsecured public line would allow them to speak to one another. Simon felt his face filling with blood—the blush marking just a portion of his deep, conflicted feelings. He tried to keep his voice under control, but each word came out hard and tense. “It’s time, Naomi. I’m going to stop your oxygen and heater now, and we can walk the rest of the way together.”

“My diary?”

He didn’t answer. “Your carapace is a fine insulator,” he said. “And if I’m right, we’ll have several minutes before you spend your last breaths.”

“But you will rescue my diary, won’t you? I tell you where it is, and you can use it however you want. As a historical record, if you want—”

“And only for that reason,” he muttered.

Emotions made her shiver, but she acted satisfied. One conspirator to another, she said, “I did genuinely like you, Simon.”

He touched the controls on her back, powering down both systems.

“And you’re a familiar presence,” she conceded. “If a person has to die this way, don’t you think she should be with a friend?”

“I’m not your friend, Naomi.”

She didn’t speak.

Oxygen had stopped entering her blood, and in the next moment, the bitter chill of Makemake began to creep inside her. “I don’t know if I can make it to the circle.”

“You can.”

“Just say that you’re my friend,” she begged. “Please. I don’t want it to end this way.”

From the satchel on his hip, Simon pulled out a small railgun, and he aimed and fired a slug of iron-clad stone into the scorpion’s brain. Naomi stiffened, and a moment later, collapsed. He grabbed a front leg and dragged her across the neat black line, then backed away to allow the cameras to descend and investigate the body with a full array of sophisticated tools. Breathing hard, he looked at the corpse, and with a steady voice he pointed out, “You helped murder hundreds of billions. And until today, you didn’t throw two nice words my way. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to help your beloved memories have any life beyond today.”

“Thank you,” the chief said.

He gave his thanks once and then again, and then twice more, with even greater feeling.

Then with an air of concern, the chief continued. “This must have been hard on you. Regardless what she was and how much she deserved her fate—”

“It was difficult,” Simon conceded.

The little creature seemed giddy with compassion. “This won’t happen again. I promise.”

“But I’m here if you need me,” Simon replied.

A dark, dark joke.

The chief nodded warily.

“She brought it with her. Didn’t she?”

The chief hesitated. “Brought what?”

“Her diary. The AI with its attached memories. Naomi came here with the hope of using it as a bribe, hoping to manage a better deal for herself.” Until Simon said the words, he didn’t believe it was true, but then they were drifting in the air and he believed nothing else.

The chief suddenly had no voice.

“And I’m guessing that one of you two brought me into this scheme. She would tell me that the fabled diary was somewhere else, somewhere hard to reach, throwing the scent far from Makemake. Naomi must have told others about her self-recording project, not to mention leaving an ether-trail from the hospitals and various specialists brought into the project. But if I thought I had this special knowledge, and if I acted according to my good noble instincts . . . well, I can see how this would have distracted a few players while you happily sat on the prize.”

“But why would I care?” the little man managed.

“Because Naomi had a wealth of experience, and that’s the part of her estate you wanted. Her expertise. Once this war is finished, Makemake will be able to reinvent itself, and prosperity is going to come easier when you enjoy the free and easy guidance of a highly accomplished atum.”

“Naomi’s dead,” the chief offered, in his own defense.

“She is. And she isn’t. No, in her peculiar mind, I think the creature held a different interpretation of events.” Simon shrugged, the last traces of anger washing out of him. “I saw a small useless death on the ice, while she saw life inside a new mechanical mind. When you’re as greedy as Naomi, it’s amazing what you can convince yourself of . . . and who knows, maybe that old lady has a point in all of this . . . ?”

EARTH

The purpose of the visit was to meet the next generation of atums, in classes and privately, assessing the strengths as well as the inevitable weaknesses of these graduates before they were scattered across the Unified System. But several grateful university officials came to the chief atum, begging for a public event that would earn notice and praise, both for them and their ancient institution. Simon agreed reluctantly. He would give a speech, stipulating only that his audience was kept small—a diverse assortment of students and faculty assembled in some minor lecture hall. He understood that any public event by someone of his rank would attract attention. What he wanted to escape were situations where multitudes of eager, ill-prepared souls would cling to every word, unable to tell the off-hand remark from rigid matters of policy. But his request, harmless and rational to his mind, led first to strict quotas, and when the demand proved too enormous, a lottery system where tickets were awarded and sometimes sold for fantastic sums—all for the honor of cramming inside a long hot room with forty thousand equally enthralled bodies, every eye and a few secret cameras staring at a figure as old as terraforming, or nearly so.

In appearance, Simon had remained stubbornly, endearingly human. Pieces of him were still physically tied to the young Martian, though those archaic tissues consisted only of a few cells scattered through crystalline overlaps, metabolic engines, and bundles of smart-light and nulls and voids. His face and body remained tall, but only in contrast to the entities gathered about him. He began with a bright smile and a voice crafted to come across as warm and comforting to the average citizen, thanking everyone for surrendering a portion of his busy day to listen to an old fellow rattle on. Then he told a story from his childhood, describing in detail how his father once handed him a nano-bomb seed—one of the old marvels intended to transform Mars from a wasteland to a paradise. “I didn’t understand the significance of that crude tool,” he confessed. “But I held the miraculous seed in both hands, believing that in my brief life, this was the most important object that I had ever touched. Yet at the same moment, I was stubbornly ignoring my own soggy brain. And everyone else’s too. But minds are the only marvels worthy of our lasting respect, and I can only wish that each of us holds that truth close to us as we pass through our future days.”

Simon was smaller than his original hands had been, smaller than that early seed. But by the same token, he was larger than the rock and iron ball that was Mars. Like any modern mind, a good portion of his intelligence—facts and language, customs and a multitude of instincts—were held in the earth’s community mind. He remained a unique citizen, endowed with his own personality and ancient, often quaint notions. But as long as citizens wished to stretch toward infinity, room was going to come at a premium. Carrying your life experience inside one isolated skull meant large, inefficient bodies needing room to live. And if those bodies achieved even modest reproductive rates, any world would be swamped in a day, and shortly after that, ten thousand worlds more.

As Simon liked to do on these occasions, he reminded every ear that the duties of an atum, particularly one granted his terrifying station, was to help select a direction into the future, that determined line balanced between wild freedom and despotic rule. What kinds of biology would embrace each world; how many children would each of these rich lives be allowed; and under what terms and what punishments would the government hold each of its citizens accountable. Everyone understood the consequences of mistakes, but just to be certain, he mentioned the First War and the Purge that followed, then the subsequent Battle of the Kupiers and what was dubbed the Final Purge, as if that species of political madness had been wrung from civilization forever.

“Nothing is forever,” he warned, “no matter if it’s an individual life or the one hundred billion year life of the smallest, reddest sun.” Then his voice grew in depth and power, taking the sleepiest in the audience by surprise. “Change is inevitable,” he promised, “but little else about the coming forever is certain. I would imagine that everyone here holds that noble wish that intelligent life will prosper in the universe, spreading to other suns and eventually to all the ends of the Milky Way. But that remains far from certain. In our ongoing studies of the sky, we have observed what has to be considered a paucity of intelligence. Today, those civilizations nearest to humanity are just beginning to hear the earth’s original transmissions, radio and radar whispers barely hinting at everything that has happened since, and it is presumed that in another several thousand years, a slow rich conversation will commence. Or our neighbors will respond to our presence with the most perfect, telling silence. The fertile imagination easily conceives wonders as well as horrors coming from this unborn history. But this man before you, this atum, believes that the real gift of the Others will be to suggest to us the richest, most stable answers to the eternal questions of life and living well in a universe that holds minds such as ours in such very low esteem.”

Tradition dictated that the chief atum had to make his or her residence on the earth, but since Simon had no role in maintaining the biosphere, he was free to live where he wished. He earned a few grumbles when he requested a modest structure erected on top of the newest conservatory—little more than one dome and various substructures meant to house assistants and the usual secure machinery demanded by his office. Some complained that the new chief didn’t trust the good work being done by the local atums. Why else would he perched himself in the vacuum, his feet standing on top of one hundred trillion heads? But explanations did no good with those people. He spoke a few times about his love for space and the illusion of solitude, but after that, he gave up offering reasons. For as long as he held this post, enemies would find reasons to distrust him, and as long as his antagonists thought in small terms, he would be safe wherever he chose to live, right up until the day that this office was lost to him.

“I have an errand for you,” Simon told his favorite lieutenant. “A mission of some importance, and I wouldn’t trust anyone else with it.”

The creature turned vivid blue, and twenty limbs shook from the apparent compliment. Then a soft clear voice said, “Sir,” and then, “I am honored,” before asking, “What is my mission?”

With a thought, Simon delivered a set of encrypted files and the necessary keys, plus a few helpful suggestions. Then he waited while the files’ headings were studied. The assistant had a quick mind; it took only a moment for the limbs to stiffen, fear turning the body into a dark, despairing violet.

“Sir,” the voice began.

“What have you found there?” Simon kidded.

“I didn’t know about these matters.”

“You didn’t, did you?” The atum nodded agreeably. “That’s what you should mention when you act on your knowledge.”

“Sir?”

“You are going to act, aren’t you?”

The assistant turned black and cold, a begging voice complaining, “This is not fair, sir.”

“Little is,” Simon agreed.

“By law, I have to take what I know to the proper agency.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way, my friend.”

The creature muttered to itself.

“But please, will you do one small favor for me,” Simon continued. “Surrender this evidence to the Office of Exotic Biology. And yes, they have jurisdiction in these matters. They are perfectly acceptable authorities, and no one will fault you, even if you choose to someday mention these events to anyone else.”

Perplexed but obedient, the assistant left on his unexpected mission.

Alone, Simon slipped into a gossamer lifesuit and stepped out onto the hard surface of the newest conservatory. The sun was a faint glow just beginning to climb over the geometrically perfect horizon. Mercury was a dull dot almost invisible against the stars, its top fifty kilometers peeled away and refined into habitats ranging from mountain-sized to smaller than a small walnut. Venus was nearer and much duller, encased in half a dozen finished conservatories whose main purpose was to grab and sequester every photon falling from the sun, allowing the interior heat to build and build until the entire planet melted—a liquid world whose crust and then mantle could be siphoned off with relative ease, creating hundreds of trillions of living worlds that would eventually form a great ring around the sun.

Jupiter remained a wilderness of space and raw materials, accompanied by its liquid worlds, infested with life but still not full. Uranus and Neptune were brighter than ever, the terrraforming of the little giants just beginning in earnest. Once again, Mars was being made into an earth-like world, but this time the work involved improved conservatories stacked on top of one another, the crust laced with sprawling caverns and hidden seas. And largest to the eye was Luna. Nearly as large as earth, it was a vast balloon composed of vacuum-filled chambers and nonaqueous species. Again, its design was aimed at growth, machines and organisms busily digesting the rocky body. But like every world in the Unified System, the genius that designed this transformation always aimed for a special stability. Each planet functioned as a nest of deeply social insects. As long as all the pieces and players cooperated, life thrived. But if the calm failed, the queens of the nest would perish, and just as important, the lowly and the innocent would inherit what remained.

Simon had helped craft this ruthless and obvious system. Humanity might have the power to draw life in any form it wished, but there still existed the Darwinian god holding sway over the majestic mess, and for the next eon or two, the best would succeed a little more other than their peers.

Some days, it seemed that reaching this station was a miracle. But on this early morning being the chief atum felt entirely natural. Of course he was important. Who else was as old as him and as short of enemies? Who else could claim that they had been there at the beginning, or nearly so, yet never took part in any conspiracy or slaughter of note?

Without sound, Simon started to laugh, enjoying the irony. The absence of ambition was the ultimate ambition, it seemed.

Then his house-mind announced a visitor.

Simon didn’t ask for the name. He knew. And turning back toward his home, walking slowly and then not so slowly, he said to the house, “Tell Lilly to make herself comfortable. The criminal is on his way.”

“How did you manage this?” she blurted. Then in the next instant, she added, “This has to be a mistake. Somebody’s trying to frame you, and they didn’t even manage a believable job of it.”

Like Simon, Lilly had kept hold of her human features. She sat and watched as he settled before her, and when he didn’t act appropriately concerned, she added, “This is the worst kind of scandal. If I’d told anyone—”

“But you haven’t,” he interrupted.

“Because I thought I owed you at least the courtesy of looking into your face, seeing if there was any explanation for what you’ve done.”

He shrugged and said nothing.

“Starships are forbidden,” she snapped. “No vessel except sterile drones can legally pass beyond the Kuiper belt.”

“I am well aware of the laws—”

“And the kind of ship you’ve built,” she blurted. “Dammit, Simon. It shatters at least a thousand codes. If you were to ride this sort of magic seed out into the cosmos . . . you could go almost anywhere . . . and then you could infect and transform any body. Any world. The outlawed technologies and the government-only technologies that you’ve assembled here, using your station as chief atum—”

“Impressed, are you?”

Lilly remained a passionate creature, dark and lovely but always focused on the needs of her life’s mission. “I’m scared, Simon. Terrified. What were you planning to do with this monster seed?”

He laughed and nodded, and then he quietly confessed, “The seed has room for one small passenger.”

“For you?” she whimpered.

“Me? Hardly.” He sat motionless, carefully watching his guest. “I have a mission in mind. But by training and inclinations, I suspect that I wouldn’t make a worthy pilot for this kind of work.”

“What work?”

Simon leaned forward, one hand and then the other taking both of hers. It was pleasant, holding onto the woman like this, feeling her heat pass into him. He was thinking about Lilly and his father sleeping together on the red wastes of Mars. He recalled that moment on Venus, in the darkness, in the wind. Then he surprised both of them, lifting their hands and kissing the backs of hers even as he slid onto his knees, saying nothing, but tasting a faint delicious salt against his lips and the tip of his tongue.

A WORLD UNBURDENED BY NAMES

The object was noticed and instantly measured—a small glimmer approaching along the expected vector, closing rapidly on the decelerating starship—and McKall’s first reaction was an energetic laugh punctuated with several choice curses. “Long enough, it took them to chase us,” he declared to his hounds and fireworms and the other powerful, fearless members of his unabashedly loyal crew. “For now, watch our enemy. Study what it shows us, and do nothing. Then at ten thousand kilometers, obliterate it.”

Whatever the weapon was, their fifth blast managed to vaporize both its armor and the surprisingly simple meat inside.

Celebratory drinks were served.

For many centuries now, the starship’s captain had been worried. Onboard mirrors showed that the solar system behind them had suffered wars and subsequent rebirths. Who knew what kinds of marvels these new generations had devised? But obviously, his concerns had been misspent. Several moments were invested in careful study of the vanquished enemy. The remnant dust presented a minor puzzle, composed of common iron and little else. Why would anyone go to such trouble, sending what looked like a fancy cannonball after him? Too late, he wondered if perhaps the device had been a decoy, a ruse. He confessed his fears to his security chief, and the chief initiated a ship-wide search for tiny breeches and undetected invaders. Nothing was found. Every system was working properly. Twenty-three minutes after that cannonball was first seen, Earnest McKall retreated to his quarters—the only private rooms allowed inside the enormous starship—and he had halfway prepared a fresh cocktail when he noticed the tiny shape of a girl or woman clinging to the ceiling.

Softly, very softly, he asked, “How did you—?”

“Slip onboard? While you were fighting the bait, the hook approached from ahead of you. I used your engine’s fire as camouflage. And as for the rest of my trickery . . . well, explaining everything is not my consuming goal.”

In secret, McKall signaled for help.

Nothing changed.

An instant later his metabolism had reached full speed, dragging his thoughts along with it. “What is your—?”

“Lilly.”

He stopped talking.

“My name is Lilly, and thank you for asking.” She was at least as swift as the ship’s captain. “Do you have any other questions, Dr. McKall?”

“What is your goal?” he managed.

“What do you believe that I want?”

“To stop me, of course. We’re not five hundred years from New Earth, and this is some last-gasp attempt to destroy my ship and me.”

She was pretty and very small, no longer than a small finger, and it was difficult, even impossible, to take her seriously. Yet her voice had weight, rising from places besides her miniscule mouth. Amused, she explained, “But I don’t wish to stop you. And I certainly don’t want to destroy you. What I want—what I have halfway taken already, without you being aware—is complete control of this vessel and its crew. I am the new captain, and you are my dog.”

McKall was furious, and he was terrified. Which emotion fixed his legs to the floor? He couldn’t decide. But he discovered that moving any limb was impossible, and his voice was a breathless little gasp.

“You’ll conquer the New Earth for yourself,” he managed. “Is that your scheme?”

“Hardly.”

The untasted cocktail fell from his hand, spilling sticky and cold across his bare feet.

“I just want your ship and its possibilities,” she explained. Then she dropped off the ceiling and landed in his rich black hair, miniature hands gripping tightly, yanking hard. “My plan? We’ll drop into orbit, and I will mine the local system, beginning construction of rings first and then a conservatory far above the atmosphere. Elaborate defensive works will be built, plus shields against interstellar catastrophe, and then I will wait for anyone who is foolish enough to follow after you and after me.”

“But what will you do . . . with the world . . . ?”

“Nothing,” she promised. Then thinking again, she added, “Except to watch its native life go about with its business. Which is what any of us do on any given day. Isn’t that right, Dr. McKall?”

The atum concluded his speech by answering the question that everyone would ask, given the chance. He posed it in his voice, wondering aloud, “And when, at long last, will we leave our solar system for other suns and the rich new worlds waiting their chance to be claimed?”

Then he paused, offering an archaic smile while nodding slightly.

Cryptically, he said, “We shall embark when we are ready.”

Then a little voice up front shouted, “And when will that be?”

Simon’s most loyal assistant was obeying explicit instructions. He glanced at the many-limbed creature, answering, “Once all of our local homes are filled and happy. I would hope. We will embark as soon as we can trust our nature and our institutions not to use this migration as an excuse for easy growth and return voyages of conquest. When we have a worthy plan and the courage and discipline to trust in it. When starships no longer consume fortunes in energy and precious matter. When we have become adults, finally mature and responsible in all occasions. But most important . . . ”

He paused briefly, enjoying the anticipation that washed over him.

“Most important,” he concluded, “we will not leave this little realm of ours until we are children again. Wide-eyed, enthralled children who know what they have in their hands and hold it with all the care they possess.”

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 2010.

Mating Habits of the Late Cretaceous

Dale Bailey

They’d come to the Cretaceous to save their marriage.

“Why not the Paleogene,” said Peter, who had resolutely refused to look at any of the material Gwyneth had sent him. “Or the Little Ice Age for that matter? Some place without carnivores.”

“There are only two resorts,” Gwyneth said, waving a brochure at him. “Jurassic and Cretaceous. People want to see dinosaurs.”

She wanted to see dinosaurs.

“And I’m afraid travel to inhabited eras is no longer permitted, Mr. Braunmiller,” the agent put in. “Ever since the Eckels Incident. So the Little Ice Age is out.”

“Besides,” Gwyneth said. “I wouldn’t mind a few carnivores.”

Peter sighed.

Cool air misted down from unseen vents. The agent’s desk, a curved wedge of gleaming mahogany, floated in emptiness. Surround screens immersed them in sensory-enhanced three-dimensional renderings from the available eras. One moment the hot siroccos of some time-vanished desert stung their skin. The next, the damp, shrieking hothouse of a Jurassic jungle sprang sweat from their brows.

“Why not a sim?” Peter asked.

“I’ve had enough of simulations, Peter,” Gwyneth said, thinking of the expense. Over Peter’s protests, she had mortgaged the house they’d bought three years ago, cashed in retirement and savings accounts, taken on loans they couldn’t afford.

All for this.

“You’re certain, then?” the agent asked.

Peter opened his mouth and closed it again.

Twilight waters washed the barren shingles of some ancient inland sea.

“We’re certain,” Gwyneth said.

Tablets materialized in front of them.

“Just a few releases to sign,” the agent said. “Warranties, indemnities against personal injury—”

“I thought the yoke—” Peter said, and a fresh draft of whispering air blew down upon them.

“The lawyers insist,” the agent said, smiling.

An hour later, forms signed in triplicate, notarized, and filed away, the agent ushered them into an airlock. When they stripped, Gwyneth could feel Peter’s gaze upon her; she didn’t so much as glance at him, though he was lean and fit, as well muscled at thirty-five as he had been at their wedding seven years before. Stinging jets of anti-bacterial spray enveloped them. Industrial-strength compressors blasted them dry. They dressed in tailored, featherweight safari gear, and cycled through another airlock, their luggage hovering behind them. The adjoining chamber was bereft of luxury—no surround screens or polished mahogany, no calming mists of murmuring air. Their boots rang on polished concrete. Fluorescent globes floated high in the latticed spaces above them, leaching color from their faces. White-clad technicians looked up from their tablets as the airlock dilated. Behind them crackled the time machine, more impressive than Gwyneth had thought it would be, a miracle of sizzling yellow-green energy, the raw stuff of creation itself, harnessed by human ingenuity and bound screaming into colossal spider arms of curving steel and iron.

The technicians took charge of them. The hiss of hypodermic injections followed, then diaphanous bands of black that melted closed around their wrists like wax. The technician touched Gwyneth’s; far down in its polished depths a series of lights—orange and red and green—flashed once and was gone.

Her yoke.

The other technician, finishing up with Peter, smiled. “Your guide will meet you on the other side,” he said. “Ready to go?”

The time machine spat fire, throwing off scorching arcs of green and yellow.

They stepped into the light.

And were gone.

A sheet of green flame blinded them. Time blurred—a day, a week, a year, then more, the centuries peeling away like leaves, so that Gwyneth, who was barely thirty-four, felt young and alive as she had not felt in this last year. The time machine stank of history, of the sun beating down upon the tiered pyramids of new-built Aztec temples; of wheat flourishing for the first time under the hands of men; and further yet, of a dark age where shrewd monkeys huddled in terror around their lightning-struck fires. But Eckels had closed all that to them, and just as well, Gwyneth supposed, for he had bestowed upon them in its lieu the immense panorama of geologic time. And how she longed to step out of her life into a world fresh made, where great Triceratops lifted his three-pronged head and the sky-flung demon of the age, titanic Quetzalcoatlus, still spread his leathery wings; where the greatest of the thunder lizards, the tyrant king of all that he surveyed, Tyrannosaurus Rex, yet bestrode the terrified earth. Where, most of all, none of it had happened yet, and she could pretend that maybe it never would.

Then there was an enormous jolt, and Gwyneth cried aloud in terror or delight. Peter reached for her hand, and a lean, leathery man whose smile never reached his eyes stood before them.

They were there.

It was a resort, all right—a rugged dream carved out of the primeval wilderness. Below and to the west, a long savannah sloped away to a distant glimmer of sea. Above and to the east a jagged mountain range knifed through the earth’s crust, so that morning came late there and afternoons lingered into a blue twilight that seemed to stretch out forever. To the south and to the north, encircling arms of forest fell in ranks toward the distant plain. And in the heart of it all, like a precious stone set in swirls of green and brown, gleamed Cretacia, a maze of sandy paths and hidden glades where clear fountains tumbled and stone benches grew black with lichen. Private cabanas perched on tiers cut into the wooded ridges, and jeweled swimming pools glinted among the trees. Below the whitewashed sprawl of the hotel itself wound a quaint commercial district. Restaurants staffed by murmuring servers crowded up against narrow shops that sold books—actual books—and bath salts and summer dresses at such exorbitant rates that Gwyneth laughed in disbelief.

Yet her heart quickened in delight when the tall man with fine crinkles around his eyes—Wilson, Robert Wilson, he’d introduced himself—thumbed open their door for the first time and she saw the sheer decadence of the place: a bower of eggshell white and blue with a bed veiled in gauzy shadow, a vase of tropical flowers, and a south-facing floor-to-ceiling window (no sim screen, but glass, thick, reinforced glass) that gave upon a forested ravine, where something small and dappled scurried through the shadows, and if you stood on tip-toe and craned your neck, you could catch a glimpse of diamonds glittering upon the sea.

“I’ll leave you to unpack,” Wilson said, and turning from the window Gwyneth saw him—really saw him—for the first time: a hard, sun-baked man with sandy hair and an unhandsome face like a promontory of granite. His khakis were worn and stained, his boots scuffed. For a moment she was ashamed of their own gear, so new that it rustled when they walked.

“The concierge can take care of all your needs here on the grounds,” Wilson said. “If you want to go outside—when you want to go outside—I’ll be your guide.”

Turning from the window, Peter extended his hand. Gwyneth saw to her horror the folded fifty inside it.

Wilson stiffened. “No thank you, sir. That’s very kind of you.”

The door closed softly behind him.

“Peter,” Gywneth said. “You’ve insulted him now. He’s a wilderness guide, not a bellhop.”

“Just as well, I suppose. God knows we can’t afford to spend another dime.”

Then:

“Well, how was I to know?”

“Perhaps if you’d bothered to read some of the material I sent you—”

“This was your idea, not mine, Gwyneth.”

“But it’s our vacation,” she snapped. “And you ought to remember why and start acting like it.”

She crossed her arms and turned back to the windows.

It was still and peaceful out there.

A moment passed. They waited to see if what had been so long unsaid would break through the stillness. She knew that it would sometime soon, or that it had better. The wound had festered. It needed to be lanced and drained.

Peter came up and stood behind her, so close she could feel his breath, warm upon the back of her neck. “I’m sorry.” His hand came up to her lower back.

Did she flinch? And did he feel it?

She wanted this to work, yet her body betrayed her.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

When he leaned in to kiss her, she turned her face away.

They breakfasted on a long shaded terrace overlooking a pool. Fans stirred the air overhead. Just outside the compound, bright tiny dinosaurs strutted, pecking at the earth like chickens. Far below, beyond a stunning vista of tree-studded cliffs, huge sauropods feasted on towering groves of conifer. Something else had spooked a dinosaur herd. A cloud of dust obscured them, but their cries—a mournful lowing like the faraway lament of a foghorn—rose up to the terrace. Gwyneth wondered what had set them running.

“The coffee is fine,” Peter said, the meal done.

A server took their plates. He came back and used a long blade to scrape the linen cloth of crumbs.

Gwyneth took her coffee black; to please Peter she took a sip. “It is fine,” she said. Insipid banalities—that was all they could find to say. They’d forgotten the language of their own marriage, so they skated along the surface, stripping away any hint of ugliness as efficiently as the hotel staff spirited away a stained pillow. Last night, in a darkness rich with the strange music of the Cretaceous woods, he had reached out to touch her, and her body had gone rigid of its own accord. They had lain like that, so stiff and silent and distant that they might have been on separate continents, lying wakeful under foreign skies. Now, when he reached out to rest a hand upon her own where it lay brown against the white tablecloth, her fingers twitched and were still.

She felt tears well up, and choked them back, determined not to cry.

She said, “Peter—”

Then Robert Wilson was leaning over them, his own hand closing about the back rail of her chair and brushing her shoulder blade. He smelled of earth and dusty leather and the dry plain below. Gwyneth looked up through a sheen of unshed tears. When he returned her smile, his eyes remained as watchful and cold as marbles under the bony ridge of his brow. They were the color of agates, washed out and narrow from squinting across the blazing savannah. Something quickened inside her. She leaned forward and he wasn’t touching her shoulder anymore.

“Something spooked down there,” she said.

“Hydrosaurs,” he said. “Bloody cows startle easily enough. Could have been anything. A pack of raptors, maybe, but mostly they lie up under the trees until dusk.”

“But the big ones—” Peter said.

“The Alamosaurs. Go right on munching at the treetops, don’t they? Not much spooks an Alamosaur. A T-Rex maybe. Too big to worry about the raptors, and tails like whips. It’s an ecosystem, right? Like the African veldt. An elephant doesn’t worry much about a lion, does he?”

“Will we see a T-Rex?” Gwyneth asked.

“You’ll hear them cough at night if one’s around,” he said. “Last night was silent as a grave. Snorkeling today. Plesiosaurs, maybe a Kronosaur—T-Rex of the sea—if we’re lucky.”

“Sounds dangerous,” Gwyneth said.

“Feels dangerous,” Wilson said. “Safe as houses, though. Your yoke will see a Kronosaur turning aggressive before we even know it’s there,” he added, and for the first time Gwyneth noticed that his wrist was bare.

“You’re not yoked.”

He laughed. “I’m too ornery too eat.”

“Let’s take a pass,” Peter said. “I think we’ll spend the day settling in.”

“Your call. You’ll have plenty of time.”

Wilson nodded and strode away into the shadows.

They sat in silence for a moment, listening to the subdued babble of conversation around them.

“I think I’d like to be consulted about any future decisions, if you don’t mind,” she said quietly.

“Gwyneth—”

“It’s my vacation, right?”

“He’s talking about swimming with dinosaurs, for Christ’s sake.”

“Well, what did you think we were here to do, Peter?”

“To—”

“To what?”

“To try and fix things.” He shook his head. “To try and fix things, that’s all.”

“Well, we’re not going to fix them sitting on the terrace drinking coffee, are we? We might as well get our money’s worth.” She set her cup down and stood. “I think I’ll go change into something more appropriate for settling in.”

Gwyneth was halfway across the room, weaving her way between the tables, when someone reached out and touched her elbow. A woman—blonde and handsome, with a strong jaw line and narrow lips—smiled up at her. Her companion looked up from his breakfast.

“I’m Angela,” she said. “And this mannerless brute”—

—said brute swiped his face with a linen napkin—

—“is Frank—”

“Stafford,” the brute said, clambering to his feet. “Frank Stafford. But just Frank’ll do.” He took Gwyneth’s fingertips, and bowed slightly, lifting his eyebrows. Crockery rattled.

“Careful, Frank—” the woman—Angela—cried.

But by this time Peter had appeared at Gwyneth’s shoulder, and the brute—he really was something of a brute, Gwyneth thought, barrel chested and broad shouldered as an ox—was reaching past her to shake Peter’s hand.

“Just Frank,” Peter said—Stafford acknowledged this tepid witticism with a deep belly laugh—“Peter Braunmiller.”

“Here, have a sit.” Stafford shoved a chair in their direction, and when they were seated over fresh cups of coffee, he said, “That guy, Wilson, he’s your guide, too? What a piece of work, huh?”

“Fearless as a bandersnatch,” Angela said. “We did a trail with him the other day, and got within twenty feet of this awful thing called an anklysaur—“

“Armored bastard. Club on its tail the size of a fucking Volkswagen. He started to swing that thing when he saw us, and I swear to God I felt the wind on my face, we were that close.” Stafford laughed. “Felt my yoke give a good tug, I swear I did.”

“Anyway,” Angela said. “We overheard—really we weren’t eavesdropping—that you weren’t going on the excursion today, and since we aren’t either—”

“Can’t swim a lick,” Stafford said. “Afraid of the water my whole life. Sink like a stone, and if I didn’t a dinosaur’d eat me for sure.”

“— we were hoping you might play tennis. Please say you do or we’ll just sit on the terrace and drink Bloody Marys all morning.”

“Terrible for the health, Bloody Marys.”

“I suppose we could play tennis,” Peter said, and then—was he mocking her? Gwyneth wondered—“You up for tennis, Gwen?”

And Gwyneth, thinking of the Kronosaur—the T-Rex of the sea—forced a smile. “Tennis it is,” she said.

Gwyneth and Peter lost in straight sets.

The Staffords were formidable opponents. Peter, a finesse player who relied on superior endurance, couldn’t handle Stafford’s powerful serves. Angela’s shots had a wicked backspin that Gwyneth never quite mastered.

“Luck, that’s all,” Stafford assured them, clapping Peter on the back, but as they headed back to the room to clean up, Peter whispered, “All the same to you, Gwen, I think I’d rather have gone snorkeling with the Karnosaurs.”

“Kronosaurs,” she said.

“Right. Except Frank Stafford is the damned carnivore,” he said. “Seriously. I think my yoke must be malfunctioning. I was getting the life beat out of me, and it didn’t so much as twitch.”

Against her will, Gwyneth laughed. Peter flung an arm across her shoulder, and for a moment the effortless camaraderie of their first years together—that playful, irreverent sense of humor, the easy way their bodies seemed to fit together—came back to her. For a moment she even thought of Peter’s hand upon her in the night, of how it might have been if she had turned to face him—

And then, of its own accord, her mind swerved away.

They showered and met the Staffords for lunch, where they learned that their tennis partner had been a subcontractor on the Museum of Post-Modern Art in D.C., among other things.

“Just a little piece of it,” Stafford said, holding up pinched fingers. “The duct work. Keep people cool in all that heat.”

“That’s a lot of duct work,” Peter said.

“You bet it is,” Stafford said, and Gwyneth suddenly had a sense of just how much she and Peter had sacrificed for this trip—of how much she had forced him to sacrifice. Stafford could buy and sell them a hundred times over, and she had nearly impoverished them.

“Angela’s idea, this trip,” Stafford was saying. “I told her I’d already found my niche. A lot of money in duct bills.” He dropped them a wink. “My little evolution joke,” he said.

“His only joke,” Angela said drily. And then: “What do you do, Peter?”

“I’m an assets manager.”

“Gambling,” Stafford said, thrusting his plate away. “Pushing money around, that’s all that is. End of the day, I like to put my hands on something solid. Like to say, I did that.”

Peter flinched, but if Stafford noticed, he didn’t let on.

Afterward, the men strolled off in search of cigars, though Gwyneth had never known Peter to smoke a cigar in her life. The two women found themselves in a secluded bar overlooking the cliffs.

“Sorry about that last bit,” Angela said over gin and tonics.

“Peter’s too sensitive.”

Gwyneth sipped her drink. She was beginning to feel the alcohol. The world had taken on a lush beauty. The edges of everything had sharpened. Each discrete bead of condensation glistened on her glass; every needle of the nearby conifers stood articulate against the azure sky. The full heat of the day had come on, and the plain below stretched empty toward the blue horizon. Gwyneth supposed the raptors must be lying up under the trees, and that made her think of Robert Wilson. She wondered if he had found his Kronosaurs, and if he was back from the sea yet.

“It’s very quiet in the Cretaceous,” Angela said. “There’s something missing, I can’t figure out what.”

Gwyneth listened.

But for them, the bar was empty. The barman stood polishing glasses. The stillness was pervasive. “Birds,” she said suddenly. “There were no birds”—and then, laughing, corrected herself. “There are no birds. Or hardly any. They haven’t evolved yet. Birds are dinosaurs. Or dinosaurs are birds. Or will be. I remember reading that somewhere.”

“You’re very amusing, Gwyneth Braunmiller.”

The barman came and freshened their drinks. When he was gone, Angela said, “What do you do?”

“I’m a technical writer. I mostly write instruction manuals,” Gwyneth said. “Or rewrite them, anyway.” She laughed. “You’ve probably read some of my stuff.”

Angela absorbed this in silence.

“Do you have children?”

Gwyneth laughed ruefully.

“I’m awfully nosy,” Angela said. “You needn’t answer.”

“No, I don’t mind. It’s just—” She broke off.

“You haven’t reached an agreement on that issue.”

“No, I guess we haven’t.”

The truth was they’d never really talked about it much. Neither of them felt strongly either way, she supposed. The problems were deeper than that, harder to pin down—the way minor disagreements had of settling into arguments and arguments into something worse, a cool distance, like planets orbiting different stars. And then, not wanting to be rude, she said, “What do you do, Angela?”

“I sit on charity boards. I spend Frank’s money. You’d be surprised how taxing it can be—no pun intended.” She raised her eyebrows and smiled.

“Children?”

“None. Frank has a grown son from a previous marriage. Musn’t threaten the heir to the empire.”

The alcohol made Gwyneth incautious. “And what brings you here?”

“Our twentieth anniversary.”

She sipped her drink.

“I still remember the wedding. Predictions for longevity were dire.” Angela laughed and touched Gwyneth’s hand. “What a pleasure to have proven them wrong.”

“To love,” Gwyneth said, lifting her glass.

They were quiet then, listening to the birdless afternoon.

The next day they went hiking—fifteen of them, Wilson’s entire excursion group. Despite the novelty of the towering conifers and angiosperms, a bleak melancholy fell over Gwyneth. The medication prescribed by her psychiatrist��“just to get you through this rough patch,” she’d said—hadn’t helped, nor had the trouble with Peter, the—what, exactly? The silence where there had been voices, the blind staring into the dark, their bodies separate and apart. And underneath that, turning its immense body in the fretful depths of sleep that finally claimed them, that unspoken sense of despair that eluded words. Malaise? Ennui? She didn’t know. Day after day after day it had worsened, for months, for a year and more, until one listless afternoon, Gwyneth happened across a documentary on Time Safaris, Ltd. Not since college paleontology had she seen live footage of dinosaurs. A desire to see them for herself, to plant her feet on the soil of another age, had seized her. And something else, as well: the conviction that two weeks away from the world—really away from the world—might fix the broken things between them.

“Jesus, Gwyneth, do you want to break us?” Peter had asked when he’d seen the cost.

She didn’t quite have the nerve to respond as she had wanted to: We’re already broken.

Her foot slipped on an outcropping of stone, and she would have fallen but for Angela’s steadying hand at her elbow. Gwyneth swiped perspiration from her eyes with the back of one hand.

“Drinks, darling. The moment we return,” Angela whispered—quiet being a condition imposed upon them at the beginning of the excursion—and Gwyneth laughed, and said, “By all means, yes,” feeling closer to this virtual stranger than her own husband of almost a decade.

That morning the two women had gravitated toward one another like old friends. They tramped side-by-side, midway in the group strung out along the trail like pearls. Their husbands forged along behind Wilson, who took the rocky path without effort, a canteen at his belt and a rifle slung across one shoulder. Late afternoon and the Cretaceous alive with sound, the hooting complaint of the striped, knee-high theropods that scattered into the underbrush before them, the steady hush of insects, the arboreal rustle of mammals the size of squirrels—“Our forbears,” Wilson had said. “The meek shall inherit the earth.”

From on high the alien shriek of some sky-borne pteranodon drifted down.

They stopped in a clearing of tall, flowering grass to search the thing out.

It was Stafford who spotted it, his arm out-stretched. They gathered around him to stare at the creature circling high above them in a sky of sun-shot blue.

“Quetzalcoatlus?” someone asked.

“Nothing so large, I should think.” Wilson unclipped his binoculars. “Looks to have a wingspan of maybe fifteen feet, about half that of Queztalcoatlus. Could be a juvenile, I suppose, but it’s hard to tell at this distance. Anyone want to see?”

The binoculars made the rounds. When her turn came, Gwyneth lifted them to her eyes, but she could never hold the image in frame long enough to get anything more than a glimpse of the creature, a fleeting impression of beak and bony crest, the vast leathery wings taut as a wind-blown kite.

They moved on then, deeper into the woods. The familiar smell of pine needles and dry loam enveloped her, the scent of unfamiliar flowers. Stafford had acquired the aura of a minor hero. Wilson had clapped him on the shoulder. “Sharp eyes,” he’d said, and the big man seemed to have expanded still more under the praise. Despite his size, he moved through the woods with a confidence Peter lacked, sure-footed, a creature of the physical world, his bearish frame poised over his center of gravity.

The terrain grew more forgiving, dropping away into a broad vale. The pace slowed, as Wilson paused to point out the flowering angiosperms and broad-leaved deciduous trees that had only recently—geologically speaking—evolved to compete with the pervasive conifers. They paused for water. Wilson moved among them, spare and purposeful, no gesture wasted.

“Okay, then?” he said to Gwyneth.

“I’m fine.”

He nodded, and moved on.

They got moving again fifteen minutes later.

Not long after that the woods thinned. Another glade opened ahead of them. Moted beams of sunlight slanted through the treetops, firing the bracken with a yellow-green glow. The boles of trees climbed the heavens in dark silhouette, dwarfing Wilson where he stood black against the green effulgence, the back of his hand upraised in universal semaphore. He waved the straggling line to either side. Something snorted, blew out breath in a long waning note. It called out—a kind of groan, long and deep-pitched, like a rusty nail being wrenched from an ancient board. Then it took a step. Weeds thrashed. Gwyneth slipped with Peter through the ferny undergrowth to the right.

The trees fell away and the glade unveiled itself.

Gwyneth gasped for the beauty of it, the shining clearing and the creatures that grazed there: majestic, ponderous beasts—three horned, twenty-five or thirty feet long, ten feet at the shoulder—cropping peacefully at the waist-high grass. Triceratops, Gwyneth thought, gazing in wonder at the massive bony frill that curved up behind their heads, flushed bright with pink and red. The breeze combing the grass smelled of the creatures in the glade, a scent of old leather and manure and fresh-mown grass.

She caught snatches of Wilson murmuring—

“. . . a bull, two cows—the smaller ones—and a yearling. See it?”

He broke off as the largest of the dinosaurs—the bull—swung its elongated head in their direction. It regarded them with a single beady eye. In three quarter profile, the beast was more impressive still, battle scarred and ancient, the horns above its eyes razor-sharp spears of bone, jutting out three feet or more. It lumbered toward them, a single step, then two and three—

“Steady, now,” Wilson whispered. “Steady—”

—chuffed, and paused, as if assessing the danger they posed; a moment later, it lowered its beaked snout and began to tear at the weeds once again. This close Gwyneth could see parasites—insects maybe—crawling across its mottled green and brown hide. She was about to ask about them, when her eye caught a rustle in the tall grass—

The underbrush erupted, shrieking.

For a moment, Gwyneth didn’t see them, they were so well camouflaged. Then she did, three, four—was it five, or more?—green- and yellow-striped raptors the size of men or larger, hurtling across the clearing from half a dozen woody blinds, so fast that the eye could barely track them. Three of them corralled the yearling and herded it, toward the trees. More than half the pack—there were seven of them, she saw—no, eight—wheeled away to face the charge of the bull Triceratops. Just as it lowered its head to impale them, they gave ground, hurling themselves at the monster’s unprotected haunches, their razor-clawed feet digging for purchase in its hide. The animal’s belly split, spilling a bulge of glistening viscera—

Peter clutched at her, trying to drag her deeper under the trees. The bull Triceratops wheeled around, lunging at its tormentors. Its tail whipped the air, flinging a raptor screeching into the undergrowth, and somewhere at the edge of the clearing the yearling screamed and screamed and screamed, until, abruptly, it fell silent. Dear God, she could see the raptors tearing it limb from limb. Grass thrashed. Geysers of blood erupted. Her heart pounding, Gwyneth wrenched free of Peter’s hand. She stepped into the clearing, she didn’t know why. The yearling’s companions, the bleeding bull among them, broke for the trees. As the remaining raptors swung around to their kill, they saw her—

—they saw her—

—and for a heartbeat—she felt a single nightmarish pulse at her temple—the moment hung in equipoise. Fathomless silence enveloped her. Then, shrieking, the nearest raptor flung itself toward her, its taloned feet clawing the earth. Gwyneth felt the tug of the yoke, like gravity seizing her as she careened through the loop of a roller coaster—

Then Robert Wilson stepped up beside her, leveling the rifle. The thing was almost upon them—the scene going watery around her as the yoke began to draw her home—when he pulled the trigger. There was a sound of thunder. The raptor’s skull dissolved into a spray of blood and bone. Its body spun convulsing to the ground. The next moment her vision cleared.

The glade was silent and empty.

“Quickly, now,” Wilson said, touching her shoulder. “They’ll be back soon.”

He spun her around and they retreated under the trees. The rest of the group awaited them there. She saw Peter, his long face pale with fury, and she reached out an entreating hand to him.

“Peter—” she said.

But he turned away.

Then Angela was there, catching an arm around her waist and cooing, “It’s okay now, it’s all over.” And then, half-supporting her as they trudged homeward through the suddenly menacing woods: “We’ll get a drink into you first thing,” she whispered. “A drink is what it wants.”

A drink, thought Gwyneth, with a mounting hilarity she did not recognize as her own. A drink would be just the thing.

Yes, a drink.

Maybe two, Gwyneth thought—definitely two, as it turned out, and she sensed a third one coming on. Fire pits threw up sparks and music swirled in the night air. She leaned against the railing, lifted her face to the breeze, sipped her martini. The gin smelled of pine trees, of the vast conifer forest, unsullied by human hands, that sprawled across the continent.

The scent triggered a flash of memory: the raptor hurling itself across the clearing at her, Wilson leveling the gun—

And here he was, speak of the devil.

Elbows on the railing, he leaned beside her. The party was in full swing now. Dancers twirled under muted lights. Wisps of conversation drifted through the air. She spied Peter, talking to Stafford by the buffet, and glanced away.

Wilson set her empty glass on the tray of a passing server and handed her a fresh martini. “Cheers,” he said.

They touched glasses. She held the gin in her mouth, savoring it.

They turned their backs to the party. For a long time, they leaned on their elbows, staring out into the dark. Before them ran the long blue savannah.

“Something else, isn’t it?” he said.

She gazed up at the sky, bereft of the old constellations. Or was it new? She laughed, and a small voice inside her said, You must be careful. He’ll think you’re drunk. Which she was. Why it should matter, she could not say.

“The stars look strange.”

“The skies change in sixty-five million years. Or seventy.”

“You don’t know, then?”

“No one knows.”

“But Eckels—”

“The recent past they’re pretty good at. The further back you go—” He shrugged. “Slippage.”

“And why is that, Mr. Wilson?”

“You’re talking to the wrong man, Mrs.—”

“Gwyneth.”

“—Braunmiller. You’d need a physicist to answer that.”

“Yet you were waiting the moment we arrived.”

“Once they have a focal point to lock in on—once some brave soul plants a flag, so to speak—then you’re fine.”

“But you don’t know when that focal point is?”

“Never will. Rough calculations can pin it down some—we’re toward the end of the era, we know that. But dinosaurs don’t keep calendars, I’m afraid.”

She could feel the alcohol buzzing through her veins. Her face was not unpleasantly numb.

“Dance?” he said.

“If you insist.”

Leaving their drinks on a nearby table, they stepped on to the dance floor.

“I haven’t thanked you for saving my life today.”

“I didn’t save your life.”

“Didn’t you?”

“Your yoke would have saved you if it came to that. You could feel it, couldn’t you?”

“Like gravity moving through me. A roller coaster. That’s what I thought.”

Her mind replayed that snippet of memory once again—the raptor lunging at her, Wilson lifting the gun—

“Why did you wait so long to shoot?”

“Wouldn’t do to miss, would it? We’re not all yoked.”

“You’ve been yoked before, Mr. Wilson?”

“Yes.”

“And had to use it.”

“Oh sure.”

“What happened?”

“Female tyrannosaur cornered me in a ravine. They’re the bad ones. The females.”

He raised his eyebrows. She wasn’t sure if he was joking.

“What’s it feel like?”

“The yoke?”

“Yes.”

“Like being turned inside out.”

“So why aren’t you wearing one now?”

“Because it feels like being turned inside out.”

“Seriously.”

“It would hardly do if your guide disappeared, would it? If I’d been yoked today, we both might have gone home. Who’d have led your intrepid hikers back to the hotel?”

She glimpsed Peter, watching them from the buffet, and had a momentary image of him trying to find his way back through the woods alone—Peter, who lived almost entirely in a world of complex financial transactions, a world where meaning was not innate, but created by the universal assent of billions. What had Stafford called it the other day? Pushing money around. He’d said something else, too: I like to put my hands on something solid. Like to say, I did that.

Yet—

“You risk your life for that?”

“There’s money, of course. And more.”

“More?”

“It doesn’t bear talking to death.”

She fell silent. They revolved to the music.

Wilson said: “What the devil possessed you to do that, anyway?”

The sound of the yearling screaming echoed in her memory.

“I don’t know,” she said. She said, “I can’t stand to see things in pain.”

“This is no good for you, then.”

“I’m not sure what’s good for me, anymore.”

“Who is?”

“You seem to be pretty certain.”

“I’ve stripped my life to certain basics, that’s all.”

“There’s no Mrs. Wilson?”

“Not for many years now.”

“Are you lonely?”

“You’re very curious, aren’t you? Let’s collect our drinks.”

They stood at the railing again. Gwyneth sipped her martini. She was being careful now.

“I thought perhaps some great heartache in your past—”

“Nothing so romantic, I’m afraid. She wasn’t willing to live with the risks I take. I wasn’t willing to live without them.”

“Why not?”

“Do you know Wallace Stevens? Death is the mother of beauty?”

“Poetry, too?”

“You know it then.”

“I’ve read it, I think. In college once.”

“You should read it again.”

She laughed. “What would I find there, Robert Wilson. Truth or beauty?”

“A bit of both, maybe.”

“You must feel great disdain for your charges.”

He shrugged.

“You must feel great disdain for me.”

“If I felt disdain, I wouldn’t be talking to you, would I?”

“What do you feel?”

“Are you flirting with me, Mrs. Braunmiller?”

“I’m curious, that’s all.”

“What you did was very brave. Also very stupid. I admire the courage.”

“And the stupidity?”

Wilson didn’t answer. He lifted his glass and finished his whiskey. He held it in his mouth for a long moment. He set the glass on the railing. “Laphroaig,” he said. “Nectar of the gods.”

“Mr. Wilson—”

He squared up to face her. “I don’t admire stupidity in anyone, Mrs. Braunmiller. But I admire courage very much. Courage compensates for many failings.” Then, after a moment: “It was the yearling, was it?”

“I suppose.”

“It won’t do to anthropomorphize them. You’re likely to get me killed that way.”

When she didn’t answer, he said, “What have you come here for? Nobody comes here without a reason.”

“To see the dinosaurs, what else?”

But he wouldn’t take that as an answer. She could see it in the set of his shoulders, in the observing blue eyes that held hers to account.

“I’m not sure,” she said.

“No one ever is,” he said.

The party settled into the languid rhythm that dying parties acquire. The band swung into something soft and jazzy. There was no more dancing. The guests who lingered clustered around the fire pits and talked quietly, occasional bursts of laughter lifting into the air like larks.

Gwyneth stood at the edge of the terrace with a glass of wine, watching as someone threw a log onto a dying fire. A shower of sparks swirled up to print themselves against the swollen moon that had lately cleared the mountains. She felt a surge of gladness, a kind of nostalgia in reverse, that at least that had not changed. The old familiar moon still gazed down upon her from the alien wash of stars.

A hand touched her elbow.

She turned, half expecting to see Wilson—she wasn’t sure where he had gone, or when—and found herself staring into Peter’s face instead.

“It’s late,” he said.

She didn’t know the time.

They leaned their elbows on the railing and stared into the night.

“I waited up.”

“I thought you might.” Her wine caught a spark of firelight and held it. “I didn’t mean to worry you.”

“You didn’t worry me.”

She saw the lie in the set of his jaw, the muscle twitching there.

“I just wondered where you were.”

“I’ve been right here.”

“I know.” That twitch of muscle. “I just wondered, that’s all.”

They were silent for a time.

“We didn’t dance,” he said.

“You didn’t ask.”

Gwyneth turned to look at him. In the moonlight, Peter’s face looked older, gaunt, his eyes deeply shadowed. How strange he had become to her.

What had happened to them?

Peter laughed quietly. “No, I suppose I didn’t.”

Then: “Was he scolding you?”

“Mr. Wilson?”

She hadn’t thought so at the time, but—

“Not scolding exactly,” she said. “Reminding me, maybe.”

“Reminding you?”

“That he wasn’t yoked. That he was putting himself at risk in ways the rest of us are not.”

And now, for the second time that evening: “What possessed you, Gwen?”

“Something came over me. I don’t know.”

The whole thing—the entire trip from the moment she’d seen that footage on her screen back home—had been something she’d had to do, a mute imperative that she could not resist. Why did you come here? Wilson had asked her.

I don’t know.

Something came over me, she thought.

“You could have gotten the man killed.”

Wind rustled the conifer needles. The cries of unknown creatures rose up to her. Gwyneth thought about the thousand battles for survival unfolding in the darkness below, marveling that someday millions of years hence, that eternal struggle would give rise to men, and that not long after that as the earth measured its days, men too would reach their apogee and subside into the muck.

Sighing, Peter said, “Come on, it’s late, Gwen.”

And this time, with a wistful glance back at the glowing fire pits and the looming globe of the enormous moon, she consented. As they climbed the plush stairs to their room, Peter put his hand to the small of her back and drew her to him. Their lips brushed in a cool, dry kiss. Gwyneth turned away. A veil of dark hair fell between them. When Gwyneth hooked it over her ear, she could not bear to look him in the face.

“Gwen—”

“Not here,” she whispered.

Yet later still, in the moon-splashed room, as they lay together in their gauzy eggshell bower, Gwyneth drew away once more. Peter turned his back to her. She watched the rigid line of his shoulders. When at last he spoke, Peter’s voice was tense with fury.

“The hell with it then.”

“Peter,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she said.

But it wasn’t enough.

Gwyneth turned away, tears welling in her eyes. They lay still then, back to back, like slow continents adrift. After a time, Peter’s breathing deepened into sleep, but Gwyneth lay awake for hours, staring out the moonlit square of window into the shadowy forest beyond. As she hovered at the edge of sleep, there came a faraway cough in the darkness. She tossed restlessly.

Something ponderous moved in her dreams.

She woke at seven to find Peter staring across the bed at her.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing.”

But his voice was cool and he didn’t seem to be in any hurry to get up. He lounged in a nest of sheets and watched her dress, scratching his chest and tossing out an occasional desultory comment like a bomb. And when he finally joined her for breakfast, he sprawled unshaven in his chair, ordered pancakes, and leveled his gaze over the table at her. “So what’s on the agenda for today, Gwen?”

She sipped her coffee. “Yet to be seen.”

“A Stegosaurus? A Brontosaurus? A fucking woolly mammoth?”

“Not tennis, you can be sure of that.”

“Tennis might do us good. At least we’d be spending some time together.”

She threw her napkin to the table. “Jesus, Peter! Why can’t you be reasona—”

“Why can’t you, Gwen? Why can’t you—”

Robert Wilson pulled out a chair and sat between them.

“You’ve got your eras confused, Mr. Braunmiller.”

Gwen slumped in embarrassment. How much had he overhead?

When Wilson spoke again, he leaned forward. “Today it’s the biggest game of all, my friends. The one animal everyone comes here to see, the one most of them never do—”

“A T-Rex,” Gwen breathed, embarrassment forgotten.

“Did you hear it in the night?”

“I thought I dreamed it.”

“It was no dream. I woke at five. It was far away, but moving closer.”

Peter kicked out the fourth chair and propped up his feet.

“And how would you know this?”

“I’m a professional, Mr. Braunmiller. I’m very good at what I do. I forget what it is you do exactly—”

“I’m a financial analyst.”

“That’s right. And I’m betting you would spot a trend in the markets long before I would, wouldn’t you?” He didn’t wait for Peter to answer. “Look, I’ve been hunting these animals for the last twenty-five years, and I’ve only seen fourteen of them—one of them nearly killed me, I was telling Mrs. Braunmiller about it last night. These creatures are the apex predators of their era. They’re rare as hell and they can pick up the scent of blood thirty miles away or more.”

“The triceratops,” Gwyneth said.

“You’re a natural, Mrs. Braunmiller.” He propped his elbows on the table. “The way I figure it, this bastard got upwind of that wounded triceratops, and has been following the scent down out of the mountains all night. We’ll be hard-pressed to catch up to it—but if we do—” He shook his head. “Six-and-a half-tons of pure carnivorous aggression. Forty-two feet, nose to tail. Thirteen feet at the hip. Olfactory bulbs the size of grapefruit. A fucking monster is what I’m saying—and I apologize for the language, but there’s really no other way I can say it. You’ll never forget it.”

He put his hands flat on the table and pushed himself to his feet.

“West gate in fifteen minutes. See you there.”

“Along with all the other excursion groups, I’d imagine,” Peter said.

“You underestimate my expertise, Mr. Braunmiller,” Wilson said without rancor. “And overestimate that of my colleagues. Besides, we know something they don’t: we’ll be tracking the bloody triceratops.”

He didn’t wait for a response.

Peter’s pancakes arrived. He buttered them in silence.

Gwyneth finished her coffee and stood. “I’ll go to the room and get our things together.”

“You needn’t bother with mine.”

She turned in disbelief.

“What did you say?”

He cut a bite of pancake, taking his time about it. When he was done, he said, “I said, you needn’t bother about mine.”

“You have to be kidding me.”

“No.”

“Don’t sulk, Peter. It’s not attractive.”

“You don’t seem to find me attractive, anyway.”

People at surrounding tables had begun to sneak glances at them.

Gwyneth sat down, pushing her plate away. She leaned forward.

“Look,” she said quietly. “The only way we’re going to solve anything is if we spend time together.”

“But we’re not, are we?”

He speared another deliberate forkful of pancake.

“We’re spending time with a dozen other people—not to mention your friend Wilson—chasing down giant lizards—”

“Jesus, Peter, did you read anything I sent you? They’re not lizards. They’re—”

“Warm blooded. I know. That’s not the point. The point is that you care more about that than you do about trying to fix things. They’ve been dead sixty-five million years or more. And staring in awe at them isn’t working on our marriage. Isn’t that what we spent all this money to do? Isn’t that what we both wanted?”

“Yes, but—”

“But what? We could have had gone to the Caymans for a twentieth of the expense and actually spent some time together—”

“We’ve been to the Caymans. We’ve been to Paris, for God’s sake. None of it helped, Peter. None of it—”

And then he said something that stopped her cold in her tracks. “The problem isn’t in Paris, Gwen. The problem isn’t in the goddamn Cretaceous. The problem is in us.”

“Then come with me and help me fix it, Peter. Please.”

“Help me,” he said. “For God’s sake, help me.”

She stared at him for a long moment, and then, like Wilson, she put her hands flat against the table and pushed herself to her feet.

“I’m going to get my things,” she said.

Peter was right: when the west gate swung open, a mass of excursion groups was sorting themselves out. Most of them chose the more difficult route, clambering up the steep ridge in fifteen-minute intervals. Wilson’s alone struck out in the direction of the clearing where the raptors had taken down the yearling.

Later, two memories from the journey stuck in Gwyneth’s mind:

Robert Wilson’s cool competence.

And the beast.

The rest was but hazy recollection. The march triple time through the looming woodland. The sweat that poured down her face till it stung her eyes. The tiny theropods that scattered before them. Even the charnel house stench of the clearing itself.

The yearling’s carcass lay on its side in a bed of thrashed and flattened grass, the great ribcage nearly stripped of flesh. Its horns lanced from a face that had been gashed and half devoured. Scavengers had descended upon what remained: opalescent maggots the size of a man’s thumb, chittering insects that were larger still, a clutch of knee-high dinosaurs, ruddy and yellow, that screeched at them in fury, feathered ruffs billowing out to either side of their narrow-beaked maws.

Wilson ignored them.

“Photos, anyone?” he asked, and several of the men shuffled forward.

Great white hunters, Gwyneth thought, as if they’d personally felled the thing. She and Angela and Frank Stafford stood to the side, sipping cool spring water from canteens, and watched.

“Peter not well?” Stafford asked.

“No,” Gwyneth said, and she felt Angela give her a knowing look.

Then they were on the move again, following the path trampled by the fleeing triceratops. Waist-high grass swayed to either side. On the far side of the clearing, the forest enveloped them once again: colonnades of towering conifers and angiosperms, damp soil underfoot. Late morning now, cool shadows under the trees, motes adrift in green air.

Gwyneth watched Wilson, lanky and tall, his neck dusky from wind and sun, slip among the trees like he’d been born of the landscape himself. Deep into the forest, the trail split.

Wilson paused, studying the sign.

“The cows went left, working their way down toward the plain,” he said, pointing. “The bull climbed the ridge-line, looking for a place to hole up.”

“Why?” someone asked.

“Who knows? Instinct, maybe. To protect the cows. He knows the carnivores will be coming for him.”

Something coughed in the distance.

Gwyneth shivered.

“We’re close now,” Wilson said.

He set a faster pace after that. Winded, they trudged after him, still climbing. Wilson moved with unswerving grace, almost invisible as he cut through shadows and the golden blades of sunlight that knifed through the forest canopy.

Perspiration slid down the channel of Gwyneth’s spine.

They followed some spoor that Wilson alone could see, continuing to climb—hard climbing, too, upon occasion, clutching-at-tree-branch climbing, scree sliding loose underfoot. A thin, bearded man slipped and fell, bloodying his forearm. They paused while Wilson disinfected the cut—it must have been three inches long—and applied a pressure bandage with deft, sure hands. “That’ll hold it for now,” he said, gripping the man’s shoulder, and Gwyneth couldn’t help noticing the grace of those long fingers, the blunt crescents of his nails. “You’ll want to get it looked at back at the hotel,” he was saying. “A couple of stitches might be in order.”

They found the wounded triceratops forty minutes’ hike beyond that. The ridge towered above them here, a rocky cliff face that stood sharp against the sky. A thick stand of conifers screened a wide ravine. Maybe a hundred-and-fifty yards from side to side, the chasm narrowed as it deepened. The triceratops lay inside, far back in an angle of stone.

“Can we get closer?” someone asked.

“I wouldn’t advise it,” Wilson said.

The binoculars made the rounds. Gwyneth studied the triceratops. The great bellows of its lungs heaved irregularly. Dirt caked the exposed wound. Insects buzzed around the glistening bulge of viscera. She could smell the thing from here, a stench of rot and shit and death. It moaned when it saw them, that long rusty sound, like a nail being wrenched from ancient wood. Wilson drew them into a blind of towering angiosperms, admonishing them to silence.

“Soon now,” he said, and they hunkered down to wait.

The fronds of the angiosperms waved above them in the midday heat. Then, like God himself flipping a switch, the air went abruptly still. Gwyneth lifted her head, listening. It was more than the lack of birds. The tiny mammals in the treetops had fallen silent; the insects that moments ago had whickered in the air around them disappeared. The forest held its breath. Something big—something dangerous—was on the move. She could sense it: a charged stillness in the air, a tension in the blood.

Something snorted beyond the trees that screened the mouth of the ravine.

Gwyneth could see it in her mind, lifting its vast head to taste of the unmoving air.

Her heart quickened.

Twenty-five years, and Wilson had seen fourteen of them. Fourteen of them. And fucking Peter back at the hotel.

A callused hand touched her elbow.

“This is a time for courage, Mrs. Braunmiller. Not stupidity.”

Indeed not, she thought. She could feel his breath tickle erect the fine hairs at the nape of her neck, and for a moment she was aware of nothing else, not the desperate gasping of the felled triceratops, not the expedition group arrayed in the greenery around her, not even the vast creature that shifted its weight beyond the curtain of trees—

Wilson touched her elbow again.

“There you go,” he breathed, and then she saw the thing: monstrous, the beast of the apocalypse itself, like some foregone doom from the age of Revelation. It did not emerge from the trees, it simply appeared among them, ghostlike and huge and utterly silent, bigger even than the creature that had run in her dreams, invisible one moment, visible the next, like a long lens pulling focus.

And silent. So silent.

Someone moaned in terror—this wasn’t what they’d bargained for, not at all—and the monster swung its vast head toward the grove of angiosperms. Another moan—Wilson hissed, “Shut up, you fool!”—and the tyrannosaur moved, shedding the camouflage of the trees like water, one step, then two, its great taloned feet tearing at the dark soil, its tiny, ridiculous arms—evolution’s prank—folded at its breast. One slow step, then another, and a third. And did the earth shake beneath its feet? Surely not, yet Gwyneth felt it all the same, felt the earth rumble as the monster lunged toward them, gathering speed, fast, oh fast, and sweet Jesus who could have imagined the thing, death rampant and alive and more beautiful than she could have dreamed; she marveled at its sunshot hide, golden streaked and green, its bullet head weaving hollow-cheeked upon its cobra neck, its nostrils flaring, its eyes ravening and aflame.

It closed fast, forty yards, thirty, twenty-five. Someone broke and ran, she didn’t see who, and then the monster—this impossible beast from an era out of time—at last gave vent to the fury that burned in its furnace heart. It roared, its jaws unhinging to reveal a shark’s hoard of yellow teeth the size of railroad spikes. A gust of carrion stench blasted over Gwyneth. Her yoke seized her and she found herself careening once again toward the gravity well of the future, trying to hang on for a moment longer just to stare in wonder at the thing—

Her stomach twisted—

And then a rusty-hinge screech of agony reminded the tyrannosaur that other prey—bigger prey, and easy—was to be had. It wheeled to face the triceratops, its tail lashing, and loped the length of the ravine, its feet hammering tracks six inches into the soil. The triceratops somehow staggered to its feet; the bloody rent in its side disgorged fresh loops of tangled viscera.

And then the beast was upon it.

The triceratops lowered its head to meet the titan. Tearing at the soil with legs sheathed in swelling ropes of muscle, the tyrannosaur wheeled around the swinging horns. The wounded triceratops was too slow. One of the T-Rex’s taloned feet ripped open its hindquarters. The next moment—Gwyneth looking on, choked with terror and some other strong emotion, she couldn’t quite say what—the tyrannosaur closed its massive jaws just behind the triceratops’s frill.

The killing blow.

The triceratops went down, feet spasming as the tyrannosaur tore lose a giant chunk of flesh and swallowed. It lifted its monstrous head to the sky and bellowed in triumph.

After that it was awful.

The party that night—there were parties every night—hummed with excitement.

Three of the excursion groups had caught sight of the T-Rex, but only one of them, Wilson’s, had seen the kill. You lucky bastard, his colleagues said, shaking their heads, but Gwyneth knew that it was more than luck, that it was skill and knowledge; she recalled the swift precision of his lean hands applying the pressure bandage, she recalled his words in her ear: This is the time for courage, not stupidity.

She was done with stupidity, Gwyneth thought. She felt that she had opened a new angle of vision upon the world; she understood now that pain was sometimes necessary, that it ruined some things to speak of them too much, that truth could equal beauty. Her fellow guests seemed faintly diminished, their conversation—

—snapped its neck like a pretzel stick—

—magnificent creature—

—empty of any genuine comprehension of what they had seen.

Maybe the change—if there was a change—showed in her face, for as they sat down to dinner Angela said, “You look flushed, darling. Maybe this afternoon was too much for you.”

“Looks like you got a fever is what it looks like,” Frank opined, ordering the duckbill steak (“appropriate, eh?” he joked).

Appropriate enough, Gwyneth supposed.

The truth was, she didn’t feel quite herself. Frank had been right: fever was the word for it. Fever—ever since she had seen that monster for herself, and felt the blast of its carrion breath. She had read about it, she had seen it on video, but not until this afternoon had she really known such things existed in the world. Fever. The fever called living, she thought, another fragment of old poetry rattling around inside her head like a piece of angry candy.

She only wished Peter had been with her.

“Where is Peter, anyway?” Frank said, as if he’d sensed the run of her thoughts.

“I think he is coming down with something,” she said. “Maybe we both are.”

“Up to the room with you, the minute you’re finished eating,” Angela said.

Frank grunted.

But it wasn’t up to the room that Angela dragged her when Frank had finished his steak and wandered off to hold court at the party. It was to the little bar overlooking the plain, where a fire-pit burned and a pair of lovers whispered in the shadows.

“Something warm,” she told the bartender, and afterwards, cupping Irish coffee as they stood by the fire pit, “Peter’s not sick and you know it.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve been married twice, love. He’s sulking. Sulking this morning and sulking at dinner, making it worse for himself every moment because he can’t stay in that room forever, and he knows it. Stupid male pride. Whatever in the world has gone wrong with you two?”

“I don’t know,” Gwyneth said.

Down below, in the darkness beyond the tree-studded escarpment, something roared on the savannah. She wondered what it was—something big, no doubt—but nothing she could shape inside her head. And that was how it was with Peter, too, wasn’t it? Something big had happened to them somewhere along the way, but she couldn’t put her finger on when, or what.

She couldn’t find the shape of it inside her head.

“I don’t know.”

She swiped at tears with one hand.

“You must think I’m an idiot.”

“I think you’re confused. It’s okay to be confused.”

“But there’s nothing wrong. There shouldn’t be anything wrong. He’s a good man, he’s kind and he’s gentle and he’s handsome—anyone could see that he’s a good man.”

Angela wrapped an arm around Gwyneth’s shoulder and pulled her close.

“I know. I—”

“He said—” Gwyneth sobbed discreetly.

The lovers had departed.

The barman found something pressing to do at the far end of the bar.

“He said that what was wrong with us wasn’t in the Caymans or in Paris or in the Cretaceous. He said it was inside us.”

“He’s probably right about that.”

“I thought that I could save us by coming here. I really did. I risked everything on it, everything we had.” She sniffed and met the other woman’s gaze. “Somehow I thought that I could save us. I don’t know how.”

“Do you love him, Gwyneth?”

“I don’t know. We just drifted away from each other,” she said, and that image came to her once again: continental drift: landmasses on the move, so slow you didn’t even notice it until an ocean lay between you.

It would have been easier if one of them had cheated.

“Shhhh,” Angela said.

Gradually, the sobs subsided.

The barman brought them another coffee. The night had turned cool, and the moon had just started to slide over the massif to their back, laying down a patchwork of shadows on the ridge below them. Once again, Gwyneth felt that new knowledge take shape inside her: that some things could not be spoken, that truth could equal beauty, that pain was sometimes necessary, and real.

“Why on earth did you ever come here?” Angela said.

They caught up with Frank at the party, but soon after, he and Angela departed—another shot at Kronosaurs had been promised for the morning, and Angela had shamed him into going along this time. “We didn’t come here to play tennis,” she said. “Besides you’ll be wearing a lifesuit. It’s not like you can drown.”

Afterwards, Gwyneth floated ghostlike through the party, waiting for Peter. She had resolved to kiss him on the stairs when he came, but he did not come, and at last it was late. The moon had risen high into the alien sky. The fires had dwindled to coals. Even the hard-core drinkers were pouring themselves one by one into their rooms.

Somehow—afterward Gwyneth could never quite figure out precisely how it happened, how the decision came to her or if it had been a decision at all and not some foreordained conclusion—she found herself at the concierge’s desk. Inquiries were made. The concierge responded without lifting an eyebrow. Apparently such inquiries were not uncommon.

The corridor was in the basement of the hotel.

She knocked on the door.

Robert Wilson opened it.

“Are you sure?” he said.

“I’m sure.”

His hands were callused. They felt real against her flesh.

Later—it must have been three or after—Gwyneth slipped through the door of her room. Peter stirred in the depths of the eggshell bower.

“What time is it, Gwen?” he said in the darkness, as though he didn’t know, as though his voice wasn’t wide awake, and waiting.

“It’s late, Peter.”

He was silent for a long time. Gwyneth stood by the door until her eyes adjusted. She made her way across the shadowy room. She stood by the window, staring out into the Cretaceous night. It had grown darker, but the moon in its long descent still frosted the leaves outside the window. If she squinted, she could see—or imagined that she could see—something moving out there near the forest floor. A low-slung night grazer, maybe, or maybe just the wind-drift fronds of some ground-hugging fern.

“The party must have gone late.”

“I guess it did.”

“The T-Rex and everything. People must have been excited.”

“It’s all anyone could talk about.”

“I’m sorry I was ill. I wish I could have been there.”

She said nothing.

“What was it like?”

“The party or the T-Rex?”

He laughed in the gloom.

She had no words for it, no way to begin.

“There was something spiritual to it,” she said. “I don’t know how to explain.”

Now his laughter had a bitter edge.

“Spiritual? Seeing one giant animal tear another one to pieces?”

“It’s not that”—

But it was. The blood sport of the thing had excited her.

—“or not that alone, anyway. It was the thing’s purity of purpose, I think. So devoid of confusion or . . . or ambiguity. Just pure appetite. Every sinew of its body had evolved to serve it.”

She said, “It doesn’t make any sense. I know it doesn’t make any sense.”

In the silence that followed, she felt once again the distance between them: continental drift, something so big she couldn’t quite shape it in her mind.

“You weren’t ill,” she said.

“No.”

“You could have come.” Then: “What are we going to do?”

He was silent for a long time.

“Was it worth it, Gwyneth?”

She stared into the moon-silvered dark.

Peter turned on the bedside lamp.

Her face hovered in the glass, hollowed out and half transparent, ghostlike.

“Turn it off. Turn it off, Peter.”

He did, and the Cretaceous dark rose up to envelop her.

“Another shot at Kronosaurs, tomorrow,” he said, and she felt a doorway open between them.

Some things you could not speak of. Some wounds healed in silence.

“We should get some sleep,” he said.

Gwyneth stood unspeaking. Her body was wide awake. She felt like she might never sleep again. Peter swept back the veils of the eggshell bower and stood, tall in the darkness, and came to her. He put a hand to the small of her back and leaned over, brushing her ear with his lips.

“Come to bed, Gwen,” he said.

But she only stood there, his hand at her back, his breath at her ear. The night deepened. Even the moon was gone. Something huge and bright streaked across the sky. It erupted on the horizon, red and orange, a god-light towering into vacuum far above. Shockwaves followed, flattening the trees on the distant ridges in a broad expanding circle, as though a great fist had slammed down upon the planet, rocking them so that they had to clutch at one another to stay on their feet. The thick glass spider-webbed in its frame. Somewhere in the depths of the hotel, something crashed. Someone screamed. Then the fire, burning from horizon to horizon as it ate the dark. Some things could not be saved, Gwyneth thought. Some wounds did not heal. Then the yoke took her. It was just as Wilson had said: it was like being turned inside out.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, September 2012.

The Lost Xuyan Bride

Aliette de Bodard

“They say you are the one to see if I want to track down a missing person,” the woman said, pulling to her the only chair in my office. She wore silk, embroidered with a qi’lin unicorn–a rank reserved to the highest businessmen of Fenliu.

I saw her long, lacquered nails and the impeccable yellow of her skin, the way she moved, sinuous and yet in perfect control–and I came to a conclusion. “I don’t take clients from your background,” I said.

“Indeed?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. “Too much trouble, Mr. Brooks?” She’d switched from Xuyan to English on the last sentence. She was good. Likely she also spoke Nahuatl, the language of Greater Mexica. A true businesswoman, who would be at ease anywhere in North America.

“Yes,” I said. “How odd that it’s the richest that cause the most difficulties.”

“I assure you I have no intention of causing difficulties,” the woman said. “I will be straightforward.”

That was familiar territory. “And leave me free rein?” I felt myself slide into the rhythm of an oft-practised dance, politeness relayed back and forth until we both reached an agreement. Xuyans could be difficult to handle, but I was used to dealing with them.

She surprised me by putting both hands on the table. “I have no time to bargain with you, Mr. Brooks. If you will not take the case, I will find another investigator.”

Money was tight, tight enough to make me regret moving west of the Rocky Mountains, into Xuyan territory. I could not afford to refuse her; and likely she had seen the peeling paint and the basic computer on my desk. But she was good at showing nothing. A good liar.

“Tell me the case,” I said. “And I’ll see whether I can take it.”

She looked at me from under long lashes. “I am He Chan-Li. I work for Leiming Tech. I want you to find my daughter.”

I said nothing, watching her. Watching her eyes, which told me all I needed to know: she was deciding what she could afford to tell me. And when she started speaking again, I knew I did not have her full trust.

“He Zhen did not come home seven nights ago,” He Chan-Li said. “Her fiance hasn’t heard from her either.”

“Seven nights is a bit early to declare her missing,” I said, slowly.

He Chan-Li did not look at me. At last she said, “She had a tracking implant. We found it abandoned in a derelict building south of Fenliu.”

A tracking implant. Not really surprising, for most of Fenliu’s elite equipped their children with those, fearing kidnappings. Though . . . I remembered the fiance. “How old is she?” I asked.

“Sixteen,” He Chan-Li said.

Sixteen was old. Sixteen was adulthood for girls in Xuya, far too late to bother with tracking. Most teenagers ran amok anyway, tracking implants or not. But I said nothing.

“Why a private investigator? The tribunal militia could . . . ”

He Chan-Li shook her head. “No. This is a private matter, Mr. Brooks. I will not bring the militia into it.”

“I see.” There probably was a reason, then, and I was going to have to find it, and soon. “Do you have leads? She might have run away–”

“No,” He Chan-Li said. “She is not that kind of girl. And how would that explain the tracking implant? She never went into that area.”

I could think of a few reasons for the tracking implant’s location–knowing that Xuyan teenagers were no wiser or more well-behaved than their American counterparts. But I said nothing; merely noted the “running away” as a possible explanation.

“I can show you her room,” He Chan-Li said. “And you can talk to Wen Yi, her fiance.”

I pondered the matter for a while. When I did not answer, He Chan-Li said, “I will pay you, Mr. Brooks. I will pay you well.” There was something in her voice–something she could no longer hide–worry, perhaps?

I said, “I’ll take the case. But I make no guarantees.”

She nodded, looking relieved. “This is a recent picture.”

I took the glossy paper, raised it to the light. He Zhen was smiling the careless smile of teenagers all over the world, displaying white, perfect teeth–probably enhancements, but they didn’t look artificial. The expensive kind, then.

“That’s all you have?” I asked.

“Yes. The tracking implant is at my house; I can give you the address where the security company found it. Is that enough?”

I shrugged. “It’s going to have to be.”

“I see. I’ll take you to my house, Mr. Brooks, and you can see for yourself.”

I shook my head. “I come in my own time.” In truth, there were several things I needed to do before leaving, things I could not let her see.

He Chan-Li raised an eyebrow. “Some would say this is arrogance.”

I shrugged. I could maintain the polite facade my lover Mei-Lin had once taught me, but not for long. At heart, I remained an American, and the elaborate subtleties of Xuya forever beyond me. “It is my way.”

He Chan-Li looked displeased, though only a slight tightness of the mouth betrayed that. “Indeed.” She waited for me to say something, but I did not. At length she rose, with a smile I knew was fake. “By the time you arrive at my house, Mr. Brooks, I may be gone. I have a business meeting.”

I nodded, did not speak.

“Someone will take care of you there,” He Chan-Li said.

And as she turned to leave my office, I saw, for a moment only, the emotion she was trying to hide from me.

It wasn’t worry. It was raw, naked fear, a fear so strong that I could almost smell it.

Afterwards, I stared at the walls of the office for a while. I should have refused the case. There was too much I did not know, too much I was going to have to pry out of the client. But I needed the money.

Being an American in Xuya–a real American, a practising Protestant, and not one of those who’d converted to Taoism or Buddhism–meant you were on your own. No company would employ you; those few landlords that rented to you would do so at exorbitant rates. It was hard to get by; which was why I’d taken He Chan-Li on, against my better judgment.

I did not know where He Zhen was. But it was entirely possible she had not left Fenliu–as the daughter of a wealthy woman, she would be a prime target for ransom. I hoped it was the case. I hated travelling abroad–Greater Mexica had stringent entry requirements, demanding either proof of familial ties or of religion, and while the impoverished United States were softer on immigration, I had no wish to return to a place where there was a warrant on my head.

Before I left for He Chan-Li’s house, I started a search on my computer, feeding it the names of He Chan-Li and of the fiance. It was not an entirely legal search, since the program would trawl through administrative records as well as on the network; with luck, I should have some results by the time I came back.

He Chan-Li’s house was in the richer suburbs of Fenliu. I took the mag-lev train from my shabby building, through the centre of the city and its skyscrapers of glass–the heart of Xuya’s economic dominion on North America–and then into the residential neighbourhoods. The view on either side of the train became apartment buildings decorated by red and yellow lanterns, which in turn gave way to individual houses with slanted roofs and white-washed walls.

At the address He Chan-Li had given me was a thick wall of bricks, covered by garlands of wisteria. When the door opened, I was surprised to find an old woman in traditional Xuyan dress: robes heavily embroidered with peaches, the ancient symbols for long life. Behind her, inobtrusive, stood a servant in livery.

The old woman said, “My name is He Lai. My daughter told me you would come here.” He Lai’s face was tanned by the sun, and wrinkled like an overripe plum. She exuded a serenity I found uncanny.

“He Chan-Li told me someone would be waiting for me. I expected a servant, not a member of the family.”

He Lai shrugged. “It is not menial work to welcome a guest into your home.”

There were ponds covered with lilies and lotus flowers, and weeping willows with long branches trailing in the water: a beauty that seemed to belong to another time, to another place. But I saw the small, inobtrusive control panels that controlled the security system; and knew that this was no pleasure garden. It was a fortress.

“Here.” He Lai was pointing to a small pavilion by the side of a bigger building–that last presumably being the main house. “Those are my granddaughter’s quarters. We have touched nothing since she left–I kept the servants away from here.”

“Thank you,” I said, and realised she was looking at me, waiting for something.

“You will find her?” She sounded worried.

“You have any idea of where she might be?”

“She confided in me–but she told me nothing about leaving. I would have thought–” He Lai shook her head. “I ought to know the risks, living in that house. Two years ago, a gang kidnapped my daughter’s maid and held her for ransom.”

“And?”

She would not look at me. It had ended badly, then. “I’ll do my best,” I said. “But you know I can promise nothing.”

“I know. But you can understand how I feel.”

I remembered sitting in the doctor’s waiting room, waiting for the diagnosis of my lover Mei-Lin–and how badly I had wished that it was nothing, that Mei-Lin would live. I did understand how frightening it was, to be in the dark.

So I said nothing, made no false promises. I bowed to He Lai, simply. And then I slid the door open, and entered He Zhen’s rooms. The servant followed me, no doubt to make sure I stole nothing.

It was everything I’d expected a Xuyan room to be: a low bed of ebony, with a lacquered pillow laid over the sheets; a few pieces of furniture arranged in a pattern for long life; a laptop on the mahogany desk; and in one corner of the room, a shrine to the spirits of the ancestors, with ashes in the incense burner.

I knelt to check the shrine, triggering a flood of blue light from the neons above it. The ashes were old. It did not look as though the missing girl had gone back to her room. I had not expected it.

Several engravings adorned the walls: Chinese paintings, reproductions from the Ming dynasty–including the most famous of all, the eunuch Si-Jian Ma’s ships departing from Nankin, on the journey that would lead him to discover America long before any European set foot on those shores.

I opened the drawers of the bedside table, and found a jewelry box filled with pearls and jade pendants, as well as a sheaf of yuans, neatly tied together–enough to pay my rent for several months.

I rifled through the jade pendants, until my hands snagged on something–a small item that had been carefully hidden at the bottom of the drawer. I raised it to the light: it was a twisted knot of jade in an abstract pattern, one that was familiar, although I was not sure why. It did not seem like a traditional Xuyan pendant, unlike the rest of the jewelry.

Apart from that, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

And yet . . .

I turned again, to look at the room, at the small things that were not quite right. Someone else might have missed it, but I’d seen enough rooms like those to know where the subtle sense of wrongness came from. Someone had been there before me. Someone who had attempted to put everything back into place, but had only partially succeeded.

According to He Lai, the servants had touched nothing; it could have been He Chan-Li, but I doubted that.

Odd. A place like that, with its state-of-the-art security, would be hard to get into. Why go to all that trouble?

I opened the laptop. It was the latest fad from Greater Mexica: sleek metal outside, with a corn-yellow keyboard inside, and a touchpad adorned with a stylised butterfly–symbol of Quetzalcoatl, the Mexica god of knowledge and computers. The laptop beeped as I started it up, but it did not ask for any password or fingerprint.

Ah well. You never knew. Likely whoever had ransacked the room had also erased everything from the hard disk, but he might have been sloppy.

I took the laptop, slid it back into its embroidered case. I also picked up the pendant, and turned to the servant, who for the whole duration of my search had silently stood in a corner. “Can I take that?”

He shrugged. “You’ll have to ask the mistress.”

Before I left the room, I snapped a few high-res pictures. My instincts were telling me I’d missed something, but I couldn’t figure out what.

I’d expected He Lai to be waiting for me outside. She wasn’t. In her place was another Xuyan: a dapper man dressed in red silk robes. He had no insignia of rank, but I was not fooled. There was steel in his bearing and in his gaze: not someone you’d want to cross.

“I suppose you are the investigator Mother hired to track down He Zhen,” he said.

I did not miss the way he referred to He Chan-Li; in Xuyan, it could only mean one thing. “You would be the fiance?” I asked.

He smiled, displaying yellow teeth. “Wen Yi.”

“Jonathan Brooks,” I said grudgingly, still looking at him. He was not pure Xuyan–although his skin had the waxy, yellow cast I associated with Xuya, his features were distinctively Chumash Indian, the original inhabitants of Fenliu. “What are you doing here?”

Wen Yi smiled again–in an angelic way that was starting to get on my nerves. “I wanted to talk to you.”

“You are talking to me.”

He looked amused. “You Americans are so uncivilised. Sometimes I wonder why you come into Xuya at all.”

I did my best impression of a smile, though it was thoroughly insincere. “Some of us like it here.” Not entirely true: I’d never have moved past the Rocky Mountains if I hadn’t had a fifteen-year jail sentence hanging over my head in Virginia. The United States take foreign sympathies very seriously, and even though Mei-Lin was only half-Xuyan, the state police judged that our being lovers was a crime. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

Wen Yi looked surprised. “I’m family.”

“Not yet.”

“Almost,” Wen Yi said. “The marriage was to take place in a month.”

There was something in the way he spoke–it wasn’t the absolute confidence the sentence brooked. It was–anger? I’d learnt to read Xuyans, to see beneath what Americans thought a smooth, calm facade. Had I been asked what Wen Yi felt, I would have said rage. But why?

“When did you last see He Zhen?”

“We had–a meeting scheduled seven nights ago, but she never came.”

“What kind of ‘meeting’?”

“I do not know,” Wen Yi said. “She said she had important things to tell me, but would not say what.”

Liar. Smooth and smiling, but liar all the same. He had seen her that night, I was ready to bet.

“Can you tell me about her?” I asked.

“A lovely girl,” Wen Yi said.

“Is that all you have to say about her? You two were engaged.”

He shrugged. “An arranged marriage, Mr. Brooks. You know how things go in Xuya.”

“A marriage for the sake of Leiming Tech?” I said. “You don’t sound so worried that He Zhen’s gone.”

He raised mild eyes to me, but I could feel the anger simmering within. “I am worried, Mr. Brooks. You would do well to remember that.”

“Is that a threat? If that is all you have to offer–”

Wen Yi was not looking at me. He said, “She was a beautiful, charming girl. When she laughed, it was as if the sun had risen in the room.”

“You think she’s been kidnapped? That she’s run away?” I didn’t believe that. Running away required planning; and He Zhen would have taken her laptop , as well as the money in the drawers of the bedside table–all of which were still there.

He started. “No. She’d never run away. She was such a devoted daughter.”

“I see.”

“If you have any information on her whereabouts–” he slipped me a glossy card. “Call me.”

And that was likely all he had come here for. He played the part of the besotted fiance very badly–save for his worry at her disappearance, which sounded genuine. Which did not mean anything–he could still be afraid that I’d find out he was behind all of it.

I watched Wen Yi walk away; when he was gone, I went into the main building, where I found He Lai waiting for me. She had a lacquered box in her hands. “My daughter said you should have this.”

Inside the box was the tracking implant. I bowed to thank her, and asked, “You knew her well?” I asked.

He Lai’s eyes watched me, expressionless. “She was my only granddaughter. How could I not know her?”

“How was she, in the days before she disappeared?”

“She was in high spirits, but then the engagement had just been finalised after a year–”

“How did she feel about the wedding?” I asked.

“She was happy,” He Lai said. “Wen Yi is a man of status in the community. She was going to be an adult–”

“And move away from this house?” I asked, and when I saw her wince, I knew I was right. “So she and your daughter did not get on.”

“Zhen always showed proper deference.” He Lai looked defiantly at me.

“I do not doubt that,” I said. But there were other ways to disobey. Still, it was looking more and more unlikely that He Zhen had run away. Whatever her quarrel with her mother, He Zhen would have been out of He Chan-Li’s reach in a month. Raising a furore in Fenliu would have been counter-productive.

And, whatever had happened to He Zhen, why had her room been searched? What had they thought to find there, and had they found it?

All questions to which I had no answer.

I raised the pendant I’d found in the drawer, dangled it before He Lai’s eyes. “Does this mean anything to you?” I asked.

He Lai’s face twisted. “It’s Zhen’s favorite.”

“It’s not Xuyan,” I said.

“No. Zhen’s father brought it back from a business trip in Tenochtitlan. It’s a glyph that means ‘Good Omen’ in Nahuatl.”

“I thought He Zhen was very young when her father died.”

He Lai did not speak for a while. “There are some things you don’t forget. Zhen loved her father very much.”

The implications were clear enough. He Zhen had not loved her mother.

He Lai said, “You can keep it, Mr. Brooks. If you find Zhen–”

“You know I can’t–” I said, and she cut me forcefully.

“I know what I am doing. Keep it. You can always give it back to me later.”

Her tone implied, very clearly, that she hoped I wouldn’t have to give the pendant back to her.

I showed her the laptop, and she shrugged. “You can take that too.” She sounded distracted, as if the pendant had brought back unwelcome memories. I guessed seeing her daughter and her granddaughter quarrel regularly must have been disheartening.

I spent some time questioning the servants in He Chan-Li’s house, asking them if they had any ideas of where she might have gone, but nothing interesting came of it.

After leaving the house, I took another train to the place they’d found the tracking implant. It was a shabbier mag-lev, which kept pitching as it ran, giving the impression it could leave the tracks at any time.

The people seating by me were the usual crowd: the wild-eyed youths drunk on opium and morphine, the dullard beggars reeking of rice alcohol, the lone mothers with tired eyes, hugging their children to their chests as if afraid someone would steal them. Many of them were Whites or Blacks, lured west by the promise of a better life in Xuya–and discovering they could not fit into this alien society. I, at least, had had Mei-Lin to help me, in the short months before cancer carried her away. They had no one.

I could not afford pity; I was already barely rich enough to help myself. But, still, every time a crippled beggar moved past me, I felt an obscure guilt.

I alighted at the Gardens of Felicity, a small station blackened by pollution and grime. The place reeked of urine; I silently made my way out of the station.

The place where they’d found the tracking implant was one of the numerous social buildings started by the previous magistrate of Fenliu, and abandoned when Prefect En Pao had come to power and the whole staff of the tribunal had changed. I stepped over crushed paper lanterns and plastic wrappings, wincing each time my shoes hit a puddle of unsavoury things. It seemed even beggars did not sleep there.

At last I stood on the fifth floor, staring into an incomplete appartment–the workers hadn’t pierced the windows yet. There was nothing remarkable here.

No, not quite true. I knelt, and rubbed my fingers on the ground. What I had mistaken for brown paint was dried blood. I looked up at the outer walls, which had once been decorated with plum flowers and swallows.

Beneath one fading set of characters, I found what I was looking for: two small holes, barely visible, with the same reddish stains. Bullet impacts.

I took pictures of the holes under all possible angles, and took a few samples of the blood. A quick scan with ultraviolet revealed a few hairs on the ground; I bagged those as well.

But, no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find the shell-casings–which meant that someone had taken them away. Someone who was used to wielding a gun.

I was starting to understand why He Chan-Li looked so fearful. This wasn’t a bored teenager running away. In fact, if, as I suspected, the blood belonged to He Zhen, there was a chance she might not even be alive.

I came back to my flat late at night, exhausted. I dumped He Zhen’s computer on the bed, and fixed myself a quick meal: instant noodles and sweet-sour pork.

When I was finished, I quickly rinsed the chopsticks and plastic bowl, and sat before my computer to look at the results of the search I’d started before leaving for He Chan-Li’s house.

There wasn’t anything surprising about He Chan-Li (co-founder of Leiming Tech, nowadays leading partner, and one of forty-nine businessmen entitled to the qi’lin insignia), or He Pao (He Chan-Li’s husband and co-founder of Leiming Tech, dead of congenital heart failure ten years ago). But on our smiling fiance Wen Yi . . .

Ostensibly, he ran a small but very successful company of personal care for the elderly. However, he had ties with the White Lotus: a rebelious organisation that had fought the Chinese motherland in Xuya, and that had subsequently turned to crime after the independence.

No charges had been brought against Wen Yi–and not surprisingly, since there was no tangible proof, and since his money had funded part of Prefect En Pao’s re-urbanisation campaign.

Clearly the kind of man who’d have access to guns and who would not hesitate to use them.

I sighed; and ran an analysis on the blood and hair samples I had gathered at the derelict building, and on the pictures of the bullet holes.

In the three quarters of an hour that it took to complete, I busied myself with He Zhen’s computer, rifling through her personal folders. There wasn’t much. I found a few pictures of He Zhen with friends, grinning into the camera with that same reckless abandon. The pictures with her mother were more subdued; seeing the way she stood, I doubted her childhood had been happy. A businesswoman entitled to the qi’lin was not always the best or more sensitive of parents.

But the folders were abnormally empty; someone had indeed erased almost everything from the memory. They had made only one mistake: the only way to erase anything permanently from a hard disk was to destroy the physical support. If not–I could probably manage to recover the erased files, but it would require an enormous amount of time, all the more so because I had no idea what I was looking for.

My computer beeped to warn me the analyses were complete; I moved from He Zhen’s computer to mine, and looked at the results.

The bullet holes, first: coming from an automatic Yi-Sen with a modified barrel, a gun favoured by agents of the White Lotus. And the rest: no great surprises either. There were two different DNAs involved; the blood was He Zhen’s, but the hairs belonged to smiling Wen Yi. Neither of which, of course, had any reason to be in that building seven days before.

I debated over whether to call Wen Yi and demand explanations, and dismissed that as clumsy. Wen Yi apparently still believed me on his side; better not do anything to antagonise him.

I launched a standard analysis on He Zhen’s computer–on security files and erased mails. That alone was going to take most of the night.

Before going to bed, I moved the pictures of He Zhen’s room to my laptop, and looked at the splendid room, but try as I might, I couldn’t find what I had missed.

I woke up long before my alarm clock beeped; seeing, over and over, the stylised butterfly on the touchpad of the laptop, and knowing exactly what was wrong with it. The butterflies of the Mexica god Quetzalcoatl did not have markings on their wings; and this one had.

I got up, throwing a cotton robe over my pyjamas, and opened up the laptop again, looking at the wings very carefully. They looked like markings, but, if you bent the right way, there was something about them . . .

Something I’d seen before. Like He Zhen’s favorite pendant, those markings were Mexica glyphs.

I did not speak Nahuatl, the language of Greater Mexica, but in the age of the internet that was no trouble. I hooked up to my building router, then to a Mexica search engine, and from there to a Nahuatl-Xuyan dictionary.

The glyphs were easy to find. They read: Smoking Mirror.

Smoking Mirror. A further search ascertained that this was the frequent epithet of the Mexica god of War and Fate: Tezcatlipoca, whose favourite occupation was challenging travellers at night to outlandish contests.

Which made me feel as though I’d leapt a wall only to find myself staring at a deep ravine, with no bridge in sight.

A password?

Think. Why had He Zhen left this here? Had she suspected that her laptop wasn’t safe, and left a message for someone else, someone familiar with Mexica customs? I thought there might be a connection with the Mexica pendant I’d found in He Zhen’s room, but no matter which way I looked at that pendant, I couldn’t make the pieces fit together.

I finally let the matter rest, and checked the recovery I had launched on the laptop. I had not been expecting much, but what I saw was enlightening. He Zhen’s computer was now on open session: all you had to do to make it work was to turn it on. But that had not always been the case. Eight nights ago, someone had switched the core routines from private ID session (which required a login, password and fingerprints to start up the computer) to open session.

It was an odd move. I’d have expected the reverse, if He Zhen had had some files to protect. I fiddled a bit with the computer, and asked it to retrieve the log history. Which, of course, had been erased. But the log history was always in the same place on the hard disk–which was perfect to launch another recovery.

When I turned away from the computer, the waitbar on the screen was displaying a two-hour search, and it kept slowing down. Someone had gone to great trouble to change those parameters, and not be discovered.

I left the computer to run its analysis; and called my client, He Chan-Li.

She appeared on my screen already dressed for work: white makeup applied liberally to her face until no patch of skin remained uncovered, and a smart set of robes emphasizing the curves of her body, prominently displaying the qi’lin insignia. “So?” she asked. “Any progress, Mr. Brooks?”

“Yes,” I said, going straight to the point. “I understand why you haven’t called the tribunal militia into this.”

Her eyebrows rose. “What do you mean?”

“You know who Wen Yi is, don’t you? That’s why you’re so afraid.”

She stood, quietly, against a background painted a soft white. She did not move; did not look at me. From a Xuyan, it was as good as an admission.

“Did He Zhen know?” I asked.

He Chan-Li said, “The company–has trouble. Financial trouble. Wen Yi offered–”

“Support.” I tried to keep the sarcasm from my voice. “In exchange for a docile wife. Did she know about Wen Yi’s other activities, Mistress He?”

Her voice, when she finally answered me, was emotionless. “No. Zhen was very honest. She–”

“She wouldn’t have stood for it. And Wen Yi would not have tolerated a refusal. Is this what you think happened?”

He Chan-Li looked at me, and would not answer.

“There’s blood where they found the tracking implant. Your daughter’s blood.”

It was hard to tell with the makeup, but I think she had gone pale underneath. “He wouldn’t have dared–”

“Do you truly think that?” I asked, watching her eyes–watching the minute flicker of emotion that crossed them.

She said, at last, “Zhen never understood–that the company was everything that kept us afloat. She never understood the meaning of filial duty.” Her voice was bitter.

I pitied her then–for she was the one who had not understood her daughter. I only said, “I see.”

“Have you–” He Chan-Li swallowed–“found her?”

Her body. “No. I’m still working on a couple of things. I’ll keep you informed.” And I cut the conversation before she could take it further.

I sat for a while, thinking. If Wen Yi had indeed killed He Zhen that night, why was he so worried? He could not possibly have left any evidence in her room.

Think of it another way. If He Zhen’s blood did indeed mean she was dead, why had Wen Yi killed her? He had her mother’s agreement, and in Xuyan law that was enough for a wedding. If the bride was not docile–well, there were ways to tame her into submission, ways I was all too familiar with from a hundred sordid cases.

I remembered the searched bedroom, and the erased files on He Zhen’s laptop. He had not killed her because she had protested; he had killed her because she threatened him. Because she had the only thing that would make him fall: proof of his ties with the White Lotus, proof the tribunal could not ignore.

It was a long shot. But not an absurd one.

Smoking Mirror. If He Zhen had indeed gathered proof, she would have been smart enough not to leave them on her computer. I could think of several places on the net where she could have opened an online storage account.

I tried them one by one, entering “Mexica”, “Tezcatlipoca” and “Smoking Mirror” as usernames.

On the fifteenth try, I hit paydirt. There was a “smokingmirror” account opened two years ago on treasurechest.xy; and after a maddening hour of fiddling with a password-breaking program, I was finally granted access.

He Zhen’s treasure trove, though, was nothing like I expected. I’d thought I’d find ties to the White Lotus–things that would make Wen Yi feel threatened enough to kill.

What I found instead was a shrine to Mexica culture.

There were pictures of the ball-game champions, leaping beneath the vertical stone hoop with proud grins; videos of religious processions ending in blood-soaked sacrifices at the great pyramids; images of Jaguar Knights laying down their lives in the Tripartite Wars before American rifles; icons of gods and goddesses with their hollow eyes turned towards the viewer.

After a while, I finally turned away from the accumulation of data, and checked the storage capacity. The account was almost full: if I wanted to look at everything, it would take me several days. I suspected I’d stop long beforehand.

Some admire the Mexica’s self-sacrificing spirit and their relentless devotion. I think it is a sick religion, and an even sicker civilisation, making thousands of sacrifices every year for no other reason than blood-thirst.

Well, I knew the meaning of the butterfly’s wings; and it did not feel like a lot of progress. I turned off the computer, checked my log recovery–which still displayed a four-hour wait–and went into the kitchen to prepare lunch. As I was picking some coriander from the fridge, a glint from the window caught my eye. I put down the stalks I’d been holding, and raised the curtains.

An aircar waited underneath my building: a slick, red limo with tinted windows, conveniently masking the view of its driver and passengers.

There was an itch between my shoulder-blades: a familiar sign of danger. The sign, too, that I was onto something.

All I had to do was find out what.

Lunch was brief and perfunctory. I gobbled up my steamed rice and eggs, trying not to focus on the aircar, and came back before my desk to find He Zhen’s computer blinking. My recovery of the log history was complete.

I stared at the screen, at the last few lines of the log. It had been He Zhen who had connected last, a few hours after midnight eight days ago–a remote session launched from an unknown router address.

Could it have been someone else? I thought for a while, but decided against it. If someone else had had He Zhen’s login, password and fingerprints, they wouldn’t have bothered with changing the session system.

I tracked the router address, which turned out to be a network centre not far from the Gardens of Felicity. What had He Zhen been doing? Erasing things from her computer?

I stared at the timestamp, and saw that the connection had been broken after thirty seconds. Far too short to log in and erase multiple files–unless He Zhen had set up some kind of script. But I knew she hadn’t been planning to run away, so there was no reason for her to have done so.

My phone was beeping–an incoming call that I had not seen for several minutes.

“Yes?” I asked, pressing the button to light up the screen.

It was Wen Yi, now dressed in purple silk with serpentine animals embroidered on the sleeves. The animals looked very close to Chinese dragons, but not close enough to give offense–in Xuya, as in China, the only people entitled to the dragon were members of the Imperial Family.

“Mr. Brooks? I wanted to check on your progress.” He was speaking English, though he knew I could speak perfect Xuyan. By this he subtly relegated me to a rank of inferior–the worst kind of immigrant, the one who could not fit into Xuyan society.

“You are checking,” I said, curtly. “Is that red aircar yours?”

He laughed. “You Americans–”

It was a deliberate insult, and it smarted. But I would not give in to anger; that would only reinforce his low opinion of me. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Tell me how things are going.”

“I do not think I can do that,” I started. “My client–”

“I am not a man you can dismiss that easily, Mr. Brooks.”

“I do not doubt that. Still, my progress is my own.”

Wen Yi said, “I am told you are working hard. That is a good thing, Mr. Brooks. But you should not forget, when you do succeed in your search, who is paying you in the end.”

An unmistakable reference: he was He Zhen’s future husband, and almost part of the family, with the engagement finalised. “If I succeed,” I said.

“You will,” Wen Yi said, raising a long-nailed finger, lazily, as if admiring a dagger. “You have–drive, Mr. Brooks. Take care not to lose that, or there will be–consequences.”

“I see,” I said. “Consequences.” He was telling me that no matter what happened, I had to continue the search for He Zhen. Which, in turn, meant that she was still alive.

I had no time to focus on the consequences of that, because I needed all my wits about me–a conversation with a Xuyan, especially a powerful one, always felt like navigating between pits of acid.

“Do not think yourself overly safe, Mr. Brooks. There are many paths a man can take.”

Another, subtler threat: I would not protect He Zhen if I abandoned the investigation. He would merely find someone else to duplicate the little I’d done.

“I see,” I said, again. I did not want to provoke him further.

Wen Yi was still staring at me. “A pity. You are a smart man. And yet you refuse to fit in among us. Even your Xuyan friend was unable to impress the bases of our society on you.”

I wanted to tell him he had no right to bring my lover Mei-Lin into the conversation, no right to sully her memory. But that would have been folly. So I simply shook my head.

“There could be a bright future, among us.”

I said nothing. I couldn’t give him a satisfying answer.

Wen Yi said, “It is not for nothing that we dominate North America. It is not for nothing that our motherland China has triumphed over the Whites in Asia.”

“I know your worth,” I said, slowly. “I do not doubt your might. But my ways are my own. There is little for me in Xuya.” And I realised, as I said those words, that they were true, that nothing tied me to that dingy office in Fenliu, beyond the memory of Mei-Lin, and the knowledge I could go nowhere else.

It was not the best of times for such a sobering thought.

Wen Yi’s face remained impassive. But his eyes took on a darker glaze, and his voice, when he spoke again, was clipped and precise. “Very well. I had thought you more capable of grasping the opportunities at hand, Mr. Brooks. No matter. Do what you are paid to do. It will be enough.”

And he cut off the communication, leaving me standing in my living room, shaking.

So. I had learnt several things, most of which unpleasant. Mei-Lin had advised me to leave the White Lotus alone, once, in what seemed like another lifetime. I knew that in that, as in so many things, she had been right.

The only thing I could focus on was Wen Yi’s admission that he was looking for He Zhen. Ergo, that He Zhen was still alive, laying low for fear of the White Lotus–

No.

If I’d been her; if I’d gone to that meeting and been wounded, and known that if I came home, my mother would simply hand me over to my future husband, I wouldn’t have remained in Fenliu. I’d have gone to a place where the White Lotus had no reach.

Greater Mexica, or the United States.

Given what I already knew, it had to be Greater Mexica.

But she had to get past the border. It wasn’t that easy, especially to get into Greater Mexica, which had all but closed its borders. The entry requirements were stiff for the border towns, and got stiffer the further south you went. To settle permanently into the capital at Tenochtitlan for a non-Mexica was near impossible, unless you had serious leverage.

You needed outside help.

I knew a couple of people who specialised in passing foreigners into Greater Mexica; they were easy to find if one insisted badly enough. They were also easy with their promises; most foreigners they ferried across the border ended up indentured in some brothel in Cuauhpamoc or Itzohuacan, or in the silver mines, breathing dust until they choked on it.

I plucked the picture of He Zhen from the table, and went out, back to the Gardens of Felicity, and the network centre she’d connected from eight nights ago.

Then I moved in ever-widening circles, questioning those human smugglers I could find, showing them He Zhen’s picture. I got only blank looks.

The thirtieth or so I tried, though, shrugged, and said, “You’ll want Doc Smith for that. He always gets the strays.”

Doc Smith was American–Irish by birth, judging by the impressive mop of red hair. I found him in a sordid bar in the Fragrant Hermitage district, the poor White neighbourhood. He was nursing a cup of rice alcohol between quivering hands. When I showed him the picture, he stared at it with rheumy eyes. “No,” he said. “Never seen her.”

He was lying. He’d looked at the picture for far too long. “She’d have come here eight days ago,” I said. “Possibly wounded. She’d have been desperate to get across the border.”

“What’s it to you?” he asked.

“Her family wants her.”

“Some family,” he snorted. “Let the dead dogs sleep, boy. We’ll both feel better for it.”

I shook my head. “Wish I could, Doc. But I have a job to do.”

“Sounds like a crappy job if you ask me.”

Yes, a crappy job. Tracker for the White Lotus, because there was no other choice if I wanted to save He Zhen–if I wanted to save my skin. I focused on the task at hand. “Is your job better? False promises to clients?”

He shook his head. “I’ve never cheated a client before. Don’t intend to start now. I gave her what she wanted.”

“And what was that?”

He smiled. “Safety. And I won’t tell you more, boy. Old Doc is no fool.”

“I’m not with them.”

“That’s what they allow you to think,” he said, with a slow, sure smile. “Trust me, boy. Give it up, and go home.”

I stared at my hands for a while, thinking of He Zhen, of the lie that had been her life–years spent dreaming of another place, only to find out marriage would be no refuge. “I can’t,” I said. “She’s not safe where you sent her. She won’t ever be safe.”

“So you’re meddling? It’s an unhealthy occupation,” Doc Smith said.

I spread my hands on the table, thinking back to Mei-Lin, of our brief months of happiness in Xuya before death had taken her. “I have nothing else left,” I said.

Doc smiled. He slid his mug of rice alcohol towards me, but I shook my head. “I’m not here for oblivion. I’m here for answers.”

“I can see that.” He stared at me, and it occurred to me that the rheumy eyes saw far more than they let on. “It’s no place for tender hearts, Xuya. No wonder they all want to get out.”

“Give me her address,” I said. “Or I’ll call the militia here.”

“That’s an empty threat, and you know it as well as I do. No Chinaman is going to enter this area.”

“If I could track her here,” I said, “someone else will. Someone else will come, and they’ll tear her address out of you. Don’t you think she ought to be warned at least?”

He looked at me, cocking his head like an owl studying you before it pounced. “I’ll give you a contact address,” he said. “That’s all. You’re on your own after that.”

“Thanks.”

His hand closed over my wrist. “I’m trusting you. I trust that you have a heart and a brain. Don’t you disappoint me.”

I said nothing. I could no longer make any promises.

The address Doc gave me was a temporary electronic mailing folder, where I left a concise message to He Zhen, appealing to her family sense. I also left something else: a spy program that would monitor the connections to the server.

And then I waited.

It took two days, during which Wen Yi called at least three times. I never answered.

I got a mail in return, unsigned. Let matters rest. I erased it, for what I was most interested in was where the mail had originated.

As I suspected, it came from Greater Mexica. More specifically, from a network centre in the inner suburbs of Tenochtitlan.

Damn. It looked like I was going to have to pull a few strings of my own.

I went back to the Fragrant Hermitage, into one of the seedy bars, and paid for forged travel documents–a fake e-visa that attested to my being a faithful practioner of the Mexica religion. The visa mentioned that I was entitled to travel to Tenochtitlan, for a pilgrimage at the Great Temple.

After checking the visa carefully, to make sure I had not been cheated, I spent the next few days reading about the Mexica gods and the sacrifices–preparing myself for embarrassing questions at the border.

And then I made the rest of my travel preparations, very ostensibly. Within two days, I was on the road south in a rented aircar, and followed at a distance by two red airlimos.

Greater Mexica was not a beautiful country: the North was a desert dotted with casinos and brothels. As you moved south, the land gave way to marshes, and to the electronics plants that brought in most of Greater Mexica’s wealth.

My progress was slow: the Mexica took their immigration very seriously; in each town, I was stopped for my papers by two or three officials in feather regalia. I hoped the red aircars behind me would be stopped, too, but knew better than to hope.

It was a prosperous country, in spite of the aridity: in every hotel were brand-new computers with butterfly symbols, and hotspots where you could access the network for no extra charge. I could almost feel the communications saturating the optic fibres beneath my feet.

On the fifth day, I reached the outskirts of Tenochtitlan, and joined the queue of vehicles being checked at immigration. I spent the fifth night in my car, slowly inching forward towards the lights of the big city.

The immigration officials spent some time with me, but not overmuch. They injected nano-trackers into my blood to be sure I would indeed be leaving Greater Mexica at the end of my “holidays”.

For a foreigner, it is forbidden to sleep in the heart of Tenochtitlan. I found myself a hotel in the suburb of Tzopalli, some twenty miles from the centre, and used the network connection to leave a message on He Zhen’s electronic inbox.

In the morning, I went to the network centre, found myself a nearby bar, and settled before a mug of hot coccoa. I still had my spy program in the inbox, set to send me a mail as soon as someone accessed it.

Nobody fitting He Zhen’s description came, but my spy sent me a mail all the same. I inobstrusively looked into the network centre, and found only a small child of ten or so years, wearing the square steel collar of slaves. A messenger, then.

I followed the child through the alleys and canals of Tenochtitlan, and lost him when he hopped onto a black barge that sped away from me.

A barge with a cactus-and-eagle insignia.

The emblem of the family of the Revered Speaker, the Emperor of Greater Mexica.

Damn.

I asked a few discreet questions, and ascertained that this particular boat was the property of one Yaotl-tzin, a minor member of the imperial family who lived on an island some ten miles south of Tenochtitlan. I also got rumours about that house, definitely on the unsavoury side: of virgins brought from Greater Mexica or from abroad, to serve as fodder for private orgies.

With a growing hollow in my stomach, I thought of Doc Smith’s words to me: I gave her what she wanted. Safety. If that was safety, he had a very sick sense of humour.

Rather dispiritedly, I asked for an interview with Yaotl-tzin–the Honourable Yaotl–, under the pretext of writing a memoir. I wasn’t expecting much, but rather unexpectedly Yaotl-tzin acceded to my request.

On the day of the meeting, the black barge came to pick me up on the quays of Tenochtitlan. It was manned by a dozen slaves, sturdy men who busied themselves with the controls and ignored my attempts at starting a conversation.

As the shores of the city receded, I wondered, not for the first time, if I was not making a mistake. No one would go looking for me if I vanished now. I’d been carrying He Zhen’s pendant ever since entering Greater Mexica; I could not help fingering it from time to time, looking for reassurance.

Yaotl-tzin’s house was a huge villa by the shores of the lake: a maze of patios and arcades decorated with Mexica frescoes. I followed my escort through several courtyards with pine trees, through corridors with wall-screens displaying the history of Greater Mexica, from the short-lived war with Hernan Cortes and his conquistadores–a war Chinese gunpowder and cannons had soon ended–to modern times, the Tripartite Wars and Mexica dominion on silicon chips and high-grade electronics.

I was shown into a living room with glass cases displaying old codices. Near the window was an ebony desk of Xuyan facture, loaded with papers and ephemeral chips; and a wicker chair where I seated myself, not sure of what else I could do.

I waited. Invisible loudspeakers broadcast Mexica hymns, with flutes and drums giving an odd resonance to each verse.

When the curtain of the door was lifted to a tinkle of bells, I rose, ready to confront Yaotl-tzin with my feeble excuses.

But it wasn’t Yaotl.

It was a woman dressed in the fashion of the Mexica, with an elaborate blouse and matching skirt, decorated with patterns of running deer and parrots. Her hair fell to her shoulders, Mexica-style; her skin was the yellow of corn, so prized by Mexica that young girls would lather themselves with makeup. I knew it to be no dye.

For, unmistakably, the woman confronting me was Xuyan.

“You are a stubborn man, Mr. Brooks,” she said, in accented English.

I bowed in the Xuyan fashion, with both hands slid into the folds of my sleeves. “Mistress He Zhen,” I said.

She shook her head. “No more. Here I am known as Tlazoxochitl, Precious Flower.”

“It suits you,” I said, without irony. She looked Mexica–the quiet, sure way in which she moved was more Mexica than Xuyan, as if she had indeed blossomed there.

“Why did you come here?” she asked.

“Why did you?”

She shrugged. “You know why. I had no choice. I will not marry a man like him.”

“And that was your solution?” I asked. “To be some whore in a stylish brothel?” I realised I was unfair, but I could not care any more. I felt used–knowing all I had done in finding her was bringing the White Lotus here.

She smiled, in a slow, secret way that reminded me of the effigies of Buddha in the temples. “I am no whore. I am mistress of this house.”

“That was how Doc Smith got you past the border?” I asked.

“Of course, Mr. Brooks. It is the fashion of the court, to have Xuyan wives who are pretty and know how to hold themselves in society. Yaotl needed a paper wife he could display at family parties. He thought I was perfect.”

“Perfect,” I said, slowly, staring at her.

She smiled. “You forget family does not always include ties of blood and flesh. Tell me why you came here.”

“You know. Your mother hired me.”

Her face darkened. “Yes. But you are no fool. You know the real reason. And still you came.”

“You are in danger here,” I said. “Wen Yi is looking for you. I need the proof you brought to your meeting with him.”

She crossed her arms over her chest–one of them still moved awkwardly, and I guessed she had not completely healed from those gunshots. “Why?”

“Because I need to expose him.”

“I could have exposed him at any time,” He Zhen said. “I chose to come here instead. I am safe. I do not need you, Mr. Brooks, or anyone else. This is a fortress safer than anything my mother could devise.” She had moved towards the window; I followed her, and saw in the courtyard Xuyans being dragged to their knees by burly Mexica. As I watched, the Mexica raised automatics, and methodically shot the Xuyans in the head. “The White Lotus has no reach here, and never will have,” He Zhen said.

“No,” I said, at last, feeling my stomach roil at the casual violence. He Zhen’s face was still emotionless. “Tell me, was it worth the price, He Zhen? Was your safety worth that price? Tell me whether you’re happy.”

She smiled again, but there was bitterness in her expression. “Am I happy, moving from one arranged marriage to another? I do not know, Mr. Brooks. Here I wield what power I can in the house. Here I am not sold like a piece of flesh to save the family fortune. What would you have done in my place?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But if I had been your father, I wouldn’t have let you be so bitter so young.”

“But you are not my father. How fortunate.” He Zhen moved between the glass cases, laying her hands over the beautiful codices. “You learn, you know. Living in my mother’s house, you learn very fast.”

“It mustn’t have been so bad,” I protested, moved to defend He Chan-Li through some obscure instinct.

She smiled again. “You know nothing. You are a lucky man, Mr. Brooks.”

“I know that your fiance tried to kill you. Do you find running away such an easy solution?”

Her face darkened again. “I am no coward.”

“Then prove it.”

“By coming back like a bird to the slaughter? I am no fool.”

I sighed. “No, you are no fool. And yet what did you think you’d achieve, that night?”

She shrugged. “Foolish things. You are right. I thought I could break a marriage contract by myself. Life taught me otherwise.”

“I can still get the man who shot you.” I thought back to the picture of He Zhen her mother had given me, of the radiant, innocent smile, and knew that nothing I did would bring that back.

He Zhen looked at me with dead, emotionless eyes. “Why should I help you?” she said. “You came here to save your skin.”

“I came for you,” I said, knowing it to be a lie.

“I have no need of you.”

“You’ve already said it.”

“That does not make it any less true,” she said. “Go away.”

“No,” I said. “I will not leave without proof.”

“Go away. Find yourself a hiding place, Mr. Brooks. Somewhere the White Lotus hasn’t touched. They still exist.” Her smile was ironic.

Once, ten years before, I had run away. I had crossed the border in the middle of the night with Mei-Lin by my side, going forth into the darkness with no idea of what I would find.

The world had shrunk since then. Mei-Lin had died, and I had traced my own path, to stand here, in the heart of the Mexica Empire, facing a girl who was no longer young. “I will not run away,” I said, gritting my teeth. “I will see justice brought.”

“Then you are brave,” He Zhen said. “Foolish, as well, for all your words.”

Perhaps she was right. But I could not walk away. I had no come all this way for nothing.

I had one last thing left–one last toss of the coin to convince her. “You may not care about what Wen Yi did to you, but others do.”

“My mother?” He Zhen laughed–a sick, disabused laughter.

“You have a grandmother,” I said, and saw her flinch.

But still she faced me, unmovable. “I had,” she said. “Here it doesn’t matter any more.”

I reached inside my pockets for the one thing I’d taken all the way from Fenliu to Tenochtitlan: the jade pendant He Lai had given me–the one she’d said was He Zhen’s favorite. Gently, I laid it on one of the glass cases, and saw He Zhen’s gaze sharply turn towards it.

“Your grandmother thought I should return this to you,” I said. “She hoped I would not have to bring it back to her.”

He Zhen said nothing. Her gaze had turned inwards, as remote as that of a statue.

“What should I tell her?” I asked, softly.

“It doesn’t matter,” He Zhen repeated, with much less conviction. For the first time emotion had come into her voice. She stared at the pendant for a while, biting her lip.

Then, slowly, agonisingly slowly, she reached out, snapped her hands shut around it. Her face still had no expression.

I did not speak, simply watched her wrestle with herself.

She said, at last, “Very well. You are a hard man to refuse, Mr. Brooks. My servants will give you what you need. Do what you want with it. And then leave.”

“Thank you,” I said.

I walked back to the door in silence, leaving her standing before the open window, silhouetted in light. Beneath her, in the courtyard, lay the corpses of the White Lotus’ agents.

When I lifted the curtain to exit the room, I heard her call me. “Mr. Brooks?”

I did not turn around.

“I am not happy,” she said, very quietly. “But don’t tell her that. Tell her that I did the best I could, with the little I had. And that it will have to be enough. After all, isn’t it the same, for everyone?” And for the first time I heard a sixteen-year-old, bewildered girl, wondering if she had done the right thing.

I said nothing. In truth, I had no answer, and she must have known it. I walked away without looking back.

Before I left Greater Mexica, I went back to my hotel, and used my connection to tinker with things. I forwarded the proof He Zhen had given me to the tribunal of Fenliu. I would have liked to send it in my own name, even to face Wen Yi myself and tell him who had delivered the final blow, but I knew this was foolishness. If I did this, there would be no safe haven for me in Fenliu, nor anywhere in Xuya. The White Lotus always avenged its own.

So to cover my tracks, I manipulated the router addresses until it looked as if He Zhen herself had sent the incriminating evidence.

It was the most satisfying thing I had done in a while.

As I drove back to Xuya, I followed the development of events with interest; although I wasn’t in Fenliu, images of Wen Yi’s arrest made the news even in Greater Mexica. The newscasters were betting on a strangling at the very least–Xuya did not joke with corruption of government officials.

In Fenliu, I dropped off the car back at the rental agency, and took the mag-lev to He Chan-Li’s house. I found her still awake, although it was the middle of the night.

She met me at the door, still dressed in her business suit. Behind her was her mother He Lai, in the same traditional costume she’d worn when I’d come to the house. “Mr. Brooks. You come at a difficult time,” He Chan-Li said.

“I know.” Leiming Tech’s value had plummeted on the market, and the banks were withdrawing out of it, fast. “I came to tell you your daughter is well, but that she won’t come home.”

He Chan-Li’s face did not move, but I could feel the hatred emanating from her. “She never did know what family was.”

“No,” I said. “Aren’t you glad that she’s alive?” But I already knew the answer to that. I knew why He Zhen had felt so oppressed in that house.

He Chan-Li said nothing; she turned away from me, and walked back towards her house.

I was left with He Lai, who was quietly staring at me.

“I am glad,” she said, softly, as I pressed into her hands the other thing He Zhen had given me: a small pendant in the shape of the red lotus, the Xuyan symbol for filial devotion.

I asked, at last, “You were the one who erased the files on He Zhen’s computer, weren’t you? That’s why she had to change the session from private to open, because otherwise the computer would have asked you for fingerprints.”

He Lai said, not looking at me. “She is my only granddaughter. What else was I to do? Sometimes our paths take us far away from what seems truth, but they are still the ones the gods ordained for us.” There were tears in her eyes now, and she was making no effort to hide them.

“I know,” I said at last. “I’m sorry.”

“Thank you. I’ll see to it that you are paid.”

“This isn’t about money,” I protested.

“Most things are,” He Lai said. “You will be glad for it, trust me. Goodbye, Mr. Brooks. I trust we will not meet again.”

No. I did not think we would.

I rode the mag-lev back to my flat, staring at the patch of sky I could see between the skyscrapers. At this hour of the night, I was one of the only passengers; I listened to the familiar whine of the train, like a symphony welcoming me home. I would go back to my flat, rise in the morning and go again through the routine of my life; filling the days and nights as I had done since Mei-Lin’s death. I wondered whether this was worth it; or whether I did it because I had no other choice. I wondered if it mattered, and thought back to He Zhen’s words.

I did the best I could, with the little I had. And it will have to be enough.

Yes. It would have to be enough, day after day, night after night.

It would have to be.

Originally published in Interzone #213, November 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

Robert Reed

Robert Reed has had eleven novels published, starting with The Leeshore in 1987 and most recently with The Well of Stars in 2004. Since winning the first annual L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest in 1986 (under the pen name Robert Touzalin) and being a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 1987, he has had over 200 shorter works published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Eleven of those stories were published in his critically-acclaimed first collection, The Dragons of Springplace, in 1999. Twelve more stories appear in his second collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys [2005]. In addition to his success in the U.S., Reed has also been published in the U.K., Russia, Japan, Spain and in France, where a second (French-language) collection of nine of his shorter works, Chrysalide, was released in 2002. Bob has had stories appear in at least one of the annual “Year’s Best” anthologies in every year since 1992. Bob has received nominations for both the Nebula Award (nominated and voted upon by genre authors) and the Hugo Award (nominated and voted upon by fans), as well as numerous other literary awards (see Awards). He won his first Hugo Award for the 2006 novella “A Billion Eves.” His most recent book is the The Memory of Sky (Prime Books, 2014).

Dale Bailey

A winner of both the Shirley Jackson Award and the International Horror Guild Award, Dale Bailey is the author of The End of the End of Everything: Stories and The Subterranean Season, both out in 2015, as well as The Fallen, House of Bones, Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.), and The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories. His work has twice been a finalist for the Nebula Award and once for the Bram Stoker Award, and has been adapted for Showtime Television’s Masters of Horror. He lives in North Carolina with his family.

Aliette de Bodard

Aliette de Bodard is a software engineer who lives and works in Paris, where she shares a flat with two Lovecraftian plants and more computers than warm bodies. Only a few years into her career, her short fiction has appeared in Interzone, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Realms of Fantasy, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Writers of the Future, Coyote Wild, Electric Velocipede, The Immersion Book of SF, Fictitious Force, Shimmer, and elsewhere, and she has won the British SF Association Award for her story “The Shipmaker,” the Locus Award, and the Nebula Award for her stories “The Waiting Stars” and “Immersion.” Her novels include Servant of the Underworld, Harbinger of the Storm, and Master of the House of Darts, all recently reissued in a novel omnibus, Obsidian and Blood. Her most recent novel was another British SF Association-winner, The House of Shattered Wings. Coming up is a sequel, The House of Binding Thorns.

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 published earlier this year by Night Shade Books. His next anthology is More Human Than Human. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.